Rock Dreams/Schemes: The History of Crawdaddy(!)
John Swenson, Crawdaddy!, March 1976
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. Billboard, Cash Box etc., serve very well as trade news magazines; but their idea of a review is: "a hard-driving rhythm number that should spiral rapidly up the charts just as (previous hit by the same group) slides." And the teen magazines are devoted to rock and roll, but their idea of discussion is a string of superlatives below a fold-out photograph. Crawdaddy! believes that someone in the United States might be interested in what others have to say about the music they like.
Total word count of piece: 2190