Summer 2024
TABLE OF CONTENTS
OPENER
Zachary Lipez
My earliest memories of movies are those of awe, terror, and a potent mix of disgust and abstract horniness that sustained me well into adulthood.
Hired Guns
HIRED GUNS
Josh Sisk, J. Bennett, Chris Boarts Larson, Samantha Marble, Jerry Brownell, Michael Tedder
PLEASE SEND LETTERS TO: mail@creem.com
Stars Cars
LES CLAYPOOL
Les Claypool's Sunbeam Alpine
CREEM DREEM
CAROLINE POLACHEK
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.
Creem Profiles
SHELLAC
RIP Steve.
NERD SHIT
PARTY WHALES
It’s not an attack, it’s an interaction!
It’s not an attack, it’s an interaction!
IDOLS FOR IDLES
Fred Pessaro
Shopping for the records that created the mosaic of TANGK
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
Just don't call it a reunion
Police Files
BLACK MAGIC MURDER
Joel Selvin
Wherein the philandering ways of Santana's original conga player caught up with him
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
With his fourth Lost Themes album, horror master John Carpenter gives CREEM an inside look at the family music business
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.
Greetings from Detroit
REGRESS IN LEATHER
Joe Casey
Zoos of Berlin prove that big rock ’n’ roll dreams are only as old as you are
GHOST BY GHOST
Brian Turner
Ghost by Ghost
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.”
CREEM Presents
THE CREEM AFTER PARTY
Madison Desler
Spiritual Cramp and Marbled Eye take San Francisco.
CREEM Comix
PARTING SHOT