Summer of Creem Part Two

50 Years Ago, I was the Editor of America's Great Rock Magazine

You may ask yourself, "what am I doing here?" The "here" being the suburbs of Detroit in the summer of 1975, fifty years ago. Why did Creem keep its headquarters in Michigan in the 1970s, when the entire music, publishing and advertising industries were in New York and Los Angeles?

The answer is provided by the question. The coasts were crowded with artists and labels and advertisers and other publications. The Creem strategy was to be the only fish in the small pond. Being half an hour outside of Detroit, a crucial stop on every rock band's tour, meant that they came to see us: Aside from local radio promotion--and Detroit radio, which included the most influential AM radio station in North America, CKLW/800 on the dial across the river in Windsor, Ontario--Creem was the place to visit. Kiss didn't write "Detroit Rock City" for nothing. It was true. It wasn't unusual for Alice Cooper or guys from his band to say hello at 187 S. Woodward Avenue in Birmingham, Mich. Alice Cooper was born there in Detroit; the band developed there through 1972, feeling a kinship with the Stooges and other bands. After making it big, they moved to New York's Connecticut suburbs.

Creem staffers took advantage of the access to artists in some creative ways. Lester Bangs had gotten into one of his pissing contests with the J. Geils Band, and in response to their challenge, appeared on stage with them, sitting at a typewriter, reviewing the concert as it unfolded.

Cover photo by Michael N. Marks. Model: One of the local gang.

Jaan Uhelszki took it a step further with Kiss. For our August 1975 issue, she convinced Casablanca Records and Kiss to allow her onstage for a song, wearing Kiss makeup and singing into a dead mic for about four minutes ("as long as she didn't call them a glitter band," the promotion guy said as a condition) . The resulting article, "I Dreamed I Was Onstage with Kiss in My Maidenform Bra" is the story that made Jaan, the former "kid from the mailroom" (as she had started as a teenager) famous.

Aerosmith came to Detroit often, shortly after I arrived. Detroit was one of their markets on repeat: They came through all the time, building a strong base, while they remained obscure on the West Coast and in the South. My friends Ed Ward and Tom Vickers were visiting from the Bay Area. We arrived a little late to the Aerosmith show at an arena in the city, probably Cobo Hall, and found the ushers and security had abandoned their posts. We found our way to where our seats were supposed to on the floor, and found chaos: chairs tossed aside, people standing where our butts were supposed to be. It was a free for all. We perched where we could, took part in the madness as long as we could, then split. It was "Lord of the Flies," or "Thighs," as the band put it, and it made us feel old. The group was just about to take-off with its third album, Toys in the Attic. They invited the editorial staff to dinner in a private room of the seafood restaurant in their hotel, which I wrote about in the September 1975 issue and adapted for Substack here. (Paid subscribers only for archives beyond five weeks).

Motown Records, the pride of the Motor City, had mostly left for Los Angeles. But a publicist and some other staff were still there, and so I was welcomed to my new job with an offer of lunch with the Four Tops, who still lived in the nearby suburb of Southfield. The Four Tops, or Three Tops (minus Levi Stubbs, who had another appointment) and the Motown publicist met me at Machus' Sly Fox. When it opened two years earlier, in the 1973, it boasted the first new liquor license for a restaurant in Birmingham in 40 years. It is often confused with Machus' Red Fox in nearby Bloomfield Township, where Jimmy Hoffa showed up for dinner that very summer, in July 1975, and was never seen again.

We drank martinis and nice bottle of wine to go with our prime rib, or whatever it was the Sly Fox was known for. It was not an interview, just a courtesy call, and I thought: This is what I hoped it would be like in Michigan: Socializing with Motown royalty. Among the Four Tops present was singer Lawrence Payton. About 10 years ago, when I was teaching journalism at St. John's University, I had a student with that surname in an interview class. She was from Southfield, and for the family member interview assignment, she spoke to her grandfather, who she said was a singer. She didn't specify his first name, but starting class one day, I said: "Is your granddad Lawrence Payton from the Four Tops?" She confirmed he was. I told her: “about 40 years ago, your grandpa and I drank martinis at lunch!" I'd like to say she was overwhelmed with enthusiasm; instead, just a shrug.

The most important editorial discussions had to do with choosing a cover story, which was harder than you might imagine. There was some good music released in 1974-1975, but it was kind of a doldrums for Creem's rock niche. Our main rival for newsstand sales was Circus, with its expensive glossy pages of photographs and not much memorable writing. Publisher Barry Kramer also wanted to the magazine to be a cross between Esquire, the National Lampoon, and for a while, Star magazine, the LA groupie magazine that went from boom-to-bust in about six months circa 1974. It was a great idea, but as with so many of Kramer's needs and wants, his reach greatly exceeded anyone's grasp. He craved a cover with the nerve and impact of the National Lampoon's audacious and still-remembered January 1973 issue: A gun pointed at a cute puppy's head with the line: "If You Don't Buy This Magazine, We'll Shoot This Dog."

This was Kramer's rationale for suggesting putting Lester's visionary Kraftwerk story on the cover. The boss's idea--because the guys in Kraftwerk were not exactly sexy cover material-- was to have our designer create a cartoonish cover with a surfboard graffiti'd with a swastika, because Kraftwerk were from Germany. We argued about this for hours. Kramer, anticipating the outrage this would cause, compared it to that famous National Lampoon cover. He didn't think it through, so it was important to remind him, that a swastika on the cover would likely get Creem removed from the very newsstands he wanted to set on fire. Bangs thought it was a bad idea, then a good idea, then a bad idea…but Kramer's appeal to Lester's ego almost got him to go for the swastikas. Duncan didn't like it, Jaan did’t care for it, and I hated it. Kramer and I were the two Jews in editorial, and he took the banal "I'm Jewish and it doesn't bother me" position. We were at a standoff when Charles Auringer entered the room. He would have to develop and design this "concept." Listening to about five minutes of the pros and cons, Auringer, keeping his muscled arms folded, just said: "Nope." End of discussion.

Bangs and I went to the Kraftwerk concert at a theater in Detroit; I think Bob Duncan was there, too. I know I enjoyed it but found it a little boring. Lester was focused like an astrohysicist discovering a new planet. The Kraftwerk story, Bangs most visionary masterpiece, correctly anticipated the end of electric guitar rock and the rise of the computers that dominated the 1980s and beyond. If he lived and teamed up with someone who knew coding, they could have been ahead of the Steve Jobs/Steve Wozniak curve.

We also saw Springsteen in Ann Arbor that summer. It was one of the weaker shows for the E Street Band, which I had seen many times since their signing to CBS Records, my first job after college, in 1972. This was an inconsistent night for Springsteen. It was a fascinating drive back to Birmingham in the back of Charles Auringer's van, as Lester kept articulating his conflicted feelings about the difference between what we saw and heard and what the "hype" out of New York was for the entire hour or so drive back. Dave wrote about Bruce that summer based on early tracks from "Born to Run." I'm not sure why I didn't send myself to cover the coming out shows at the Bottom Line that summer. I did fly to New York for a few days to hang out with the Doobie Brothers on tour. Landing back in Detroit, my suitcase was lost. A day later I got a call from the airline that it had been found. I went to pick it up, and found a slight tear that had been in my cheap suitcase had become a full rip across the top. But all of my stuff was there, including the baggie of pot, undisturbed, at the very top of the suitcase. I don’t think the airlines provide that service anymore.

There was not a great deal going with potential Creem cover artists, so it was a recurring rotation of the Rolling Stones, The Who, David Bowie, Rod Stewart. It would have been heretical, a betrayal of our readers, to jump on the James Taylor/Carole King/Cat Stevens bandwagon. Lester, in fact, had written an essay that was too vituperative even for Creem, and was published in a fanzine: "James Taylor, Marked for Death." For some reason Southern rock bands were popular among our readership, but none were big enough or sexy enough for a cover. But every issue during my six months had a cover line story about the Allmans, or the Marshall Tucker Band or Lynyrd Skynyrd or something similar. We covered the Grateful Dead, though the Creem aestetic was anti-hippie. We weren't against smoking weed, it's just something we all did. But unlike Rolling Stone, for example, it didn't signify our culture. Lester wrote a long letter to me and others about it earlier in the 1970s: be the voice of a retro culture, fast food vs. health food, booze vs. weed, John Coltrane over any soft-rock of the day.

As editor, I was mostly, if not entirely clueless. I had wanted the well-organized Georgia Christgau to be managing editor, but she never got the chance. (See part one.) As a newsroom leader, I wasn't an Alpha, more like a Beta-minus. I, or should I say we, did work cooperatively, everyone pitching in.

We were always looking for new writers. This was Creem's original allure, an open call for contributors that I'm sure Dave Marsh wrote and started appearing as early as 1971: "Here's the deal: NOBODY WHO WRITES FOR THIS RAG'S GOT ANYTHING YOU AIN'T GOT. at least in the way of credentials. There's no reason why you shouldn't be sending us your stuff: fiction, reviews, features, cartoons, stuff about film, ecology,books, or whatever...There's really no such thing as an 'unsolicited manuscript.'" We all did a lot of reading of "there's no such thing as...unsolicited manuscripts," and yes, some got published. Others, like the Letters to the Editor, seemed to come from insane asylums.

But by the summer of 1975, we did a lot of reach out. At least that's what I thought an editor should be doing, bringing in new writers. We knew how big the Eagles had become, but none of the staff wanted to touch them. We didn't hold them in contempt as much as actively ignored them.

We had subscriptions to every alternative weekly in the US and Canada, and in the Chicago Reader, there was well-written, measured, and fair feature on the Eagles. I called the writer, John Milward, and he wrote up a fresh version that got a big cover line in the November 1975 issue. That same issue, a friend from Boulder, Kenny Weissberg, had his pulse on the Colorado-friendly country rock scene, and did a piece on Richie Furay from Poco. Eagles headline: "Fly Me, I'm Vacuous." Furay headline: "Jesus Freakout!"

The Rolling Stones were on tour, of course, and the well was running dry on fresh voices to cover it, since the Stones were in almost every issue. We brainstormed about writers outside the usual rock critic boundaries who might write for us for the pittance we paid. Lester came up with the name Charles Bukowski, the cult writer and muscatel-swilling barfly who wrote a column for the L.A. Free Press. We all cheered. Bukowski would be perfect to review the Rolling Stones at the Forum in L.A. Bangs called Bukowski, and looked a bit chagrined that Bukowski had never heard of Lester Bangs, never heard of Creem magazine, and had hardly a clue about the Rolling Stones. Nevertheless, he delivered a Bukowskian piece that began: "They opened on the 9th at the Forum and I went to the track the same day."

The summer I was the editor, we did another culture package on booze, Bangs again in the director's chair. By that time, I had settled on premium vodka as my drug of choice, and I wrote the vodka page. I also went on to write about vodka for Oui magazine (not published), the Russian youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, about why Stolichnaya was losing U.S. market share (Communists did not know much about marketing or advertising or brand development; Absolut's ad campaign was eating Stoli's zhakusas.) I also wrote a piece for New York Newsday's food section, for which I wrote when I gave up the pop music beat in 1994, about finding The Best Vodka Martini in Manhattan. Three weeks of leaving the office early, armed with a company credit card and expense account, to report on my findings. (The winner was Temple Bar in NoLita.) I wrote about Stoli in the Creem top ten tipples in that October, 1975 booze issue.

Other strange memories include driving to Chicago for the weekend with Sherry to stay at the Ambassador Hotel, paid for by MCA Records, for a Roger Daltrey solo album junket. Sherry had some fresh, mild but effective psychedelic mushrooms. We got into the elevator to go to our rooms when some midwest corndog was trying to impress some teenage girls. "I'm Wayne Robins from Creem magazine," the slobbo said. They were so unimpressed that Sherry and I burst out laughing. I had business cards with me and could have spoiled his game, but why harsh his mellow?