The Michigan Scene Today

The Michigan Scene Today

Editorial

We’re a year old this month and a year older. The alternative culture is a year older too, a year further out of adolescence or a year deeper into it. Whatever, we thought to take stock of the home front as we see it; where we’ve been and where we are, and maybe we can draw some conclusions as to where we’re going.

The alternative culture in the Detroit/Ann Arbor community is first and foremost a rock and roll culture. Whatever movement we have here grew out of rock and roll. It was rock and roll music which first drew us out of our intellectual covens and suburban shells. We got excited by and about the music and started relating to each other on the high plane of energy that has come to be associated with our community; it is around the music that the community has grown and it is the music which holds the community together.

The reason is simple: there isn’t anything else here. It isn’t a street people’s community because there are no street people. We’re too spread out for that — it’s forty miles from Detroit to Ann Arbor and the northern Oakland County area that is the present hotbed of teenage upheaval is equally distant. And it’s not a dope subculture, not at its core. A dope-subculture is based on transcendental experience, rooted in the mystical and dwells on the aspects of the sublime, but the sublime could never catch on in Skonk City, USA. It’s not that it isn’t attractive, it’s only that it isn’t relatable. Life in Detroit is profoundly antiintellectual. If you live in San Francisco or New York, the traditions are there, and even if you reject them wholly you’ve been shaped by them. Detroit is completely lacking in that climate; our institutions are industrial and businesslike, not cultural or intellectual.

Detroit has never been accused of being a fashion center; the new waves are only ripples in the midwest. People aren’t drawn to Detroit, though thousands came to work in the factories. Chairmen of the Board aren’t intellectuals, they’re merchants. The top intellectual stratum, for the most part, is made up of engineers.

But too often fashion centers are fad centers too. This or that may be derivative, but what we’ve made ourselves is as real as the foul breath of the Ford plant or the scum in the Detroit River. But all of these things are subconscious; we’re really not aware of the things we missed and we do seem to get by all right with what we’ve got.

And, like we said, all we’ve got is rock and roll. Rock and roll gave us immediacy, energy, release; what we were looking for. And it taught us to prize those qualities above all others and to look for them in everything else: media, politics, everything.

So we call it rock and roll culture and apply it to everything; “Zabriskie Point” is a rock and roll movie (above and beyond the soundtrack) and “Woodstock Nation” or “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me” are rock and roll books. We’ve carried rock and roll beyond a mere musical form and made it a lifestyle.

The lifestyle, like the music, is naive, crude, adolescent, simple and simplistic. Those are the reasons that we have the reputation that we have, those are the reasons that we fall into the traps that we do and those are the reasons this is occasionally the most vital music scene in Amerika. Our youthful exuberance is at once our primary asset and our greatest fault.

A year ago it seemed to us as though Detroit/Ann Arbor was going to be the next nexus of the alternative culture. It wasn’t.

We were giving a party, but nobody showed up. And all those extra hats and everything. “A year ago Detroit was the most vital music scene in Amerika. Nothing was happening in New York, San Francisco was dead or dying and Chicago hadn’t had anything going on since Bloomfield and Butterfield were jamming at Big John’s and Mother Blues. And now it has a reputation as being a sham, it ain’t together and people can’t even work with each other.” Bob Rudnick, who at one time or another has been a disc jockey and journalist in New Jersey, New York, Detroit and Chicago and Minister of Propaganda for the White Panther Party.

What’s been happening with us this last year?

The Grande Ballroom, which was the first ballroom outside of San Francisco, and a year ago was the oldest continually operating ballroom in the country, has closed and reopened and reclosed and reopened so many times in the past year that we finally stopped writing about it. At present it’s closed, but we can’t really be sure. Russ Gibb, the disc jockey-turned schoolteacher-turned entrepeneur-turned disc jockey who started the Grande has moved into the eight month old East own through an on-again-off-again-on-again partnership with local Bob Bageris and Chicago’s Aaron Russo (the intricacies of which we’ve also stopped reporting) and the Birmingham Palladium, a reconstituted municipally-owned suburban teen club, (in partnership with Punch Andrews, who also owns Silverbell and Something Different, two smallish teen clubs, rumored to be folding), and a revitalized Walled Lake Casino (once an amusement park/greaser hangout), in partnership with Gabe Glantz, who owns fifty percent of everything Gibb does. If this smacks of oligopoly, it ought to; the music business in Detroit is at present in the hands of a tiny group of neo-moguls. None of these men are evil, or even particularly venal, but they are surely willing participants in a capitalist system which tends to concentrate power in the hands of a very few. Moreover, they are clearly not of the people who form the community/audience.

In the classical model of oligopoly, an industry tends to become more closely held and made up of fewer producing units as the rigors of competition and the economies of scale dictate merger, consolidation and clandestine cooperation. Just so in the Detroit club and ballroom scene. The effect of the original Detroit merger was that the Grande, which had moved down the street to the Riviera Theatre, closed with the Eastown remaining open as a partnership venture. The old Grande then re-opened only to close a couple of months later because it was too much competition for the Eastown. Couple this with the neardisappearance of the midwestern club, once a

None of these men are evil, or even particularly venal, but they are surely willing participants in a capitalist system that tends to concentrate power in the hands of a very few.

phenomenon in itself, and the result is that emergent bands have damn few places left to play. This, for years, was one of the ways in which so many bands could survive; a heirarchical scale had been developed, which bands moved up and down on. Only the better local bands could play the Grande but, until they got that good, they had loads of other jobs. And now they don’t.

The teen clubs have folded as a result of too much competition, both from the local ballrooms and the large-scale pop festivals which, last summer, drew hundreds of kids from their own communities almost every weekend. Couple this with the soaring prices of rock acts and, again, you have a classical capitalistic situation. You simply can’t compete with a room that can double or triple your capacity and can pay prime prices for talent as well. And the people have come to expect the Big Show, the one that will cost the clubowner prime prices.

A parellel situation exists in the local booking agencies. The big shot booking agent until three or four months ago was Mike Quatro; Quatro was forced out of the booking business due to the fact that he was taking commissions on the concerts which he promoted, a tactic which is considered illegal or at best unethical. Quatro’s agency was sold to Diversified Management Associates (the agents are Quatro’s old employes) which has, at this point, managed to obtain “exclusive Michigan booking” rights to fifteen major Michigan bands.

The only other booking agency of any consequence is Jeep Holland’s A2 Agency, which at one time had a monopoly on Grande bookings and exclusively booked almost all of Michigan’s top bands. Jeep himself has recently ceased booking groups, leaving it up to his subordinates so that he can concentrate on management. But the effect of the situation is that most small bands are not dealt with by DMA, which books both of the large ballrooms, at least in terms of local acts. Just another hardship in the development of local talent.

The one organization that should be able to control any excesses in other areas of the music business, the union, is controlled in Detroit by the left-over 1930s dance band musicians. Detroit’s Local 5 was the scene of the one power play by rock and roll musicians in union history. Dennis Day, a former band manager, had become a union business agent interested in unionizing rock and roll groups. “The union had no one who knew rock,” Dennis said.

In 1967 he joined the union as a replacement for Jim Cassilly (presently managing Tegarden & Van Winkle), trying to institute programs for rock bands. “The only avenue we had to eliminate the bullshit,” Dennis said, “was the union.”

£)ay organized the clubs and began to set up the Junior Guild; lower initiation fees, special scales and a whole program of business and technical advice were to be offered to musicians. Unfortunately, the New York office of the Union had declared those kind of programs illegal; “You couldn’t be half a member of the union, you had to be a full member” and the Junior Guild was considered a sort of half membership due to the reduced initiation fees.

But Day pressed ahead with the program, helping others set up the program (Local 47 in Los Angeles, notably). The union was freaked; they realized that rock was taking over but they had no idea of how to deal with it. They moved in to squelch the work that Day was doing; their very power base was threatened. “25 rock musicians could take over the Ann Arbor union,” Dennis said, “In Lansing maybe 50; here in Detroit it’d be 500.”

By early last year Day had become exhausted; he decided to take a leave of absence. “When I went to pick up my last check, it wasn’t there. They’d locked my briefcase and all my personal possessions in my office after I’d given them back the keys. They implied that 1 had taken union money, illegally - never said it outright, just implied it. I had to come back on Monday with my attorney, John Levy to get my money and my briefcase.”

It was obvious harassment; “the unions are very political,” Day noted and went on to add, “they actually let me take more stuff than I actually should have.”

Day was replaced by Dave Kimbler, whose father is president of the Pontiac local. “Kimbler destroyed the Junior Guild and he was fired,” Dennis said. “Then they hired Gar Paskell, who’s really fighting; but he’s running into the same things I did.”

What the Junior Guild was to provide was an educational process with its own rules, regulations, teenage scales, a four track studio for learning purposes only and audition nights to let business people in the community hear new bands.

It never happened; at least, it never happened the way Dennis had envisioned it.

Last summer at the union’s national convention, the emasculated Junior Guild was approved by the national union. Dennis feels that he was made a fool. “I believed in a' priniple that was not being executed on the beaureaucratic level.”

But the Union has now introduced the audition nights, which points up the internal problem within the rock community; at first, the response was great but, as time wore on, attendance became very sparse. Rock musicians as Dennis puts it, “are bitching musicians. But they won’t get up on Sunday morning to vote.”

His attempt to organize the rock and roll musicians on a statewide level was a dismal failure. The rock and roll musicians just don’t understand power in those terms (another case of our classical naivete) and the powers-that-be don’t have any idea of what their power could be, Dennis thinks. “The unions could control every aspect of the music industry. Every aspect - record companies, ballrooms and clubs - all of it. But they don’t.

“Everything’s wrong with it and nothing’s right with it...the principle is right but the people instituting the principle are wrong.”

At this point it looks like the rock kids will continue to get shafted, continue to support the union hierarchy with their work dues and continue to complain and do nothing. “They could easily take over the union,” Dennis says, “but they never will.”

While the union may not be attuned to the community, Detroit’s underground FM stations

The rock and roll musicians just don’t understand power...they could easily take over the union...but they never will are well geared to their audience. Progressive rock fm stations are by now an established phenomenon in this country; the unique thing about Detroit’s stations is their close relationship with the community they serve.

A year ago it was safe to say that WABX held the undisputed lead in fm broadcasting in the Motor City; WKNR did garner many young listeners with Russ Gibb’s weekend shows and their greater transmission power. WXYZ, the ABC-network LOVE station, had even greater transmission power but little else to attract listeners. But, abundant as progressive rock was on Detroit’s airwaves, WABX was still king of the hill.

WABX attained its position through its total assault on the community. They had one of the prime air personalities on either am or fm in Dan Carlisle and it was Carlisle who came up with several of the promotional gimmicks which led to ABX’s position. The station also had, last spring, a short-lived program -which featured John Sinclair. Sinclair was on the air with Jerry Lubin, to make certain the irrepressible John didn’t get too far out of hand. The Sinclair/Lubin affiliation folded rather quickly, however, due to the management’s inability to relate to Sinclair’s just . emerging politic. Politics and radio in Detroit seemed to be rent asunder at least temporarily.

In the spring, though, Bob Rudnick and Dennis Frawley, a pair of media gypsies from New York, arrived with an already established program which had been recently scratched at WFMU in New Jersey. The Kokaine Karma show was one of the better utilizations of air space in radio history; besides the music, which ranged from Fats Domino/Little Richard segues to whole sides of Archie Shepp, the show also had Bob’s acid tongue and Dennis’ laconic wit to commentionsome of the more controversial aspects of the alternative culture’s contemporary affairs. As the summer wore on, and despite the 2 to 6 a.m. time slot, the Karma show became more familiar in Detroit.

WABX as a whole was basically continuing with its past efforts to support the community; the station has, since its inception as a rock formated station, provided free advertising to local organizations who are throwing benefits and the like. It also placed great emphasis on music produced by local bands. (In fairness it should be noted that these precedents have been followed up by both WKNR-fm and WXYZfm). They had a complete series of summer concerts planned for the city’s parks, which were remarkably successful, a series of free movie previews and weekly rock and roll news, a series of half-hour cultural news segments.

By August several developments had occured. For one, Carlisle was being wooed away from WABX by WKNR-fm. More significantly, Rudnick and Frawley were in danger of losing their show; Rudnick claims to have been told that they were “playing too much jazz” and his heavyhanded blasts at innumerable sacred cows, both local and national, weren’t going over too well at the management level either.

In certain ways of course the competition is beneficial...but for the most part it represents a siphoning of energies that could be better used...

Then, in one incredible day, Rudnick and Frawley were fired, without much explanation from WABX, and Carlisle resigned. Dan’s resignation said that he was quitting because of “WABX’s refusal to offer a competitive salary” and because of “the firing of Rudnick and Frawley.” Carlisle chose, of course, the proper move to make at the proper time; it’s clear that Dan would have left, regardless of who the station fired or hired. He made that clear to the area in an article in CREEM at the time. But his resignation did have one remarkable effect. John Detz, WABX station manager, offered Rudnick and Frawley their jobs back; Dennis accepted. Rudnick, who’s not exactly known for his lack of pride or ability to exist in a restricted situation, didn’t. Whatever, the war of the radio stations was on.

That war quickly descended into pettiness. It’s almost impossible to say who struck the first blow; at any rate, the whole thing has been blown out of proportion until now the stations resemble warring fuedal duchies. The effect on the information getting out to people was about the same as those wars for the serfs; if you speak to a staff member of one station, you’re treading on thin ice with the other.

In certain ways of course the competition is beneficial, as in certain ways all competition can be beneficial. But for the most part it represents a siphoning of energies that could be better used in finding creative joint solutions to community problems. If one goal is to get more outside money into the community, how much more effective bargaining could be done with a united front? Instead, rivalry lays both stations open to the kind of games that straight businessmen play so well. To use this country’s perverse economic system for the community’s good requires that one understand it; it is not enough to be assimilated by it. It’s the difference between being a mechanic and being a tool. The stations have lost the forest amidst the trees and have been sucked into vindictiveness and competition of the most picayune sort, and all of them and all of us are suffering from it. Essentially, the problem is one of noncommunication. How can people doing the same job in the same community not speak to each other?

They speak with pride of becoming more “professional,” but what they have in fact done is succumbed to corporate consciousness of the basest sort. It’s one thing to read the rating services and think of ratings as a tool with which to manipulate corporate owners and advertisers, but to take them seriously, to take pride in rating superiority as an end in itself, to forget why you want those numbers and to worship the numbers themselves is something altogether different. It’s petty and stupid and boring and antithetical to what our community, supposedly their community, is all about.

The stations have lost the forest amidst the trees and have been sucked into vindictiveness and

competition of the most picayune sort.

Despite the absolute inanity of Brother John and the greasy LOVE format, WXYZ is making a valiant, though perhaps vain, attempt to improve its generally abhorrent programming. Since the Love format does not provide for any live, on-theair shows it can’t rise beyond a sort of pretaped mulch. But, if WXYZ is planning the experiments they say they are (and what they say isn’t too definite, just that it’ll be far out) it might be successful. After all, it is the most powerful of the three stations. And, whatever its defects, a tape recorder doesn’t give a fuck who you ate dinner with last night.

Despite all that, and without questioning the veracity of everything above, Detroit still has the heaviest radio scene in Amerika. If that appears to be a contradiction, chalk it up to that youthful naivete we mentioned earlier. Thed.j.s and station managers are young, under thirty for the most part, and there’s still a whole lot of hope left; at least the music played is better than the muzak one receives on the waves of am. In a certain sense, in fact, Detroit’s underground radio is a microcosm of its entire rock and roll culture.

When we talk about naivete in terms of Detroit/Ann Arbor’s rock and roll community, we mean exactly this kind of naivete, which leads one to believe that you can play all the old games and get away with them, if you just change their names. And when we talk about an air of adolescence, the radio stations again point up what we mean; it’s exactly that frustrating air of pettiness that makes them so impossible to deal with that is one of Detroit’s greatest enchantments/faults. The radio stations are crude in the sense that we’re crude; in trying to be suave, they often fall flat on their faces. And their simplistic ideas about what makes radio tick and why their audiences are there reflect, again microcosmically, some of the entire community’s favorite fantasies as to why certain things go on in this world. The currently favorite fantasy being the tendency of bands to think that record companies are set up to benefit bands, that all that front money’s free. Whereas, in Amerika, nothing is free.

That’s the essential problem with that ruling clique (and, to be sure, there’s a tiny oligarchy which rules each and every segment of the Detroit scene). They tend to relate to everything, quite naturally, based on their own experience; and that experience, frankly, is not very broad. It leads to things like the radio situation, the oftentimes abysmally poor choices bands make of which record company to sign with and the total communication breakdown between the oligarchy and the community.

We’ve mentioned some of the names of the rock and roll powers that be. The amazing thing is that the average Detroit band doesn’t know who these people are. There are any number of kids who move in their circles, who hang out at their clubs; rock and roll kids. But with the exception of Russ Gibb, who has gone out of his way to make himself a public figure, most of our rock and roll moguls are inaccessible and unknown to the community at large, even to that special segment of the community whose lives are wholly given over to rock and roll, whose livelihood depends on rock and roll. Not a conspiracy, but rather a kind of spirit gap; the people who wield the cultural power are not of the culture, and for the most part keep their distance.

Not a conspiracy, but rather a kind of spirit gap; the people who weild the cultural power are not of the culture...

Detroit has a vigorous underground press, who might do much to bridge the gap, at least informationally, between the oligarchy and the community as a whole, but for the most part the underground press (The Fifth Estate, The South End, The Metro) is oriented towards the radical vanguard and not towards the community at large. Detroit underground newspapers are not rock and roll newspapers, even in our broad use of the term.

The Ann Arbor Argus is a rock and roll newspaper, and perhaps currently one of the two. or three best underground newspapers in the country (like all underground newspapers, the Argus has monumental ups and downs), but it is fairly insular in its Ann Arbor orientation.

Ann Arbor is pretty much Detroit’s Berkeley. Warmer than Detroit, smoother, more satisfying, Ann Arbor will get your clothes cleaner. And - it’s biodegradable. There’s certainly an overall Ann Arbor/Detroit sense of community, but the pace of the two places is different. Detroit people go to Ann Arbor to rest up; Ann Arbor people never go to Detroit, except on business.

Ann Arbor gave birth to the White Panther Party, our indigenous revolutionary operat; revolution for the hell of it. The WPP was originally pretty much a vehicle for promoting the MC5 as the first in a projected series of “guerilla rock and roll bands.” This is not to say that the political orientation was in any way a sham. But the original WPP was, with YIPPIEL a truly postMcLuhanistic political party. Originally the Party was pretty much a free-form endeavor, but of late, with repression becoming infinitely more real and immediate, the Panthers have begun to take themselves a good deal more seriously. Whatever one thinks of their ideology and rhetoric, the WPP has become an effective radicalizing catalyst in the Ann Arbor/Detroit community.

...with repression becoming infinitely more real and immediate, the Panthers have begun to take themselves a good deal more seriously.

For one thing, it is around the WPP, and the imprisoned John Sinclair, that the STP (for Serve The People) coalition was formed. Imperfectly, but better than ever, the amorphous STP coalition has united the diverse political and cultural elements of our community behind concrete projects. STP may well be the most important development of the past year.

Its first project was the two-day John Sinclair benefit, which netted $8,000 for the Sinclair Legal Defense Fund, and it has now thrown its support behind Open City, the apolitical Detroit community service organization. Open City provides the much-needed medical, legal, housing and job aid that would otherwise be completely unavailable to the rock and roll community. Though the concepts of a switchboard and the individual services are not unique, the idea of having all of them under one roof is a step forward. Whatever its faults, Open City is the one project that you have to relate to in Detroit, if only because all of the work that it does is essential.

Like we said, this is a rock and roll culture. What about the rock and roll?

Musically, Detroit seems to have peaked out last summer, at least temporarily. No new bands of any particular significance have surfaced since, and the bands that have been around for a while have been getting sloppier and less innovative. It may be the Michigan winter, and the residue of ice and cancer it leaves in your guts; it may be that the tightening grip of the money moguls has taken some of the excitement out of the scene for the bands—very prominant rock and roll business personality, no matter what his principal occupation, owns a band, and uses his influence peculiarly in their behalf—but the bright promise of last spring has gone largely unfulfilled.

There are 400 rock and roll bands in Detroit and Ann Arbor, 1,500 union musicians under 25, and we used to be proud to say that a good many of them, in any given weekend, could blow any “national” act off the s.age You don’t

hear that boast very much any more. Detroit Ann Arbor bands have always been people’s bands -the only difference between the performer and the audience was the placement of the guitar, and everybody knew, dug it - and one of the great strengths of our community was its serene of itself the pride we took, and were justified in taking, in our music. You don’t feel that pride (and sure, it was sometimes just chauvinism, but so what?) very much any more. The local bands don’t get the receptions they used to. Maybe the people are getting jaded - there’s always been so much good Michigan music around, so accessible - but it’s a well known fact that most top Detroit bands can’t afford to play Detroit, because they can command much higher prices almost anywhere else.

The fact remains, though, that there’s more rock and roll here than anywhere else; we probably are jaded. We may have lost our perspective, and this goes for the bands as well as the audience. On one hand, we’ve come to expect a tremendously high level of energy in our music; on the other hand, a lot of bands seem to have come to think that musical inventiveness consists of no more than turning up the amplifiers. It wasn’t just volume that made the MC5 high energy, that has given Detroit music its vitality.

But we should make clear that when we criticize, we are dealing from strength. In Detroit we have all the elements of the most high-powered rock and roll culture in the country. Now and again we’ve proven what we can do; we’d like to see it sustained, and carried to a higher level. This means a more constructive sense of community, a higher level of awareness, a more reality-oriented approach to our situation.

This is the youngest rock scene in America; the music is younger, the musicians are younger and the audiences are younger. Members of rock and roll bands generally range in age from 18 to 21, or thereabouts. They obviously haven’t had much experience m dealing with shysters and slickies and they obviously haven’t had time to assimilate a lot of what the older musicians in other areas have. When rock and roll wasn’t a viable musical form, they were too young to know it. For the most part they didn’t turn to jazz or folk music, and then turn back to rock and roll, the lessons of the other musical forms assimilated; they never turned away from rock and roll in the first place. Our people are young, adolescent, naive; it gets us into a lot of trouble sometimes, but it produces a fresher, less self-conscious sort of music than can be heard anywhere else.

We must come back to the centrality of rock and roll to the life of Detroit’s alternative culture. Our alternative community could not exist without rock and roll, because rock and roll is, like we said, all we’ve got. Detroit’s rock and roll kids are rock and roll kids like no kids anywhere else in the country; rock and roll is uniquely central to their lives. Again, their lives are based on rock and roll music. They listen to more of it, are more involved in it, have come to depend on it more than kids anywhere else. If you’re a kid in Detroit you either hang out at a club or ballroom and have your free time filled by music, or you don’t hang out at all.

We have to keep coming back to, and emphasizing, that central fact about Detroit; Detroit is such a unique hotbed of rock and roll because the kids are so deeply involved in it. Rock and roll is their whole lifestyle and they know no other. They’ve followed the bands around, hung out at the ballrooms, maybe played in a band or two and that’s all they do. And, it bears repeating, that is because there is nothing else, at all, here to do. If you’re not into rock and roll, you’re not into anything; if you don’t hang out at the ballrooms, you don’t hang out. That trite old line about “his music is his life” applies here not only to the musicians but to the audiences. There is an integral association with rock and roll here, a nearly simbiotic relationship between the bands and their audiences.

Where do we fit into all of this?

Within the community, we ought to be the stuff that runs between the subatomic particles, the tightly bound power blocs that run rock and roll in this area. We should convey information and apply pressures that may rationalize their interrelationship, give each part a sense of the whole and spur them on to work for the good of that whole. We can also popularize, rationalize (in another sense of the word) our experience as a community for the rest of the alternative culture, in the hope that focusing attention on what we have been doing may benefit people both within and without Detroit.

Still, we’re consciously more than a community newspaper, and the scope of our involvement with the alternative culture goes beyond the boundaries of the Ann Arbor/Detroit area. We’re one of maybe five or six national magazines of the alternative culture and as such we have something to say about more than just what goes on in our own neighborhood. Still, even within this broader framework we’re a Detroit artifact. The style of the Detroit scene is our style. Our orientation, our self conception, our likes and dislikes are products of our experience as members of the Detroit/Ann Arbor community, and the kind of contribution we can make to the media on a national scale is similar to the kind of contribution that we feel Detroit/ Ann Arbor artists can make to the overall music scene.

As we’ve said, our bands are people’s bands. Similarly, we think of ourselves as a people’s magazine. We want to be “professional” only in terms of our access to information and our efficiency in putting out our magazine regularly and consistantly. We do not think of ourselves as Professional journalists and we do not want to adopt that distant, oracular stance of Professional journalists. We do not want to be another Rolling Stone. We are aware of the hazards of a selfconception. We would not turn CREEM into an in-groupish trade paper even if we could. We have seen the counter-productive effects of cliquishness on our community and we do not wish to export that.

We hope to bring a fresh, vital, high energy perspective to bear on our culture. We are a rock and roll magazine, with all that that implies. Our culture is a rock and roll culture. We are rock and roll people. We’ve been doing this for a year, and we’re getting better at it, but we’re nowhere near as good at it as we think we can be. We don’t want to be slick, but we do want to get tighter and faster. That’s what we want everybody to be, and we hope we can all do it.

Dave Marsh

Deday LaRene

Barry Kramer