Crawdaddy!
Encyclopedia
Crawdaddy! was the first U.S.
magazine
of rock and roll
music criticism
. Created in 1966 by college student Paul Williams
in response to the increasing sophistication and cultural influence of popular music, Crawdaddy! was self-described as "the first magazine to take rock and roll seriously."
Preceding both Rolling Stone
and Creem
, Crawdaddy! is regarded as the U.S. pioneer of rock journalism and was the training ground for many rock writers just finding the language to describe rock and roll
, which was only then beginning to be written about as studiously as folk music
and jazz
. The magazine spawned the career of numerous rock and other writers. Early contributing writers included Jon Landau
, Sandy Pearlman
, Richard Meltzer
and Peter Knobler
.
Williams left the magazine in 1968, going on to write over 25 books. From 1993 to 2003 he self-published a Crawdaddy! reincarnation. In 2006 it was sold to Wolfgang's Vault
and later resurrected as a daily webzine. Effective August 5, 2011, visits began redirecting to PasteMagazine.com, which announced that Crawdaddy "relaunches as a blog on Paste, where we’ll share stories from the Crawdaddy archives and publish new content on legacy artists."
in England at which the Rolling Stones played their first gig, Crawdaddy! was started on the campus of Swarthmore College
. Williams was a science fiction fan
who at the age of 17 started mimeographing and distributing a collection of criticisms (at first mostly his own) about rock and roll music and musicians. (He had begun publishing a science fiction fanzine
, Within, at the age of 14, and later recruited some of his fellow fans to help.) Crawdaddy! quickly moved from its fanzine
roots to become one of the first rock music "prozines", with newsstand distribution.
(who first wrote for the original Crawdaddy! under Williams in October 1968), with senior editor Greg Mitchell
, featuring contributions from Joseph Heller
, John Lennon
, Tim O'Brien
, Michael Herr
, Gilda Radner
, Dan Aykroyd
, P.J. O'Rourke and Cameron Crowe
, plus a roster of columnists including at times William S. Burroughs
, Paul Krassner
, David G. Hartwell
, the Firesign Theater, and sometimes Paul Williams himself. While on the run from the law, Abbie Hoffman
was Crawdaddy 's travel editor.
Among Crawdaddys scoops: the first major profile of Bruce Springsteen
, written in December 1972 by Peter Knobler with special assistance from Greg Mitchell. Crawdaddy "discovered" Springsteen in the rock press and was his earliest champion. Springsteen and the E Street Band acknowledged by giving a private performance at the Crawdaddy 10th Anniversary Party in New York City in June 1976.
As the decade progressed, the Crawdaddy staff included Timothy White (later, an editor of Billboard
), Mitch Glazer
, Denis Boyles
, Noe Goldwasser, John Swenson and Jon Pareles
(currently a music writer at The New York Times
). Because of such notable talent, Crawdaddy has been described as the Buffalo Springfield
of the rock magazine world.
Crawdaddy was a generational magazine known for its well-written, insightful profiles particularly of musicians, but also actors, athletes and other celebrities prominent in 1970s pop culture, including Sly Stone
, Bob Marley
, the Who
, Eric Clapton
, the Rolling Stones
, Mel Brooks
, John Belushi
, Jack Nicholson
, Gregg Allman
, Muhammad Ali
, Joni Mitchell
, Bonnie Raitt
, Linda Ronstadt
, Roxy Music
, Little Feat
, George Carlin
, Randy Newman
, Paul Butterfield
, Brian Eno
and Roy Orbison
. Under Knobler, Crawdaddys editors often assigned artists to write about other artists; Al Kooper
profiled Steve Martin
, Martin Mull
interviewed Woody Allen
, William S. Burroughs
talked magic and mysticism with Jimmy Page
.
The record reviews sections, driven by editors Swenson and Goldwasser, had an iconoclastic reputation - well-known and respected by the music industry for its fierce independence. Crawdaddys features section regularly covered scenes from New Orleans funk to Austin, Texas' cosmic cowboys to Scientology
, est
and disco
. Its renowned sense of humor produced the Crawdoodah Gazette, The Whole Earth Conspiracy Catalogue and "The Assassination Please Almanac".
In 1976 the magazine published the first in-depth article on the life and bizarre death of country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons
, anticipating the wealth of information published about him in later years. Greg Mitchell went onto write various books concerning U.S. political events and is now the editor of Editor and Publisher.
and Mary Matalin
and the autobiographies of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
, Hakeem Olajuwon
, Governor Ann Richards
, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton, and Sumner Redstone
.
. In May 2007, the magazine was re-launched as an online publication at Crawdaddy.com, equipped with video and mp3
capability. Credited for its reputation for "thinking man's music writing" by Magnet
, Crawdaddy! operated as a daily music news blog and source for longform music journalism, with a team of freelancers spanning the globe and a small San Francisco-based editorial staff headed by Editor-in-Chief Angela Zimmerman. At the film, music and culture website PasteMagazine.com, where Crawdaddy appeared as a blog on August 5, 2011, the host site undertakes to import and maintain the Crawdaddy archive, and promises to continue to post not only archival but new material from "many of the columnists and writers you might have enjoyed at the Crawdaddy! website."
The magazine's content spanned the entire age of rock 'n' roll from its inception (and all of the genre's derivatives) to extensive coverage on new and breaking bands. Regular columns and features included interviews, reviews, song histories, lyrical dissections, interviews on songwriting, roadie tales courtesy of Dinky Dawson, new classics, music and politics, crate diggers, the weakest cut, memoir and fiction pieces, in-house video sessions and interviews, and more.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
magazine
Magazine
Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of articles. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three...
of rock and roll
Rock and roll
Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from a combination of African American blues, country, jazz, and gospel music...
music criticism
Music criticism
See also Music journalism for reporting on classical and popular music in the media.The Oxford Companion to Music defines music criticism as 'the intellectual activity of formulating judgments on the value and degree of excellence of individual works of music, or whole groups or genres'. In this...
. Created in 1966 by college student Paul Williams
Paul Williams (Crawdaddy! creator)
Paul Williams is an American music journalist and writer. Williams created the first national US magazine of rock music criticism :Crawdaddy! in January 1966 on the campus of Swarthmore College with the help of some of his fellow science fiction fans...
in response to the increasing sophistication and cultural influence of popular music, Crawdaddy! was self-described as "the first magazine to take rock and roll seriously."
Preceding both Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
and Creem
Creem
Creem , "America's Only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine," was a monthly rock 'n' roll publication first published in March 1969 by Barry Kramer and founding editor Tony Reay. It suspended production in 1989 but received a short-lived renaissance in the early 1990s as a glossy tabloid...
, Crawdaddy! is regarded as the U.S. pioneer of rock journalism and was the training ground for many rock writers just finding the language to describe rock and roll
Rock and roll
Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from a combination of African American blues, country, jazz, and gospel music...
, which was only then beginning to be written about as studiously as folk music
Folk music
Folk music is an English term encompassing both traditional folk music and contemporary folk music. The term originated in the 19th century. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers....
and jazz
Jazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
. The magazine spawned the career of numerous rock and other writers. Early contributing writers included Jon Landau
Jon Landau
Jon Landau is an American music critic, manager and record producer, most known for his association in all three capacities with Bruce Springsteen.He is currently the head of the nominating committee for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame....
, Sandy Pearlman
Sandy Pearlman
Sandy Pearlman is an American music producer, artist manager, professor, poet, songwriter, and once was a record company executive...
, Richard Meltzer
Richard Meltzer
Richard Meltzer was one of the earliest rock music critics. His first book, The Aesthetics of Rock, evolved out of his undergraduate studies in philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and graduate studies at Yale University...
and Peter Knobler
Peter Knobler
Peter Knobler is an American writer living in New York City. He has collaborated on several national best sellers and was the editor-in-chief of Crawdaddy magazine from 1972 to 1979.- Writing :...
.
Williams left the magazine in 1968, going on to write over 25 books. From 1993 to 2003 he self-published a Crawdaddy! reincarnation. In 2006 it was sold to Wolfgang's Vault
Wolfgang's Vault
Wolfgang's Vault is a private music-focused company established in 2003 dedicated to the restoration and archiving of live concert recordings in audio and video format and the sale of music memorabilia. It began with the collection of the late promoter Bill Graham, and added multiple other music...
and later resurrected as a daily webzine. Effective August 5, 2011, visits began redirecting to PasteMagazine.com, which announced that Crawdaddy "relaunches as a blog on Paste, where we’ll share stories from the Crawdaddy archives and publish new content on legacy artists."
Magazine roots
Named after the legendary Crawdaddy ClubCrawdaddy Club
The Crawdaddy Club was a 1960s music venue in Richmond, Surrey, England. Several other seminal British blues and rhythm and blues acts also played there....
in England at which the Rolling Stones played their first gig, Crawdaddy! was started on the campus of Swarthmore College
Swarthmore College
Swarthmore College is a private, independent, liberal arts college in the United States with an enrollment of about 1,500 students. The college is located in the borough of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, 11 miles southwest of Philadelphia....
. Williams was a science fiction fan
Science fiction fandom
Science fiction fandom or SF fandom is a community or "fandom" of people actively interested in science fiction and fantasy and in contact with one another based upon that interest...
who at the age of 17 started mimeographing and distributing a collection of criticisms (at first mostly his own) about rock and roll music and musicians. (He had begun publishing a science fiction fanzine
Science fiction fanzine
A science fiction fanzine is an amateur or semi-professional magazine published by members of science fiction fandom, from the 1930s to the present day...
, Within, at the age of 14, and later recruited some of his fellow fans to help.) Crawdaddy! quickly moved from its fanzine
Fanzine
A fanzine is a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon for the pleasure of others who share their interest...
roots to become one of the first rock music "prozines", with newsstand distribution.
- You are looking at the first issue of a magazine of rock and roll criticism. Crawdaddy! will feature neither pin-ups nor news-briefs; the specialty of this magazine is intelligent writing about pop music.... -- Issue No. 1, February 7, 1966
Mass market magazine
Crawdaddy! briefly suspended publication in 1969, then returned, with its title unpunctuated, in 1970, as a monthly with national mass market distribution, first as a quarterfold newsprint tabloid, then as a standard-sized magazine. Crawdaddy continued through the decade, led by editor-in-chief Peter KnoblerPeter Knobler
Peter Knobler is an American writer living in New York City. He has collaborated on several national best sellers and was the editor-in-chief of Crawdaddy magazine from 1972 to 1979.- Writing :...
(who first wrote for the original Crawdaddy! under Williams in October 1968), with senior editor Greg Mitchell
Greg Mitchell
Greg Mitchell is the author of twelve books and currently blogs on the media and politics, and of late especially on WikiLeaks, for The Nation...
, featuring contributions from Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller
Joseph Heller was a US satirical novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His best known work is Catch-22, a novel about US servicemen during World War II...
, John Lennon
John Lennon
John Winston Lennon, MBE was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music...
, Tim O'Brien
Tim O'Brien (author)
Tim O'Brien is an American novelist who often writes about his experiences in the Vietnam War and the impact the war had on the American servicemen who fought there...
, Michael Herr
Michael Herr
Michael Herr is a writer and former war correspondent, best known as the author of Dispatches , a memoir of his time as a correspondent for Esquire magazine during the Vietnam War...
, Gilda Radner
Gilda Radner
Gilda Susan Radner was an American comedian and actress, best known as one of the original cast members of the NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live, for which she won an Emmy Award in 1978.-Early life:...
, Dan Aykroyd
Dan Aykroyd
Daniel Edward "Dan" Aykroyd, CM is a Canadian comedian, actor, screenwriter, musician, winemaker and ufologist. He was an original cast member of Saturday Night Live, an originator of The Blues Brothers and Ghostbusters and has had a long career as a film actor and screenwriter.-Early...
, P.J. O'Rourke and Cameron Crowe
Cameron Crowe
Cameron Bruce Crowe is an American screenwriter and film director. Before moving into the film industry, Crowe was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine, for which he still frequently writes....
, plus a roster of columnists including at times William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
, Paul Krassner
Paul Krassner
Paul Krassner is an author, journalist, stand-up comedian, and the founder, editor and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958...
, David G. Hartwell
David G. Hartwell
David Geddes Hartwell is an American editor of science fiction and fantasy. He has worked for Signet , Berkley Putnam , Pocket , and Tor Books David Geddes Hartwell (b. July 10, 1941) is an American editor of science fiction and fantasy. He has worked for Signet (1971–1973), Berkley Putnam...
, the Firesign Theater, and sometimes Paul Williams himself. While on the run from the law, Abbie Hoffman
Abbie Hoffman
Abbot Howard "Abbie" Hoffman was a political and social activist who co-founded the Youth International Party ....
was Crawdaddy 's travel editor.
Among Crawdaddys scoops: the first major profile of Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen , nicknamed "The Boss," is an American singer-songwriter who records and tours with the E Street Band...
, written in December 1972 by Peter Knobler with special assistance from Greg Mitchell. Crawdaddy "discovered" Springsteen in the rock press and was his earliest champion. Springsteen and the E Street Band acknowledged by giving a private performance at the Crawdaddy 10th Anniversary Party in New York City in June 1976.
As the decade progressed, the Crawdaddy staff included Timothy White (later, an editor of Billboard
Billboard (magazine)
Billboard is a weekly American magazine devoted to the music industry, and is one of the oldest trade magazines in the world. It maintains several internationally recognized music charts that track the most popular songs and albums in various categories on a weekly basis...
), Mitch Glazer
Mitch Glazer
Mitchell A. Glazer is an American movie producer, writer, and actor.-Biography:Glazer was born in Key Biscayne, Florida and was raised in Miami, the son of Leonard and Zelda Glazer, an English teacher. Glazer is a relative of Sidney Glazier and Tom Glazer. He attended Miami Beach High School. He...
, Denis Boyles
Denis Boyles
Denis Boyles is a writer, editor, former university lecturer and the author/editor of several books of poetry, travel/history, criticism, practical advice and essays, including Design Poetics , The Modern Man's Guide to Life , African Lives , Man Eaters Motel , A Man's Life: The Complete...
, Noe Goldwasser, John Swenson and Jon Pareles
Jon Pareles
Jon Pareles is an American journalist who is the chief popular music critic in the arts section of the New York Times. He played jazz flute and piano, and graduated from Yale University with a degree in music. In the 1970s he was an associate editor of Crawdaddy!, and in the 1980s an associate...
(currently a music writer at The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
). Because of such notable talent, Crawdaddy has been described as the Buffalo Springfield
Buffalo Springfield
Buffalo Springfield is a North American folk rock band renown both for its music and as a springboard for the careers of Neil Young, Stephen Stills, Richie Furay and Jim Messina. Among the first wave of North American bands to become popular in the wake of the British invasion, the group combined...
of the rock magazine world.
Crawdaddy was a generational magazine known for its well-written, insightful profiles particularly of musicians, but also actors, athletes and other celebrities prominent in 1970s pop culture, including Sly Stone
Sly Stone
Sly Stone is an American musician, songwriter, and record producer, most famous for his role as frontman for Sly & the Family Stone, a band which played a critical role in the development of soul, funk and psychedelia in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1993, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of...
, Bob Marley
Bob Marley
Robert Nesta "Bob" Marley, OM was a Jamaican singer-songwriter and musician. He was the rhythm guitarist and lead singer for the ska, rocksteady and reggae band Bob Marley & The Wailers...
, the Who
The Who
The Who are an English rock band formed in 1964 by Roger Daltrey , Pete Townshend , John Entwistle and Keith Moon . They became known for energetic live performances which often included instrument destruction...
, Eric Clapton
Eric Clapton
Eric Patrick Clapton, CBE, is an English guitarist and singer-songwriter. Clapton is the only three-time inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: once as a solo artist, and separately as a member of The Yardbirds and Cream. Clapton has been referred to as one of the most important and...
, the Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones are an English rock band, formed in London in April 1962 by Brian Jones , Ian Stewart , Mick Jagger , and Keith Richards . Bassist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts completed the early line-up...
, Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks is an American film director, screenwriter, composer, lyricist, comedian, actor and producer. He is best known as a creator of broad film farces and comic parodies. He began his career as a stand-up comic and as a writer for the early TV variety show Your Show of Shows...
, John Belushi
John Belushi
John Adam Belushi was an American comedian, actor, and musician, best known as one of the original cast members of the NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live, The Star of the Films National Lampoon's Animal House and the The Blues Brothers and for fronting the American blues and soul...
, Jack Nicholson
Jack Nicholson
John Joseph "Jack" Nicholson is an American actor, film director, producer and writer. He is renowned for his often dark portrayals of neurotic characters. Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award twelve times, and has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice: for One Flew Over the...
, Gregg Allman
Gregg Allman
Gregory Lenoir Allman , known as Gregg Allman, is a rock and blues singer, keyboardist, guitarist and songwriter, and a founding member of The Allman Brothers Band. He was inducted with the band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Georgia...
, Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali is an American former professional boxer, philanthropist and social activist...
, Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell, CC is a Canadian musician, singer songwriter, and painter. Mitchell began singing in small nightclubs in her native Saskatchewan and Western Canada and then busking in the streets and dives of Toronto...
, Bonnie Raitt
Bonnie Raitt
Bonnie Lynn Raitt is an American blues singer-songwriter and a renowned slide guitar player. During the 1970s, Raitt released a series of acclaimed roots-influenced albums which incorporated elements of blues, rock, folk and country, but she is perhaps best known for her more commercially...
, Linda Ronstadt
Linda Ronstadt
Linda Ronstadt is an American popular music recording artist. She has earned eleven Grammy Awards, two Academy of Country Music awards, an Emmy Award, an ALMA Award, numerous United States and internationally certified gold, platinum and multiplatinum albums, in addition to Tony Award and Golden...
, Roxy Music
Roxy Music
Roxy Music was a British art rock band formed in 1971 by Bryan Ferry, who became the group's lead vocalist and chief songwriter, and bassist Graham Simpson. The other members are Phil Manzanera , Andy Mackay and Paul Thompson . Former members include Brian Eno , and Eddie Jobson...
, Little Feat
Little Feat
Little Feat is an American rock band formed by singer-songwriter, lead vocalist and guitarist Lowell George and keyboardist Bill Payne in 1969 in Los Angeles....
, George Carlin
George Carlin
George Denis Patrick Carlin was an American stand-up comedian, social critic, actor and author, who won five Grammy Awards for his comedy albums....
, Randy Newman
Randy Newman
Randall Stuart "Randy" Newman is an American singer-songwriter, arranger, composer, and pianist who is known for his mordant pop songs and for film scores....
, Paul Butterfield
Paul Butterfield
Paul Butterfield was an American blues vocalist and harmonica player, who founded the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in the early 1960s and performed at the original Woodstock Festival...
, Brian Eno
Brian Eno
Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno , commonly known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno , is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer and visual artist, known as one of the principal innovators of ambient music.Eno studied at Colchester Institute art school in Essex,...
and Roy Orbison
Roy Orbison
Roy Kelton Orbison was an American singer-songwriter, well known for his distinctive, powerful voice, complex compositions, and dark emotional ballads. Orbison grew up in Texas and began singing in a rockabilly/country & western band in high school until he was signed by Sun Records in Memphis...
. Under Knobler, Crawdaddys editors often assigned artists to write about other artists; Al Kooper
Al Kooper
Al Kooper is an American songwriter, record producer and musician, known for organizing Blood, Sweat & Tears , providing studio support for Bob Dylan when he went electric in 1965, and also bringing together guitarists Mike Bloomfield and Stephen Stills to...
profiled Steve Martin
Steve Martin
Stephen Glenn "Steve" Martin is an American actor, comedian, writer, playwright, producer, musician and composer....
, Martin Mull
Martin Mull
Martin Mull is an American actor who has starred in his own television sitcom and acted in prominent films. He is also a comedian, painter, and recording artist...
interviewed Woody Allen
Woody Allen
Woody Allen is an American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, jazz musician, author, and playwright. Allen's films draw heavily on literature, sexuality, philosophy, psychology, Jewish identity, and the history of cinema...
, William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
talked magic and mysticism with Jimmy Page
Jimmy Page
James Patrick "Jimmy" Page, OBE is an English multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and record producer. He began his career as a studio session guitarist in London and was subsequently a member of The Yardbirds from 1966 to 1968, after which he founded the English rock band Led Zeppelin.Jimmy Page...
.
The record reviews sections, driven by editors Swenson and Goldwasser, had an iconoclastic reputation - well-known and respected by the music industry for its fierce independence. Crawdaddys features section regularly covered scenes from New Orleans funk to Austin, Texas' cosmic cowboys to Scientology
Scientology
Scientology is a body of beliefs and related practices created by science fiction and fantasy author L. Ron Hubbard , starting in 1952, as a successor to his earlier self-help system, Dianetics...
, est
EST
-Places:* Est , a town in Gelderland* Estonia, a nation in northern Europe** Estonian language, the Estonian language in ISO 639.2 or ISO 639–3 language codes* Est Region , one of Burkina Faso's 13 administrative regions...
and disco
Disco
Disco is a genre of dance music. Disco acts charted high during the mid-1970s, and the genre's popularity peaked during the late 1970s. It had its roots in clubs that catered to African American, gay, psychedelic, and other communities in New York City and Philadelphia during the late 1960s and...
. Its renowned sense of humor produced the Crawdoodah Gazette, The Whole Earth Conspiracy Catalogue and "The Assassination Please Almanac".
In 1976 the magazine published the first in-depth article on the life and bizarre death of country-rock pioneer Gram Parsons
Gram Parsons
Gram Parsons was an American singer, songwriter, guitarist and pianist. Parsons is best known for his work within the country genre; he also mixed blues, folk, and rock to create what he called "Cosmic American Music"...
, anticipating the wealth of information published about him in later years. Greg Mitchell went onto write various books concerning U.S. political events and is now the editor of Editor and Publisher.
Rename and closure
Under Peter Knobler's editorship from 1972 to 1979, Crawdaddys focus expanded to cover more general aspects of popular culture, particularly politics, sports and movies, and in 1979 the magazine changed its title to Feature. When the music business retrenched, Feature lost much of its advertising revenue, and after three issues at the beginning of 1979 it ceased publication. Knobler went on to collaborate on numerous best-selling books, including the political memoir All's Fair by James CarvilleJames Carville
Chester James Carville, Jr. is an American political consultant, commentator, educator, actor, attorney, media personality, and prominent liberal pundit. Carville gained national attention for his work as the lead strategist of the successful presidential campaign of then-Arkansas governor Bill...
and Mary Matalin
Mary Matalin
Mary Joe Matalin is an American political consultant, well known for her work with the Republican Party. She was an assistant to President George W. Bush and counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney until 2003. Matalin has been chief editor of Threshold Editions, a conservative publishing imprint...
and the autobiographies of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a retired American professional basketball player. He is the NBA's all-time leading scorer, with 38,387 points. During his career with the NBA's Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Lakers from 1969 to 1989, Abdul-Jabbar won six NBA championships and a record six regular season...
, Hakeem Olajuwon
Hakeem Olajuwon
Hakeem Abdul Olajuwon is a retired Nigerian-American professional basketball player. From 1984 to 2002, he played the center position in the National Basketball Association for the Houston Rockets and Toronto Raptors. He led the Rockets to back-to-back NBA championships in 1994 and 1995. In 2008,...
, Governor Ann Richards
Ann Richards
Dorothy Ann Willis Richards was an American politician from Texas. She first came to national attention as the state treasurer of Texas, when she delivered the keynote address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. Richards served as the 45th Governor of Texas from 1991 to 1995 and was...
, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton, and Sumner Redstone
Sumner Redstone
Sumner Murray Redstone is an American media magnate. He is the majority owner and Chairman of the Board of the National Amusements theater chain...
.
Later relaunches
Paul Williams reclaimed the punctuated title in 1993, publishing 28 issues until financial pressures forced him to end its run in 2003. In 2006 Williams sold the rights to the Crawdaddy! name as well as all of his published works in back issues and a handful of his authored books to Wolfgang's VaultWolfgang's Vault
Wolfgang's Vault is a private music-focused company established in 2003 dedicated to the restoration and archiving of live concert recordings in audio and video format and the sale of music memorabilia. It began with the collection of the late promoter Bill Graham, and added multiple other music...
. In May 2007, the magazine was re-launched as an online publication at Crawdaddy.com, equipped with video and mp3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...
capability. Credited for its reputation for "thinking man's music writing" by Magnet
Magnet (magazine)
Magnet is a music magazine which generally focuses on alternative, independent, or out-of-the-mainstream bands.-History:The magazine is published four times a year, and is independently owned and edited by Eric T. Miller. Music magazines with a similar focus in the 1990s era included Option,...
, Crawdaddy! operated as a daily music news blog and source for longform music journalism, with a team of freelancers spanning the globe and a small San Francisco-based editorial staff headed by Editor-in-Chief Angela Zimmerman. At the film, music and culture website PasteMagazine.com, where Crawdaddy appeared as a blog on August 5, 2011, the host site undertakes to import and maintain the Crawdaddy archive, and promises to continue to post not only archival but new material from "many of the columnists and writers you might have enjoyed at the Crawdaddy! website."
The magazine's content spanned the entire age of rock 'n' roll from its inception (and all of the genre's derivatives) to extensive coverage on new and breaking bands. Regular columns and features included interviews, reviews, song histories, lyrical dissections, interviews on songwriting, roadie tales courtesy of Dinky Dawson, new classics, music and politics, crate diggers, the weakest cut, memoir and fiction pieces, in-house video sessions and interviews, and more.
Very Seventies
Peter Knobler and Greg Mitchell edited the book Very Seventies: A Cultural History of the 1970s from the pages of Crawdaddy, published in 1995.Further reading
- Williams, Paul, The Crawdaddy! book : writings (and images) from the magazine of rock, Milwaukee, WI : Hal Leonard Corp., 2002.