mostly other writers or non-writers? Do they work in related fields or not? Either way, how does it contribute to the ‘frienemy’ notion?

Robert Matheu is pretty excited about his book release, CREEM: America’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll Magazine. In fact it’s all he can talk, or e-mail, about. It isn’t a session with one of the hundreds of musicians he’s photographed before. No, this time it’s all about the book he just finished with a little help from some of his old, and new, friends.

Starting out like many of his Creem compatriots, an impressionable young music enthusiast from Michigan, Matheu instead used photos for words, providing the visuals for many an infamous caption. While Creem was known for using many photographers, it was he who remained most affixed to the magazine, later being a guiding force in the 1980s after his move to the West coast. Leafing through back pages (often literally), it can be great fun to try to spot all the photos. This game will be slightly easier with the book.

AR: What was your first introduction to Creem?

RM: In my early teens, growing up on the West side of Detroit - and that was actually the hard part when I was writing the outro to the book - remembering the bookstore at the corner of my street. Thankfully, my brother didn’t do as many drugs as I did over the years and he actually remembered. I didn’t really start reading it until ‘71. I had a lot of friends, older friends, but I think of our lot, I was the first to discover Creem. They sold it at the corner store on my street and at that time had an adult section. It was displayed right on the rack next to Al Goldstein’s legendary Screw Magazine because the name had the weird spelling with the double e; it was kind of misconstrued as being some sort of soft core porn magazine.

Richard Siegel, who is what I refer to as on of the founding fathers, actually used that to their advantage in the early days because from what I understand of all the stories I heard from Rick and Charlie Auringer, they pretty much when they got the paper done, when it was still the double-fold newspaper, everyone had had their duties - almost like a paper route - taking it around to different stores that they actually went to.

Creem was like the only one that appealed to our sensibilities because even though Rolling Stone was around it was very much, you know, they wrote about the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead, which wasn’t necessarily the stuff we were seeing in Detroit. It was much more originally a local magazine. I think that’s what Tony Reay meant, when we first hooked up and started talking about the website, he said that was his original vision; we were supposed to be about the local scene. It was such a beautiful time and Detroit was such a different city, but it was like CKLW being what it was and WKNR, it was all about Motown, which is why I could never relate to Rolling Stone.

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while growing up and why? What are some of them now, or what do you miss about former ones?

Lately, it seems that many of the pieces that get linked to around here are about how dismal are the prospects of music criticism. The equation regarding criticism that is more than “consumer advocacy” seems to be: readers don’t want to read it, publishers don’t want to publish it, writers thus slouch in their duties to provide it. But are there counter-examples to this mentality and to this assumption? (And if so, where are they?) Anyone out there thinking otherwise?

Clouds and Clocks, the brainchild of Italian correspondent Beppe Colli (and a great site for interviews with well known experimental artists as well as with various music critics) , recently celebrated its fifth year of existence with some interesting thoughts on the health of music criticism, etc. The comment that most caught my eye, of course, was this one:

Mark Boudreau in the Rock and Roll Report reviews a brand new Bomp! anthology:

“I can distinctly trace my introduction to rock and roll like it was yesterday. From my first pre-pubescent exposure to a live Beach Boys record in Grade 5 followed quickly thereafter by the hard rock blast of Cold Gin by KISS, what has stuck with me almost as much as the music has been those that have taught me along the way and introduced me to all kinds of amazing rock and roll. From KISS to the Rolling Stones, from Styx to Frank Zappa and from the Sex Pistols to Rush (niche-free even back then!), my desire and interest in not only listening to but reading about rock and roll grew in leaps and bounds.

“As I look back at my musical journey through the rock and roll landscape, three people come to mind as being essential, not only to my enjoyment of rock and roll but to broadening my musical horizons: Keith Richards, Peter Buck and the incomparable Greg Shaw.”

While the verdict is still out as to whether 2007 was a complete bust, a bright spot was veteran punk rock photojournalist Theresa Kereakes’ celebrating three decades of punk rock’s uppers and downers with her moving art show, Punk Turns 30.

Working the West coast circuit since she was a teen, and later going bicoastal, she amassed a cache of visually explosive iconography, including signature snaps of Darby Crash, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Patricia Morrison  and bands The Cramps, Dead Boys and Germs, as well as group shots of stars during downtime.

While this past fall provided a gothic backdrop for shows in Oxford, MS  and Memphis, TN, this month the traveling photo exhibit, Unguarded Moments: Backstage and Beyond was assembled for Atlanta.

The underground odyssey continues on into the spring with likely stops in New York, New Orleans and Washington, D.C.

Steven Rubio has an interesting post up about the Rhapsody music service, its association with Robert Christgau, and the venom (four pages of it) spewed by Rhapsody-subscribing assholes readers about Christgau, and about music criticism in general.

“As you read through the messages, it becomes clear that it’s not just Xgau that the writers hate. They hate the very idea of criticism. Note the problem described above: what gets the writer’s ire is that Christgau dares to give bad reviews to albums the writer liked. Apparently, the sole function of a music writer should be to list the tracks on the album and then get out of the way.

“I think this relates to the growth of artificial intelligence software that predicts our taste preferences. These programs don’t exist to help you appreciate art … they exist to help you find the stuff that already agrees with your tastes. They assume that the listener doesn’t want to be challenged. The rhetoric suggests otherwise, of course … they always claim that their method is the best way to discover ‘new’ music. But by ‘new’ they mean ‘things that are like all the other stuff you already like, only you haven’t heard it yet.’”

I think there’s some truth to all that, but my question is, has it ever really worked differently? Are we talking about a fundamental difference in the reasons people choose to listen to the music they do, or are we simply talking about the means by which they do so? Hasn’t radio been courting like-minded listeners for eons? (And haven’t listeners, in turn, long gravitated to the stations which filled their particular niche?) Ditto music magazines? Ditto live circuits and “scenes”? Have there been more than a handful–if that–of music magazines over the years which have seriously ever challenged their audience’s core assumptions and tastes? I don’t mean these as rhetorical questions–not entirely.

This French new wave track from 1981 is decent enough, I suppose (they’re no Stinky Toys), but the video’s fantastic for its colourful backdrop, which consists entirely of images from one of my all-time favourite music books (memorably described in a 2004 article by Nick Coleman as “the pornography of rock” as well as its “stained glass window”).

Gregory Stephen Tate and a dozen others salute Tom Terrell in this week’s Village Voice, a great tribute to a writer and DJ I confess to being barely familiar with before the announcement of his death last week.

“Tom also threw the absolute best D.C. house parties back in the day, affairs eagerly awaited and renowned among men and dogs for their hot fusion of wine, weed, women, and song. Like me, Tom left DJing (and concert production) to scribe in New York: a natural transition, except Tom went on to also do, as he had in D.C., just about every job you could do in the music business without singing, strumming, and dancing. Not just promotion, marketing, and a&r, but tour managing (for Steel Pulse) and rigging lights 50 feet in the air above outdoor stages, too.”