Excerpt from Vol 9, No. 28, January 1998:

"COLLECTING MAGAZINES: A Look At U.S. Rock Periodicals
From Zeppelin's Golden Era, 1969-1980"

By HUGH JONES

(excerpted from Proximity #28 - this section is the introduction to the piece, the actual article contains brief individual histories of each magazine and listings of all the significant Zeppelin articles and cover appearances, with illustrations of most of the covers.)

Though magazines like Hit Parader, Melody Maker and the industry bible Billboard have been around since the days of Tin Pan Alley, what we think of today as "rock journalism" is widely considered to have started with Gloria Staver's 16 Magazine in the mid '60s. Though written in the breathless, gossipy style which reflected (and encouraged) the hysterical teenage fandom of the era, 16 actually provided excellent coverage of the doings of the Beatles, Stones and their brethren in the mid-60s, and Stavers (who died of lung cancer in 1983) was a good writer and editor who is rightfully respected as a pioneer in the field.

Rock journalism got "serious" right around the same time the music did in 1966, and the first reflection of this was magazines like Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy, both of which are still around in some form today. Following these came Circus, sort of a '70s version of 16, a new-look version of the venerable Hit Parader, the British publications New Musical Express and Sounds, and a handful of other rock mags of varying quality from countries around the world-Rock et Folk and Best from France, Music Express from Germany, Music Life from Japan, and many others.

While Rolling Stone was the more successful publication, probably the best embodiment of the rock & roll attitude in print came with the birth of Creem in 1969, which balanced intelligent journalism with a healthy dose of humor and ready acknowledgement of the absurdity inherent in '70s rock music and style, something the 'bigger guns' like Stone never quite seemed to grasp.

During the decade of the 1970s Led Zeppelin were the biggest guns of all, and this is reflected in the blossoming rock press of the time. The band appeared on the covers and in the pages of all of these publications many times, sometimes with favorable mentions and sometimes not, and these vintage magazines have become valuable relics, providing documentation not only of Led Zeppelin, but of an entire glorious, excessive era of rock & roll, before it became corporate-ized and assimilated into the mainstream of commercial pop culture.

While the earliest editions of these magazines have become very scarce and can fetch high prices on the collectors market, many of the best issues are not that hard to find for reasonable prices, and even the reissues and "best ofs" that occasionally pop up are worth picking up just for the articles and photographs, if not for their collectibility.

For those wishing to seek further information on this material, we highly recommend two excellent books-Robert Godwin's Led Zeppelin . . . The Press Reports (Collectors Guide Publishing, 1997) and Steve Jones' A Guide To Led Zeppelin & The Press (self-published 1992).

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Write Hugh Jones, Proximity Editor:

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