As founder and editor of Crawdaddy! magazine, Paul Williams has helped the rock music field itself, as well as outsiders, to recognize the importance of rock as a modern music and as a facet of modern experience. In Outlaw Blues, his first book, the author presents his own experience of rock music, the history of his reactions and insights over a two-year period.
For a critic to offer something true to his readers, he must be more than an appraiser. He must be a listener, deeply and passionately involved in the experience he describes, a lover rather than an observer. Outlaw Blues is a book full of feeling, a guide to one man's musical experience that is intended to bring all its readers closer to the nature of their own relationship with music, with the joy that bursts from the transistor radios and the open doors of the concert halls. The author says: "I see rock as a means of expression, an opportunity for beauty, an art. So what I have written is expression, not explanation; an attempt to convey what I feel from the music, an exploration of what rock does to me."
Paul Williams offers us in Outlaw Blues the same warmth and honesty of style, the same acute sensitivity and insight into the workings of contemporary music, that have made him the most respected writer in his field--admired as much by the men he writes about as the listeners he writes for. His first book makes it clear that he deserves that admiration.
