September 1969
ROCK & ROLL NEWS
Steve Cropper, lead guitarist for Booker T and the MG’s, noted producer for Stax Records and author, with Otis Redding of Respect was in town recently to finish, with Mitch Ryder, the DETROIT-MEMPHIS EXPERIMENT album at Tera-Shirma Studios.
LETTERS
Fhonda Peters
Dear Creem: The review of the Stooges’ album in your last issue was insulting to the intelligence of even your most small-minded readers. To make excuses like “this may be the guitar style of the future” for a group which is instrumentally deficient is inexcusable.
DEATH CITY
STEVE MACKAY
ANN ARBOR BLUES FESTIVAL
The Ann Arbor Blues Festival came at the height of the Great Pop Festival Overzap of 1969, and for all but the ivory tower bluesfreaks it took a certain readjustment of one’s sensibility to be able to take it all in the proper sensory-emotional perspective.
DELANEY & BONNIE & FRIENDS
“We’ve got to get ourselves together Take some time and know each other We’ve got to get ourselves together.” Bands together enough to draw raves from both Jimi Hendrix and Mick Jagger are rare. Those together enough to do that and get invited to The Big Sur Folk Festival, the nation’s most prestigious folk gathering, are almost non-existent.
Creemedia
Midnight Cowboy
James L. Jones
It’s an ultimately beautiful film on many levels.
Kokaine Karma
It’s amazing that the music which has become so free and full of life is still presented in rigid formats of commercial elitism which enforce restrictions and set up artificial boundaries that hold back energy forces. There are plateaus of acceptance and silver tipped success which are still based on myth, hype and old time show business superstition.
MC5 ON THE CUSP
“Our program, at its finest level, is supposed to be together, coherent and relatable. In order to be effective you have to have those qualities, and our program obviously didn’t in the past because our program, which was to clarify things, muddled things.
Books
Jonathan Eisen
“Rock music was born of a revolt against the sham of Western culture: it was direct and gutsy and spoke to the senses. As such it was profoundly subversive. It still is” . . . Jonathan Eisen, from his book The Age of Rock: Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution.
EARTH HOUSEHOLD
Georgia Straight
A new book: EARTH HOUSE HOLD, by Gary Snyder, New Directions, 143 pp. $1.95 paper. Gary Snyder’s first volume of mostly prose arrives at a good time. We have been bombarded this spring with varieties of information indicating we’ve so damaged the planetary ecosystem that quite possibly we’ve extincted ourselves.
Records
Richard C. Walls
Captain Beefheart, T. Rex, more.
DICK GREGORY: THE LIGHT SIDE, THE DARK SIDE
If you find it difficult to catch this country in her lies; if you’ve found it impossible to grasp what’s comin’ down on campuses and in the streets; if you’re acquainted with Dick Gregory only through the mass media as a candidate for public office or as an insane black “comedian,” and have fallen to their persuasion, here’s your reprieve on all three counts.
CALENDAR
EXHIBITS The Art of the Poster. South Wing, Det. Institute of Arts. Sept. 1-7. Annual Summer Student Exhibition. Best works from all departments. Cranbrook Academy of Art. Sept. 1-14. Contemporary Abstract Kenetics and Collages. Robert Thom Gallery, Birmingham.