BARRY D. KRAMER 1943-1981

BARRY D. KRAMER 1943-1981

(On January 29 CREEM publisher and founder Barry Kramer died at 37, just as we were going to press. Our business is words, but they rather fail us when it comes to describing someone who was the vital force behind CREEM—who was indeed, Boy Howdy! himself. We immediately thought of Dave Marsh to attempt to write something, as he worked here as editor and knew Barry intimately at one of the most crucial points in CREEM’s history. He speaks for all of us.)

Dave Marsh

Barry Kramer started CREEM in the winter of 1969 with about $5,000 and his usual total conviction and ambition. The magazine was solely his, of course. The original idea came from an English clerk in Kramer’s Full Circle record store named Tony Reay. Charlie Auringer, Robin Summers, Deday LaRene and Sandra Stretke were involved from the first issue, and some fairly prominent people in the Detroit rock community were small investors.

But CREEM was really possible—and certainly it has lasted so long—because of Barry Kramer’s involvement. He was a fairly well-known face around the local rock scene, having already created the first and best Midwestern head shop and bookstore, Mixed Media, then host of a short-lived WABX radio show called Tea Party, and having also promoted a daffy and disastrous Ford Auditorium show by the Incredible String Band.

It was Kramer’s reputation that got CREEM started and more than anything, it was his energy and enthusiasm that kept it going. Maybe the vitality of the Michigan music scene would have created a musicoriented publication anyhow. But there could never have been a magazine with so much guts, ambition and pure spirit without Barry Kramer fostering it.

He gave me a job that summer of ’69. I was a skinny 19-year-old suffering from over-exposure to LSD and the MC5, with absolutely no prospects. We never discussed why he picked me up and encouraged me, because after a while we didn’t need to know, already understanding too many things about one another. Anyway, the reasons and circumstances of how anyone —the originals or myself or later additions like Richard Siegel, Connie Kramer or Lester Bangs—came to be involved in CREEM were never as important as the nature of that involvement.

In those days, this magazine was not so much a job or even a publication as it was a nonstop raving, brawling family. This has something but not everything to do with the fact that all or most of us lived in one dilapidated Detroit slum building. It was mostly the result of the environment that Kramer, the eternal psych student, established from the beginning. Sometimes the place seemed to be a 24-hour version of group therapy with a floating corps of undergraduate crazies and postgraduate maniacs. Sometimes it seemed like a weird prank we pulled on the rest of the world. Most of the time it was genuinely both of those things, because Barry Kramer wanted it that way. If Barry enjoyed anything, it was creating chaos and attempting to control it.

So he was the architect and center of everything that went on, as the magazine traveled from Cass Avenue in Detroit to Walled Lake to Birmingham, which in local geography is a trajectory that describes success. Barry was right in the middle of the action, whether he was refereeing a bout between warring staff members or battling himself, dreaming up some new and likely solution to the ever-present financial deficits or scheming on some new project to keep everybody excited or counseling some staff loony (usually on the editorial side) through one of our seemingly perpetual periods of post-adolescent heebie jeebies. That meant, of course, that one day we loved each other, and the next wished the other would split, but it also meant that there was a certain irreducible bond between Barry Kramer and every other human who entered CREEM’s doors and stayed for more than a minute. Barry Kramer offered me something more than a start and a career, or the opportunity to edit what I still think was the best rock magazine ever in those days when we did it together. He gave me a chance to find out about the most extreme limits and potentialities of real friendship; he taught me more about those things than I sometimes thought I could bear to know. In the words of what must have been his favorite song: “An empty heart is like an empty life/And it makes you feel like you want to cry.” So today, every heart Barry Kramer touched is just a whole lot less full.