Job Interview at Creem, 1972

You Have to Work Somewhere After College

Before spring break 1972 my senior year at the University of Colorado in Boulder, I asked around to see what people were doing. I was just planning to Lebowski around town, work a few days at Hilltop Records, where my roommate Sam Maddox and I put in some hours on weekends when we weren't co-editors of the Colorado Daily's arts section.

But some people were planning on spending time in Denver, or Colorado Springs, or Longmont, or back home in Texas or Topeka, doing job interviews. Job interview. Hmmmph, I thought. What the heck is that?

Apparently, a job interview is what you did if you wanted to get a job after college. Nobody told me about this. I was told you were to type a piece of paper called a résumé on which you listed your experience, education, and qualifications. Then you called for an appointment.

My education was a work in progress, obviously, although I was getting good grades for the first time in my life at CU. I took some journalism courses in summer school for conditional credit, the condition being that my pending application for enrollment in fall 1970 was accepted. They were happy to have me, and my parents were delighted to have me back in college after what is now known as a "gap year." Then it was known as "dropping out," after Bard College asked me to take at least a one semester off before applying for readmission after I failed "Moderation," to which I can only add, "I'll say!"

The J-school at CU was an under-appreciated department and major: I aced all my classes. And my résumé was pretty strong for a college senior: I'd been published in the Berkeley Barb, Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Fusion, Creem, Earth, as well as the Boulder Express and Boulder magazine, the latter two published by the Community Free School of Boulder. (All memories first-hand but specific dates subject to imprecise recall.)

One day in 1970 or 1971, I went into the Boulder magazine office to find proofs of the entire issue on the boards in various states of preparation for publication. No one was around, until a few people drifted in. They were glassy eyed, the look that said: "I have seen the future of civilization, and its name is the Guru Maharaj Ji, the 13 year old perfect master whose spiritual practice we have accepted at a retreat in the Rockies." The plan was to move the Boulder Express/Boulder magazine into more of a special interest publication called Divine Light, the official publication of this new age ministry. Sam Maddox and I pondered this as we listened to Blue Oyster Cult, our preferred ritual of purification, and I joined Sam in creating the Means and Media Friday entertainment section at the Colorado Daily, where he was the music critic.

Still, there was an awareness to consider what I might do after college. I wanted to work for a real newspaper, but the Boulder Daily Camera was right-wing, pro-development, anti-Greenbelt, pro-Nixon. It was noteworthy for front page typos and banal photo captions. Although the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News were about to go through growth spurts that gave the Denver area two competitive, sometimes excellent newspapers, in 1972 they seemed mired not necessarily in mediocrity, but an insufferable squareness. I heard reporters wore ties in the office; I wasn't going.

There was only one place that I wanted a job: Creem magazine, then in the exurbs about 32 miles northwest of Detroit in Walled Lake, Michigan. I had started contributing to Creem a year earlier, when Dave Marsh and I had a long phone conversation that resulted in my editing a letter of his appearing in Boulder magazine. It was a point/counterpoint about Grand Funk Railroad. Dave was pro-Grand Funk, as they were from Flint, Michigan, and Dave wrote to my colleague, who had sent Creem a rejcted anti-Grand Funk review. Dave’s point was that it was time for those of us who grew up on the blues-and-r&b based rock, Chuck Berry and Little Richard and the Beatles/Stones/Who, to give way to a new generation: Our younger brothers and sisters, who were developing their own musical tastes. Dave and I were both 19 or 20 at the time of this conversation. I ended up with an assignment to review the Rascals' Search and Nearness album, and for the next four to five years wrote regularly for the magazine.

Creem was the hub of the emerging Michigan rock scene. Bob Seger was still a local hero, his “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” a regional hit. The Stooges were transforming rock with the reckless abandon and incendiary stage shows led by the unpredictable antics of James Osterberg, aka Iggy Stooge/Iggy Pop. And the MC5, the only band to face down the police riot during the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, provided the anthem for this new, fierce Motor City rock and roll: “Kick Out the Jams!” Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs were the idiosyncratic chroniclers of this music, freestyling in Creem with an intensity that matched the spirit of the sounds.

Charles Auringer, the biker-Clark Gable photo editor, picked me up at the Detroit airport in his truck, and with hardly a word spoken for 45 minutes (Charles was also the strong silent type) dropped me off in front of what appeared to be a rustic and rundown plantation house. Despite Creem's own anti-hippie, hard rock musical esthetic, the staff lived communally in one house on this rural property, presumably owned by publishers Barry and Connie Kramer. The magazine was edited and produced in a second building. It was isolated in the sticks. I think the staff was paid about $25 a week plus room and board, but I don't remember asking.

I stood outside this locked, empty house for a long while, increasingly nervous. I thought maybe they forgot I was coming. Finally, one person walked towards me, and asked if I knew where Barry was. I said I did not, explained my situation, and he kept me company for a while. We introduced ourselves, and he said, "I'm Billy. Wanna smoke a joint?" I said, sure. As Billy and I got high, his face began to come into focus. I recognized him. "Billy. Billy Lee?" He said that was him. Billy Lee (aka Levise) was also known as Mitch Ryder, of Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels. This was the band that Marsh and I had bonded over on the phone. Being his local teenage Michigan band made good, he had seen them coming up at high school or CYO or American Legion shows.

I'd seen them at Murray the K's World, an abandoned airplane hangar at Roosevelt Field decorated with nothing except strobe lights, primitive light shows, and a blasting sound system. I seem to recall the Barbarians, featuring Moulty, the one-handed drummer, as an opening act.

I had also seen Mitch's foreboding performance as anticlimactic headliner of a week or 10 days of shows at the Paramount Theater in Manhattan in 1967. These were the last of the old school multiple-act, multi-show revues that disc jockey Murray the K had specialized in at the Brooklyn Fox in the 1960s. But instead of Patti LaBelle and the Bluebells, Joe Tex, Jay and the Americans, and other r&b, pop, and soul stars, doing two or three songs each (and a John Wayne movie to clear the house between shows), the show at the Paramount in 1967 introduced The Who and Cream to American audiences. Mitch Ryder had to follow them with a large orchestra, performing "What Now My Love" and other standards, (including a Rod McKuen song), a massive miscalculation by Ryder's songwriter and producer Bob Crewe.

But in 1972, Mitch was rocking again, with a group called Detroit, managed by Barry Kramer. In an interview with Josh Baron of Relix in 2012, Ryder was benevolent towards Kramer:

“There was a lot that Barry Kramer did for me that kept my career going, and then, I started making serious mistakes after that once I didn’t have his umbrella to lie under.”

The self-titled album, Detroit (1972) contained the definitive cowbell cover of Lou Reed's "Rock and Roll."

Meeting Mitch Ryder in that fashion offered the hope that I might have found my place. And I had, but not yet. The isolation of Walled Lake and the farm spooked me: There was no place to walk to, nowhere to go. The claustrophobia of working and living with the same people 24/7 went against my need for privacy, some escape from colleagues, not to mention restaurants and bars, book stores, record stores. . .a larger dating pool.

Marsh set me up in his room. At dinner, I met the rest of the crew: Lester Bangs, a recent transplant from El Cajon, Calif., and refugee from Rolling Stone. Roberta Cruger, movie specialist. Gary Kenton, a sort of out of place preppy who had been an editor at the Boston rock magazine Fusion, where I had published my first book review, of Michael McClure's 1970 novel The Mad Cub, back in my junior year of college. Kenton was a nice guy; I felt bad about him having to take Bangs' verbal abuse, because there was no exit. I was disappointed at the absence of hard liquor: I really needed some vodka, or bourbon, but everyone drank red jug wine with spaghetti dinner. Cheap jug wine was Lester's favorite beverage, an even better high, he would claim, than Romilar cough medicine, for which we shared a fondness: Me as a stoning of last resort, him as a kind of preference.

My initial impression of Bangs was not good: An alpha dog drunk with a cruel streak. The more he drank, the more he hazed Kenton, who, like the rest of us who were not from Michigan, was drawn to the Creem mystique of expressionist writing, its gonzo sensibility that was just starting to take shape as the dominant style of rock criticism against the uniformity and dullness of Rolling Stone. Also, Creem was developing great cachet: It was gaining buzz all through the industry. Lester was not the only Rolling Stone name who found artistic asylum at Creem: Greil Marcus, Ed Ward, John Morthland, and others had gravitated to the Michigan mag. But none of them lived in Walled Lake.

I had already decided I wasn't ready to live in Walled Lake. I was added to the masthead, though, as part of the editorial staff. In spring 1975, the magazine having moved to the main commercial district of the affluent suburb of Birmingham, I moved there to become the editor, where things really got personal with Lester, as it might with anyone with whom one shares a small office for about 50 hours a week. It wasn't fun, but we all did good work for the Creem brand.

But just one last thing about the commune at Walled Lake: after dinner we took a drive to the nearest mall, where a controversial new movie was making its suburban premiere: Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather."

Like almost everything at Creem in those very early days, the opinions were argued late into the night. I had enjoyed the flick, but did not feel like talking it to death, so I turned in early. The next day I went to work for a few hours, editing some record review copy, and took an afternoon flight back to Boulder. A year later, after the commercial failure of the great Detroit album, wrecked by drugs and booze and a throat ailment, Ryder moved to Denver and worked in a warehouse before a launching series of small comebacks that never brought him the acclaim he deserved.