Dear CREEM:

Maybe you can tell me why the rock stars have no moral values? Why drugs and sex mean everything to them.

I have been hunting through many magazines to find a clean, decent person in the rock business. To my surprise, I still haven’t found one. What makes them think that this unmoral conduct is so much fun? They all follow each other. I can’t understand it!

1 am considered so old fashioned and down right straight according to today’s values. I have a hard time finding friends, too. I don’t condemn any rock star or person of this nature but I surely don’t respect them either. I intended to be a rock star myself, for I play guitar and I’m in a band. I want to be respected for my music, but I’m afraid I won’t be accepted because I don’t dig drugs or sex where it don’t belong. ^

The way everything is today, who is going to look up to a straight person?

Peace,

Pat of Maya

Point Pleasant Beach, NJ

Dear CREEM:

Long time ago I bought an album called On Time and found it rather dull. Sometime later I met a guy with the improbable name of Lee Long who owned two or three copies of each Grand Funk lp. He sold me the scratchiest copies of Closer to Home and Grand Funk for a dollar apiece. Couple of months ago, he moved to Los Angeles. Now I read Rolling Stone and listen to “Aimless Lady” occasionally. Sometimes on Sunday morning, I listen to Blows Against The Empire.

I tell you tins only because you should know. Because you, Dave Marsh, must remain an enigma — a fun-house mirror distortion of the art snob. Because the glorification of such crass commercialism as art is no worse than the glorification of art for art’s sake and there are too many goddamned spoiled brats with massive record collections. Because this affluence is artificial and sick and it doesn’t matter anyway. Because I’ve told you my sins. Now tell me the truth.

Edward Wrobel Baltimore, Md.

(Mr. Marsh: I didn’t listen to Surfs Up very much.)

SMOKEY! DON'T GO

Dear CREEM:

In the April issue, Smokey Robinson retires. I’m very diappointed to hear that (about him retiring). I think Smokey has a nice voice and should sing forever — he’s one of my favorites. I love his sexy voice and every record I ever heard by his I liked a lot. Please don’t quit Smokey, we all love you and your voice!

Love and peace,

Miss Chris Calderone Greensburg Pa.

Dear CREEM:

I got my first issue of your magazine today (Alice Cooper cover) and Just wanta say it’s great.

You bring back the spirit of rock better than the old Crawdaddy, the old Hit Parader (when Jim Delehant edited) and the old Rolling Stone. Add CREEM to the list and you have all the rock magazines who ever really said or meant anything.

I was wondering what had happened to all those excellent writiers that Rolling Stone had a couple of years ago such as Ed Ward, Greil Marcus, Langdon Winner, Jon Carroll, etc. Add to them Dave Marsh, who I like almost as much as Paul Williams and my favourite writer Lester Bangs; not to mention Greg Shaw, Mike Saunders, Richard Pingston, etc. and you’ve got; the best rock magazine of all time and except for R.S. the only one worth buying today.

Michael Ward

Seattle, Wash.

HOT DEATH CROSS THE GLOBE

Dear CREEM:

I pity you. But as long as I’m not forced to read your shitty magazine, I don’t care who you put down and cut up and tear apart for the tinyest little criticisms. But you can’t get away with cutting up George Harrison and the Concert for Bangla Desh.

Do It!

This is just to say we want you. That should’ve been obvious all along, of course, but just in case it isn’t here’s the deal:

NOBODY WHO WRITES FOR THIS RAG’S GOT ANYTHING YOU AIN’T GOT, at least in the way of credentials. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be sending us your stuff: fiction, reviews, features, cartoons, stuff about Him, ecology, books or whatever you have in mind that we might be able to use. Sure, we don’t pay much but then who else do ya know who’ll publish you? We really will... ask any of our dozens of satisfied customers. Just bop it along to us and see what comes back your way (lots faster if you enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope). There’s really no such thing as an “unsolicited manuscript,” you know, and if you have eyes to be in print, this just might be the place.

Whaddya got to lose?

Whaddya got?

I am so fed up with you egotistical, neurotic, frustrated, narrow-minded, uptight, superior, “super-super-hip” critics whose opinions are the only ones that are right. You think the music you like is the only kind worth liking and everything else is to be laughed at. Everyone should have their own opinions and I respect them but you don’t have to be so obviously one-sided and closeminded.

Has it ever crossed your perverted little minds that maybe, just maybe there are one or two people somewhere in the workd who don’t like GFR, Black Sabbath, etc. And maybe you could say one good thing about something else that really deserves it?

As for you, Greil Marcus, you don’t even deserve to be alive! How dare you put down the Concert for Bangla Desh? Everyone else in the world seems to realize what a beautiful thing it was. Your ignorance is appalling. You just don’t get it, do you? It’s sad. You treat it sarcastically — like a joke. You don’t even have the facts right:

1. The sitar part is hardly a half hour (16 minutes), you exaggerated a bit. By the way, I was wondering how you expect to offer an intelligent (HA!) criticism of something if you don’t eVen listen to all of it.

2. No side of it is “barely seven minutes long.” Sometimes I wonder if you listened to it at all. I assume you mean the sixth side. Well, did you ever consider the clapping. But I guess you’d find that boring as well.

You say you found it dull. I don’t think too many'people would agree with you on that. O.k., we all know you don’t like it but you could hardly say it’s dull. Ironicly, you say the concert missed the point. On the contrary, you are the one who missed the point. You don’t even know what the point was in the first place. You put down the whole idea of the concert. “The same God that allowed this wonderful concert to take place was also raining hot death on the other side of the globe.” I suppose you think it would have been better for George to Sit back and let people die without doing anything about it. You know he didn’t have to have that concert but he did because he is genuinely concerned. Name me one other person who would do all that he did.!?!

I think it’s really pathetic the way you have the wrong idea about such a beautiful thing.

Holly Schwer

Quarkertown, Pa.

Dear CREEM:

I just read the March issue of CREEM and it made me furious. Don’t you guys do anything but put down everything! All you shitty people know how to do is tear things apart! How can you put down George Harrison? Greil Marcus is nothing but an uptight, narrow-minded, neurotic bitch! You have the nerve to say the concert for Bangla Desh'was boring! What do you shitty people think Grand Funk and Black Sabbath are?

Don’t you think you exaggerated a bit on the monotony of the Indian music section? Half an hour? Get out... it was only 16 minutes long. And just what did you mean by “all those devout rockers seemed to be missing the point?” Did you expect each of the artists there to write a whole new program of new songs? Aren’t you satisfied with the fact that Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Bob Dylan, Billy Preston and Leon Russell all agreed to help George?

It’s obvious that you despise George. The way you boost Eric’s guitar, Ringo and Bob’s singing, makes it apparent that you don’t think of George as an artist. When you say about one side being only seven minutes long, don’t you realize that that was the side where the crowd was clapping and giving such a devoted band what they deserved? In my opinion, Greil, you are an egocentric condescending little chauvinist.

Dianne Wink

Quakertown, Pa.

Dear CREEM:

Only on rare occasions do I respond to articles written in “Pop” magazines or papers, but this certainly is that time. I just finished the piece on the John Sinclair Rally of December 10th and your opinions and comments were so negative that I felt like I was reading the Detroit News. Of course, you are entitled to your opinions and some were very good, but when the vast majority are so negative that’s when you must be especially careful to be accurate, and in this case, I feel strongly that you failed your readers. I think you owed it to us to research your statements a good deal more — if John Lennon and Yoko “blew it” so certainly did you in your interpretation and statements of fact.

As you know I headed much of the staff that produced the show. Everyone involved knew that if such an event were to be of value we had to pull it off quickly to have an effect in freeing John Sinclair from jail. With eight or nine days remaining John and Yoko decided to lend their support to an already existing event. They thought it important enough to make such an appearance even if eight days is too short a time to put together and rehearse a good rock and roll band. Four acoustic numbers from the hedrt was the only realistic thing to attempt in eight days and the Lennons were clear from the first announcements (which you must have missed) that they planned only a very short appearance as part of an already existing and planned event. There was absolutely no manipulation on their parts from the start and for you to repeatedly indicate such is just completely wrong and very misinformed. Did you even make one phone call to justify any of your statements? For example, instead of blasting Stevie Wonder, I could have told you that Stevie Wonder asked if he could play and paid for his whole band to fly in from New York. Everyone else received expense money but him, and Motown was never involved in any way — it was Stevie’s decision alone so you blast him and make him look a bit of a fool.

I wished you had worked with us on making the event possible. Then you might have seen the real value of it. We knew we couldn’t pull off a smooth running four hour show with each group playing fifty minutes and all speakers planned perfectly, but we were all aware of the much greater symbolic effect we were after to help John S. and we hoped at the same time to raise a few people’s consciousness to the problems surrounding the issue of John’s imprisonment. I can’t agree that John Sinclair was almost lost to the audience that night as. you mentioned. It just wasn’t so and for you to complain about the phone call from John in jail is just as overcritical as the rest of your interpretations. You complain that John Sinclair was overshadowed at the event on one hand and that the phone call was an evil plan to build some sort of cult — I’m afaid you overthought a simple phone call that was not planned out except for giving John the number to call, and you made it into an evil attempt to subvert youth. I remember speaking to Dave Marsh and he told me how great he thought the whole event was. Did the staff change your mind later — did you “see the light” or were you just giving me a bunch of shit?

Continued on page 80.

Continued from page 8.

Of course, there were mistakes and areas for criticism, but there were many good positive points you could have spoken of, and if you insist on your negative approach then please won’t you do us the favor of researching your comments at least a little bit.

Your Reader,

Pete Andrews

Ypsilanti, MI.

(Mr. Andrews is an Ann Arbor concert promoter and sometime band manager who was the producer of the Lennon/Sinclair benefit. -Ed.)

Dear CREEM:

I was very disappointed to read yer put-down of David Peel in the article about the Sinclair Rally. Like, I can understand you goin’ after John and Yoko — they have this terrible tendency to “move into” an area and ignore or denigrate the righteous efforts of a local people - but Dave ain’t them. This dude has played to captive audiences in Washington Square Park for years for free. He’s been raising the vibes at demos here in NY and elsewhere by singing songs like “Up Against the Wall,. Motherfucker” and “Oink, Oink,” while they are happening, in the midst of them, for a long-assed time. And he’s played at literally hundreds of benefits. Smoke-ins seem to be one of his specialties — during the national one in DC last July 4, the pigs stormed the stage while he was playing, and exhibiting some kind of weird phallicgroupiesm, tried to “touch” him and the members of his amorphous group, the Lower East Side, with their nightsticks. He played at the Dana Beal Smoke-In in Madison last September and everyone dug him and he helped immeasurably in convincing the pigs that if they kept Dana in the slam they’d have plenty of angry people on their hands. Peel may not be the Eric Clapton on guitar but ya gotta remember he’s a revolutionary who’s also a musician, not visa-versa [sic]. But he’s also a fine poet and I think he’s the Woody Guthrie of the ’70’s.

As for the Sinclair Benefit — first of all let it be known that David and the LES were at the JS benefit LAST YEAR and two years before that, when it wasn’t the “in” thing to be there. This year he was put on late in the bill and everyone was antsy to see John and Yoko. As for “The Ballad of Bob Dylan,” it was like a positive song — as positive as you can get aftet having been brainwashed by me, the biggest Dylan trasher around, for about a year and a half.

Peel is far from perfect — he signed Rubin’s attack on me — the one that tried to purge me from the RLF [Rock Liberation Front -Ed. ] and defended Dylan even though it looks like he really didn’t mean it judging from his new song, “Blackmail Conspiracy” (which is about a rock star who tries to force someone to kill a song about him he don’t like). But Peel is the least elitist, most radical and one of the most creative music people on the scene and you should try and dig this. The Rock Liberation Front is proud to list him as a Minister of Culture and we hope CREEM will look at him more objectively in the future.

A. J. Weberman

New York, NY

(After the John/Yoko/Sinclair Benefit, we’re hoping we don’t have to look at him at all. -Ed.)

Dear CREEM:

Well, I’ve just purchased my March copy of your magazine, and after reading the letters section, I felt very nauseous. Reason is because of most of the greasers that write to you. Just don’t understan’ it; these young kiddies waste an eight cent stamp and write a letter saying how much they hate Dave Marsh, then when it’s printed they buy 70 copies of the magazine, distribute it to all their pals, with the greeting, “Hey man, look, I wrote a letter to this magazine, look, I’m cool, I’m a liberal.” Oh, aren’t they cool, they told Dave Marsh he’s a jerkoff, how can they? What audacity. I’d like to see these teeny-freaks do half the work Dave does. So what, I disagree with some of the things he writes, but I’m not calling him a “high energy asshole.” These kids don’t realize what it takes to put together a music magazine, any magazine. I mean, all they’re doing is walking around in bluejeans, smoking dope and shouting “Right on,” when half of them don’t even know who the Beach Boys really, are. “409” really is important. It really is. Now where would we be without a song like “Surfin’ ”? Eh? Tell us, Barbara Kievats, go ahead and get stoned and play with yourself. Maybe you’re so goddamned bitter that nobody wants to fuck you anyway. And Julian Ravine, how can you call Dave fucked up? What are you doing? Are you investing your bread in anything besides bottles of ripple? Are you up researching rock bands on Saturday nights or are you just sitting back listening to them; and the only piece* of journalism you can come up with is “Surfs Up is a fantastic album”

Now I’m no Beach Boys fan, nor am I a Grand Funk fan, but I will not call Dave Marsh plastic because he chooses to write something complimentary about them. What he wants to write, he can write. You greasers who don’t know a barre chord from Terry Knight’s left testicle don’t have to buy this magazine. Save your sixty cents and buy some prophylactics instead. You can’t read or hear between the lines anyway.

One objection though: Greg Shaw, please, please do not compare Yes to the Airplane or Beach Boys. Maybe the lyrics to “Your Move” are a bit daft, but Jon Anderson and Chris Squire are stumbling merrily all the way to the bank. I guess it’s because “Your Move,” was issued as a single, a big mistake. Listen to the long version and you’ll know that Anderson is no chess player by any means.

Oh, about Benny Hill; he’s the fastest milk cart in the west and don’t you forget it.

I might compare my old man Steve to Dave Marsh. Steve’s a d.j., and just as a journalist has to be fair and give his honest opinions about certain bands, d.j.’s do too. Steve thinks that E. Pluribus Funk is a waste of vinyl, but then, there’s “I’m Your Captain,” which he and I agree is a fine piece of music, considering the limitations, (musical and otherwise) of Grand Funk Railroad. He’s fair and he plays absolutely everything, unlike many d.j.’s I’ve heard, who satisfy their own musical tastes and not those of their listening audience. Now, if CREEM Magazine was like those other d.j.’s, they’d be out of circulation by now. It’s nice to read about Elvis and what ^ joke he’s become. It’s nice to read about soul music, something I thrived on as a tot.

Dave Marsh, you’re a man and a half. No matter what you write.

Love,

Pentecost Groupie Sister Atlantic City, N.J.

(Under the boardwalk; up on the roof)

Dear CREEM:

Re: your story about Arhoolie records (Down Home Blues, May) by Hal Aigner (who, by the way, was not identified):

I would like to state that the two record companies named in my reference to bootlegging of old blues material, Columbia and Specialty, were cited as off-the-top examples during a rather casual conversation with Mr. Aigner which turned into an article about my work.

I wish to apologize to the two companies, but I did not see the article until it was in print. In the meantime, I have read'a letter from Mr. Hammond of Columbia Reocrds to Living Blues magazine stating that Bukka White did indeed get royalties from the LP of re-issued old sides by him. In regard to Specialty Records, I have no knowledge of the facts and wish to apologize for having used their name.

Chris Strachwitz

Arhoolie Records

Berkeley, Ca.

(And our apologies to Mr. Aigner. —Ed.)

Dear CREEM:

Any truth to the rumor that Lester Bangs?

Craig Zilba

Montclair N.J.