Crawdaddy was an American rock music magazine launched in 1966. It was created by Paul Williams, a Swarthmore College student at the time, in response to the increasing sophistication and cultural influence of popular music. The magazine was named after the Crawdaddy Club in London and published during its early years as Crawdaddy! (with an exclamation point). According to The New York Times, Crawdaddy was "the first magazine to take rock and roll seriously", while the magazine's rival Rolling Stone acknowledged it as "the first serious publication devoted to rock & roll news and criticism". Preceding both Rolling Stone and Creem, Crawdaddy 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 contributors included Jon Landau, Sandy Pearlman, Richard Meltzer and Peter Knobler. After Williams left Crawdaddy in 1968, the magazine was edited by Knobler from 1972 until its last issue in 1979. From 1993 to 2003 Williams 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 the music website Paste, 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". Fanzine roots Named after the legendary Crawdaddy Club 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 (the first issue was mimeographed by fellow fan Ted White) 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 1, February 7, 1966 Mass market magazine Crawdaddy briefly suspended publication in 1969, then