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PUSHING UPWARD
Paul Williams
First published in 1973, and finally back
in print, this collection of essays, fragments, poems and songs and two interviews,
"essentially represents my life and interests and development leading up to
my 21st birthday in 1969."
A BELATED GUIDE TO THE CONTENTS (from the new edition)
p. 9, Letter to Rew...I met her in March 1969, on an airplane, and then hung out with her a little on that East Coast visit, so this was written after that, spring '69, back home in my cabin in Mendocino
p. 10, Love Street: So Far...this appeared in the October 1968 issue of my rock music magazine, Crawdaddy!, the last issue I edited before leaving New York City for a cabin in the woods in Northern California
p. 21, The Sources of the Nile: Ron Cobb...this appeared in a December 1968 issue of an underground newspaper called The San Francisco Express-Times, edited by Marvin Garson and Robert Novick
p. 27, The Sources of the Nile: R. Crumb...another installment of the same column from the same weekly newspaper
p. 32, Memphis Blues Again...the first few pages were written at Swarthmore College in March or April 1966. They just burst out one afternoon in my freshman dorm room after I was very moved by watching some sort of modern dance performance outdoors a half hour earlier. I liked what I'd unexpectedly produced, and held on to the pages. In July of that year, in an apartment in Cambridge, Mass., I decided they were the foreword to a novel I would now write, named after a song on Bob Dylan's new album. Chapter One was written then. The letter from Suzie was the text of a real letter my first girlfriend had mailed me the previous autumn. "Feel like a broke- down engine" is from a Blind Willie McTell song as sung by Dave Ray p. 45, In 1966 I tried...fragments from '66, framing material done in '69 p. 49, Letter to a Young Writer...an actual letter. I don't know if she ever published her novel. Thirty years later (as I write these annotations) I'm still not a fiction-writer, and I think I'm at peace with that p. 62 This is a sheet of paper...sheets of paper with this PW-authored message on them were handed out as broadsides in New York City in summer 1967 by Jim Fouratt's East Coast version of the San Francisco Diggers' communication company
p. 65, The Procol Harum album...this is from the January 1968 issue of Crawdaddy!
p. 73, The fact that mere "noise"...this appeared in the October 1967 issue of Crawdaddy! under the title "Sergeant Pepper as Noise" p. 74, Long poem and You ask me...these are "fragments," notes to myself typed on sheets of paper when I was 18, 19, or 20, and then kept around because they pleased me; I thought of them vaguely as some sort of literary output, which is why I eventually included many of them in this book
p. 75, I don't know if...this fragment indicates within iself that it was written in September 1968. Yes, the same Dale who did the pictures p. 78, The Great Astrology Essay, written early in 1969 and published in a book/magazine called US edited by Richard Goldstein and published by Bantam Books
pp 95-114, 14 songs...the first of these, "Cold Weather Blues," was written in March 1965; the others followed during the next four years. I didn't (and don't) play an instrument, but I loved music so I wrote songs anyway, and sang them to myself while hitchhiking
p. 115, Symphony: The View from Now...written in March 1969 and published in the first US book/magazine
p. 127, Flight...written in 1963, I think, when I was 15
p. 129, The Rolling Stone Interview with Timothy Leary...was never published in Rolling Stone. Jann Wenner, RS founder and publisher, gave me the assignment but never published the result (though Tim nagged him about it for a while), mostly because it made him uncomfortable that we talked about him in the interview...he thought he'd look vain if he published that part and would look uptight if he cut that part out. It was the first time Tim and Rosemary and I met; three months later we traveled across America together for a few weeks and ended up at John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Bed-In for Peace in Montreal
p. 149, "Sister Ray" shames me...this Mendocino fragment was written sometime before "Symphony," winter 1969
p. 150, If it seems I...November 1968; I think I did make the requested changes but the Times Book Review never published the review (of some forgettable book about the Beatles)
p. 151, These days poetry days...published in autumn '68 in a respectable literary magazine-my only such appearance-because my friend the coeditor liked it
p. 152, "Now, what's this about claustrophobia?"...self-therapy at the typewriter, autumn 1967
pp. 164-7, 3 fragments...all from Mendocino, where I lived in a clearing in a redwood forest, three miles from town and a mile from the river
p. 168, The Sources of the Nile (The Dragon in the Sea)...another San Fran Express-Times column, Jan. '69
pp. 173-6, Smokey! and Beau Brummels...both from Crawdaddy!, June 1968
p. 177, Soaring into updrafts...from Friends & Neighbors #4, May 4, 1969, published by PW on his mimeograph for his Fs and Ns
p. 178, Sooner or Later (One of Us Must Know)...written for, and rejected by, the Express-Times, 1/69, and then published in Crawdaddy!
pp. 191-200, 8 songs...written in a few days while hanging out with David Crosby in Los Angeles as the first Crosby, Stills & Nash album was being recorded. He put music to a few of them and for two days it looked like "The Word Has Need of New Meaning" would be on the album
p. 201, Essra...written for, and I think not published by, Rolling Stone; her next album, Primordial Lovers by Essra Mohawk, was terrific but never got the attention it deserved
p. 205, How many times have I loved you...also from Friends & Neighbors #4
pp. 207-214, 4 fragments..."I'm surfacing" is from late '67 ("icebag" was a variety of marijuana); the Yippie piece is from late '68 (in 1995 Brian Wilson stared at me pensively, and said, "Didn't we see each other in an airport?")
p. 215, Stopping in Chicago on the Way to Los Angeles...written Jan. '68, driving across America in a Volkswagen with Joel Hack, then the southern Calif. distributor of Crawdaddy! and various underground newspapers
p. 216, All of my girl friends...particularly Trina and Dale, probably written late '68
p. 219, The Hippies Are Gone. Where Did They Go?...this appeared in The Village Voice, October 26, 1967
p. 222, Craig and his friend...1968 fragment
p. 223, Riding downtown...appeared in Mademoiselle, sometime in 1968
p. 229, The problem is...Mendocino fragment
p. 230, Against the Tide the Tide...the sailboat incident was August 1963 near Wellfleet Harbor; I think I wrote this in '64
p. 232, The good is often...musings circa January 1967
p. 233, May 27, 1964...written the awful day my childhood pet (Rocket, a sheltie) was killed
p. 234, Letter to Another...published in Crawdaddy! #22, May 1969, written June 1968; the first Entwhistle book was How to Commit Revolution in Corporate America by G. William Domhoff, summer 1968; "that time at Brown" was a freewheelin' discussion I led at Brown University when the same Freddy had arranged for me to give a lecture there
p. 244, Caught up in a strange loneliness...this seems to be another Memphis Blues Again fragment, probably from 1966
p. 245, I am glad that I'm so many people...end of '68 or early '69
p. 246, Homage À Kinks...this record review did appear in Rolling Stone, sometime in the spring of 1969
p. 251, The Sources of the Nile...Express-Times, 1/69
p. 255, Tauruses are self-conscious...winter '69, "she" was my neighbor Essra, also a Taurus
p. 256. Thrilling Wonder Stories: Philip K. Dick...this was published in another underground newspaper, the NYC cousin of Boston's Avatar, in the winter of 1968. The girl was my then- girlfriend (I was 19, she was 29), the amazing Trina Robbins, who along with Art Spiegelman and Bhob Stewart (all names to conjure with, in certain circles) had "turned me on" to reading Philip K. Dick novels a few months earlier. Then in September 1968, at a science fiction convention in Oakland, I gave a copy of this to Dick, who was thrilled to be in an underground newspaper. I was thrilled to meet and get high with my hero, and we began a long friendship. At that same convention, I met new friends who influenced me to choose the Mendocino woods as my next home and then did the groundwork to make it possible, bless 'em
p. 262, Thrilling Wonder Stories: Dune & The Green Brain...also New York Avatar, summer 1968. David Hartwell and I took turns writing this science fiction column, first for Avatar then a few years later in still another incarnation of Crawdaddy!
p. 265, In December of 1966...this early '69 fragment could be considered something of a precursor to the visionary book I wrote a year and a half later, Das Energi
p. 269, Standing in the branches...possibly written in high school days, my best and perhaps only haiku
p. 270, Earth Opera/Joni Mitchell-The Way We Are Today...from the August 1968 issue of Crawdaddy!
p. 284, I'm Beginning to See the Light...this appeared in May '69 in an experimental West Coast paper called Planet, edited by Robert Gold. Because I like being proved right by history, it tickles me that high points of this piece were excerpted in a 1969 MGM Records ad that is reprinted on page 61 of the booklet included in the 1995 Velvet Underground box set
p. 295, Conversation between Paul Williams and Mel Lyman...the rest of the book had been assembled by the time of this conversation in early June; the book essentially represents my life and interests and development leading up to my 21st birthday, May 19, 1969
p. 319, Waking Poem...1968 or
1969; I like the way the picture matches the poem (Dale's Afghan is me) (and
the reader is all three of us...) 
Copyright © 2000 by Paul Williams.