A couple weeks back, I was thrilled to receive my copy of the gigantic, gorgeously designed Creem anthology. Still haven’t read ANY of it, to be honest (that’s one thing about coffee table books that look great–they’re not especially conducive to delving in and spending time with; who wants to mess up all those lovely pages?), but a few perusals through the thing once the initial shock wore off and my excitement level dropped somewhat. For starters, as a few people mentioned in this ILM thread, the bulk of the book’s content is devoted to artist profiles, which, while certainly in the Creemspeak tradition, are probably the thing I was hoping to see the least of–certainly not as the bulk of the package. As “xhuxk” notes in that thread, it’s cool to see in there things like “Stars Cars” and “Backstage” and “Creem Dreem” reprints, but the book seems sadly lacking in record and book reviews (in fact, I don’t think there are any–I’d love to own a whole book of Creem record reviews, come to think of it). Also, the selection of writers and feature subjects just seems a little scattershot, occasionally making me wonder, “why is this here?” (Though, let’s be fair, no collection could satisfy everyone, and omissions are  both understandable and fully to be expected. That’s a tribute to the mag itself, the fact that a true “best of” could never be captured in a single anthology).

Anyway, I was (and am) still happy to own the thing, and there is some great stuff in there, but how much of it I’ll actually get around to reading… not a lot, I suspect. The mags themselves are always close by. (God forbid we should have a fire, the Creem stash will be the first detour on the way out the door–after my wife of course.)

Well, the story, as it turns out, is a lot more complicated.

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