Fall 2024
TABLE OF CONTENTS
OPENER
DAN MORRISSEY
SiriusXM program director Jeremy Tepper, perhaps the greatest expert on outlaw country music I’ve ever come across—and just the nicest guy you could run into at a Dwight Yoakam concert—had died suddenly at 60 of a heart attack. I mention Jeremy here not just in tribute, but because he was one of a few influential music lovers who set me on the bottle-strewn path to the artistic love of my life: country music.
HIRED GUNS
JUDITH PIERCE, STITCH WITCH Judith “Pebbles” Pierce, professional seamstress, was born on Mars and raised in San Diego, California. She established her brand RoseCut Clothing 15 years ago, and since then has designed and created stagewear for artists like Post Malone, Phoebe Bridgers, Orville Peck, and personal fashion icon Exene Cervenka.
Are you really just gonna subscribe without saying howdy? —Ed. HOWLIN’ FOR YOU We get it, you have a lot of barely passable riffs to write to fill all those empty arena seats. ZING. -Ed. WHAT GOES UP... MUST COME DOWN... No one is more surprised at all the love than us.
CREEM PROFILES
DRY CLEANING NAME: Lewis Maynard, Florence Shaw, Nick Buxton. AGE: The blacker the berry... FROM: London, U.K. OCCUPATION: Joshin’ around, acting cheeky, having moxie, being a Sassy Sassafras. HOBBIES: Enunciating clearly and concisely, avoiding all visible emotion, being English.
STIGMA FOR PRESIDENT
Paul Campagna
At CREEM, we’re always going to have an opinion on everything. Some people might call us obnoxious loudmouths, but we like to say that we’re just expressing ourselves in a passionate, forceful, and objectively correct manner. And in 2024, who can avoid having an opinion about the coming election?
LIQUID THERAPY
Kirk Podell
In all these adventures, I’ve never tackled the inevitable: hangovers. Yes, Born to Booze might be a fun thing for you, the reader, to enjoy, but at what cost to me, your humble servant of fun? I awoke the Sunday of meeting our friend and yours, Ted Leo, with a crippling anxious feeling from activities the night before.
The Black (Metal) Plague
Luke Ottenhof
The year is 1509, and life is alright. You’re farming delicious, non-GMO corn on a small fief in the peaceful English countryside, and the hip, youthful King Henry VIII has just taken the throne. Your landlord is kind of an asshole, but you steal a flagon of his shitty moldy ale every night to stick it to him.
REAL-LIFE CAREERS IN MUSIC!
Joe Casey
Is there any profession as mythic and, perversely, as ubiquitous as the musician-bartender? They are omnipresent enough that I'm sure nailed to the wall at CREEM HQ they have an AI-rendered photo of an übermusican-bartender circled in red ink with the note: “our target audience.”
THE NOT-SO-SECRET LIFE OF BEES
Jaan Uhelszki
When you think of Steve Vai, you think guitars. Words like “genius,” “expert,” and “savant” come to mind. Frank Zappa, a genius himself (albeit a discerning, cranky one), hired Vai to do his guitar transcriptions when Vai was just 18, and later drafted him into a late-’80s version of his band.
ROMANTICIZE THAT
Taran Dugal
Fontaines D.C. in the flesh are nothing short of animalistic glory. At the postpunkers’ recent gig in Brooklyn, the crowd moved en masse—a seething, kinetic chaos that wreaked havoc on the dance floor. Between songs, an older patron in front of me pulled out a crumpled pack of Marlboro Reds, lit one with a match, cheefed the entirety of it in four biblical drags, threw the butt down, stomped it out, and then, still reeling from the buzz, promptly fell flat on her face.
SACRIFICED TO SATAN
J. Bennett
They buried her under a pentagram. That’s what the Los Angeles Times said, anyway. There are many details about this fucked-up series of events that remain unclear, but this much is true: Elyse Pahler was 15 years old when three teenage boys sacrificed her to Satan.
LIVING LIFE TO PIECES
Mandy Brownholtz
"I fucking love all the weird magic and coincidence and kismet that I’ve ever experienced,” says Shannon Shaw pensively. “I’m into seeking the symbolism. It gives me comfort." If you aren’t yet acquainted, Shannon is the husky-voiced singer-bassist leading her eponymous garage rock band Shannon & The Clams.
ARE YOU READY FOR CREEM COUNTRY?
Zachary Lipez
The United States of America is a land of contrasts. Neither a success nor a catastrophe (despite what absolutists on either side will tell you), America is like a diner that stays open late, where the meat is under-or overcooked, the wall art is nothing but dead celebrities (with Elvis being the only one who made it past 40), but the french fries are fucking delicious.
SIERRA FERRELL
As the wise men of Big & Rich once said, “Save a horse, ride a cowboy,” but Americana darling Sierra Ferrell tends to buck conventions like a wild bronco. If, like Ferrell, you cut your teeth by hopping trains and busking in cities along the railway, you’d probably be more likely to spange in front of an Erewhon than to write quirky and heartfelt tracks about love and loss.
MARCUS KING
Admittedly, CREEM had a bit of an issue coming up with the right nomenclature to describe Marcus King in this stunning shot. Standing in front of this absolutely jaw-dropping 1973 Cadillac Coupe DeVille in his native Nashville, would you refer to the rocker as boss? What about big daddy?
INTERVIEW WITH KID ROCK ON A HORSE
Dave Carnie
Kid Rock is a confusing mixture of rap, rock, ridiculous, and, of late, country. The latter is often served with a side of conservative, right-wing nutjob sauce: Kid Rock is best known, at this point, not for his music, but for the viral video of himself mowing down a case of Bud Light with a semiautomatic rifle in protest of Anheuser-Busch’s relationship with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
IS THAT REALLY COUNTRY?
Deborah Evans Price
It’s 2024. Post Malone, Beyoncé, Lana Del Rey, and Shaboozey are invading the country charts, and even America’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll Magazine is jumping on the trend. Seems like everyone wants to be part of Nashville these days. To the country neophyte, the current crossover stampede might seem exciting and new, but it’s been happening for decades.
GET IT TWISTED
Dan Morrissey
So the other night I went and saw this movie Twisters with my CREEM BFF Fred Pessaro. I gotta admit, I was skeptical at first. A movie about storm chasers? Uh, okay, now I’ve officially heard everything. But the truth is...it ruled. It has these two teams of storm chasers—one of them is real scientific and the other just wants to party and make YouTube vids.
ASK A COUNTRY MUSIC EXPERT
Tyler Mahan Coe
Dear Tyler, Alt-country. Please discuss. —©chattanoogacharmer Goddamn it... First question? How much am I getting paid for this? All right, “alt-country” was one of several labels affixed to one of several moments in history when publicists and journalists agreed to lump a bunch of artists/bands together as if their music represented a collective and purposeful backlash to mainstream country music, a genre that almost none of the people mentioned in this sentence listened to very much at all, which was fine because neither did the audience they were trying to reach.
MALL AMERICAN GIRL Interview With the Amythyst Kiah
Zachary Lipez
"When people ask me what I do, I say, ‘Oh, I’m a singer-songwriter, I do Americana music.’ And then I break it down to kind of explain that this is just American music, essentially.” And Amythyst Kiah has been exploring the wild definitions of Americana for more than a decade.
A SLICE OF AMERICANA PIE
Holly George-Warren
It’s 5 p.m. on a sweltering July afternoon in rural upstate New York, and my friend Amy and I are stuck, bumper-to-bumper, inching down a narrow country lane toward the site of the most famous rock festival in history, 1969’s Woodstock. At this much smaller-scale outdoor gathering—Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival tour stop at Bethel Woods—nearly 15,000 of us have flocked to see Willie, Bob Dylan, and the duo of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss backed by a band led by Tulsa guitar slinger JD McPherson.
MJ LENDERMAN
Jaan Uhelszki
Forewarned isn’t always forearmed. We knew that MJ Lenderman wasn’t going to be a chatterbox after we read an interview last year in Indy Week where he told the reporter that he didn’t think he was very good at talking. “The less people hear me talk, the more they can project on me or think I’m a smart guy,” he maintained.
Tyler Childers IS GOING HOME
Evan Minsker
Glen Jean is one of these coal-mining towns in West Virginia that once bustled. Forget the company store, at one point this town a few miles out from the New River Gorge had its own opera house. It’s not there anymore, and there isn’t nearly as much going on.
BITTERSWEET HEART OF THE RODEO
Zachary Lipez
In the year that “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’N’ Roll),” AC/DC’s bagpiped salute to art being a job, was released, Alejandro Escovedo was 24 years old. Despite belonging to a family that already counted multiple members of Santana amongst its numbers, Alejandro was not a musician.
TURNING LEMONS INTO CHAMPAGNE
Fred Pessaro
When does collecting become something more than just having too much shit? Before you run out to ask a collector of vinyl from Urban Outfitters, mind this— imagine everything you collect is a piece of history, a moment frozen in time that will be referred back to for all eternity.
LUCINDA WILLIAMS’ BIG INTERVIEW (NEVER MIND SHE'S ONLY 5'5")
Jaan Uhelszki
She’s received an honorary doctorate of music from the Berklee College of Music, she was inducted into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame, and her 1998 breakthrough album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
BOYS OF FAITH
MANDY BROWNHOLTZ
"I never have really been a country music fan.” An ironic statement coming from Louie Nice, the photographer touring with rising country star Zach Bryan. Bryan began his musical career when he was still in the Navy, writing songs and recording them with his iPhone in the barracks.
CRAZY HORSE NEVER DIED
ROXY GORDON
The presence of Roxy Gordon—Texan, American Indian poet, writer, activist, journalist, and musician in the most rudimentary sense—was unique and unmatched, sadly unknown to a lot of the mainstream. The distinct, sharp, reedy drawl that hovered over his recordings and performances gave them a ragged, pretense-free tone.
LEVII’S JEANS
Mandy Brownholtz
Your fantasy of being Post Malone’s stylist has finally come true! All you need is a pair of scissors, a Bud Light (okay, a Boy Howdy! beer), the entire Fleet Foxes discography, and off you go.
WAYLON JENNINGS: “IF I WAS EVERYTHING PEOPLE MAKE ME OUT TO BE, I’DA BEEN DEAD A LONG TIME AGO.”
Chet Flippo
"Waylon Jennings is a hoss.” The words came from one of the hangers-on in a coach’s office adjoining the gymnasium of a Catholic junior high school in Gallup, N.M. I was sitting around, waiting to meet the man himself, and I pondered those words as they applied to the renegade country singer who is this year’s prime candidate for crossing into popular music.
LOVE IN THE TIME OF ALGORITHMS
Kim Taylor Bennett
I’m sitting with Greg Gonzalez, the singer of Cigarettes After Sex, on a bench in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, and before either of us has a chance to respond, he answers his own question. “Definitely him, not her,” he says, gesturing to Gonzalez and then at me.
LOVING FUN
Hilary Pollack
Sheer Mag’s newest song was written using artificial intelligence. The sentence above might set off alarm bells of shock and horror if one were to learn it entirely out of context. THAT Sheer Mag? The iconic Philadelphia garage-punk outfit that’s written so many of the best powerpop songs of the past decade?
THE HITS KEEP COMING
Martin Douglas
Since forming La Luz, Shana Cleveland has outrun the long arm of death not once but twice. Therefore, it’s not too far outside the realm of imagination that a big album release show, in the city where the band was formed, would make a good enough excuse as a celebration of life and an outpouring of gratitude.
Crème de la CREEM
Fred Pessaro
COLOR GREEN Wading through the Mexican Iron Maiden bootleg tees, racks with hanging bullet belts, and LP boxes bursting with names like General Surgery and Last Days of Humanity, the band Color Green is waiting patiently on the far end of Zebulon’s outdoor patio beyond all the wares.
ROCK-A-RAMA
Zachary Lipez
If I were in a popular rock band that sold a lot of records but didn’t get much critical respect, I would hate Jack White. Think about it: You pay your dues to the ZOSO Recreation Society on time, your bassist has an MBA from Nü Metal U, your drummer’s drum kit is made out of Mjölnir, and your singer has had sex over a dozen times just to be familiar enough with female genitalia to know which part is the lemon and which part is the moneymaker.
2ND ANNUAL SUMMER SUNBURN
FRED PESSARO
Ah, nihilism! Sweet, hilarious nihilism! CREEM hosted our second annual Summer Sunburn in Brooklyn on Aug. 17. We came, we saw, we drank, and we rocked the eff out courtesy of Sub Pop’s smartest bad boys Pissed Jeans, along with Knifeplay, Dazy, Native Sun, and Glimmer.
JUST THE MOSH PARTS
PARTING SHOT
Ian: “This guy’s trying to pretend that 'Waiting Room’ isn’t a ska song!”