Summer 2024
TABLE OF CONTENTS
OPENER
ZACHARY LIPEZ
I remember, in order of emotions, being giddy seeing the first three Star Wars (I was under 10 for all three, the appropriate age to have a strong feeling about Star Wars). I remember seeing An American Werewolf in London when I was 6 and sobbing so uncontrollably that my dad had to take me out of the theater.
HIRED GUNS
JOSH SISK, PHOTOGRAPHER Josh Sisk is from Louisiana by way of North Dakota, though he has lived and worked in Baltimore for two decades. A photographer focusing on music and culture, his work has been featured in countless print magazines (remember when those still existed?), and he is a contributing photographer to The Washington Post as well as the last two print music magazines of note, Decibel and, of course, CREEM.
DEPARTMENT OF RETRACTIONS Hi CREEM, I am glad you enjoyed the Billy Strings concert, but there’s a big error in your piece. Billy’s mother and step dad, Terry, are alive and well. Billy even made an album with his dad in 2022 (Me/And/Dad) that was nominated for a Grammy.
LES CLAYPOOL
(Well, I remember it as though it were a meal ago!) It’s Les Claypool, not to be confused with Bill, or Jack, or Pete, or Dennis. The Primus mastermind and the man with the most pronounced thumb calluses in rock ’n’ roll knows the value of taking time off from his insane tour schedule to enjoy the finer things, such as good vino (Purple Pachyderm is his winery) and fancy cars, like this eyecatching Sunbeam Alpine.
CAROLINE POLACHEK
DANG! Move over, Paul Bunyan! We’re replacing a knit hat and overalls for, well, nothing and nothing at the behest of former Chairlift vocalist and STIHL-approved woodworker (we’ll avoid that one) CREEM DREEM Caroline Polachek. This lumberjack-cumwitchy earth goddess has traded in steel-toes for knee-high stiletto boots to complete her “outfit,” which we’re pretty sure isn’t exactly OSHA-approved for chopping trees, but hey—who’s complainin’?
QUESTIONS & JAANSWERS
The questions you ask every issue seem to fall into a theme. This time there was a lot of tentative romantic questions: Should I make a move? Tell them I care? Can this relationship work? Love—or love anxiety—was on everybody’s mind, but you guys were only dipping a cautious toe in.
SHELLAC
NAMES: Steve Albini, Todd Trainer, Bob Weston. AGE: Timeless. FROM: Chicago. OCCUPATION: Making the best of the best sound their best, cleaning clocks at the poker table, being a role model to thousands despite themselves. HOBBIES: Driving everyone crazy by insisting on calling the Mel Brooks movie/musical The Engineers.
PARTY WHALES
It’s not an attack, it’s an interaction!
It’s a story that seems manufactured for maximum Instagram shareability, not unlike the proliferation of “Mob wife aesthetic” to conveniently coincide with the 25th anniversary of The Sopranos. Beginning in 2020, scientists have been noting a significant uptick in killer whale attacks on pleasure boats between the Strait of Gibraltar, a narrow body of water that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, and Galicia, a coastal province in northwestern Spain.
IDOLS FOR IDLES
Fred Pessaro
Funkadelic playsets. A rare Cramps flyer. An oversize bus-shelter Hüsker Dü poster. These are the sorts of things that appear in every record store around the world, but what separates the good from the great is the excellent curation and stock.
BALTIMORE CITY Bowl Crew
Mandy Brownholtz
You know that old expression “If March comes in like a lion, it will go out like a lamb"? Far be it from me to argue with the Farmer’s Almanac, but the final week of March was anything but docile here in Baltimore City. March 26 saw the tragic collapse of the historic Francis Scott Key Bridge, almost 47 years to the day after it opened on March 23, 1977.
SUNDAY SAUCE
Jaan Uhelszki
Masters of Reality’s Chris Goss is an anomaly. Public and private, pragmatic yet otherworldly—if you squint your eyes, his Wikipedia photo looks like a flinty Nosferatu on a day pass from Transylvania, while in others he’s a Zen master in a rainbow-hued Moroccan market hat sitting serenely under the spiky California pepper trees strung with tiny birdhouses, wind chimes, metal skeletons, and miniature teapots, like out-of-season Christmas ornaments at his home in California’s high desert.
COLOR ME CHISELED
Kirk Podell
Welcome to another round of Born to Booze, where we engage in some lighthearted alcohol abuse. In this special edition, our resident bartender/musician Kirk Podell (Subversive Rite, Anti-Machine, Neo Cons) embarks on a harrowing journey down 1-95 from NYC to Baltimore with Oil Bois the Chisel.
THE MUMMIES UNWRAPPED
Tim Abbondelo
A Master Class on Budget Rock™ is long overdue and would benefit every band out there. The central figures of that seminar would surely be the Mummies, with lessons covering how to spawn your own rock subgenre, “acquire” cheap vintage gear without getting caught, buck industry trends like releasing new music on the most current and popular formats and platforms, and touring—all that without showing your face in public EVER, even four decades in.
BLACK MAGIC MURDER
Joel Selvin
"I want that n****r to come outside,” shouted the angry, estranged husband. The Santana conga player Marcus Malone had been spending the afternoon lolling around with his girlfriend when her husband showed up banging on the door. Malone was slated to leave that week to begin recording his band’s debut album at Columbia Studios in Los Angeles with producer David Rubinson.
A MORE PERFECT PUSSY
Michael Tedder
Delayed gratification is often the sweetest. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see a band than I was to see Mannequin Pussy on July 30, 2021, at the Jersey City, N.J., venue White Eagle Hall. By that point I hadn’t felt the intrinsic connection of live music in 20 months.
EGG, IN YOUR FACE
Derek Scancarelli
It’s 6:10 p.m. on Sixth Street in Austin during SXSW, and there are 600-plus on the street watching Nashville’s greatest underground punk export, Snooper. But the band’s performance isn’t sponsored by the U.S. Army, its giant green papiermâché mosquito isn’t bouncing around in a venue, and the band’s psychedelic video units built to look like stand-up arcade games aren’t connected to a stage.
UNCANCEL CULTURE
Michael Friedrich
The most hateable-faced man in rock is back. Alt-country’s alleged sex pest Ryan Adams has returned from the near social death of being “canceled.” The time has come for more concerts, according to Adams and his management team and his booking agents and the goons at Ticketmaster and venues named after prominent beverage conglomerates and lucrative festivals like Austin City Limits.
HELP FROM MY FRIENDS
MANDY BROWNHOLTZ
"What the fuck? These photos are like something that I already take, pictures of stuff that I am already doing with my friends. I could just be taking photos of my friends.” Photographer Alexis Jade Gross describes her experience flipping through the photo book of photographer [REDACTED] when she realized hey, she could do that too! Gross has since made a name for herself documenting the scenes intersecting between music and skateboard culture, building relationships with bands like Turnstile by taking deeply authentic, visually arresting images.
CREEM GOES TO THE MOVIES
At CREEM, we appreciate cinema. We live for immersion. We savor the escape. We get giddy when the lights of the theater dim, the smell of popcorn fills our nostrils, and we once again indulge our kink of shushing our loved ones during the previews.
THE PASSION (S) OF PENELOPE SPHEERIS
Zachary Lipez
"I’m not one of those flashy, glamorous, walk-the-red-carpet people. That sucks. I hate it,” Penelope Spheeris says over the phone, the slight rasp of her voice closer to that of a sardonically peeved twentysomething podcaster than someone who was at the ground floor for punk, hardcore, and hair metal, and who covered all three so incisively and authoritatively that all the subcultures of the three that came after were at least indirectly shaped by the templates she was the first (and best) to set on celluloid.
ALL IN THE FAMILY
J. Bennett
"Almost all directors are losers. We’d rather be rock gods.” That’s John Carpenter talking about his second career as a professional musician. “It’s much more fun than directing,” he says. “And you probably get more girls.” Carpenter is 76 years old and happily married, so we’re pretty sure he’s not trolling for strange.
MY DINNER WITH ANDREW
Zachary Lipez
The Sisters of Mercy, a rock ’n’ roll band, have not put out a new song since Aug. 16, 1993. The band tours regularly, to a fan base that retains its ardor despite the band’s reputation for a live show commonly described as “erratic.” Some years back, Andrew Eldritch promised that a new album would be released if Donald Trump was elected president.
CREEM! LIVE FROM THE RED CARPET
Mandy Brownholtz
When it comes to Oscars fashion, we have only three words to sum it up: “Old Hollywood Drag.” We unfortunately cannot take credit for the coining of this expression—we must attribute it to the hosts of our favorite fashion and pop culture podcast Every Outfit, Lauren Garroni and Chelsea Fairless.
CELLULOID HEROES
Andreas Loretan
It’s been 69 years since Hollywood decided to exploit a passing fad called rock ’n’ roll, teaching us a valuable lesson still treasured today: If you need an emotional shortcut, add more guitars. From Blackboard Jungle using “Rock Around the Clock” to hypnotize impressionable teens into mugging old ladies for their purses, to The Crow creating a template for school-shooter warm-up playlists for decades to come, to modern blockbusters beating us over the head with bullshit nostalgia—cinema doesn’t just help us make sense of the world, it reminds us how badass a riff can sound when it’s played over an action star jumping out of a helicopter.
THE RAMONES: HOT RODS TO HOLLYWOOD
Billy Altman
Joey Ramone and I are standing in the first-floor hallway of a dilapidated, no-longer-being-used high school situated somewhere in one of the less fashionable neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Scarcely had we arrived for the day’s shooting on Rock ’n’ Roll High School—the New World Pictures (that’s Roger “King of the Drive-Ins” Corman’s company) film in which the Ramones make their cinematic debut—when director Allan Arkush walked over to us and shoved cans of spray paint into our hands.
EAT YOUR GREENS
FRED PESSARO
The word “legend” gets thrown around a lot. Maybe it’s the infiltration of English slang (“Wot a fookin’ legend!”) or just internetforward hyperbole, but regardless, anyone who makes a funny TikTok or a half-decent vegan cheese sandwich nowadays could be classified as one.
Crème de la CREEM
FRED PESSARO
MEATBODIES After a successful debut and their similarly regarded sophomore effort, Alice, the much-loved and hard-touring Meatbodies were beginning to show cracks in the band through fatigue and intergroup tensions. Eventually mastermind Chad Ubovich found his project to be back at square one with personnel, and he attempted to escape by partying away his problems.
THE DESIGNATED MOURNER
Zachary Lipez
"As time marches on, people die around you. And that seems to be happening at an alarming speed that I’ve not experienced since the AIDs epidemic. Now it’s more that people are aging out,” Kid Congo Powers explains, resting at home in Tucson after a long birthday weekend at the Broad Museum in L.A., where he and fellow punk survivor Alice Bag performed.
REGRESS IN LEATHER
Joe Casey
This past February, I found myself at On the Rocks Bar & Grill in nearby Madison Heights to commiserate with Trevor Naud, member of the Detroit band Zoos of Berlin. The bar was chosen for its ambience—they have sumptuous brown leather booths, a growing rarity around here as older bars vanish or inevitably devolve into brightly lit Apple Store-esque echo chambers hawking shitty brews with cloyingly ribald names.
GHOST BY GHOST
For better or worse, the evolution of and reflection on psychedelic rock music post-’60s took a lot of cues from making templates of past culture and fashions. While a generous amount of musicians manifested some heady, established ’60s concepts to propel and create something forward-thinking for modern times (see ’80s acts like the Dream Syndicate, Bunnymen, and Teardrop Explodes, for example), a lot were content to merely ape stylistic reference points and generally act as replicant Aquarian mimes armed with paisley clothes, teardrop guitars, and bowl haircuts, spouting not a whole lot more rhetoric than “take acid man/kill the pigs/peace and groovy love,” etc.
Rock-a-Rama
Zachary Lipez
How you’re going to feel about this bad boy depends on a few factors: how one feels about guitars that sound like bass drops spilling from the butt of a Dodge Challenger, how one feels about metalcore guest features designed to set the Twitch chat on fire, how often “Ad-Rock spitting in my mouth” shows up in one’s search history, and if one could make it through the last couple Code Orange albums without falling on the floor from laughter.
AUSTIN’S ONLY ROCK ’N’ ROLL PARTIES
FRED PESSARO
One of the great intellectuals of the 20th century once said that an ideal partnership was like "peas and carrots.” Yes, 2024’s Third Man x CREEM Day Parties in Austin at the 13th Floorfit that description pretty perfectly... well, maybe we’d describe it as like “beer and beer” or, better yet, like "beer and Slane Irish Whiskey.”
THE CREEM AFTER PARTY
MADISON DESLER
As part of our No New York, No L.A. issue, we made it our mission to sniff out all the scenes and all the loudmouthed local hooligans worth knowing from sea to shining sea. That’s why, when we were called to host an after-party for Noise Pop’s annual San Francisco fest, we knew exactly which loudmouthed local hooligans to call.
CREEM Comix
PARTING SHOT