Reading Is Fundamental: The new CREEM revival is not your father’s CREEM…or mine!

But it is good, and it is CREEM. As you digest your turkey or tofurkey and pumpkin pie, I consider the return of America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine.

Wait’ll ya see what Iggy does with 8-tracks!!

If you grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s and loved rock ‘n’ roll – the real, 150 proof version descended from Chuck Berry and Little Richard, as opposed to “rock music,” the snooty “artform” that lost all the roll – you didn’t read Rolling Stone. Well, you might have, but it felt like you were reading a magazine with which you shared no common ground. The mag you most often turned to was likely CREEM.

Irreverent, unpretentious as hell, working class to the bone and likely drunk on Boone’s Farm and high on Romilar, CREEM roared out of Detroit, as loud and brash as the music and trash culture it celebrated. Yep, Dave Marsh, Jaan Uhelzski, and especially their most celebrated writer/editor Lester Bangs all loved the Stones and Rod Stewart and the Faces, and Black Sabbath/KISS/Ted Nugent/all the rest. But they especially loved Iggy And The Stooges. They really dug the MC5. They adored the New York Dolls. St. Lester alone spent three issues rhapsodizing in a barely controlled beat verse about the Stooges’ Funhouse record. He picked fights with his hero Lou Reed when he felt he was slacking, then published them as interviews. He composed epics about The Troggs and the entirety of Sixties garage rock before Lenny Kaye compiled Nuggets, even daring to invent a three album discography for one-hit heroes the Count Five to encapsulate the fuzztone-and-carbon-monoxide spirit. (How many people are still searching out their “rock opera,” Snowflakes Falling On The International Dateline?) If anyone invented the punk aesthetic, codified it, and wrote its literary canon, it was Lester Bangs at CREEM.

CREEM was literary rock ‘n’ roll. And it disintegrated across the ‘80s, as corporate rock grew stronger and wiped out its teenage dirtbag essence, even as such brave souls as Bill Holdship, J. Kordosh and Dave DiMartino kept the flag flying high. Mercurial founder and publisher Barry J. Kramer died in 1981, leaving it to his 4-year-old son J.J., though his mother Connie administered on his behalf. She eventually sold it to Arnold Levitt, who ran it from 1986 to 1989. One year later, some Florida investors bought it and tried to make it a short-lived glossy tabloid. The rights swapped hands many times over the years, with no magazine forthcoming. The adult J.J. Kramer ultimately used his training as an intellectual property attorney, finally winning back his birthright and stoking modern day interest with a documentary, CREEM: America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine, helmed and directed by visionary rockumentarian Scott Crawford.

And now, CREEM is well and truly back.

When news arrived early this summer that CREEM would relaunch as a VICE-style “lifestyle brand,” with a website and a quarterly print edition available only by subscription, it was greeted with a mix of excitement and skepticism. This is only natural – people get emotional about CREEM, especially former staffers. But it was in good hands with original staffer Uhelzski onboard as editor-at-large and a sorta spiritual guide; the writers guidelines state they are looking less for Bangs imitators and more for those with voices inspired by Uhelzski.

First came a subscription-only website (CREEM as Substack?!), complete with an online archive of the original mag’s complete run. The new writing could be solid and meaty, if at times trying too hard to be CREEM. At best, the spirit has been there, if not always the execution. It runs into trouble when writers mistake the irreverence marking Bangs’ best work, or that of the underrated Rick Johnson, for modern day snark. For example, what’s the point in reviewing the recent Pistol miniseries when your critique ultimately amounts to, “This sucks, rock biopics suck, the casting is awful, and the Sex Pistols sucked anyway”? The old CREEM always worked from a position of knowing what the fuck they were talking about, even when trashing something. Plus old CREEM loved the Pistols. The urge to slay your father is always fervid, yes. But if you’re gonna deflate sacred cows, you’d better have more solid reasons than they were from well before your time….

The first print edition, which arrived in September, gnaws closer to the bone. One wonders how well the model they’ve adopted – no newsstand edition, strictly running as a subscription-only quarterly, with subs going for $75 annually – will work for them. Yes, they need to make money, hence a merch operation hawking limited edition designer CREEM t-shirts and other lifestyle items. And notably, as they prepare to drop their second print edition next month, the mag is running a Black Friday sale this week, slashing the subscription price by 25%.

Fortunately, at least with the first issue, you could individually order a copy for $35 a pop. At first blush, the tabloid-sized/perfect-bound/cardboard cover mag that arrived in the mail brought to mind Interview, Andy Warhol’s old publication. Except Interview would have never commissioned a Raymond Pettibon front cover, though it would have been fully killer if they had. Mind you, flying the old “America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine” slogan above a vaguely Henry Rollins-oid singer, Shure SM-58 in hand, embellished with a typical Pettibon scrawl (“ROCK IS DEAD.” “SO IS PRINT.”) feels more petulant than rebellious. It’s like your sullen little brother needling you with bon mots like, “Well yeah, the Sex Pistols kinda sucked, anyway….”

Raymond Pettibon’s CREEM cover: “MY WAR!!! MY MAGAZINE COVER!!!”

Open it up, and you see many of the hallmarks of classic CREEM: Stars Cars reentering the modern age with a double-page spread of Slash filling up a “murdered-out 1967 Ford Mustang GT500 Fastback Tribute.” A CREEM Profile featuring Swedish electro soccer hooligans Viagra Boys yucking it up with cans of Boy Howdy Beer. Indie scallywag Kurt Vile as the issue’s Creem Dreem pinup, thus upending one of the mag’s long-running bits of what the modern world surely sees as institutionalized sexism. Even a reduction of the last page of photos with typically hilarious captions reduced to a full page Parting Shot: Boy Howdy in a 12-step meeting, moaning, “I was off the shit for 33 years, but turns out I’m powerless over CREEM….”

But while OG CREEM had style to burn, what attracted us all to its pages every month was the quality of the writing. And much of the Fall 2022 issue sports meaty, substantial features operating at an Esquire-esque level. And while the new CREEM’s caretakers may be well aware of the legacy they’re being expected to maintain, they are not operating a nostalgia factory here. The writers and editors’ gaze is focused upon the current cutting edge of rock ‘n’ roll, as Bangs and crew were. There’s quality prose taking on such worthy subjects as Amyl And The Sniffers, NOLA gender-fluid No Wavers Special Interest, and modern day hardcore monoliths Warthog. There’s also some solid investigative journalism into the 1991 murder of communist book store owner Bob Sheldon, a key figure in Chapel Hill, NC’s music scene. Lydia Lunch contributes a monograph on migrating to New York City in the ‘70s, to essentially invent No Wave: “With 200 bucks in my back pocket and a notebook full of misanthropic rantings, I didn’t give a flying fuck if the Bowery smelled like dogshit.” And filing eight pages on West Texas polymath Terry Allen in your first issue is certainly waving a football-field-sized flag announcing the seriousness of your intentions.

So, should we welcome this generation of CREEM? Absolutely. There’s few serious music mags out there these days, especially ones with intelligence and humor. If the new CREEM isn’t exactly OG CREEM, it is good and weighty, with enough Boy Howdy spirit to want to chart its progress. It’s early days. Their Bangs-style superstar writer has not yet emerged. He or she may never arrive, As it is, the writers are sort of anonymous, submerged beneath the weight that they are now working for CREEM. It is a monolithic CREEM style that emerges above all else. This is fine. As stated, the mag is in its larval stages at the moment. The new CREEM shows lots of potential, as long as it sticks to high quality writing, and marketing those designer t-shirts doesn’t become the focus. And maybe a little less pouting that the Sex Pistols kinda sucked….

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