http://www.metrotimes.com/music/story.asp?id=13608

Since I started at CREEM in 1981, I won’t take your assessment as an insult, although I’d say most people thought it was pretty damn great from 1970 through ’75 as well. In fact, many consider those its golden years, having something to do with a dude named Bangs or something like that. As an “old punk,” I thought maybe you’d appreciate that.

And I’d also like to point out that John Cougar got his first major feature story in CREEM (by our friend Richard Riegel) in 1979. There were reviews and other mentions long before that. So the magazine went poof and “started losing its cool” when it started writing about John Cougar, yet CREEM was cool from ’75 to ’85, even though Cougar was featured on its cover the first time in 1980…before I started working there? Somehow that time frame is just slightly skewed.

So to use your own quote: “not sure what you are talking about.” Like I said, a little late on the draw there, Rudy…but thanks for playing!

It was a great rag from about 75 to 85..then it poofed.

As far as the John Cougar stuff….not sure what you are talking about…but I do remember thinking that I hated him back then and why the #$^)%($*$* is Creem wasting space and Ink about him…

I’d say that’s when Creem started to lose its cool. (Both figuratively and literally)

1) Few people outside of the Detroit area knew ANYTHING about Creem magazine before 1971 or so, and my guess is that the publication’s national reputation wasn’t really established until ’73 or later. As a teen, I was a RABID consumer of music rags (RS, Crawdaddy, Fusion, Zoo World, Bomp) and I didn’t find a copy of Creem in Tennessee until late 1971. It doesn’t really matter how GOOD the rag was in the early days when comparing it to the latter days if nobody got to see it….

2) The Reverend is going to go out on a limb here and commit a major sin, but there has NEVER been a rockcrit more overrated than Mr. Lester Bangs. It may be blasphemy to say so, but Bangs’ death at an early age has made him the Jim Morrison of rock writing, placing every word above reproach. Did he expand the vocabulary of rock criticism? Sure. Was Bangs highly influential on a generation of writers to follow? Without a doubt. Was his work entertaining and humorous? Yes, it usually was. But Bangs was also often long-winded and purposely obscure, and his stream-of-consciousness style of writing read better in the chemically-altered ’70s than it does today. For my money, Marsh and Holdship are better journalists, Rick Johnson was a more entertaining critic/reviewer, and Kordosh one of the funniest scribes I’ve ever read. That being said, I still enjoy reading Bangs’ work, but hindsight and an early death have clearly served to inflate his reputation.

3) Nobody – and I mean NOBODY – outside of a small circle of insiders and hangers-on (and I probably fall in the latter category) really cares about this Creemtastic feud! Yeah, I began reading Creem in ’71 and devoured each monthly issue throughout the decade, but the vast majority of people that I’ve spoken with recently about Creem remember the magazine of the ’80s, most of them quite fondly. The magazine’s lofty reputation does not rest merely on the small, sparsely-circulated 1969-73 era but rather on Creem’s impressive overall run, circa 1969-1988. That’s what really matters to most people (i.e. everybody that’s not a rock critic or journalist).

All of that being said, I did buy a copy of the Creem book and will be working up a review of it for my Trademark of Quality blog sometime soon. Truthfully, though, if Matheu had been a really savvy businessman, he would have pitched Harper on a three-book deal…maybe toned down the coffee table book aspect a bit…and assembled a Creem-of-the-70s volume, a Creem-of-the-80s volume and, of course, a Creem reviews book. It would have made a buncha cheddar, to be sure….

Of course, the Reverend always has more to say on anything, and for anybody wanting the full, overwrought story, here’s a link:
The Battle Over Creem’s Future from my Ryan Adams Sucks blog

That’s the big problem – not who was slighted and who was glorified – the book isn’t as entertaining as it should be or could be. No Punky Meadows, no Canadian jokes…

I was a loyal reader back in the days (say 1975-83). The person who gave it to me for xmas paid hard earned money for it and for that hard earned money better is deserved.

The layout is ugly too and not CREEM ugly, just ugly. No proof read apparently either.

Just returned to this Website today, as I actually had some work to do this week, so I hadn’t read Sue’s response until today:

>>>As for Bill’s lengthy rant against me, I am … amazed.

It wasn’t a rant against you, Sue. It was a rant against you (or anyone) rewriting CREEM’s history.

>>>I was flipping through the Creem book briefly while the NY Observer reporter asked me questions, and Mellenhead’s ’80s visage just pissed me off.

You mean the visage that you assigned four or more major features on in the ’80s?

>>>I didn’t see who wrote it, and even when Bill was sending me a million emails an hour about this last week, he never overtly said, “That was my story, so you insulted me.” Nobody else thought I was personally insulting Bill Holdship.

Sue, I have all the e-mails on my computer – the “million” I sent you, and the “million” you sent me beginning the day you received the book in the mail (I hadn’t even addressed the subject with you yet) and your blood pressure went “through the roof.” Shall I post them for others to judge? I mean, since you brought it up, it seems like fair game at this point.

>>>I didn’t realize it was his story until I saw his stream of consciousness blog, attacking me. Bill: Blogs aren’t supposed to be every thought that runs through your head.

When exactly did you become the expert on blogs, Sue?

>>>And I was gone from Creem in January ‘83. Do you honestly feel I worked that far in advance, to plan a July ‘83 feature on Duran Duran? I assure you, I did not.
>>>But …Bill is focused, and Mellencamp is what he cares about in this inbroglio.

No. What I care about is your rewriting of CREEM history. But at least you’ve been consistent in that over the years; I’ll certainly give you that.

>>>That and doing PR for Mark J. Norton. I well remember a time Norton called in “sick” at deadline. Unfortunately (for him) he was seen by our ad director Harvey Zuppke very healthy, riding a motorcycle on Woodward Ave. That was the end of MJN at Creem, a short and not very memorable time.

Again, Sue, I’m not doing PR for Mark J. Norton, a man you hired and eventually promoted to Associate Editor. I’m doing PR for factual accuracy. In those “millions” of e-mails last week (and elsewhere), you argue that he was never anything more than “editorial assistant.” I told you that was untrue; that he was promoted when you were editor. Then you e-mailed me that “Barry fired him.” I replied, asking “How could Barry have fired him when Barry was already dead?” You wrote back that you never said Barry fired him. And I sent back the e-mail that you’d sent me hours before, stating just that. You then responded that if I continued to “defend him” people would be “laughing at me.” As if I care about that…!

At any rate, as you also stated to me: “I have the right to my opinion.” And you do. But no one has the right to rewrite history. And those with the slightest power of reading comprehension understand that’s what my rant was about, not defending John Mellencamp or Mark J. Norton.

I don’t know Mr. Matheau but I believe that he did have the legal right to publish this – or any other – book using the Creem material… as for his debatable relationship with the other “investors” that’s one for the courts to decide and if he didn’t have the reprint right necessary then where’s all the lawsuits against the publisher?

Like several others in his periphery, I’ve often leaped to Dave’s defense on many a page and during many a phone call or email with mutual friends. I’ve never claimed to be his bosom buddy which isn’t surprising given my own personal memories of the coup that forced me out of the magazine I started – and whose style of arrogant knowledge and opinion I founded from my opening column. But I’ve ALWAYS demanded that he be given full co-credit, with Barry and Charlie, for the establishment and foundation of Creem as a national entity and the strident, often harpish, points of view of its audience it so accurately reflected. The fact that Barry was fortunate to have found Dave when he did was the making of Creem and its resultant legacy – long before Lester or any of the others.
He wasn’t the entire raison d’etre of the history of the rag, but then again, no-one except Barry and maybe Charlie, truly were.

But Dave’s recollection of our own relationship is perhaps suggestive of the very comments I am reading here from others who know/knew him better. It appears that Mr. Marsh is becoming just a little overly paranoid and self-obsessive even for his own good.
I’ve never said a bad word about him… particularly recently.
Maybe he truly remembers me as being “kinda snotty” to him… Hellfire, maybe I was… go figure… I was twenty and fairly fresh off the plane from a little village in Northern England suddenly thrust into the maelstrom that was Detroit music just after the riots… but in all fairness, I was probably snotty to everyone, and it was just that attitude that eventually gave Creem it’s style, remember?

It’s his use of the phrase “record clerk” that irks me… his slanted incompleteness. As I recall it, by the time he met me, I was no longer a record clerk though I had recently been one and very proudly too… in ‘69, being a record clerk was a position of great power and accorded much respect within the fledgling community of heads and hippies around most US campuses… but I was ALSO co-music editor of the Fifth Estate with John Sinclair, a columnist for the Detroit News, temporary MC of the Grande Ballroom, had a radio show on WABX and helped promote several area events, not the least of which were the RocknRoll revival and the great Hudson’s drive-in concert. I was as thoroughly and deeply involved in area rock as it was possible to be when Dave was a… college student.

In fact, long before Creem and Barry and all the rest, I started and published (with help – always with help) a poetry magazine in Windsor Ont., just over the river.
Maybe I didn’t see the talent lay latent within Dave’s student brain AT THE TIME, and, truth be told, he didn’t burst from the womb with the brilliance that he displayed within a short time of the literary freedom afforded him by Barry AND DETROIT.
He’s right, of course… it was two entirely different magazines… and it may well have become very white after he left, but he didn’t BEGIN coverage of black music in Creem – one of the first issues had a wonderful Archie Shepp piece and the magazine was fortunate enough to find Richard C. Walls who remains to this day the best pure music writer to ever grace it’s pages… and who covered music of all shades and genders with equal aplomb and skill… and who ALSO is woefully neglected in Mr. Matheau’s book.

The Lesterisation of the mag, which divided its history and reputation almost surgically in two – or three, as I look at it, probably completed the task of turning a successful and unique regional magazine into the national icon that it became and possibly remains.
But Lester wouldn’t have had anything of the foundation for frolic that he enjoyed and manipulated so ardently were it not for the work, skill, diligence, passion and bullheadedness of the young and irrepressible Mr. Marsh… and, Mr. Marsh wouldn’t have had his own foundation were it not for those same elements that I, often by accident and never without great help, brought to the table before him. It’s always easier to ghostwrite book two than to author the first edition.
By the time Dave got there, Barry was already involved. Dave didn’t have to sell ads, set up and carry out distribution, learn layout or answer his own phones… all one of them. Barry had taken care of that. Dave just had to concentrate on being Dave.

My point here is not self-agrandisation but rather the seeking of the full story and that the story of Creem varies considerably dependent on what you consider to be the “early days”. The “early days” for many of us, were not in the upstairs of the house on Cass avenue or the farm in Walled Lake, not even in the basement of Mixed media, higher up on Cass, but rather in the basement apartment on Gladstone Street… it’s all about perspective, yea?

It’s sad that Dave and his wonderful career should be so sidetracked by attempting to get due credit from such a fait a complit as this book… he must surely realise it is his own stirring of the storm-in-a-creemcup that has given the book much of it’s attendant publicity, far beyond the normal round of reviews and articles that it’s release would have otherwise accomplished. He must also realise that his vitriol will only further persuade the unknowing general public to want to see what all the fuss is about and buy the thing.

Reading his foaming-lip words today remind me of nothing so much as Hoffman’s “Lenny” towards the end. LET IT GO, Dave… no one denies your contributions and, sadly, no-one gets to design the headline fonts in their own history… not even you. It’s not necessary for all of this back-biting from everyone about who did what and why to whom about which…
Anyone who reads the early issues of Creem, including – I’m proud to say – my own, will see that everyone in the realm of the arts “belongs” in its pages… EVERYONE. Just ‘cos you don’t like Johnny Cougar, or Alice Cooper, or Melanie, or Miles or Iggy or Leon or… WHOEVER, doesn’t mean they don’t belong and often that was sufficient reason alone.
Dave did a fabulous job with Creem, as did Lester, Ben, Jaan, Sue, Dave and all the others who followed the star – ecclesiastically speaking. I personally would have like nothing more than a book that reflected such shining lights… but I’d also like cows to give Jack Black and that ain’t happening either.

I admit that I don’t know Dave Marsh EITHER. I have had the advantage and great pleasure to have followed his career since the early days when I hated him for being a part of the theft of my baby, which is the way I saw it back then… and it is testament to the greatness of his talent that he overcame my initial feelings and turned me into a fan of his writing. But y’know what? He doesn’t answer MY emails either…
On this day when I awake in frosty angle-land to the news that Ike Turner has died… I wonder if Dave will bestir himself to write the eulogy rather than continuing to attempt to rewrite his own illustrious history… after all, there’s no-one better qualified or equipped to do so anywhere on the planet.

P.S. Just for the record, when I speak of the relationship between myself and Barry regarding his “taking the magazine from me” I do not mean to imply that Barry did anything wrong – because he didn’t. His actions were fair, if not just, and I remained – to MY way for thinking – friends with him and miss him quite terribly. When all the sheep come home to roost… or something like it… the credit is all Barry’s. If I hadn’t started Creem, he would have ended up with something like it anyway, if only because he didn’t like what Werbe was doing with the Fifth Estate and wanted somewhere to promote his own stores apart from ABX whose ad rates were rising significantly in ‘69.
If he hadn’t stumbled upon Dave and Lester and Ben etc. he would have found others… writers, editors, photographers, regardless of the immense skills that they bring to bear, are not uniquely irreplaceable. But Barry Kramer was most certainly a mold-breaker and, despite the recollections of many others with their own bias, a good friend and brilliant businessman.