Although founded only one year after Rolling Stone—and covering an ostensibly similar range of artists and topics—Creem couldn’t have differed more from its more respectable predecessor. Rolling Stone was linked to the West Coast intelligentsia and counterculture, while Creem was aggressively Midwest, specifically, the still revving but increasingly dangerous Motor City. Where Rolling Stone sought approval in high places, Creem wanted to put a stick in everyone’s eye.
The documentary Creem: America’s Only Rock’n’Roll Magazine will be a flashback—maybe from bad street acid?—to an era that has receded into history. Released on DVD by Kino Lorber, the film chronicles the magazine’s origins and contradictions, and profiles the loud personalities that drove it from a third-floor ghetto walk-up into transatlantic notoriety.
Creem had attitude and intelligence, often splitting the difference as unadulterated snark. Greil Marcus, more a Rolling Stone man but interviewed for this film, describes Creem’s “wild sense of humor” and “lack of respect” in a “game of mocking everything.” One of the ex-staffers adds, “We were all a little crazy.”
With the notable exception of California-reared Lester Bangs, the staff were native Detroiters. Fueled by the regional pride that can complement the irksome sense of inferiority to coastal elites, Creem distilled an attitude that some saw as the rude, spunky essence of rock. To their credit, Creem promoted hometown heroes such as Alice Cooper and The MC5 and—I’ll argue—helped keep Iggy Pop from slipping into obscurity. They were open to punk and embraced Patti Smith early on.
Creem was a boy’s club with girls allowed, starting with Connie, the wife of publisher Barry Kramer. He is described as an “edgy entrepreneur” with a vision. Although he could be chap as a flophouse mattress and argumentative as a drunken Hells Angel, he provided the boundaries for the anarchic personalities he hired.
The documentary also touches on Creem’s negative side from today’s vantage. The ‘60s upheaval that gave rise to Creem and its writers often liberated the worst instincts in the name of smashing old pieties and questioning social mores. Restraint went out the office window, along with the LPs occasionally hurled at the Detroit asphalt below. The writing could be intentionally cruel, casually homophobic and sexist and inadvertently racist. Even though the Kramers were Jewish, this didn’t dissuade Bangs from anti-Semitic jabs. Creem reveled in the self-destructive as well as the socially constructive aspects of the ‘60s and ‘70s rock culture. Bangs was dead at age 37, overdosed on (probably) cheap drugs purchased from street hustlers. Editor Dave Marsh, on the other hand, is still alive today as a critic of unrestrained capitalism and the commodification of culture.
Creem: America’s Only Rock’n’Roll Magazine includes testimonials from Michael Stipe, who recalls reading it on base as an Army brat, and Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament, who drove 35 miles across Montana ranch land to the nearest store that carried Creem in its magazine section. The influence was persuasive and widespread.
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