(Collins)

www.harpercollins.com

Imagine growing up in a world without CREEM: for those of a certain generation, it can’t be done. Billed as “America’s only rock ‘n’ roll magazine,” during its storied 1969-88 run CREEM raised the bar for two-fisted rock journalism, lowered the barriers between the artists, fans and writers, and managed to blow more than a few teenaged minds in the process. Your truly’s included: In 1970 I purchased my first copy—the Stooges were on the cover; it was still a Detroit-focused newsprint fold-over—along with some Zig-Zag rolling papers at a local head shop. Thus were planted the seeds of my own eventual foray into rock writing. (Now you know who to blame.)

Everything’s here in this 272-page, coffee table-sized book assembled by Robert Matheu, a veteran CREEM photographer who revived the beast on the web a few years ago, and Brian J. Bowe, former editor of www.CreemMagazine.com (also a HARP contributor). It’s not a comprehensive, month-by-month chronicle of CREEM’s sometimes outrageous/sometimes incomprehensible/always fascinating trajectory, but with anecdotal snippets from musicians (among them, Alice Cooper, Iggy Pop, Thurston Moore, Ian Hunter and Ted Nugent), and former staffers presented alongside freshly laid-out reprintings of classic articles arranged more or less chronologically, you still get a vivid sense of the chaos, irreverence, humor and passion that went into the making of the magazine.

Included are seminal pieces by rock-crit visionaries such as Lester Bangs (“Iggy and the Stooges Take America By the Spleen”), Dave Marsh (“A Who Primer”), Jaan Uhelszki (“Led Zeppelin: One More For the Road”), Dave DiMartino (“Rash Clash Mash in Motor City Bash”) and Billy Altman (“David Lee Roth: And the Gleeby Shall Rock”). Also front-and-center are some of the rag’s more memorable recurring features: who can forget those “CREEM’s Profiles,” where artists posed clutching shiny cans of Boy Howdy! Beer, or the “CREEM Dream” pinup page featuring va-va-voom pix of hot chix like Debbie Harry, Lita Ford and, uh, Divine. Everything’s wrapped in an eye-popping design generously decorated with classic CREEM covers, and the iconic mascot Boy Howdy!—he of teeshirt and catchphrase fame—dots the layout like a leering punctuation mark.

In the ‘90s the magazine was resurrected but the resulting product was so sterile and so un-irreverent that it was CREEM in name only—a humorless vessel housing the turd-stained scribblings of a buncha journalism-school gimps. Which is why this book is so perfect: it’s sweet revenge for anyone who ever mourned the passing of that golden era when rock writing dunked deep in the spirit of the very artform it purported to cover.

All that and pics of Grace Slick flashing a boob and Wendy O. Williams smearing whipped cream all over hers? Boy howdy! FRED MILLS

[Images courtesy Robert Matheu]