I Come To Bury Caesar: Creem Magazine #2 (2023)

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” - William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 1599

When I was a teenage rock ‘n’ roll fiend growing up in the rural suburbs of Nashville at the dawn of the 1970s, Creem magazine was literally my doorway to the world of music. Launched in Detroit in 1969 by publisher Barry Kramer and editor Tony Reay, the rag’s ‘Blue Collar’ irreverence appealed to my ‘Rust Belt’ upbringing, and writers like Dave Marsh, Lester Bangs, Jaan Uhelszki, Richard Meltzer, Jeffrey Morgan and others provided my education in rock music. By the mid-‘70s, Creem was shuffling close to a quarter-million copies a month out the door, second only to Rolling Stone among music zines at the time.

The rag’s editorial focus, unfettered by advertiser manipulation or the desires of the recording industry, meant that they could – and did – write about artists like the New York Dolls, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Roxy Music, and Blondie long before they were discovered by more mainstream publications. When a second generation of writers and editors came along in the 1980s, including Dave DiMartino, Susan Whithall, Rick Johnson, Bill Holdship, and John Kordosh, Creem introduced readers to artists like the Replacements and R.E.M. From 1969 through 1989, Creem magazine was an integral part of American popular culture.

21st Century Creem

The magazine struggled in the years after Barry Kramer’s death in 1981, and although the staff published some good work during the decade, ownership changed hands, Creem moved to the West Coast and, by 1989, it was kaput (the less said about a short-lived and dismal 1990 NYC-based version of the rag, the better). Long story short, there was plenty of litigation, and various hijinks ensued before Barry’s son (and heir to the Creem throne) J.J. Kramer gained ownership of the magazine. A documentary film about the early days, Creem: American’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine, was released in 2019 to rave reviews.

As inevitably as the sun rises in the east, Creem magazine itself was resurrected in 2022 as a quarterly, subscription-only “lifestyle” publication which resembles the original rag not a whit. Kramer brought in professional magazine wranglers from the executive suites of Vice magazine, Entertainment Weekly, and Rolling Stone to publish the new 21st century Creem; Jaan Uhelszki was hired as Editor-At-Large to provide a link to the zine’s notorious past. A website was thrown together, tee-shirts featuring the magazine’s classic, Robert Crumb-designed mascot “Boy Howdy” were screen-printed and put out for sale, and a weekly email newsletter primed the pump for a print version of the magazine.

Creem In Print

When subscriptions became available for a Creem print version, I swallowed hard and coughed up the ridiculous sum of $80 for four quarterly issues. I’m halfway through my one-year Creem subscription and, so far I am not moved. With the third issue of the new Creem about to be published, I thought it the right time to review what they’d done so far, and it ain’t pretty. The current iteration of the zine has little of the wit or irreverence that made the original publication a rock ‘n’ roll media legend. None of the current crop of writers has jumped off the page, grabbed me by the ears, and poked at my eyeballs with a number 2 pencil to make me pay attention.

The rag’s physical size – an unwieldy 10.5”x13.5” – provides a lot of space for editorial content, which is squandered by the over-use of full-page photographs and illustrations. It’s a pet peeve of mine when magazines overly rely on pages of photos to fill up space – I perceive it as a lack of creative vigor – and the second issue of the reborn Creem sitting on my desk right now features roughly 40 mondo-sized pages of photos, or nearly 1/3 of the issue’s 128 pages. An otherwise interesting twelve-page story on the tragic final days of singer/songwriter David Berman (Silver Jews, Purple Mountains) is littered by six full pages of unnecessarily large photos and a seventh introductory page that add little of value beyond the story’s other four smaller photos.

An Awkward, Oversized Print Format

This is a minor cavil, perhaps, but photo galleries like “Be Our Guest” or the glut of pix embedded in the barely-there story “Freak On A Leash,” for example, are the print equivalent of website slideshows, which went out of style a decade ago. Admittedly, the awkward, oversized print format allows for some fantastic full-color photo reproduction, and the zine’s overall graphic design is reasonably contemporary, efficient, and yet exciting. The publication relies too often on illustrations to accompany the stories – three of the issue’s dozen features offer bad artwork to open the story, others over-utilize photos.

As for the editorial content, it hasn’t been all that compelling over the first two issues. Number two has an interesting story on how the CIA stole $5 million from classic rockers Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the aforementioned story on Berman serves its purpose, if providing little insight into the artist’s work or the lifelong depression that led to his suicide. Three pages of Justin Borucki’s original tintype photography of heavy metal musicians is at least three pages too few, considering its uniqueness and stark imagery. They could have taken pages away from illustrations and featured more of Borucki’s work. “Complacence Rock,” an article on wannabe billionaire rock stars, is a nifty bit of social commentary, but otherwise much of the content is hipster posturing and disposable trifles.    

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

Unless the next two issues of my Creem sub really knock me down and drag me to the record store, it’s unlikely that I’ll be re-subscribing. At the cost of a double sawbuck per issue, there’s too little bang for too many bucks. When I cough up $12 for a copy of Third Man Records’ Maggot Brain zine, there’s usually three or four articles of interest, and something about an obscure artist that makes me spend my money on. With shipping, a copy of Ugly Things cost me nearly $20 for the zine and another $100 for the records I buy after reading the issue.
 
Personally, that’s my benchmark for a music magazine – does it tell me something new about artists I’m already familiar with, and does it introduce me to artists I didn’t already know, getting me excited about new music I’ve yet to hear. I realize that you can never go back to the old daze [sic], and I’m probably an old man shaking his fist at the clouds. If you dig the “new” Creem, go for it – I won’t judge you – but I’m afraid that they’re no longer singing for me, so I’ll look for my cheap thrills elsewhere… (www.creem.com)

Full Disclosure: My first editor and mentor “Ranger” Rick Johnson got me into the pages of Creem in the early 1980s, and I sold them a handful of humorous reviews of books, TV shows, and such for the “Media Cool” section. The zine went bankrupt owing me something like $15 and I got legal paperwork for years afterwards as a legit creditor. I promise that this outstanding debt did nothing to color my impressions of the magazine’s new incarnation.

 

Book Review: Paul Gorman's Totally Wired - The Rise and Fall of the Music Press (2022)

The music media in the U.S. and the U.K. basically developed and evolved in parallel universes during the 20th century. The enduring American jazz magazine DownBeat published its first issue in 1934 (and they’re still going strong today) while Hit Parader – an offshoot of the 1930s-era ‘songster’ broadsides that reprinted song lyrics and sold for a nickel – first appeared in 1942 and published regularly until 2008. On the other side of the pond, Melody Maker launched in 1926 as a magazine for dance band musicians, gradually evolving as the market changed to cover jazz, folk, blues, and rock music over the decades. England’s New Musical Express (NME) was a relative latecomer, first publishing as a weekly newspaper in 1952 until finally pulling the plug as a freebie in 2018.

During the late 1960s and early ‘70s, as pop and rock music became a bona fide cultural phenomena (i.e. there was tons of moola to be made), music zines began sprouting up like mushrooms in a field of cow shit. Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, Zoo World, Circus, Trouser Press, Rock magazine, Phonograph Record, and Creem were among those publications that cropped up stateside, while in the U.K. the aforementioned NME and Melody Maker were besieged by competitors like Blues and Soul and Let It Rock as well as by underground newspapers like Oz and International Times. The 1980s brought new challenges for the old guard of the music press, with publications like Spin magazine (U.S.), and Sounds and Smash Hits (both U.K.) appealing to readers with fresh editorial perspectives and contemporary music coverage that helped them sell tons of copies and sneak away with market share.

Paul Gorman’s Totally Wired

With Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of the Music Press, writer Paul Gorman has attempted the unenviable feat of outlining the history and evolution of the music press in both the U.S. and the U.K. from the 1920s through the present. Gorman does so with an eye for detail that would put Pete Frame to shame, documenting the music media’s trajectory from its roots in 1920s Tin Pan Alley to its evident self-destruction in the 21st century digital age. While a worthwhile endeavor, it’s a Herculean task without favor as, no matter what you’ve written, you’re going to slight somebody along the way. Gorman is no neophyte to the music world, previously writing tomes like The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren and The Story of The Face: The Magazine That Changed Culture. Based in London, he’s obsessively-knowledgeable about the British music media, but it’s this Anglo-centric perspective that throws a spanner in what is an otherwise exhaustively-detailed and inclusive book.

First, the good news – if you’re a fan and collector of music magazines (like the ol’ Reverend), there’s a lot to like about Totally Wired as Gorman fills in any gaps in the reader’s knowledge with a well-researched tome that not only documents the music press in New York, London, and elsewhere, but also does a fair job in explaining these publications’ role in popular culture on both sides of the Atlantic, how they fit into the overall tumultuous synergistic evolution of pop and rock music, and the publications’ overall influence on generations of music fans. Where the book really shines is with Gorman’s efforts to include the stories of marginalized writers (and musicians), Totally Wired boldly addressing the sexism and racism faced by women, people of color, and immigrants trying to forge a career in music and journalism.

But now for the bad news – unless you’re a fan and collector of music magazines, or have an extensive history with the medium (like the ol’ Reverend), Totally Wired proves to be one hard slog of a reading experience. At 360+ pages (not counting notes and a woefully-incomplete index), Gorman may have written the definitive history of the music media, but he’s also created a thick hardback doorstop of an afternoon read that will take you a fortnight to trudge through. Gorman’s biggest crime is his entirely gratuitous name-checking of every writer of note for a couple dozen U.K. publications. There’s an incestuous nature to the field, as well, so the same names pop up at different publications but, honestly, you can’t tell the players without a scorecard…and there are a lot of ‘em!

The Rise and Fall of the Music Press

Although I would expect U.K. readers of Totally Wired to be somewhat more plugged-in to the extensive, Marvel movie film credits-length list of writers, editors, et al that slipped through the revolving doors of Smash Hits, Melody Maker, NME, and such, for us stateside readers, it’s really just so much random noise and anonymous names. For much of the publishing era that Gorman so keenly documents, distribution of British music magazines was ‘hit or miss’ in the United States, even for those of us who diligently attempted to track down copies. As such, only the cream (or most notorious) of British scribes are reasonably well-known stateside – Kris Needs, Chis Welch, Julie Burchill, Tony Parsons, Nick Kent, and Charles Shaar Murray are all familiar talents that come to mind. The Reverend has written for several British music magazines over the years and most of the names checked in Totally Wired were still new to me.

Too, as I mentioned above, the daunting task of writing such an all-encompassing documentary work, even one with the impressive page count of Totally Wired, means that there are important omissions. I don’t mind that Rolling Stone magazine isn’t documented in depth – Joe Hagan’s 2017 book Sticky Fingers disposed of that particular task – but Creem magazine is largely forgotten by the end of the 1970s, Gorman totally neglecting the zine’s thriving early ‘80s run. Spin magazine – arguably as important to late ‘80s and early ‘90s alt-rock culture and coverage as Rolling Stone and Creem were to their respective eras – is provided only a few pages in passing, and his otherwise entertaining chapter on 1990s-era publications like The Source or Rap Pages that covered hip-hop music and culture, moves on after only a few pages…just as it’s picking up steam. Gorman dedicates a few pages to the legendary British metal zine Kerrang!, but glosses over similarly-influential publications covering the genre like Metal Edge and Revolver (both U.S.), or my buddy Martin Popoff’s seminal Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles zine (Canada).                

To his credit, Gorman does touch upon such culturally-relevant publications as the ‘90s zines Ben Is Dead and Maximum RockNRoll; Ira Robbins’ influential late ‘70s magazine Trouser Press; the short-lived but impactful Beastie Boys-financed Grand Royale zine; and fleeting 1990s commercial music rags like Blender and Ray Gun which, my personal distaste for them aside, were cultural touchstones nevertheless. British music magazines like The Face and Q became more widely-distributed stateside during the late 1980s, and his coverage of both is interesting and informative, but his minimal commentary on Mojo – probably the best-known British import of the last 25 years – seems like a major oversight. Important American publications like JazzTimes (b. 1970), No Depression (b. 1995), and Paste magazine (b. 2002) are overlooked altogether.

The Reverend’s Bottom Line

Neither does Gorman delve too deeply into the digital publishing ‘revolution’ of the late 1990s and early 2000s that affected the traditional music press and ultimately shuttered a number of the publications that he writes about. The 21st century music press is given short-shrift altogether, with Pitchfork briefly mentioned, but popular music-oriented websites like Perfect Sound Forever and Rock and Roll Globe unfairly overlooked. Yes, the underlying documentary aim of Gorman’s efforts may have been too daunting a task for any writer to truly achieve and Totally Wired, while often informative, sometimes entertaining and, occasionally fascinating, is nevertheless a flawed and frequently-tedious work that you have to really invest time and effort into reading. As such, I can’t really recommended the book to anybody outside of the hardcore journo-groupie or curious academic. (Thames & Hudson, published November 22 , 2022)

Buy the book from Amazon (if it sounds like your 'cuppa'): Paul Gorman’s Totally Wired

Rock N Roll Legend Lou Reed, R.I.P.

Rolling Stone may have been the first to report on the tragic loss to the world of rock music that came with the death of rock 'n' roll legend Lou Reed, but they certainly weren't the last to speak their minds on the acclaimed musician and songwriter. I'll leave it up to all those other folks to provide the minutiae of Reed's life, and biographies of the artist are certainly easy enough to come by, so I'll just relate Lou's importance to my life and career as a rock critic.

I was too young to have experienced the Velvet Underground, Reed's influential and essential mid-to-late-1970s band, but I came to love Reed's music with the release of his 1972 self-titled solo album. A collection of old, and sometimes unreleased or obscure VU tunes, with a handful of new songs, Lou Reed the album was a curious beast, comprised of both lean, stripped-down, garage-level rockers with a touch of the old Velvet magic, as well as some grand, exciting compositions that borderlined on prog-rock with their lush arrangements and progressive slant. Reed even enlisted the help of future prog legends Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman in the studio!

I had read about Reed's solo album in the pages of Creem, the music bible of choice for a young rock 'n' roll fanatic, and listening to it in its entirety proved to be a revelation. Lou Reed sent me back in time to rediscover the Velvet Underground, and opened the door to a future of musical possibilities. No longer restrained by either AM Top 40 pop or AOR-oriented FM radio, Reed's early albums – the debut, Transformer from later in '72, and 1973's Berlin – would lead me directly to energizing and inspiring music from artists like the New York Dolls, the Dictators, and the Flamin' Groovies, but it was Reed that first put me on that track.

When in high school, my Reed fandom was no secret, and when a bad haircut was forced on me by my parents to make me "presentable" for my grandfather's funeral (thanks Brentwood Barber Shop!), friends at old Franklin High began calling me "Lou" when Reed started wearing short-cropped and dyed hair. And yes, I dug the comparison! When Reed enlisted two of my fave Motor City axemen in Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter for Rock N' Roll Animal, I was thrilled.

But with the release of Metal Machine Music, which coincided with graduation from high school in 1975 and my subsequent sojourn into a semester of college and, subsequently, full-time employment, I lost track of, and interest in Mr. Reed. Although I followed Reed's jousting with rockcrit idol Lester Bangs in the pages of Creem, I wouldn't pick up on the man's music again until 1982's The Blue Mask, which prompted me to look backwards at Coney Island Baby (1976) and Street Hassle (1978).

Although Reed was no longer my fave rocker – a status I'd bestow on Bruce Springsteen after seeing him perform half a dozen times between 1978 and 1985 – I kept up with his work sporadically through the years and on albums like New Sensations (1984), the wonderful New York (1989), and Magic and Loss (1992). Reed gets a bad rap for the inconsistency of his albums through the late 1980s and into the new millennium, but he was consistent in his experimentation and willingness to take risks, and for every travesty like Lulu (2011) there is a triumph like The Raven (2003).

Reed only ever had one "hit single" – the ubiquitous "Walk On The Wild Side," from his 1973 sophomore album Transformer – which rose to #16 on the chart and drug the album behind it and into the Top 30. That's not to say that Reed didn't experience some commercial traction afterwards, as albums like 1974's Sally Can't Dance (#10), Coney Island Baby (#41), and New York (#40) all enjoyed modest success while virtually all of Reed's 1970s and '80s albums charted at least for a short while.

Reed's influence on rock music transcended commercial concerns; as a songwriter, he built upon the lyrical possibilities first created by Bob Dylan to expand the vocabulary of rock 'n' roll and allow artists as diverse as David Bowie, Ian Hunter, Tom Waits, and Patti Smith, among but a few, to aggressively chase their creative muse and wrestle the beast to the ground. As a musician, Reed continued to push the envelope in various interesting ways, never settling on a singular style or content to retread past glories…and for that, rock fans owe the man a debt of gratitude that we'll never be able to pay…

(Thanx to brother Thom King for the video links below)