Creem for your coffee table
CREEM:
America’s Only Rock ’n‘ Roll Magazine
272 pages. Collins $29.95
By Robert Matheu and Brian J. Bowe
Reviewed by David Daniel
The late 1960s saw the birth of a number of publications which grew out of and were aimed at the burgeoning youth culture. With music as that culture’s chief avatar, little wonder that ground zero for these publications was the exploding rock and roll scene.
Chief among these magazines were Crawdaddy (founded 1966) and Rolling Stone (1967); but whereas these two sparked between the electric poles of New York City and California—Creem (1969) sprang from Detroit, with a prose style and attitude as supercharged as a muscle car.
This new book, edited by Creem stalwarts Robert Matheu and Brian J. Bowe, with a little help from their friends, is a photo-rich, coffee table volume, which spans the apotheosis of the 1960s scene, from psychedelia through the days of glam rock, punk, and thrash. In fact, Creem is often credited with adding the terms “punk rock” and “heavy metal” to the lexicon.
That Creem had attitude in spades is evident right from its brash claim to being “America’s only rock ’n‘ roll magazine” (and strictly speaking, this may have been so; a reader wasn’t going to find Richard Brautigan poems or Gonzo letters; long, moody pieces about Brian Wilson or Joni Mitchell; or the investigative exposes that the competition offered). No, what a reader of Creem, in its tabloid format, would get was hard-won battlefield rock reports, many about great Detroit area acts (MC5, Iggy Pop, Nugent, Seger, Grand Funk Railroad) as well as an expanding lineup of groups on the wider scene. In the process, Creem (along with Crawdaddy and R S) created rock criticism, and helped to launch the young writers and photographers who went on to some of the biggest reputations in the rock crit biz (Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Nick Tosches, Cameron Crowe, and a dozen others).
The book skims the...well...the cream off the periodical’s pages and presents it here in a single volume. The pieces offer the kind of irreverent take that the outsider brings, and at their best they still make for entertaining reading forty years later—not easy in the ADHD world of music writing.
Among the better articles here are ones about the Stones, Springsteen, the Cars, Alice Cooper, George Harrison, John and Yoko, Wendy and the Plasmiatics, Blondie, and a bunch of others. The photography, in full color and in black and white, is captivating, too. Even the feature “Star’s Cars,” which shows rock ’n‘ roll acts posing with their wheels (what else in Motor City?), is engaging.
On the flip side, however, some pieces are dull or formless or even unreadable—that free-form roll-your-own journalism had it drawbacks (Give a guy too much to smoke, shove him center stage, and how much clear prose can you expect?). Too, there are a lot of pages wasted with the Creem “profiles”—a spoof on those Dewars Scotch ads—tricked out here with the R. Crumb “Boy Howdy” motto and played strictly for yuks—but, alas, yuks that aren’t that funny all these years later.
Still, reading about Bob Seger and his run at the big time, or getting to hang up-close and behind the scenes with Devo or the Sex Pistols, and riding with Alice Cooper are worth the ride. At a cover price of $30 (the cost of a couple lids back in the day when Creem was first hawked by street vendors) the book gives good weight and captures some sweet moments in the history of that most ephemeral of popular forms.
David Daniel is author of many books, including a
forthcoming collection of stories, Six off 66, and a novel, Reunion. Visit http://daviddanielbooks.com.