Every rock magazine likes to believe it is the centre of its culture, but Creem really was. It wasn’t just a magazine that covered rock music, or whose writers lived up to the cliches of the rock’n’roll lifestyle. It was a magazine with rock’n’roll in the very fabric of its building.
“Creem had this three-storey building downtown in a bad neighbourhood,” Johnny Badanjek, drummer of the band Detroit, told me last year. “In the back were all the writers – there’d be Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and Ed Ward. And we were on the third floor. We practised at noon, but I’d come up at 11 in the morning and Dave Marsh [Creem’s editor] kept shouting, ‘Damn it, Bee! I want to sleep in!’ I guess I was like the alarm clock.”
