Love, but That’s Only Part of His Story

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/arts/music/paul-williams-at-the-cafe-carlyle.html

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When Paul Williams and Charles Fox were invited in the late 1970s to write the theme song for “The Love Boat,” Mr. Williams recalled during his opening night at the Café Carlyle last Tuesday, they took it to the singer Jack Jones expecting the television series to last for four episodes at most. Little did they know that it would continue for a decade and that the tune “The Love Boat” would become a staple — and running joke — of Mr. Jones’s shows.

It became a joke again in this show, when Mr. Williams coupled it with one of his biggest hits, “Evergreen,” written with Barbra Streisand for “A Star Is Born.” The reason? Both songs, Mr. Williams said, begin with the word “love.” In “The Love Boat,” love is “exciting and new”; in “Evergreen,” “soft as an easy chair.”

A garrulous storyteller with a self-deprecating air and a keen sense of the absurd, Mr. Williams is a much more complicated person than his lyrics, even the sadder ones like those for “Rainy Days and Mondays,” let on.

At times the show had the feel of a Gestalt therapy session in which there was a dialogue between two aspects of Mr. Williams: the pop sentimentalist who wrote bittersweet valentines recorded by the Carpenters, and the once-ubiquitous talk-show guest who by his own count made 48 appearances on “The Tonight Show.”

Last month, he said, he celebrated his 23rd year of sobriety. Although he doesn’t remember many of his television appearances, he said, he also became as addicted to being on television as he was to alcohol.

His quirky croak of a voice lent a personal poignancy to numbers like “I Won’t Last a Day Without You,” “You and Me Against the World” and “We’ve Only Just Begun,” songs that bridged the classic American songbook and 1970s soft rock. “The Rainbow Connection,” his favorite original song — and mine too — written with Kenny Ascher and introduced by Kermit the Frog, distilled the wistful essence of this superannuated little boy, now 72 and still yearning for the ineffable.

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>Paul Williams continues through Saturday at the Café Carlyle, at the Carlyle Hotel, 35 East 76th Street, Manhattan; (212) 744-1600, thecarlyle.com.