Paul Williams, _Outlaw Blues_

I AM WORKING through Shake It Up, the Library of America anthology of rock-&-pop music journalism, with a student who is doing a "directed readings," and one of the volume's first items is "Outlaw Blues," the first chapter of Williams's first book, which is mainly a collection of his pieces from Crawdaddy!, founded by Williams, often cited as the first U.S.A. periodical devoted to rock music.

Re-reading Williams's tripped-out excursus on the Rolling Stones' Satanic Majesties Request and Jefferson Airplane's After Bathing at Baxter's was a Proustian madeleine for me, as I had read Outlaw Blues when I was in high school, probably 1970 or 1971 (it was published, a "Dutton Paperback Original," in 1969). Back then, I devoured Outlaw Blues, reading it in a day or two and then re-reading it--the most enlightening, stimulating, and original thing I had yet read about the music that was occupying an ever-growing domain of my mental landscape. In fact, it has had only a few rivals for me since. Now, nearly fifty years on, seemed like an opportune time to re-read it.

Most of the pieces date from 1966 and 1967, a time of soaring confidence in the power of popular music to shape culture. Williams writes:

   At this stage of its history, rock is bursting forth from restrictions placed on it in childhood, and I suppose we can say it is having a brilliant, though difficult, adolescence. It is discovering, in new ways every day, just what is really going on out here; and every new discovery is heralded as the final, unassailable truth. And perhaps (I hear it in the most recent music of the Kinks, the Who, the Byrds, the Beach Boys, Dylan) rock is just now beginning to discover that there are no unassailable truths, there is only greater and greater awareness of the universe. And of oneself.

This extravagant hope had already gone rancid around the edges by the time I read the book, post-Manson, post-Altamont, post-Beatles breakup, post-Self Portrait, but it still spoke to me, somehow. The artists listed in the parenthesis are all in my own pantheon, as are most of the other groups Williams discusses elsewhere in the book--Love, Buffalo Springfield, the Rolling Stones--and I think the music of 1966-67 and Williams's way of talking about it remained foundational for me ever after. It was because of Williams that I bought Blonde on Blonde, fell in love with such unlikely projects as Their Satanic Majesties Request, and became obsessively curious about what Smile sounded like.

Williams died in 1995. I never read another book of his--apparently he became a kind of New Age seer, as the above reference to "awareness of the universe" pre-figures. But I owe him an immense debt, which I gladly acknowledge here.