February 7: Crawdaddy!

Paul Williams launched Crawdaddy!, the first national magazine dedicated to rock and roll, on this date in 1966. Williams was a talented writer among a corps of young Jewish rock critics (including Jon Landau, Greil Marcus, Lillian Roxon, Richard Meltzer and others) who were, as Lenny Kaye put it, “trying to create writing as musical as the subject they wrote about.” Crawdaddy! preceded both Rolling Stone and Creem; it was named for a club in England where the Rolling Stones played their first gig. Williams, still a 20-year-old student at Swarthmore when he founded the publication, left it two years later and went on to write twenty-five books about music and other subjects. He became a leading authority on the music of Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, and Neil Young, and was also a major science fiction meyvn who served as executor of Philip K. Dick’s literary estate. Williams reclaimed Crawdaddy! in 1993 and published twenty-eight more issues over the course of a decade. Injuries in a 1995 bicycle accident led to early onset Alzheimer’s disease, and he now lives in a nursing home.

“Working for the formats that exist in the corporate universe is not the only alternative.” —Paul Williams