Who the first rock critic was is a matter for debate; legend has it that the San Francisco Chronicle’s jazz writer, Ralph Gleason, was the first daily journalist to take the music on its own terms, just as the Dead and the Airplane were coming to prominence. In New York City, Richard Goldstein was writing serious commentary on the music for the Voice and the New York Times around then as well. And at about the same time, a 16-year-old Boston kid named Paul Williams was writing down his thoughts on the music explosion. He xeroxed them, stapled the result together, and called the thing Crawdaddy!
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The next few years were heady: For decades, Brian Wilson’s lost Smile album was a Holy Grail for critics; Williams sang backup on it. As Timothy Leary’s campaign manager for his rather fanciful run at the California governorship, Williams participated in John and Yoko’s bed-ins and made an appearance in the accompanying “Give Peace a Chance” video. The rock world was much smaller then: He remembers being at Warner Brothers and talking to superproducer Richard Perry. Perry said he’d been recording a new group with one standout, if diminutive, member. His name, the producer said, was Paul Williams: “But don’t worry, we’ll change it.” The writer said not to bother.
Last year, after a hiatus of nearly a quarter century, he started publishing Crawdaddy! again. It’s different now, but the same: a xerox-and-staples quarterly affair mostly filled with one extravagantly long Williams essay on a group of current albums. The new issue covers the Counting Crows, Tim Hardin, Joe Henry, Liz Phair, Uncle Tupelo, Pavement, and Berryhill. Those brought up on the fanzine morass of Spin or the unintelligibility of the Voice will find the patina of what an unsympathetic person would call 60s overoptimism. But what comes through is intelligence, honesty, and sincerity; absent is anything flip or glib. “I try not to cop an attitude,” Williams says, and shrugs. “I did when I was young, but I was arrogant and stupid.”
