Summer 2025
TABLE OF CONTENTS
There’s No “AI” in “Rock ’n’ Roll”
John Martin
I was flipping through an issue of a recently relaunched general-interest music magazine with “Discothèque’’-era-U2-looking “alternative dance group" Rufus Du Sol on the cover. Not my speed. But the back page had a story by the bassist from Guided by Voices about playing a show where his amp actually burst into flames.
HIRED GUNS
JOEL GION, WRITER Joel Gion has played tambourine center stage with the Brian Jonestown Massacre for the past 30 years. He’s that good. The band was formed in 1990 and immediately established itself as the torchbearers of the classic ’60s “San Francisco Sound” and the most prominent U.S. chapter of shoegaze and Britpop.
IS MUSIC JOURNALISM DEAD?! April 30, 2024 Hi CREEM Magazine, Is music journalism dying? I'm a current journalism student worried I'm about to enter a jobless field. As of January 2024, Spotify, YouTube, Universal Music, Tidal, Bandcamp, and Amazon Music all announced layoffs.
JOHN CALE
Check out John Cale’s hilariously smug look as he sits on the hood of his Ferrari 1970 Dino 246 GT, crotch forward, devilishly grinning like a Cheshire cat and clearly the inspiration for Tawny Kitaen in that one Whitesnake video. Despite his best efforts, it’s unlikely he’ll be remembered as a “video vixen.”
ARROW DE WILDE
There’s a misconception that rock ’n’ roll criticism is sexy and badass and mysterious, but CREEM can definitively argue the contrary—unless our XXXL Rush tee and basketball shorts count as irresistible. But hey, everybody’s got their type, and thankfully some people dig on the brilliantly messy.
TROPICAL FUCK STORM
NAMES: Fiona Kitschin, Gareth Liddiard, Lauren Hammel, Erica Dunn. AGE: I believe the term is “grown and sexy,” thankyouverymuch! FROM: Greater Fuck Melbourne, on the coastline of Port Fuck Phillip Bay. OCCUPATION: Space truckers. HOBBIES: Beating cancer.
DON'T WORRY, BABY
Joe Casey
I have a baby now. I’m thinking as I write this on the couch next to that little colicky version of myself and my wife mushed together that it might have been a bad idea. It’s 5 a.m. on March 7, 2025, and I’m expecting the news of the day on the state of the country to be worse than the day before since yesterday’s news was just a tad shittier than what preceded it.
TERRIFYING THRIFTY ALIEN LOOKS
Jerry A. Lang
I can’t remember what I was doing or where I was when I heard about No New York, the compilation album bringing together four of NYC’s biggest, newest, and best “no wave” bands. There'd never been anything like this record—and I seriously don’t think there’s been a record like it since, either.
PUNK DRUNK LOVE
Jonathan Toubin
My first ’90s New York job was delivering food in Hell’s Kitchen. And while I wasn’t the most industrious employee, both on and off the clock I became a diligent explorer of the wide variety of dives still dotting the Times Square area. While I discovered a number of suitable locations to indulge my wide-eyed Bukowski on Mean Streets twentysomething romanticism, particularly along Ninth Avenue near the shadowier end of Port Authority, my absolute favorite bar was smack-dab in the belly of the beast.
SWINGIN' WITH MORBY
Jaan Uhelszki
"There’s something deeply punk about learning an ancient martial art via YouTube at 3 a.m.” It’s hard to get a bead on who Kevin Morby really is. Sincere and sardonic, drywitted and slyly funny, he’s more prone to an arched eyebrow than a grand gesture.
BOTTLED UP FOR YEARS
Fred Pessaro
Nirvana’s Live and Loud broadcast on MTV in 1993 was crucial to hardcore punks of a certain age. It was the television debut of guitarist Pat Smear, the legendary member of L.A.’s the Germs, and maybe less important to some but hugely important to me, bassist Krist Novoselic wore a black T-shirt with a big “SSD” across the chest.
LOVE & ARDOR: SHARON VAN ETTEN
Jaan Uhelszki
For this issue, Nine Perfect Minutes Zoomed into Sharon Van Etten’s L.A. kitchen, where the former indie It Girl was waiting for her 8-year-old son to get home from school. Dressed in a boyish black T-shirt and skinny jeans, her hair wet from a shower, her face free of makeup, not even a slash of black eyeliner, it was Van Etten in her off-duty role as a mother and wife, rather proud of herself because she had just taken a face plate off her oven door to clean it.
LAST OF THE BIG-FUCKUPS
Joel Gion
My pocket buzzes mid-pull of my vodka disguised in a coconut water carton. I pull the phone out and thumb-press the notification from British Airways, which then opens a portal into warning-world anxiety and the big reveal I’d been on watch for: Another Brian Jonestown Massacre tour is starting out in true Brian Jonestown Massacre fashion.
A LIFE OF CRIME
Steve Miller
Sonic Youth wrapped recording Daydream Nation, a double LP, in August 1988 and the album was slated for an October 18 release. The band had just returned from ten dates in Europe and were much like the Laughing Hyenas in that each of the four members were advanced, accomplished, and diligent in their craft.
HEAVIER THAN HEAVEN
Michael Tedder
In 2022, Superheaven played one of their first shows in years. It didn’t go how they expected. Surprisingly, this was a good thing. It was the Outbreak Festival in Manchester, which is nominally a post-hardcore kind of thing, but Superheaven aren’t really hardcore.
OBSCURED BY VOLCANIC CLOUDS
Paul Campagna
Imagine Nob’s feelings, that sensitive Afghan hound howling along with David Gilmour’s harmonica in Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii. The band, enigmatic rock stars that they are, get to go hang out on some ruins and crank their amps, and Nob is stuck with the short end of the... knob, recording his moaning in a boring sound studio on the outskirts of Paris, probably with some A&R guy breathing down his neck.
FIFTY YEARS OF SEX, DRUGS, AND ROCK 'N' ROLL
Zachary Lipez
When it comes to the question of “Whither SDRR?” it’s possible to overthink things. And while underthinking has its charm, and failing to interrogate may work for savants like Black Oak Arkansas or Nashville Pussy, it’s also how you end up with a Runaways biopic that'll turn your stomach.
IN AND OUT OF YOUTH
For those not in the know, a new record or tour from Young Widows is an event, a rarity, and something to look forward to—like the last day of school, sliding into a fresh pair of sneaks, or someone pulling a fire alarm. As that old adage goes about absence and the heart, we promise it’s also accompanied by mild frustration and resentment that the Louisville trio aren’t just perpetually around.
UN-STARSTRUCK
Brian Turner
As an astute reader of this here chronicle, you are surely well-versed in the American and U.K./Euro components of the post-punk zeitgeist, and all the attached information that has cornered the market of awareness via various reissues and tales that have ensued.
GONE, (SPEEDBALL) BABY, GONE
"But nothing really happened in the ’90s in the New York music scene, did it?” I’m being interviewed by a young slip of a thing about my memoir The Ballad of Speedball Baby, which is all about that caustic, thrilling, sharp-edged, and—yes, I’ll say it—influential era.
THE BIG INTERVIEW JIM JAMES
Jaan Uhelszki
Deeply philosophical, humble, adept, and creatively nimble, Jim James is equal parts mystic and mad scientist. As close as we can get to a psychedelic prophet these days, he’s like an artist from a bygone era, in his wide-brimmed hats and sharply tailored dark preacher’s coats, dressed like someone just as ready to play a festival as to lead a séance.
DIGITAL DRAMA, ANALOG HEART
Zachary Lipez
hen I was smoking pot,” Kim Deal says, using her glasses to gesture, “I tuned my Autoharp so every single peg, whatever, string, was the same note. So it just went 'Wzzzschhhhhhhhh.' I did that high. I’ve never been able to put it back.” I tell Kim Deal that’s amazing.
I MIGHT HAVE TO FIGHT MY WAY OUT OF THIS ROOM
Sam McPheeters
I met John Dwyer in 1997, when he was a supporting player in the Fort Thunder warehouse scene of Providence. Dwyer was the scariest member of the scariest band, Landed. In a group of fabulous and unique weirdos, he clearly played the role of designated lunatic.
OUR SCREAMING YOUTH
Tim Abbondelo
By then a confrontation erupted, with the most violent burst being between two band members on the far-back bench seat. The year was 2002, and the band was the legendary Pageninetynine. That tour would have taken them to 52 shows across a dozen countries in nine weeks.
MR. NICE GUY
Fred Pessaro
What if the music industry were filled with only nice guys? Just think of all those stories about Peter Grant ruling Led Zeppelin with an iron fist and replace them with him crumbling like sand at the first misstep or four-letter word. Then again, maybe there would be no mud shark...
crème de la creem
ZACHARY LIPEZ
NADAH EL SHAZLY Nadah El Shazly’s first band was Sick Gdrch, a Cairo punk outfit with a focus on Misfits covers. Outside of the (now Montreal-based) composer going where eagles dare, this detail is irrelevant. Or maybe it’s relevant when coupled with the fact that El Shazly’s greatgrandfather was a poet who wrote for Umm Kulthum, “Egypt’s Fourth Pyramid" of song (whom we’d tie the bow neatly by calling him “Egypt’s Glenn Danzig,” if we were a complete idiot).
ROCK-A-RAMA
Zachary Lipez
Seeing one of the great innovators in the field of mall punk (complimentary) making an album that’s half not bad but also halfrote, third-wave pop punk (derogatory) breaks my heart. Like, I’m genuinely sad that there’s no one in Billy Idol’s circle to tell him, “Your voice is still there, your lyrics are still fun, your cheekbones are still fab.
AUSTIN’S ONLY TWO-DAY ROCK ’N’ ROLL PARTY
Fred Pessaro
For the second year in a row, we ventured into the Texas sun with our friends Third Man Records to put up a pair of banger gigs during SXSW. From 11:30 a.m. until 6:55 p.m. on March 13 and 14, we brought two days of guitars, beer, whiskey, dill pickles, and more to the 13th Floor—one of downtown Austin's great stages.
FIESTA DESTRUCTO
On March 15, 2025, at Hotel Vegas, CREEM may have answered the eternal question: Does guitar deity Matt Pike perform shirtless even in breezy, temperate climes? The answer is decidedly yes, although we prefer "attack" or “pulverize” instead of “perform.”
PARTING SHOT
Liam Gallagher gets the best of Damon Albarn at their 1996 charity football match. But after seeing this photo, CREEM can declare the true winner of the Britpop wars: Pulp, hands down.