In 1977, the day after Paul Williams won an Oscar for writing lyrics for “Evergreen” — the theme song from “A Star Is Born” starring its composer, Barbra Streisand — he received a phone call from bookers for “Circus of the Stars #2,” a television special that would showcase 1970s stalwarts like Telly Savalas and Lynda Carter.
“They were going to do a skydiving segment,’” Williams recalled. “They were looking for a celebrity with experience, and there was a Paul Williams listed by the Parachute Club of America. They said, ‘That’s not you, is it?’ I said, ‘Yes it is, and the answer is yes.’”
That mix of versatility and chutzpah made Williams, who will be celebrated in “The Lovers, the Dreamers & Me: The Songs of Paul Williams” at the 92nd Street Y this week, one of the most inescapable personalities of his era.
The diminutive songwriter’s many credits include some of the Carpenters’ enduring hits, among them “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Rainy Days and Mondays” — both crafted with the composer Roger Nichols — and Kermit the Frog’s beloved signature tune, “Rainbow Connection,” written with Kenny Ascher.
Williams was also a staple of variety and talk shows, at one point turning up on Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show” in the hirsute costume he wore acting in 1973’s “Battle for the Planet of the Apes.” While writing for soundtracks, Williams took on an array of other film and television roles: a record producer in the cult favorite “Phantom of the Paradise,” a moneyed Texan in “Smokey and the Bandit.”
But Williams’s most outrageous character was himself. Substance abuse was a factor — “cocaine and vodka, or whatever you had. Some more, please,” he quipped. Not sated by jumping out of planes, he also raced bikes in the desert during his 20s, and was later drawn to cars. “I like to go fast,” he explained.
At 85, Williams has learned to slow down, at least in some respects. “I drive a BMW M2 Competition that goes up to 180 miles an hour,” he said, “but at 20 miles an hour.” He has been sober for 35 years, a point that came up repeatedly, often accompanied by the words “recovery” and “surrender.” “It was, ‘OK, drugs and alcohol, you win; I cannot compete with you anymore.’”
He quoted the Sufi poet Rumi, paraphrasing slightly: “‘Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment.’ When my addiction was at its worst, I became very clever. I wrote amazing, brilliant lyrics — and they’re in a drawer somewhere.”
Williams was chatting in the New York offices of ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, where he has been president and chairman of the board since 2009, and dressed in a black sweatshirt emblazoned with a picture of Animal, the rock-drummer Muppet, in a pose nodding to Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” When the Muppets creator Jim Henson asked him to appear on the first season of “The Muppet Show” in 1976, Williams said, he felt an instant kinship.
“I never had a treehouse when I was a kid, a place where you’d be up hanging with your gang. As soon as I walked on the set and met the Muppets and Jim, I had a treehouse.”
Christian Borle, the musical theater star who cocreated and wrote the 92NY celebration with his wife and fellow performer, Skye Mattox, hopes to reflect that playful spirit and unabashed, sometimes melancholic yearning. That combination has drawn artists including David Bowie and Sergio Mendes to Williams’s material — and in more recent decades attracted collaborators such as Daft Punk and Scissor Sisters.
“Paul knows he’s basically the de facto host,” Borle said of the upcoming event in a video interview. “He loves to talk to an audience, and he has this cache of incredible stories.” The tales are supposed to be three minutes long, Borle added, but “it’s not going to be three minutes; it’s going to be six. And that’s fine!”
Mattox noted that Williams has seemingly been “avoiding reading too much of what we send him. I think he really wants to be surprised; he talks a lot about ‘bewilderment.’”
Williams will also sing, a bit. “With my hearing,” he said, “I get to a point where there’s audio fatigue, so if I try to sing for an hour and a half, it could be painful for the audience.”
He is, indeed, always ready with a joke. Elizabeth Matthews, ASCAP’s chief executive, noted via email, “Rarely do I have a conversation with Paul when I don’t end up in tears from laughing so hard. He is the OG American storyteller.”
For Williams, humor and openheartedness work very much in sync. “I’ve always joked that I wrote codependent anthems,” he said. “I wrote like the man I wanted to be — the man who could cry about how much in love he was with somebody else. I think that’s pretty well blocked in a lot of men, and one of the things that can unblock it is music.”
These days, he focuses on his work for ASCAP, supporting the less-starry anchors of the pop world: “I love walking the halls of Congress, even in these times, reminding everybody in Washington that there would be no music industry without songwriters and the composers and publishers who support us.” And he remains active on behalf of other recovering addicts with fewer resources, making Comic-Con appearances to benefit “the organizations that saved my life.”
Creatively, Williams’s projects in development include stage adaptations of “Paradise” and “Pan’s Labyrinth,” Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 film, for which Gustavo Santaolalla is writing music.
He credited this productivity to the increased awareness he gained with sobriety. “I don’t think, ‘OK, in eight months I’ll be dead.’” Mortality does periodically rear its head: A few months ago, Williams underwent surgery for a painful herniated disk; one surgeon spotted a dead nerve, or so he thought.
“The other surgeon said the way he described it to her was that the nerve began to vibrate — first slowly, than more quickly, until it was at maximum speed, which he described as ‘joyously,’” remembered Williams, who had brought a walking cane to the interview. “When she said ‘joyously,’ a tear ran down my cheek.” He whispered to her, “‘Music is vibration.’ And we both lost it — two people who barely knew each other, their arms around each other, crying.”
This past spring, Williams had another emotional experience at Coachella, where he and other artists joined some of the Muppets’ inheritors, the puppets from the children’s show “Yo Gabba Gabba!,” to sing “Rainbow Connection.” Audience members in their 20s and 30s “were crying like a big old bunch of softies,” Williams recalled, delightedly.
“That’s what I call a heart payment — like when someone tells me, ‘I had a single mom, and for us, it was ‘You and Me Against the World,’” Williams said, referencing the 1974 hit he and Ascher wrote for Helen Reddy. “That statement, that tear on the cheek — that’s the Oscar. That’s the real Oscar.”
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