Here’s the interview rockcritics.com published 12 years ago with Paul Williams. It was Pat Thomas, I’m pretty sure, who suggested the title, and I saw no reason to dispute it. 

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The Godfather of Rock Criticism: Paul Williams

By Pat Thomas, with Christoph Gurk (August 2001)

Growing up in the late 1970s, there was very little available to read by legendary rock scribe Paul Williams. His books were out of print, old issues of Crawdaddy! were long gone, and Paul himself was M.I.A. for the most part. It wasn’t until Paul published his first major tome on Bob Dylan [Bob Dylan: Performing Artist] that I was able to get into the meat of what made Paul great. Here was a book about Dylan that didn’t worry about what color shirt he was wearing the day he recorded this song or that one. The book went past that bullshit and got into the essence of the music. How does it sound and more importantly how does it feel? Paul was able to explain feelings about Bob’s music that I didn’t know I had. And most importantly, although Paul’s writing was very personal, he left his ego at the door. Later when I met Paul, there was no ego, no “I am a rock legend” or “I know everything” attitude, that I have experienced time and time again from music journalists with far less to brag about than Paul Williams.

Paul, for many reasons, is not gonna be on MTV interviewing Pearl Jam, he’s not gonna blow hot wind in front of a video camera doing a documentary on the history of rock n roll–he’s just not that kind of guy. I strongly suggest you check out his revamped and reborn Crawdaddy!. No ads, no corporate sponsorship, just solid heartfelt writing. Paul’s writing has moved me to check out bands I never would have dreamed of checking out, because he brings the human element into it, gets inside of himself, seemingly getting inside of me. Now, I know this sounds all flowery and new agey, but Paul came out of the 1960s and he never lost his naiveté about listening to music; it still sounds fresh to his ears. He’s not some jaded hack on the staff of (fill-in-the-blank magazine) being forced to listen to crap he doesn’t wanna listen to, he only reviews what he really likes and what truly moves him. I think that’s rare these days.

One of Paul’s faves is Neil Young, who I personally have given up on (though I applaud his commitment to keep waving the flag). Nevertheless, it’s a Neil Young song title that sums up Paul Williams for me, and that’s “Mr. Soul.” What follows is a previously unpublished interview I did with Paul in a café in Germany a couple of years back. (Also joining us was Christoph Gurk, who at that time was editor of Germany’s most respected, if overly scholastic, music magazine, SPEX).

So what does Paul have to brag about, but doesn’t? The man started the first real rock music magazine, Crawdaddy!, while still a teenager–a year-and-a-half before Jann Wenner startedRolling Stone. Via Crawdaddy!, he gave a lot of other “legends” their first writing outlet: Sandy Pearlman, Peter Guralnick, Jon Landau, and Richard Meltzer, to name just a few. He also hung with Tim Leary and sang with him on John and Yoko’s “Give Peace A Chance” single, recorded in a Montreal hotel room in 1969. If you ever get a chance to see the video from that day, Paul’s clearly in it…I could go on all day. He’s the man. Long may he run.

Something New: The Birth of Crawdaddy!

Pat Thomas:   Why don’t we just start at the beginning: How you first got into writing. Were you doing any fiction or non-fiction writing before you actually started writing about rock ‘n’ roll?

Paul Williams:   Well, not really, I was writing high school term papers or something like that, but I usually say that I got started as a professional writer by publishing myself, because when I started Crawdaddy! I didn’t have anyone else writing for me so I had to write all this stuff to fill up the pages. And it took a while, but after all I got a sense of what I wanted to do, you know? And I started sounding more like something that was really me. My first publications outside ofCrawdaddy! were either, like, Hit Parader reprinting something from Crawdaddy!, and then other magazines calling me up because Crawdaddy! was starting to get attention.

Christopher Gurk:   That was ’66, right?

Paul Williams:   Yeah, the first issue came out at the end of January in 1966.

Pat Thomas:   And how old were you then, Paul?

Paul Williams:   17.

Pat Thomas:   How did you get the idea? This was really the first rock magazine or fanzine…

Paul Williams:   In the States, yeah.

Pat Thomas:   So how did you dream this up?

Paul Williams:   Well, there were two big influences on me. One was that I’d been a science fiction fan and was used to putting out magazines. When I was 14, I put out my first science fiction fanzine, and there was a whole community of people doing that, and I put that out for a couple years. You know, mimeograph stencils and writing your own magazine seemed normal to me coming out of that world. The other influence was, when I started Crawdaddy! I was at Swarthmore College near Philadelphia, I’d grown up in Cambridge and the Boston suburbs, and there was a very active folk scene, and of course there were folk music magazines…

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