Creem suffered its first bankruptcy in August 1985, a little over ten years after I’d begun writing regularly for the magazine. Strangely enough, I first heard the news from my 12-year-old daughter, who’d caught the bulletin on MTV. Editor Dave DiMartino soon phoned me with the official notification, and I thought my career as a rock critic was done for. But Dave called back a few weeks later with the good news that Creem had been purchased by an entrepreneur named Arnold Levitt, and would resume publishing in early 1986.
Mr. Levitt hadn’t come to us through music journalism, but had worked elsewhere in the publishing industry over the years, and was now putting out his own series of sports magazines in Los Angeles. His offer to resurrect Creem included certain conditions, including that the office would move from its native Detroit to L.A. by early 1987, and that the magazine would be split into two parallel titles, regular Creem and Creem Close-Up: Metal. The latter mutant was a recognition of the boom in glam-metal bands in the mid-’80s, along with the fact that issues of Creem with metal stars on the cover had tended to sell the best, whatever was inside. If that was where the market was going, Levitt wanted to go with it.
Dave DiMartino assigned me to write a video-reviews column for the new Metal. He told me I could write virtually whatever I wanted in the column, as long as I covered a number of metal videos each time. Which I did — metal was far from my favorite genre of music, but the soon-monthly opportunity to lavish my sarcasm and dada in a national magazine for actual $$$ was irresistible, and I could method-fan an interest in metal with the best of them. Along the way, as an ongoing beneficiary of Creem’s tradition of expressive freedom, I unloaded all sorts of cultural and political commentary among my Motley Crue bon mots.
Everything went swimmingly until I happened to be writing one of my metal-vid columns on the weekend of the 1987 Super Bowl, which MTV was heavily promoting, and I let loose with a trademark blast against mixing football with r’n'r. After I sent the ms. up to Creem, word came back from Dave (or maybe John Kordosh by that time) that Arnold Levitt didn’t appreciate my attack on pro sports, not while he was publishing his other magazines on that all-American topic, and my comments would have to go if I wanted that column to run. The whole idea of the metal-video column was a whorish joke to me on one level by that time, so I complained but didn’t insist, and the truncated column ran in the June 1987 number of Creem Close-Up: Metal. If you happen to have that issue on hand, insert the following passages between the 1st and 2nd published paragraphs, to see what you missed:
“Before we move on, though, I should point out that in my day (In MY Day!) something like MTV’s Super Bowl Sunday never would’ve happened, as us counterculture shock troopers always considered rock’n'roll and professional sports to be dialectical opposites. We thought that rock music had come along to save us from all the evils of the big people’s corrupt society, including the macho preening that was already disfiguring pro sports. However, it wasn’t long before certain rockwriters were sneaking baseball (well, that’s okay, it’s America’s pajamas er pastime, after all) back into their dispatches from the us-vs.-them barricades.
“From that tentative foothold of jocks on rock, we’ve devolved to Super Bowl-Shit Sunday 1987, which has MTV spreading the perception that rock’n'roll and pro football are more or less interchangeable cultural pursuits, since both involve strutting and farting for the camcorders. As though it’s not bad enough already that pop music and pop movies have been fused into one bright-colored, cool-musiced glob that constantly screams ‘BUY ME!’, now we’ve gotta endure pro sports being slam-dunked into that devil’s brew too. Pretty soon we won’t be able to tell the players even with a scorecard.
“No form of pop art retains any special identity any longer, and speaking of Andy Warhol, he was wrong about everybody enjoying 15 minutes of fame. Anybody who gets his mug on TV these days is good for at least a 2000-year halflife of media attention forever afterward. It’s no more than a Sinatra-fearing, People Magazine-believing grateful nation owes its favorite celebs, after all. Frankly, I don’t know why my fellow Miami Trace High School alumnus Art Schlichter is even bothering to try to salvage a football-centered career by now, when it’s obvious that he already has enough name & face credentials to step right into a megabucks slot as a VH-1 video jock. He could easily pick up the music lingo on the job, probably knows it already, I’ll bet.”
Whew! Pretty incendiary anti-sports rhetoric that had to be excised. I was one cranky young 40-year-old that year. Arnold Levitt’s two-headed-monster version of Creem went bankrupt itself the next year, probably because the fans still wanted the metal-sleaze-cum-beatnik-intellect schizophrenic soul of the mag to stay contained within one cover. That’s my take, anyway. Levitt’s had the last laugh, as his beloved pro sports are smooshed into pop culture juicier than ever by now, MTV doesn’t even bother to show its raison-d’etre music videos any longer, rock criticism is going down slow, and my own daughter has become a sports blogger about her passion, ice hockey: http://neutralzonetrap.wordpress.com/ Her enterprise even got her blog picked up for a time by the NY Times last year, somewhere her old man has yet to be published. Sufferin’ succotash! I guess I owe something to Arnold Levitt, not just for resuscitating Creem for three more years of my writerly jive, but for giving me a bit of (however resisted) future-shock therapy along the way. Yessir.
