In the first installment of his new column, ANDREW STAFFORD finds inspiration in the story of legendary music writer Paul Williams.

Every time now that I go out
I look around, want to jump and shout
Don’t keep me waiting, ain’t got the time
You know that it’s alright
To jump, jumpin’ in the night

- The Flamin’ Groovies

When he was 37 years old, Paul Williams had a rock’n’roll epiphany. At the tender age of 16, Williams had founded Crawdaddy – the first rock’n’roll magazine, first published in January of 1966. Now it was 1985. Williams had spent much of the past 15 years doing as people generally do – getting on with life, finding a steadier source of income, and having kids. He still loved music, but it wasn’t at the centre of his life anymore.

And then, suddenly, there it was again. Williams dove right back into the deep end, not caring whether it was U2, R.E.M. (both quite new bands then) or even whatever the ghastly Rolling Stones album of the time was – Dirty Work, I think. He’d go see Lone Justice one night, Black Flag the next, and find merit in both experiences.

I can relate to Williams, although my life trajectory’s hardly the same. I’m 39, and I still don’t have kids, or for that matter a steady source of income. But suddenly – after a few years where it seemed all I wanted to listen to, if anything, was old stuff – I’ve got the bug again.

I think the second Eddy Current Suppression Ring record gave it to me. I saw them a couple of years ago playing with The Onyas, an old favourite Brisbane band of mine. The Onyas are brilliant/dumb bonehead rock’n’roll, and coming after them it’s fair to say I was unprepared for Eddy Current’s sinuous, angular attack.

“Musically, our brains are a bit like an iPod: whether we can fit 30, 60 or 120GB of music in there, eventually there’s simply nowhere for the new music to go.”

They hit the stage and for the first five songs I wasn’t sure. Then I started to move; I couldn’t help myself – Eddy Current are a great dance band. I took Primary Colours home with me that night, and I couldn’t believe how good it was. (And still is.)

Or more correctly, at the time, I couldn’t believe I could be so taken with a new band. Musically, our brains are a bit like an iPod: whether we can fit 30, 60 or 120GB of music in there, eventually there’s simply nowhere for the new music to go. We can only physically retain so much information in our memory.

I thought I’d reached that point a long time ago. But then the new stuff just seemed to keep coming. I found myself becoming steadily more immersed in the world of Hits. Then, earlier this year, I discovered Dandelion. Then things I never thought I’d appreciate, like the new Sally Seltmann album, I suddenly found incredibly appealing and, well, new.

Back to Williams. I first discovered him when I was just a little baby writer, in the early 1990s. I’d just been paid for my first article in the street press – $35. I went to a bookstore, and I bought Clinton Heylin’s anthology The Penguin Book of Rock & Roll Writing (later published by Da Capo).

In it I discovered all the greats – Nick Kent, Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus and Nick Tosches. (Later I picked up an answering book of female writers on rock, and swooned to the work of Caroline Coon, Deborah Frost, Evelyn McDonnell and many others.)

But I liked Williams perhaps the most. Like watching David Attenborough narrate one of his Wildlife Documentaries (now there’s a lost Australian band for you!), there was something about his unaffected, joyous enthusiasm that swept me up in all the excitement.

In his book The Map – written in the middle of that late-30s epiphany, published in 1988 – Williams starts from a simple standpoint. “I’m an idiot,” he says straight up in his introduction, confessing that the last 15 years of popular music had pretty much passed him by.

It’s a bold way to begin a book that purported to give an overview of the state of the rock’n’roll nation at the time (remember, this is 22 years ago), but Williams makes it work to his advantage. “Anybody who has to defend a self-image that they know what’s going on is working with a tremendous handicap,” he writes. “The essence of what we’re dealing with is mystery.”

The mystery is why this stuff still seems to matter so much. On one hand, a record doesn’t change the basic facts of life one little bit. But I know there’s nothing else in my life that moves me in quite the same way as music, and I like the fact I’m not entirely sure why. Paraphrasing Williams again, as long as I stay an idiot, and can’t quite explain it, I’ll keep going back for more.

So, welcome to Jumpin’ in the Night. This column will give me the chance to explore some of these ideas, starting with Williams’ premise that rock’n’roll – which really has saved my life more times than I care to remember – is “a resource, as much or more so today than it’s ever been in the past. It is a healing music ... The general purpose of rock’n’roll now is to allow people to explore their own maps of personal and collective reality.”

I first started writing about music out of blind enthusiasm. I couldn’t play it; the best I could do was tell people about it. At the time, the Stooges and the Ramones were still not much more than a cargo cult, even a couple of years post-Nirvana and Nevermind.

“Music should be fun, not a pissing contest. You can hardly be a snob and an idiot at the same time, can you?”

I loved the fact that that record was so massive. I believed great music should be heard by as many people as possible – and I still believe that. I don’t think that the music ceases to be cool when that happens. Lots of people like the Stooges now, and the Ramones. Good. That’s the way it always ought to have been. (Then again, if the first Ramones record had been huge, we might not have had the wonderful but tortured masterpiece that is Road to Ruin.) Anyway, you get the idea: don’t expect elitism from me. Music should be fun, not a pissing contest. You can hardly be a snob and an idiot at the same time, can you?

In The Map, Williams dreamed up an incredibly prescient vision of what he thought was a timeless model of rock’n’roll: an enormous jukebox, with the selections arranged in no particular order. On the jukebox was music both old and new, records you love and records you hate, current hits and favourites you’ve forgotten about, and loads of songs you may never have heard before, many of which are bound to turn out to be wonderful and to sound like they’ve been written just for you.

Today, of course, the jukebox exists, in the shape of the iPod. And anytime you want, you can put it on shuffle and it might come up with, for example, ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ by the Beach Boys, and in Williams’ words it’ll sound like what rock’n’roll sounds like.

Williams tells us that the music will keep playing “regardless of history, in an order determined only by serendipity and the whims of your head and heart. And if someone tries to sell you a program that tells you which songs are worth listening to and what order to play ’em in, don’t buy it. Because only the map you draw for yourself can possibly bring you home.”

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Andrew Stafford is a Brisbane-based writer and the author of 'Pig City'. He’s currently working on his second book for University of Queensland Press. His column appears monthly.