Outlaw Blues

Outlaw Blues, by Paul Williams
July, 1970  Pocket Books

First published in hardcover in 1969, Outlaw Blues collects several articles Paul Williams originally wrote for rock magazine Crawdaddy, some of the articles having been edited for this collection. Crawdaddy started before Rolling Stone but never made the same traction; it was more of a fanzine in its look and design, and also was more focused on intensive music analysis than the far-ranging counterculture coverage of Rolling Stone. Williams started the magazine and was one of the chief contributors, but it seems that by the time this paperback edition was published he’d already started moving away from the rock scene.

One thing I have to mention because it blew my mind is that Williams was only like 21 at the time, but he writes with such a keen insight that you’d never believe it. He definitely has a gift for writing, and throughout the first half of the book I was jotting down one memorable line after another. After a while I got worn out and just decided to appreciate the book and stop taking notes. While I really, really dig vintage rock criticism, I was unfamiliar with Williams’s work; he’s similar in a way to another unsung Crawdaddy critic, Sandy Pearlman (later of Blue Oyster Cult fame, or infamy), with probing, far-ranging analysis that almost comes off more like ego-strokery than actual reviewing. But it’s done so well! And I’ve gotta say, I like his work a lot more than overhyped Lester Bangs, whose “reviews” were mostly just bitch sessions. However like most of those early rock critics, Williams focuses a bit too much on the lyrics, at the expense of what the actual music sounds like; in one of the essays here he claims this is because it’s a waste of effort to describe how great the finale of, for example, “The End” by The Doors actually sounds. If you’ve heard it, then you already know how great it is, and a writer can’t help you. But I’d disagree with this. A capable rock writer can capture the sound of the music, recreating it in vibrant prose: James Henderson does it throughout Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child Of The Aquarian Age.

The first piece is the titular essay “Outlaw Blues,” which is dated December 1967 and is the gem of the collection. In this far-ranging, fantastically-written piece Williams looks at the then-recent spate of psychedelic albums, focusing in particular on Their Satanic Majesties Request by the Rolling Stones and After Bathing At Baxter’s by the Jefferson Airplane. He starts off on the Beach Boys’s Pet Sounds, though, arguing that he feels it’s one of the greatest rock albums of all time, something I definitely disagree with. He writes how the album was loved by critics but disliked by fans, comparing its lack of success with how well Beach Boys Party did in comparison, an altogether lame album that would be frowned upon by the hip hippies of the day. Williams argues though that it’s a great album, despite (or because of) its total lack of artistic aspirations, the same sort of back-to-basics rock that so many groups were just beginning to strive for in late 1967. He then goes into a tangent on overly-produced albums, ie psychedelic albums of ’67, and from there into a study of the Stones and Airplane releases.

First we get a track-by-track study of Their Satanic Majesties, which I greatly enjoyed as it’s always been one of my favorite Stones albums. Williams is a total fan of it, with none of the apologetic tone you’d encounter today nor any of the acidic dismissal you’d find at the time; Rolling Stone ran a track-by-track analysis when the record was released which was a total attack. Meanwhile I think it’s a great album and I’d rather listen to it that Sgt. Pepper’s any day, and speaking of which Williams is notable among early rock critics in that he hardly ever refers to the Beatles. And when he does it’s usually in a dismissive tone, or just for comparative purposes; he says, for example, that Their Satanic Majesties wasn’t so much a ripoff of Sgt. Pepper’s as it was inspired by it, and for that matter argues that Sgt. Pepper’s itself was inspired by “the final notes of Between The Buttons. Williams is such a fan of this unsung Stones album that he even likes the four tracks most critics (both then and now) usually state as being the worst: “Sing This All Together (See What Happens),” “The Lantern,” “Gomper,” and “On With The Show.” In fact these tracks get more focus than the best song on the record (not to mention one of the greatest psychedelic rock songs of all time): “2000 Light Years From Home.”

From there to After Bathing At Baxter’s, another favorite of mine, probably my favorite by the Airplane. Williams loves it too, for one reason because “you hear new stuff each time you listen to it.” Here too we’re treated to a track by track rundown, Williams again even enjoying the track(s) other reviewers diss, like the long proto-Hot Tuna jam that occupies a lot of side 2. For that matter, Williams points out something I hadn’t even noticed on my vinyl copy – that no bands separate the tracks. The album is split up into large pieces, and as Williams notes the Airplane is so confident people will play the whole record and not just individual tracks that they didn’t even put bands on the record so you could jump to a specific song – something, Williams also points out, that must’ve really upset radio station DJs. “The value of a record now has nothing to do with when it came out,” Williams wraps up his essay, again going back to Beach Boys Party and why that earlier record is now reconsidered in a more positive light than it had been when released.

“Bleshing” follows, beginning with an appraisal of Donovan’s Sunshine Superman, which Williams deems “the most 1966 LP I’ve ever heard, better than Revolver.” From there to a look at the first album by the Buffalo Springfield, with Williams enthusing over the tightness of the group; there’s an ironic-in-hindsight bit where he says that the group is so unified that one can barely notice Neil Young on guitar. I say ironic because Williams likely didn’t suspect Young would go on to such a prolific and long-lasting solo career. Williams is prescient in that he suspects the recently-released Springfield single “For What It’s Worth” will be a big seller; now it’s become the cliched song you hear in practically every documentary, movie, or TV series set in the ‘60s. This piece finishes off with a look at The Byrds’s Greatest Hits album, Williams going on about how these classic tracks in a different order brings a new light to them. This latter piece in particular seems to have been written while Williams was seriously stoned.

“Tom Paine Himself” is the next essay, and it’s all about Bob Dylan. I’ve never really been into his music so I skipped this one.

“What Went On” is a series of dispatches from the ever-changing world of rock, ranging everywhere from newly-released “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” from Procol Harum to the death of mono. There’s also some interesting stuff on early rock radio, and also how rock now gets media attention, in particular Sgt. Pepper’s, though Williams complains that the pre-failing New York Times gave it a bad review because the reviewer had no understanding of rock music.

“The Night On Fire” is a long piece on the Doors’s first album, with a long dialog between Williams and Doors producer Paul Rothschild. First though Williams relates those sentiments I mentioned earlier: “Descriptive criticism is almost a waste of time, where quality is concerned.” In Williams’s opinion it would be a waste of effort to describe for you the rousing finale of “The End,” and I guess I see his point when it comes to mainstream or at least well-known pieces of music. But back in the day, before easy MP3 downloads or Youtube uploads, “descriptive criticism” was very important when you were trying to learn about some obscure album. Williams is overly focused on a particular Doors song, “Soul Kitchen,” especially the closing line “Learn to forget.” In Williams’s view, this line, casually tossed out by Morrison, takes on almost gnostic proportions.

The wide-ranging conversation with Rothschild is pretty interesting. We learn about studio recording techniques, and also the interesting observation from Rothschild that engineers are to producers what producers are to artists. There’s also some cool background material on the recording of the first Doors album, as well as observations on the Lizard King himself: “Jim is fascinated with the concept of death,” Rothschild states. We get the now-famous story on the recording of “The End,” Rothschild claiming it was the only time in his professional career when he was so caught up in the music unfolding in the studio that he forgot to pay attention to the recording levels and etc: “The muse visited us.”

The next piece runs to nearly 50 pages and is the second highlight of the book: “Brian,” all about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and his aborted attempt to make the ultimate psychedelic pop album, Smile. Like the previous piece, this one’s made up of an interview, this time with David Anderle, who’d been a member of the Beach Boys entourage for a while, even briefly running their record label. I have a strong suspicion that this piece played a key role in the creation of Glimpses; so many lines of dialog and situations here would later appear in that Lewis Shiner novel. But then, “Brian” became a key piece in the ensuing Smile legend, along with Jules Siegel’s “Goodbye Surfing, Hello God” (which itself mentioned a bit in this interview). Smile was what got me on a brief Beach Boys kick, back in the ‘90s; I’d never heard of it until a random review of a bootleg release in the All Music Guide, which soon had me finding Beach Boys bootlegs and putting together my own mixes of the album on cassette tape.

I have to say one thing about Williams: he’s not ashamed to admit when he’s wrong. This piece opens with both guys complaining about how they were “let down” by the recent release of Wild Honey, going on about how it was a huge step down from the potential of Smile. This piece is made up of two interviews, done months apart, and in the second half of the interview both Williams and Anderle are suddenly huge fans of Wild Honey, realizing it took a while for the quality of the album it to sink in. And more importantly, how the album predicted the back-to-the-roots movement other artists wouldn’t be getting to for a few more years. (Nicely linking back to the previous piece, we’re also told that none other than Jim Morrison dug the album!) For the most part, though, the majority of this long piece is devoted to Smile and Brian’s attempt to create a piece of art that would rival anything by the Beatles.

Since this is all so soon after it happened, the two are unaware – or just didn’t want to put it in print – that Brian was close to a breakdown at this point and would soon be under psychiatric care. Indeed, Anderele predicts that Brian will soon do “something big,” and that his genius will no longer just be limited to music, with forays into movies and whatever else strikes his fancy. Instead he’d get in bed and only rarely venture out of it. And the in-fighting with the other Beach Boys is downplayed, with Anderele merely stating that it was a “clash of personalities” which led to the dropping of Smile, that Brian just lost interest in it because he was sick of constantly having to explain it to the others. But the stuff on the actual recording of the album is fascinating, and as mentioned so much from Glimpses is here, from Brian doing “business meetings” in the pool to making impromptu music with his dinner guests.

Of course, many years later Brian released all the Smile sessions, giving fans the opportunity to piece together their own versions in higher fidelity, something Dominic Priore predicted might happen in Look! Listen! Vibrate! Smile!. I’ve listened to a lot of these mixes over the years, but this one, the Pocket Symphony Mix, is by far the best. It’s as if the story from Glimpses came true, that some modern Brian Wilson fan went back to ’66 and helped Brian complete the album that was eluding him. All the pieces were there, as this mix proves, it’s just that Brian needed a guiding hand to help put the pieces together, and no one around him at the time really “got” what he was trying to do. Perhaps my only criticism about this Pocket Symphony Mix is that it doesn’t feature “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow,” with the fuzzed out bass guitars, but its lack is a small price to pay considering how strong the completed album is. And it actually plays like an album, not just a decades-later fan reconstruction. Seriously, head to the link above and download it off the guy’s Google drive, it’s great.

Last up is “How Rock Communicates,” which like the above one on the Byrds seems to have been written under the influence. It rambles all over the place, Williams struggling to define how exactly rock communicates to the listener, bringing in references to many of the artists already discussed. Finally Williams gives up with: “How rock communicates is a mystery to me.”

I’m glad I picked this one up. It was a very entertaining read, particularly in the titular piece and “Brian.” Makes me wish more of these sorts of anthologies had been published in the day, in particular stuff by Sandy Pearlman – though you can find some of his material in Jonathan Eisen’s The Age Of Rock 2 (1970) and Twenty-Minute Fandangos And Forever Changes (1971).