Sad News About Paul Williams (the Crawdaddy music critic)

http://paulwilliams.com/

About Paul Williams

Called by many the “father of rock criticism” after founding Crawdaddy Magazine at the age of 17, crucial early champion of Philip K Dick, author of the underground classic Das Energi, confidant of John Lennon, biographer of Bob Dylan and traveling companion to the Grateful Dead, Paul Williams has lived a half dozen remarkable lifetimes, and his work as rock critic, holistic philosopher and avant-garde underground gadfly forms a unique and indespensible link through the past 40 years of pop and rock culture.
About The Accident

In 1995, Paul Williams suffered a traumatic brain injury in a bicycle accident, leading to early onset of dementia, and a steady decline to the point where he now requires full-time care.

The burden on his immediate family has been immense.
About This Website

Our purpose in creating this site is to ask for your help, in the form of contributions of any size, to assist in Paul's continued care and medical attention.

We hope you'll explore the site, and learn more about the work of this remarkable individual.

Then, if you can, please visit the donation page we've set up, and contribute.

Love,

The Friends and Family of Paul Williams. And, of course, Paul himself.

His books on Brian Wilson, Neil Young and Bob Dylan are all wonderful. This is very, very sad to hear.

Revive, if only to push back to the top of New Answers...

oh man that's sad : (

It really is. He's a wonderful writer, and dementia/Alzheimer's is just about the worst thing to happen to anyone -- much less someone so young.

ugh, that sucks -- enjoyed his "performing artist" series on Bob Dylan, a lot of fun, detailed info. had no idea this had happened -- hasn't he published books since 1995? i guess it says, "slow, steady decline."

R.I.P.

http://www.gollancz.co.uk/2013/03/in-memory-of-paul-williams/

Such a damn shame. Thanks for reviving the thread, was just about to get to it.

RIP

The Collected Crawdaddy book he put out a while back is essential. It's highlights of every issue during his tenure with retrospective "behind the scenes" notes from Williams himself.

RIP, really enjoyed his stuff -- maybe he wasn't quite as gifted a writer as some of his peers, but pretty much every word seemed like it came from this heartfelt, deeply passionate place.

Too bad. I can also vouch for the Crawdaddy Book. It really feels like the starting point for anything written about popular music afterwards. Plus, actual intelligent writing on the 60s canon from a non-hindsight perspective is very refreshing and hard to find.

yeahhhh, i need to get that.

Very sad news. Even though I only agreed with his musical tastes about half the time, I always enjoyed his writing and his talent for effortlessly conveying his enthusiasm for great music and helping me appreciate it (and despite what the Gollancz article implies, he was plenty well known in the US too). RIP.

hopefully he got to enjoy the fact that philip k. dick went from being an obscure sci-fi dude to pretty much a household name (a change he certainly had a lot to do with).

very sorry to hear this -- he wrote a long review of the beach boys' 'good vibrations' box set (which sadly doesn't appear to be online anymore) that had a huge impact on me when i was 15. the guy's writing wasn't 'edgy' at all but it just radiated sincere love of whatever he was talking about.

also the guy who got me to read theodore sturgeon, thanks to this (awesome) book:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41J54374K0L._SL500_AA300_.jpg

the guy's writing wasn't 'edgy' at all but it just radiated sincere love of whatever he was talking about

OTM

Sorry to hear this. I have the book pictured above, but I've only leafed through it a bit. I was aware of his byline since I first started reading this stuff, but only through other people mentioning him. Rockcritics.com just reposted the interview they did with him a few years ago:

http://rockcritics.com/2013/03/29/from-the-archives-paul-williams-2001/

This memoir is good:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2013/03/30/175775627/remembering-paul-williams-founder-of-rock-magazine-crawdaddy

this is great -- especially all the old ads: http://www.crawdaddyarchive.com/index.php/sixties-archives/#archive

Holy crap! I was looking for that on WV the other day -- thanks for posting that!

yeah, it's sort of tricky to track down for some reason. say goodbye to the next couple hours!

Haha, yeah, guess I'm not getting anything done today.

Also, presented in glorious Squint-O-Vision.

yeahhh, i know, not the easiest interface, but hey. is the Crawdaddy Book presented like this (meaning just reprints of the actual pages)? i would like that.

It feels weird to complain about having to squint a little in order to read seminal issues of a seminal magazine that I never thought I'd ever have a chance to read, but jeez, just one more zoom-in would be perfect.

Haven't seen the book, thinking it's time to pick it up.

The book is mostly that stuff reprinted.

i love those early issues of crawdaddy that wfmu is posting...lol at his review of revolver!

I like the Revolver review!

no mention of TNK = hilarity

My favorite bit in the collection Outlaw Blues, which I think is all from the 60s, is when this guy he's interviewing says the last time he listened to "A Day In The Life", he started laughing at the ending--like, "Oooh, is the record gonna blow up?"

Best parts of "Outlaw Blues" are the interviews with Paul Rothchild all about the making of the Doors debut (before it broke big) and with Brian Wilson associate David Anderle that helped establish all the SMiLe pre-release hype.

I always appreciated Williams' writing for its gee-whiz enthusiasm, plus the fact that he was there at the forefront. RIP dude.

yeah those anderle chats about the beach boys are fascinating and kind of hilarious in their hand-wringing-ness: "Brian Wilson hasn't released any music in four months -- CAN BRIAN WILSON MAKE A COMEBACK!!!???"

no mention of TNK = hilarity

There's a whole paragraph about it.

ach there was another page d'oh

basically he says they should save their experiments for the studio and not put them on their albums. so interesting to read relatively negative reviews from the moment of canonical records. he was like, eh it's no rubber soul...and i always thought the rubber soul crowd were just contrarians

and he DIDN'T like the strings on Eleanor Rigby! sorry, i'll stop now

PW wasn't the biggest Beatles fan (said so in those exact words in his "100 Greatest Singles" book)

huh, did not know that! thanks, i'll explore...

kinda interesting how much ambivalence about the beatles there is in early rockcrit -- nik cohn really blasts them in 'awopbopaloobop,' basically says he detests them except for a handful of lennon songs. i think greil marcus has said a couple places that he thinks it was all the way downhill after 'rubber soul.'

yeah, "Sgt Pepper" was when the STRAIGHT world really caught on

Doesn't Marcus call the White Album stunning in Stranded? Sgt. Pepper, yes, he was ambivalent.

There was hardly critical consensus about Pepper at the time. Marsh was lukewarm on it, too.

Sure, but Time magazine & the like were all over it, was all I meant.

Doesn't Marcus call the White Album stunning in Stranded?

Don't own it, but he does say that in his RS Illustrated History of Rock and Roll piece. Here's what he says on '66-'67 Beatles:

"At the time, it was obvious that Revolver, released in 1966, was better than Rubber Soul, just as it was obvious that Sgt. Pepper was better than both put together. The times carried the imperative of such a choice--though it was not really a choice at all, but rather a sort of faceless necessity. The only road, after all, was onward.

Such a choice does not seem so obvious now, and of course the necessity has faded. Revolver retains the flash its title promised but little of the soul its predecessor delivered. Compared to either, Sgt. Pepper appears playful but contrived, less a summing up of its era than a concession to it."

You need to rememberthat Marcus is always referring to the American Rubber Soul when talks about the album (it's the one pre-'68 stateside release of theirs he included in Stranded).

http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-aow/column2.php

Beautiful, may well be his best early piece (next to the one about the young woman who starved herself to death on a macrobiotic diet, with a mention of anorexia nervosa, italics his---what a strange thing to glimpse in the mid-60s, it seems). Always good when he lets other people into his pad. Love that he quoted all those early responses to Pepper. and explained his own. I agree with him: they did want to turn us own to the real world, reconcile the generations, to some extent, for inst. But that's not just a conceptual thing, "I used to be Angry Young Man/Me hiding me head in the sand" leads to also the truly confessional side, which wasn't only re that trend in US x Uk poetry: "I used to be cruel to my woman I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved/Man I was mean but I'm changing my scene, I'm doing the best that I can", which puts a lot of strength into "I've got to admit things are getting better." The only one that really doesn't work at all for me is "Within You Without You", although I agree with Williams' interviewee--Anderle? Think so--about "A Day In The Life"'s production getting too self-important.

I remember being shocked in high school to read contemporary, mainstream press reviews of the Beatles catalog and discover that general consensus was it was all downhill once they entered their psych period. at least, that's what the assembled reviews in my hs library indicated.

Wow! What were the sources?

I wonder if Marcus viewed the "concession" of Sgt. Pepper as being musical or something to do with the subject matter. In either case, I'm not sure what was conceded.

dow this was like 30 years ago lol but I remember that the reviews were primarily short blurbs from non-rock-music mags, more mainstream papers/press.

er 20 years ago? fuck how old am I

At least as old as since Sgt. P taught the band to play.

here's a funny one from The Harvard Crimson ('68 - White Album review):

ON ONLY ONE of their albums have the Beatles taken a fundamental step forward to compare with their achievements on the singles. That record was Rubber Soul, which brought about the supreme liberation of rhythm-and-blues by injecting an unprecedented controlled melody into the rigid structure of thumping drums and bass. In doing so, Rubber Soul significantly dissolved this structure by making it technically and spiritually possible to fuse a lurching tune onto stuttering, free drums. This development led the Beatles directly through the half-successful numbers "Rain" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" to its culmination in the masterpiece, "Strawberry Fields."
The Beatles does not contain the seeds of such a revolution. It is a traditional Beatle album and as such it consists of a collection of measured and highly crafted songs; therefore it is mandatory to have it around. Nevertheless, even within this limited perspective the record leaves one with a nagging sense of non-fulfillment.

"the supreme liberation of rhythm-and-blues"!!

"Never in the history of art"

"half-successful"?

Xgau:

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band [Capitol, 1967]
A dozen good songs and true. Perhaps they're too precisely performed, but I'm not going to complain. A

to get back to williams, i just posted this thing over here: http://doomandgloomfromthetomb.tumblr.com/post/47121287935/caribbean-wind-bob-dylan-warfield-theatre which williams wrote about at length.

h'mm, another encounter with thee, Witcheh Woman. The music would prob make a dif, but reading this, I like Dylan's comments on the song better than the lyrics. How are Williams' Dylan books?

i dunno, i love that song... williams' dylan books are great if you want to get deep into specific shows/tours/periods.

Williams considered "Renaldo & Clara" the supreme artistic achievement of Dylan's career!

Cazart! Any direct quotes?

Williams considered "Renaldo & Clara" the supreme artistic achievement of Dylan's career!

http://www.popmatters.com/feature/the-improbable-birth-of-american-rock-writing/

Yet Crawdaddy! was a long way from mere teenage snark. When Paul Simon read Williams’ insightful review of Sounds of Silence in the first issue, he called him up—finally getting him on the floor phone in his freshmen dorm.

...

According to Williams’ lore, of which there’s no shortage, the young editor became a rock ‘n’ roll gadfly. In his Zeligesque history, he got turned on to weed by Brian Wilson in the psycho refuge of the Beach Boy’s living room tent. He not only made it to Woodstock, he arrived there with the Grateful Dead in the band’s limo. When you hear the rifle being locked and loaded on The Doors’ “Unknown Soldier”, that’s Paul Williams doing the locking and loading. He served as campaign manager for Timothy Leary’s brief attempt to run for Governor of California against Ronald Reagan—

his PKD book is so great

good digital versions of the Williams era of Crawdaddy here -- some great stuff
http://www.vistaservices.com/crawdaddy/
need to read his PKD book

oh! and there's this cool radio show w/ williams and producer Tom Wilson chatting in early '68. http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/69887