The cause was complications of early onset dementia, which had been triggered by a traumatic brain injury suffered in a bicycle accident in 1995, his wife, the singer Cindy Lee Berryhill, said.
Mr. Williams was a 17-year-old freshman at Swarthmore College when he started his magazine, in 1966. The first issue, mimeographed and stapled together, promised readers a level of critical insight into the emerging rock scene that it said was missing in fan magazines and trade publications. “Crawdaddy will feature neither pin-ups nor news-briefs; the specialty of this magazine is intelligent writing,” Mr. Williams wrote.
Mr. Williams is considered by many to be rock journalism’s founding father. He printed the first issue of Crawdaddy (the name, taken from the London nightclub where the Rolling Stones first played, was originally rendered with an exclamation point, at least some of the time) 18 months before Jann Wenner founded Rolling Stone and two years before the debut of Creem, another major competitor. (Smaller rock publications had been started before then, but not distributed nationally.)
Turning a stapled dorm publication into a national journal required cleverness and some luck, friends said. Besides handing out copies on the Swarthmore campus, west of Philadelphia, Mr. Williams mailed them to the performers reviewed in its pages, a tactic that drew phone calls of appreciation from some of them, including Bob Dylan. Mr. Williams parlayed the calls into extended published interviews with Mr. Dylan, Paul Simon and others, which drew notice from record companies interested in ads.
Mr. Williams left college at the end of his freshman year, moving the magazine first to Boston and then to a small office on Canal Street in Lower Manhattan, where it became a platform for many first-generation rock writers, including Jon Landau, Sandy Pearlman and Richard Meltzer, author of “The Aesthetics of Rock,” a 1970 collection of essays, many of which first appeared in Crawdaddy.
Published on a shoestring, with a combined circulation from subscriptions and single-copy record store sales of about 20,000, Crawdaddy was quickly overtaken by the slicker and more professionally managed Rolling Stone, which achieved a circulation of around 250,000 within three years. But Mr. Williams’s innovative idea — to publish smart writing about the increasingly sophisticated ’60s rock scene — was by all accounts seminal.
Peter Knobler, who became editor of Crawdaddy in the ’70s, described the journalism Mr. Williams developed as a combination of music criticism and close-up reportage about the gathering societal storm that came to be known as the counterculture.
“The music was part of all that, and the writing reflected it,” Mr. Knobler said in an interview on Friday. “It was generational, political, all about this new thing, the youth culture. That was Paul’s vision.”
Robert Christgau, the veteran rock critic formerly with The Village Voice, said rock ’n’ roll writing was indebted to Mr. Williams and his magazine “for its very existence.”
Until Crawdaddy, Mr. Christgau said, the sort of dense, almost literary analysis it ran about groups like Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape and the Doors was simply “not a possibility.”
In 1968, Mr. Williams turned over control of the magazine to others and left for California to become a full-time freelance writer. Crawdaddy folded in 1979.
Mr. Williams wrote scores of articles for Rolling Stone and other rock journals as well as two dozen books, including three about Bob Dylan. In 1993 he became editor of a revived version of Crawdaddy, which lasted until 2003, when his illness began taking its toll.
One of Mr. Williams’s best-known articles as a freelancer was one he wrote for Rolling Stone in 1975 extolling the virtues of Philip K. Dick. Mr. Dick’s work was respected in science fiction circles but was relatively unknown to the general public.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/arts/music/paul-williams-father-of-rock-criticism-is-dead-at-64.html?partner=rss&emc=rss