Posted April 11, 2008
Believe it or not, there was a time when a mere magazine accurately read popular music's pulse. Rock and roll was well out of its first flush of youth, past its juvenile delinquent phase and into experimentation and changing the world. The letters "MTV" meant nothing (and if anyone had strung them together they would have been mistaken for an exotic new drug) and had someone suggested that one day music fans would sit in front of 17-inch screens and keyboards to get their fix of something musical, they would have been consigned to the same nuthouse that fried Roky. It was an evolving and exciting time for society and western culture in general and CREEM was there, not as a sidelines observer but as a participant, irreverently exposing rock's fumbles, foibles and successes without fear or favour.
It's said that Americans don't "get" irony. Well, CREEM had a mortgage on it - especially compared to the posturing English rock press where style almost always seemed to win over substance. At CREEM, cutting reviews and hilarious piss-taking photo captions were also stock-in-trade but they came in far more edgy form. The Michigan mag's relative separation from the east and west coasts entertainment industry strongholds bestowed outsider status for sure, but for the most part CREEM also "got" rock and roll. It reveled in being "out there" - especially in the first half of its life before it succumbed to the inevitable pressures of delivering a bottom line in an evolving music industry - but mostly it reveled in rock and roll before the really big money moved in and fucked it up.
CREEM was a fertile laboratory for a long line of talented writers and photographers, most notoriously Lester Bangs (brought to life for the masses in "Almost Famous") but certainly also Dave Marsh, Dave DiMartino, Ben Edmonds, Ric Siegel, Cameron Crowe, Greil Marcus, Nick Tosches, John Morthland and Richard Meltzer. CREEM was equally known for its sense of style and mythical "Boy Howd"y whipped cream man logo, penned by cartoonist R. Crumb for the price of a six-pack and a cheap leather jacket.
CREEM was THE magazine to read if you were dwelling on rock and roll's fringes in the early '70s. It sang the praises of the MC5, the Stooges and Alice Cooper and was read as far afield as the UK and Australia (where Radio Birdman's principals were avid consumers.) The magazine has had an enduring influence long after it ceased two decades of production in 1989, having long deserted the Midwest and turned mainstream after moves to Los Angeles and then New York City. By then, the thrill was gone and so were all the founders and early editorial crew.
Photographer ROBERT MATHEU grew up with the magazine. He joined the party as a contributor in 1978 and hung in there, eventually fronting a partnership that bought the rights to its contents in 2001 with a view to resurrecting CREEM in some form. A successful online presence parlayed into merchandising and co-branding of a live Stooges DVD. A curious legal dispute brought on by the estranged son of the late ex-publisher Barry Kramer didn't stop the 2008 publication of a glitzy coffee table tribute book to CREEM, co-edited by Matheu and Michigan writer/academic Brian Bowe. It has some flaws and - unsurprisingly given the depth of passion readers still maintain for CREEM - provoked sharp polarisations among some, but on the whole its a lavish and loving tribute to a long-gone but revered institution. Reviews appear here.
The I-94 Bar has already spoken at length with Robert about his part in Easy Action's Sonic's Rendezvous Band CD box set and Motor City rock in general, but we decided to bring him back to the bar for some chat about CREEM. THE BARMAN fired the questions.
Q Welcome back to the I-94 Bar and congratulations on getting the book into print. How long was the concept of a CREEM book been in the pipeline?
It was always on top of the list of things to do, going back to 2001 when we started the website. We spent some time finding the hard elements, missing issues that I didn’t have in my collection, photos, artwork, putting the archives together. Brian Bowe and I did the first draft of the proposal in 2003, we didn’t really shop publishers that aggressively, we spoke with three or four, looking for the right deal, the combination of control, artistic freedom and the most importantly an in-house editor who understood what it should be.
Q It was rumoured that the original concept - at least when the website launched - was a new hard copy version of the magazine. I'm figuring that was a red herring devised by the hopeful and a book was always the main game?
The online presence started as archive of issues, covers and contents, a few of the CREEM Profiles, things that we could get our hands on. Then we started with some new articles, just getting our chops together to see where we could run with it. There was always talk about a monthly publication, but it would surely have to be a loss leader for other projects that we could lend the CREEM name to. We have some people who would still like us get it back onto the newsstands, we still haven’t ruled it out. We knew that the book would do nothing but help with that and the time has never been better, the response has been great.
Q It would be an understatement to say the book has polarised opinion. Why do you think people have been so passionate about the project, both for and against? I have to say the overwhelming weight of reviews has been pro.
I’ve stayed back from much of that…you know the old saying you are not going to make everyone happy. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I had hoped to make it clear in the very beginning, back in 2001, that anyone could take part, anyone that ever had anything to do with CREEM. Some choose to, others stayed on the fence, some told me straight out to fuck off. Some of these people claim not to have known, this wasn’t a secret, there are no secrets when it comes to old CREEM editors.
I really didn’t read much of the blogs, that’s not my thing. Then again, from what I’ve heard from others, I don’t believe many of those who have issues with it understand the intention of the book either. It has my name on it; it’s my book, CREEM from my perspective.
My editor at Harper Collins wanted me to do my version of Almost Famous, what I thought the CREEM “story” was, but I flat out said that I wasn’t going to go down that road, that could be someone else’s tale to tell. I went to my friends that were involved and artists that I knew held some kind of affection towards CREEM. I wanted some snap shots of CREEM, from other perspectives. I think if you read all the new content, it gives you a good idea…
It was important to have as much of Charlie Auringer’s (Steven Tyler) work in there as we could, same for Richard Siegel (Alice Cooper), but so many of his photos were lost over the years. Same for Bob Alford, the photos were an important part of CREEM, and I am after all a photographer, I was inspired by what I saw in the magazine when I was starting out…I am a fan of the photos we used. I do wish we could have used more of Bob Gruen and Neil Zlozower. Back to your question…if I could paraphrase someone long before me, “CREEM isn’t about any one person…”
I think the real CREEM fans understand who the important players were and when, and I am sure that there are as many fans of the later years as there were the early. We know that for a fact because we have had so much feedback through the website, more Rick Johnson! or who is Jeffrey Morgan? Love them both…
Q With the benefit of hindsight where do you think CREEM sits in the cultural context of rock and roll? How does that sit alongside the idea of the book being a tribute to CREEM rather than a comprehensive Best Of or re-run?
CREEM is a relic of an era that could no longer exist, somewhere it became the “music business” too many heavy-handed managers and overbearing publicists…
but the influence still lingers today…I am glad to see that you understand the intention of the book. A tribute as opposed to a Best Of.
Q From the point-of-view of critics, you've obviously been the prime target for a few of the old-timers who worked at CREEM. Was that unexpected? Any regrets about the state of relationships with some of those people?
Not unexpected, see our Acknowledgements in the back of the book! Someone posted a comment on Rock Critics dot com, in response to comments following my interview with Anthe Rhodes, something along the lines of “…those people should just be happy someone is reading about something they did 30 years ago.” No regrets.
Q Ben Edmonds once said: "apart from a passion for music, [the writers] had nothing in common." True enough? If so, doesn't that explain the reactions that have been negative?
I can only comment on those that I know, sure that’s true. It seems to be a fact that life goes on, that they have even less in common. I am sure the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have less in common now than they did when they wrote and recorded Exile On Main Street, don’t you think? Richard Siegel recently pointed out that anyone could have done a book over the years, still could, there is room for more and there is interest. What has meant the most to me was reactions from Richard and Charlie, who were there from day one until the magazine changed hands, it is their legacy as well. The others all left the magazine, moved on to greener pastures, didn’t they?
Q I get the impression that some might have felt better if the magazine had stayed buried and this book had never seen the light of day. Can you understand that?
Not really. I don’t see the book as rewriting anything, it just gave another look at it, from a different angle. We didn’t let any of the skeletons out of the closet, didn’t tell anyone else’s tale, just our own. I’ve heard stories of typewriters being thrown, but I wasn’t there for that, so we stayed away. I have many stories of late nights in the Birmingham office…
There was a pissing match going on in 2000, over whose idea it was to start CREEM and who qualified as a “founding” editor, long before we started any of this, again that’s not my concern. We didn’t change the final score, the game ended the same.
Q Balancing the ledger, what are some of the nice things people have said?
As you know, ever since the demise of the 12-inch album cover, people have been looking for a worthy substitute to roll their own on, or chop one out and I'm proud to say that the CREEM book has filled that void.
Q What's your favourite piece in the book? Is there an article you most regret leaving out?
My favorites in the book are the new stories, the war stories. The only regret about something not going in, would be not getting Chrissie Hynde’s comments. She agreed to do it from the get go, 4 years ago, she was just too busy, she kept saying she’d get something to me, but... She’s been a good pal, someone I always enjoyed working with and she loved CREEM. When I was on tour with the Pretenders in 1984, she knew we were going to do a cover shoot, but we wanted to do something really cool, we decided to mock the April 1974 Iggy cover.
Not all bands did special shoots for the magazine, that was something I tried to bring. I also shot one of the worst covers as well, I followed the art director’s concept and thought it was a good idea at the time, just awful…yeah, I love to digress.
Q I have to ask you about the concept of the book itself and how it turned out. Were you tempted to just do a spread of issues of the magazine? On the face of it, what's been published seems to be a chronological collection of features with some changes to the way they've been laid out. Why was that necessary? How did you go about picking what to run and what to leave out?
We had a number of criteria, bands that were CREEM favorites, like the Faces and Stooges for one. The Stones, Led Zeppelin and Van Halen were all time leaders for cover appearances. We also took the stories that were as much about the writers as the artists themselves, that is something nobody has recognized. It became obvious to Brian and I at one point that it was rather funny how that played out from the early Mad Dogs and Englishmen piece, right through the later Clash, Pretenders, Iggy and Replacements articles.
It is roughly chronological, layouts couldn’t be reproduced exactly because the magazine changed so much from the early newsprint to semi gloss of the 70s, so we needed to have a uniform feel to it. We couldn’t really go back and lay it out exactly, just wouldn’t have had a proper flow to it. We tried to keep the layouts close even if we cleaned them up a lot, the early Grand Funk Railroad opening pages hold a strong resemblance to the double fold paper, we actually scanned Charlie's photos from the original paste up boards. Alice Cooper’s Alcohol Cookbook is another we tried to get as close as we could.Again, being a photographer and a fan, the pictures were going to take as many full pages as possible, the magazine was very much about great photos as well as the editorial. Some of what was chosen was because we had access to the photos, the Stars Cars, the CREEM Dreems. What didn’t make it in was because we couldn’t find the original photos or even ones that were specific to that story or era. At one point we asked Charlie to send his original Who negatives for us to do higher res scans instead of using his original prints from 1971, he joked that they never worried about quality back then, didn’t have to on newsprint, but when he got the book he was the first to rave about us “doing it up right!”
We wanted to use a few other features, but then found that those were the stories that had almost become classics. There was of course Lester’s Count Five classic and even “I dreamed I was onstage with Kiss…” both were top choices, but had been re-told elsewhere, in the case of “Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung” in as least 2 other books. We included an edited version in the book, because of DiMartino’s fine tale of An Editor Remembers.
Q Will we see a second volume of the book?
I don’t think so, we went in reminding ourselves not to hold back for next time. That was it, but there will be other books.
Q Why the absence of reviews, which for many people seemed to be what they dug the most?
When we pitched the book, we had a pretty big list of reviews, but two things became clear pretty quick. First we had a lot of features that we wanted to get in and, second we could do another book of just record reviews, which we’d still like to do. Already have some ideas for that and at least 3 or 4 other books. So again, I doubt that we’ll do a second volume like this, so many other concepts to tackle. Personally, I’d love to see an entire book dedicated to the backstage section. May be we’ll do a book of just the CREEM profiles, we’ve had at least a dozen requests since the book has been out for that one.
Q There's the odd yarn in there that some people may not consider "CREEM-like". For example, Duran Duran. Can you tell us what the reasoning is there?
It is in there to show that even though CREEM tried hard in the '80s, it had to address Duran Duran, not because they loved them, but because they were so big and the readers loved them. The point of it being in the book was simple, it was a fine example of the writing, what could be done even with a band that may be "we" didn't approve of. It wasn't about the band, it was about the writing. Same for example, the fIREHOSE piece; it isn't just that as some suggested because Watt is a pal, it's because it was a fine example of Steve Peter's writing, Steve was the last editor standing in 1988 and it was important to have him in there. If we had printed the 10 or more Reader's Polls, which are lots of fun, you'd be surprised on what they voted for, year in and year out, didn't really reflect the editor's tastes to say the least
Q One name stands out among the cast of writers who wrote for CREEM and that's Lester Bangs Was it tempting to use more of his stuff given his reputation or do you think the bulk of his best material has already been re-published? I have a feeling you might have a strong opinion on Lester and his place in the CREEM scheme of things...
Years ago we Sainted Lester and got it over it. His work has been celebrated extensively, collected in books and archived on the Internet. Just about everything in our book was first archived on the CREEM website, partially because the readers wrote us and asked for certain articles, so in a way the readers choose most of what went into the book.
I’ll try not to digress again here…I’ve also said on many occasions that Bangs and Marsh are very much the Lennon and McCartney of rock journalism, in many ways. In addition to their great body of work, Lester has been canonized by his early death, Marsh has spent the time since reminding everyone that he was there with Lester and gone as far to say that CREEM turned into a comic book after he left. I have respect for Marsh’s work, but I can’t agree with his perspective.
I only met Lester on a couple of occasions when he was at CREEM, but it was before my time. I did see him at NYC gigs in the early ‘80s, can’t really say that I knew him, but he is one of the two names most closely associated with CREEM, him and Boy Howdy!
Q To me it seems a bit of a no-win situation in that if you'd traded on the Bangs name, some of the same detractors who've been at you would have come down like a ton of bricks.
Again, damned if you do…
Q Do you think there was ever a point where CREEM 'jumped the shark'? Was the magazine a victim of changing times and the commodifying of rock writing and music in general? More crucially, at what point did it stop being an 'outsider' publication and was that fatal?
Dave DiMartino has said it many times, they were forced to change with the times in the ‘80s with the advent of MTV, you didn’t turn to CREEM to get your music news, it was on MTV as it happened. When I was 15, I went to the corner bookstore to get the new issue and found out that the Rolling Stones were going on tour that summer, now they have their press conference live on Fox News. In the later ‘80s, CREEM launched their Metal counterpart, which I believe at one point outsold CREEM 3 to 1. There was some great stuff in there, again enough for another book. It seemed to always stay an outsider, but the move to L.A. certainly didn’t help it in my eyes.
Q If you'd had your time over again, what would you have changed?
Well, you know what they say about hindsight being 20/20, but if I had the chance to do things all over again, I probably wouldn't have invited Screaming Lord Sutch to sing at my wedding.
