BOC: The Crawdaddy! book

[Scruton, Jason]

Pawul Williams' collection of 'highlights' of Crawdaddy! magazine
is out on Hal Leonard Press.

Its a big book, 300-ish pages, but I find some of his choices hit or miss,
but
not-so-strangely reflecting the waning interest he had in running the
'zine at the time.. The last handful of chapters are lumping togethers, like
"issues 13 and 14" ,featuring primarily "the News" columns from the ma
back then and an article or two from each ish.

He actually decided to put all the news columns done for the mag into the
collection,
to "provide" context.. I would have preferred more articles that
he only gives a synopsis of in the retrospective essays in each chapter.
One can only read so much about vague hints of new material that obviously
never
materialized in a lot of cases. Eh.

Directly BOC-speakin', he mentions that Allen Lanier and Albert Bouchard did
article/LP reviews. Also, gives a quickie history of SFU turning into BOC.
That's
nice.

As for Meltzer and Pearlman,
book describes how those guys got pulled into writing for Crawdad, and
that one issue was actually edited by Sandy with help from two others in
Paul's absence.

from what I remember,pieces included are
Pearlman's pieces on the Byrds (which RM uses in the Aesthetics of Rock) and
another one on Raga Rock, a review of a temptations(?) live disc
and the stones' "got live if you want it" -- describing the sound as
"metal"on this one disc.

Meltzer's "Spyder turner's raunch epistemology", and "Ptyhagoras the cave
painter."

In the historical 'essays' which preface each chapter, Williams mentions a
cartoon that Meltzer and his then-girlfriend had put in one issue, which
pushed Williams' editorial buttons, so to speak. Also, he (P.W.) did seem
somewhat
ruffled by the article "What a goddamn great 2nd album by Cream."


More when I read more of it. It's kinda inappropriate to read it at work ;)

On with the headphones.
Jason