STAY OUT OF MY HOUSE

The night has moved in on another Memorial Day in the Motor City. The helicopter seeds drop from the maples in untended yards. The druggies and soccer moms have been swept from Hart Plaza after another successful Movement Festival. The heat rises with the damp while the citizens of our city go about their days knowing the winter has left us unscathed but the summer, just beyond the horizon, waits to melt us to our car seats.

Burglary, like the unending scourge of pedal pubs, is the hottest trend in Detroit this spring. My house was broken into and rifled three times last week. I’d like to say it’s the price you pay for living on the edge in Murdertown, or however else I could fancily describe the reality of living here for my more European readers. The truth is that the Casey house has been under our ownership for 60 years, and this has never happened before. Sure, I have had numerous car break-ins, a mugging, multiple friends shot for nothing. Detroit implants a fear in you at an early age, and from that point onward it is merely a countdown of the empty hours until those fears manifest. But hey, that’s the price you pay for living on the edge in Murdertown!

Seeing cherished family memories collected in that house over the lifetimes of my now-deceased parents now stolen or smashed upon the floor got me to thinking: “What is the legacy of CREEM magazine in Detroit?” I know, an odd choice of thought. Usually after something this heartrending happens I think, “How far would I have to walk in one direction until I die of natural causes?” But honestly, does CREEM still mean anything to Detroit? Does it have that long-buried municipal folktale resonance of a Farmer Jack, a Watts Club Mozambique, or the multiple Transformer movies that filmed here and used our downtown as a stand-in for a dystopian wasteland perfect for wide-screen robohumping? Or is CREEM—like so many others doomed to short lives that burn violent, then brilliant, then out—meant to be half-remembered or, worse, half-assedly rebooted by resurrection until the IP sticks, the clips go viral, and Chris Pratt voices Boy Howdy?

I wouldn’t bump into CREEM until 1991, when an offhand mention in the Kids in the Hall sketch “Into the Doors” was beamed over the Detroit River by the CBC in Canada and straight through my forming brain. I would have been 14. I'm sure I saw the magazine at Classic Movie and Comic Center in Livonia at an earlier age, but as it probably had Alice Cooper on the cover, I would have avoided it with a primordial fear. See, many things scared me as a child: tornadoes, nuclear holocaust as depicted in The Day After, Russians. None so much, though, as the gnarled visage of Alice Cooper. As my bona fides in the storied history of CREEM were lacking, I watched the recent, wonderful documentary from 2019—until I got to the part with Thurston Moore. I made a pact with myself years ago in the spirit of maintaining my own sanity to turn off any music documentary that features Thurston Moore as a talking head. Unfortunately, this means I have never finished a music documentary in my life.

Unable to move the needle on my understanding of the CREEM legacy, my mind stumbled back to questions about the three break-ins. Why did they take what they did? Why take the G.I. Joe lunch box from the moldering basement but leave the television? Why walk away without the Gangster Fun record but abscond with the trombone? Do they like ska or not? The motives of bad men are often unanswerable, maddening. To address the CREEM question, I decided to turn to the Detroit rock scene. Because when looking for straight, if somewhat incoherent, answers, who better than the no-shit-giving Detroit rock ’n’ rollers CREEM used to represent so irreverently? After figuring out most Detroit no-shit givers were dead—and deciding on which of the living ones I was too scared of to ask—I was able to question a fair spectrum of up-and-comers, plus a few down-and-outers, about their thoughts.

had similar vague memories bubble up from his youth: “I can remember seeing CREEM at the local Farmer Jack or B. Dalton Bookseller at Fairlane Mall when I was about 11, 12 years old. It was slightly less heshered out than, say, RIP or Hit Parader magazine but covered similar territory. It wasn’t until later on that I learned of how influential CREEM was.” He also echoed what many said about the feeling of the magazine in relation to the area’s rock ’n’ roll. “It definitely captured a certain Detroit spirit: loud, brash, with a hearty dose of humor. Something that the best bands in town still have.” Most other Gen-X folks, when questioned, offered up variations on that theme while often pointing out both the magazine’s and the city’s penchant for “boneheadedness” and cruelty mixed with wit and trash.

The younger bands, thankfully forging ahead over the bloated corpses of us elderly mook-rockers, also shared similar first run-ins with the mag. Many saw the T-shirt around or saw Almost Famous. Some, either from that movie or from books, discovered Lester Bangs and worked their way back. Many others responded with refreshing frankness, treating CREEM with the same disdain those longhaired writers from the ’70s might have given to talk of Collier’s. When asked what CREEM magazine means to them, Aleahia Thompson, a member of the great new band Day Residue, replied, “Absolutely nothing.”

One other interesting find from spending time trying to understand the yawps and burps of bands both millennial and Zoomer was that some had a strong connection to the magazine through their parents or grandparents being readers. Adam Hunter of Werewolf Jones had a dawning realization in a basement: “I first knew of CREEM as a magazine when I found out my close friend growing up’s dad was a photographer for CREEM back in the ’70s. As a kid I spent a lot of time at their house, which had lots of old black-and-white photos of musicians I, at the time, did not know but gradually came to recognize, and more would be brought out for inspection once he realized we had an interest in this stuff.” The youthful retro-psychedelic Shadow Show seem to have taken this whole CREEM idea to heart, commenting that “it’s our heritage,” having the “stack of frayed-page issues your dad bought religiously since 1969 that are now yours.” They then added as a sign-off, “You can’t have CREEM without Detroit. Period.”

Most important, all the musicians interviewed hoped the revamped CREEM would focus on new bands who exist outside the norm, unpicked by PR firms and management companies to be fed into the algorithm. They want real interviews with relatable people doing stupid things. Still crass and funny, definitely less scummy toward women. They want both smart and dumb. Real raw-power stuff. You know, like Detroit. They also warned against nostalgia. Nostalgia can make you do stupid things, like, I dunno, hide in your house for several nights with a Dmitri Young autographed baseball bat hoping to bury it in an imagined fourth burglar’s skull. They said CREEM wouldn't get far into the future rehashing the past. I agree. I hope you’ll join me for my next installment of Greetings From Detroit: “Turn the Page: I Bet Bob Seger Has Something Interesting to Say. ”