On Knowing the Phenomenal Energi of Paul Williams
The Father of rock journalism and an unwitting architect of the New Age movement
IT WAS 1980 and I was 28 and living in St. Helena, the heart and soul of California’s gorgeous grape-growing Napa Valley. I had a day job attending to the needs of the plants and customers at Four Seasons Nursery. I enjoyed this job, as plant people tend to be friendly and plants tend to be even friendlier.
I was hardly wealthy — Hell’s Belles, I was barely solvent most of the times! — but I felt blessed: I had a decent job and I was in love with a beautiful woman. And, most amazingly, she was in love with me.
I was also buying and selling collectable records, which I acquired by haunting used record shops in the Bay Area, especially the thousands of records in the dollar bins at the back of Rasputin’s in Berkeley.
I sold these records at the monthly swaps at the Holiday Inn in Emeryville, the Castro Valley’s Boy’s Club, and the “legendary” Capitol Record swap in Los Angeles. I had also recently started running regular ads in Goldmine magazine, so I was a mail-order dealer.
“Don’t ever think you know what’s right for the other person. He might start thinking he knows what’s…
