Creem: The Alternative Music Magazine Which Gained Readership Among the Trendy

I follow a guy on Twitter called DrPopCultureBGSU from Bowling Green, Ohio. He happens to share a TON of interesting pop culture images. The other day, he shared a picture of seventies pop music idol Andy Gibb (initially, I wrote Barry Gibb which was a mistake ... sorry!) wearing a muscle-shirt (even though he was a skinny kid who didn't really have very big muscles) with an image that struck me: Creem magazine. 

Creem magazine was an alternative to Rolling Stone magazine or Billboard back in the seventies with a somewhat provocative title that evoked porn during a period when even THAT was still pretty taboo in mainstream culture, only the magazine's music coverage was unique in that it covered hard-rock, punk, alternative and new wave music which Rolling Stone and Billboard did not dare touch until those bands had already made it to the Billboard top 40. Creem began in 1969 (the year I was born), and continued publication until 1989. Its peak was arguably during the seventies.

 

 

I was listening to groups like Blondie, The Ramones, and Martha Davis and The Motels, or if I was feeling up to something a bit harder with more guitars, Iron Maiden or Def Leppard, while Rolling Stone was covering my parents' (Baby Boomer) music like Bob Dylan and James Taylor which we kids felt was more of a sedative.

Indeed, Creem was based in Detroit which most people believe gave it an editorial edge, hence its musical coverage was different from a New York or Los Angeles-based magazine likely was. As a result, Creem was favored by many people who didn't really like or consider reading mainstream musical coverage. Creem was edgy. The magazine covers were provocative, and article headlines were irreverant.

I also grew up on a street where the litter-bugs of the world literally threw Creem and other magazines out their car windows, so as kids we got to see Creem and read it. Initially, it looked like porn, but when I actually read it, I was impressed with Creem's musical coverage because it covered bands I actually listened to on college radio stations in the seventies into the early eighties. Creem spoke to me in a way that mainstream music magazines did not. Rolling Stone was for our parents, yet Creem was listening to what I listened to.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apparently, Creem magazine is enjoying something of a resurgence thanks to a hit 2020 Netflix documentary called "CREEM: America's Only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine". The trailer for that film can be seen below, or at https://youtu.be/GUcCMNRTZpI:



Perhaps as noteworthy as the documentary, the old magazine now has a newly available digital archive where the old issues can be read again online (find it at https://archive.creem.com/ to read some of Creem's old coverage).

Which brings me to the Andy Gibb Creem picture. Sure, Andy Gibb was a teen idol at the time, but he was also an image of youth, and no mainstream music magazine was focused on youth at the time, they were all aging with Baby Boomers. They were becoming Yuppies.

The revival of Creem magazine was a passion product of JJ Kramer, the son of the magazine's founder, the late Barry Kramer.  The original Creem magazine ceased publication in 1989. I was in college in the Boston area at the time. There were still other (now defunct) publications, such as Boston-based newspaper The Phoenix (and its radio station WFNX which sadly, today, is a lame country station which I would never listen to) which I read instead of Creem because it had news of bands which were coming to and/or playing around Boston at the time.

Anyway, Creem's resurgency is having it's day in the sun. From the Creem documentary website:

Capturing the messy upheaval of the '70s just as rock was re-inventing itself, the film explores Creem Magazine's humble beginnings in post-riot Detroit, follows its upward trajectory from underground paper to national powerhouse.

Then it bears witness to its imminent demise following the tragic and untimely deaths of its visionary publisher, Barry Kramer, and its most famous alum and genius clown prince, Lester Bangs, a year later.

Fifty years after publishing its first issue, "America's Only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine" remains a seditious spirit in music and culture.

 

Be sure to catch the Netflix documentary "CREEM: America's Only Rock 'n' Roll Magazine". It will be an interesting flashback to a time when music journalism was still in print.

Strange Archives: Attention K-Mart Shoppers

The internet has a collection of the truly obscure! The website Plaid Stallions, with a heavy focus on toys from the 1970's, featured a 1978 newspaper flyer for K-Mart including ads for toys of that era. However, because its the holiday season, memories of shopping at cheesy, American discount stores like K-Mart is also no doubt something for which many people are familiar.

Notably, the Internet Archive is assembling a massive digital collection of miscellaneous things, some quite impressive, such as the emulator library of video games and home video game consoles as well as handheld devices which I've addressed in prior posts, including one about Speak & Spell and other items, for example. There are also video clips from different sources, and a large audio collection. Due to copyright issues, audio can be more challenging, but sometimes the work is already done by others, in this case the once-giant discount retailer K-Mart Corporation.

Shoppers of K-Mart may recall the retailer's in-store audio background music which was periodically interrupted by K-Mart product commercials which were usually introduced with the phrase "Attention K-Mart Shoppers".  A collection entitled "Attention K-Mart Shoppers" is one such collection. It even contains special audio advertisements announcing the addition of a new K-Mart pharmacy from 1974 where shoppers could fill their prescriptions.

As the archivist Mark Davis admits, this is a somewhat strange collection. In the late 1980's and early 1990's, he worked for K-Mart behind the service desk and the store played specific pre-recorded cassettes issued by corporate (before that, they were reel-to-reel tapes sent to each store location every month to keep the background music fresh). This was background music, or perhaps you could call it elevator music. Some have some recordings of musicians including the likes of Neil Diamond, for example. He saved the tapes from the trash during this period, and its built from his extensive, if odd collection, although others have since supplemented his recordings. One of these recordings date back to December 1974, evidenced by the continuous loop of Christmas music that was featured. Separately, there was also a Muzak Christmas music tape from another collection which was quite similar, except its missing the regular K-mart ads throughout. Another 1973 recording featured the company's advertising jingle used at the time about K-Mart being "your savings store". There are even some in the collection that came from vinyl recordings when the company still went by the name S.S. Kresge which date back to the 1960's. An October 1989 recording is possibly the type most people who shopped at K-Mart back in the day will remember. Most recordings are differentiated mainly by the introductory spot introducing the retailer to shoppers, as if the big red "K" and the aqua-blue "mart" wasn't enough of a tip for them to know exactly where they were.

Until around 1992, the cassettes were rotated monthly. Then, they were replaced weekly. Finally sometime around 1993, satellite programming was introduced which eliminated the need for these tapes altogether. The older tapes contain canned elevator music with instrumental renditions of songs. Then, the songs became completely mainstream around 1991. All of them have advertisements every few songs.

He notes that the monthly tapes were very, very, worn and rippled at the time they were converted to MP3 files. He says that's because they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse. If you do the math, assuming that each tape is 30 minutes per side, that's over 800 passes over a tape head each month.

Still, for anyone interested in this peculiar collection of background music that played in K-Mart stores during that era, this collection might be worth listening to.

Visit the full "Attention K-Mart Shoppers" collection at https://archive.org/details/attentionkmartshoppers for this rather unusual collection.

For a sample of what's contained in this collection (this one from 1973), listen to the embedded post below, or visit https://archive.org/details/Kmart1973ReelToReel for the recording.