Q&A: Legendary Music Magazine CREEM Returns, Introducing ‘Boy Howdy’ To Readers In 2022

Nostalgia is a powerful, and unpredictable force. When tapped into properly it can be an unstoppable tool. But of course it cannot be predicted. No one knows why Emo Nite, for example, drives kids around the globe into a frenzy of singing songs, some less than 20 years old, while other genres that were even more commercially successful can hope to at best be a niche thing.

So when the producers of the 2019 documentary on the iconic music magazine CREEM, the 1970s and ’80s irreverent home of Boy Howdy, set out to tell the story of the publication that once cockily billed itself as “America’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll Magazine,” they had no way of knowing how much of an audience even remember CREEM.

Turns out a lot more than probably anybody imagined. Maybe it was the fact the magazine had been gone for years so people missed it. Cameron Crowe’s brilliant Oscar-winning Almost Famous with the late, great Philip Seymour-Hoffman, arguably the greatest actor of his generation, bringing CREEM editor Lester Bangs to life and introducing the CREEM ideal to a new generation certainly didn’t hurt.

Whatever the confluence of events that led to the demand for CREEM, the voices behind the original periodical were paying attention. And now, CREEM is back for a new generation. CREEM 2022 launched today (June 1) by unveiling the full digital archive, which should send every true music nerd into gleeful shock and ensure that they will cancel all plans for at least the next month.

I spoke with chairman JJ Kramer, the son of co-founder and publisher Barry Kramer), and returning editor Jaan Uhelszki, a seminal voice in the original CREEM, about what the magazine will be and represent in 2022.

Steve Baltin: CREEM obviously has such a rich history of having fun with things. How do you mix that rock and roll sensibility, the Boy Howdy sensibility with the fact that in 2022 everybody is so goddamn serious?

Jaan Uhelszki: I don’t always think that that’s true of artists except big bloated artists, like artists on the make will do anything. I mean, that’s how we were way back in the way back. We’ve gotten people on their own volition send it in Boy Howdy profiles, where they’re drinking boy howdy beer. So I think the sense of humor is still there, but I think it’s a certain segment of the population. It’s almost like graveyard humor, like you’re laughing instead of crying kind of thing. But I think that they’re willing to go there.

JJ Kramer: And I think the pendulum is starting to swing the other way. I think that there’s been this huge void that CREEM left when it went away and some brands, some publications have tried to fill it. Some have succeeded in little ways, but never filled the entire void. And I just think that there’s like it’s been missed and there really is a massive opportunity for CREEM to come back and real talk with the band, real talk with the audience, and to start injecting some fun back into reading about music.

Uhelszki: I think that they need this mood breaker. I think what we’ve learned when we did the documentary is there was such a nostalgia for CREEM. It pretty much shocked us that people held it in such high esteem or affection because I always felt like we were these big bruisers out there with our caveman clubs, like wrestling rock stars to human form. And I think that whole thing that rock stars were a part of that too. They liked it as much as the audience. But I think on the other hand, I don’t know if that’s lost. I think fans still want to know, like they want you to open up their locker and show you what’s inside. And usually it’s done with fun. If you’re going to a serious publication, if you’re gonna be interviewed by Vanity Fair or you’re gonna be interviewed by the New Yorker, you know what you’re gonna get. If you’re gonna be interviewed by CREEM, you’re coming with your sense of humor on your sleeve, you know something untoward is gonna happen. So once you walk through that door, that virtual door, that Zoom door, you know that CREEM is not gonna just give you the obvious question kind of stuff.

Kramer: And at the end of the day, CREEM, it’s not gonna be for everybody. And that’s okay. I think that’s the problem with a lot of entities that are existing out there today is they’re trying to be everything for everybody. And as a result, everything becomes super sanitized in vanilla. And a lot of that’s driven by advertising. And they’re answering to the algorithm and we’ve set this up in a way where that’s not how the business is modeled. And it’s gonna give us a whole lot of editorial freedom to talk about things we want to talk about. And I think that is gonna be really appealing to a lot of people, not to everybody. And that’s okay. There’s plenty of magazines or websites for those people to go to.

Baltin: I do think that maybe CREEM falls into that sweet spot of nostalgia because it was actually gone. Do you feel like because CREEM was away there’s nostalgia for it?

Uhelszki: Well, I guess there’s truth in that. I think what the difference always was between CREEM and Rolling Stone anyway, we’re just not directly answering your question, but we were more like fans. We were doing not their bidding, but asking things that they want to know, putting artists in positions that they would’ve want to. There was always this passion or response to artists and music. And I think it didn’t try to be cool. It didn’t try to be manicured. And I think that that has been gone for all these decades and I think that’s what’s missed.

Baltin: With the documentary and social media did you guys find what was it that people really did miss about CREEM?

Kramer: Yeah, well, I think that it’s lots of things. It’s just to put a bow on sort of CREEM being gone and it’s sort of whether that actually benefited us in a way, I kind of think it did. The reverence for CREEM never went away. It’s like obviously the publication went away, but the legend of CREEM kind of grew year over year in a really good way, because it was gone. And we started to see, when we did produce the documentary, the reverence that people still have for it, like people wanting to tell stories about going to their record store, their drug store or their mailbox, and picking up a copy of the magazine and that act of sitting down and flipping through the actual physical issue, like that shared experience that they had with other people who were subscribed to the magazine, people had like, such an affinity for that. It was like a binding of tribe moment. And I feel like that’s been sorely missed, that community aspect of it.

Uhelszki: Which would make so much sense. Here’s one indicator. I was always trying to fill in my collection on eBay. And I noticed that at certain point that the CREEM magazines kept getting more and more expensive. So I just stopped collecting, I figured, “Oh, it’ll work out. Someone will give them to me.” But the thing was the initial reason for CREEM, was it was a community. You’re part of an outsider’s club. You don’t belong everywhere. Just what J.J. said before. CREEM is not for everybody. And we don’t give a s**t. CREEM is not for everybody, but the people it’s for, it’s like a Bible. And I think that that part of it is really important to people. One of the people we work with today said something about CREEM. It’s that there are not a lot of magazines anymore. And that sense of being a part of something, you feel, if you’re reading it, you hold it in your hand. You were there when we were actually interviewing somebody or making fun of somebody. You can feel a part of it, rather than just on the website. And God knows I’ve worked through websites and done enough news to know that’s so ephemeral, that’s so brief, that’s so temporary, and this is actually a document of a time. And again, like we have, on the CREEM site, we have the archives there. So you can see what was happening from like the stretches of history since March 1st, 1969. So you can see what actually happened. So I like that sense of you’re holding a piece of history.

Baltin: What are the elements that you are most excited to bring into CREEM in 2022?

Uhelszki: I like the mystery. Like don’t destroy all the mystery for me. I really do want to think that artists are tapped into something, if not holy something otherworldly, and I’m always interested in what that is. And I don’t think that that’s changed for CREEM either. I think we’re just deconstructing or doing surgery or just they’re just showing the underside or showing all the sides that you wouldn’t normally expect to show. But I just think there’s something there it’s like, it’s always been in celebrity, but with artists, for me, it’s always been sacred. It’s always been holy, there’s always been some element of prophecy and lyrics of a song. And I’m always gonna get to the bottom of it. And I think that on so many levels CREEM is like that they’re actually uncovering some kind of mystery and sharing it and letting you be a part of it.

Kramer: In the era of social media, you have lots of these bands that are very carefully curating their image. Right? And I think that is a huge opportunity, again for CREEM to like Jaan said sort of take these artists off their pedestals, lift them up and inspect them, deconstruct them and give their fans something different, something that they can’t read in a tweet or watch on a reel, and really sort of click into what these folks are really all about.

Baltin: The state of music journalism in 2022 is pitiful and depressing. And that is why you have so many artists the caliber of Beyonce and Adele not doing interviews. They don’t have to and the questions they’re asked are not interesting if they do. So how do you make journalism interesting today?

Kramer: A good way to ground this is well, first and foremost, we’re not here to post tour dates. We’re not here to circulate the same press release that 20 other media sites are doing. That’s not what we’re here to do. And to frame this up, CREEM 2022 is not a media company. CREEM 2022 is an entertainment company. And that’s an important distinction because media companies aggregate eyeballs and sell them to advertisers. And that informs what they’re gonna talk about, when they’re gonna talk about it and how they’re gonna talk about it. Entertainment companies build long term relationships with their audience. They tell them entertaining and compelling stories and over time monetize that relationship in different ways with, through telling those stories. So, the way that we’ve set up from a business perspective and set and modeled the company is we are not dependent on advertising. In fact, we’re gonna be incredibly selective about the advertising we take. We’re gonna view our advertisers as partners. They have to align with our brand, but we’re not dependent on it. And because we’re gonna have that freedom to not be beholden to the almighty ad dollar or to the ad algorithm, we can talk about things from all different perspectives. We can get weird and we’re gonna get weird and we’re gonna get interesting and we’re gonna take artists out of their comfort zones and ask them difficult questions. And I really think that, Jaan said this earlier, that there’s a lot of artists that want to be asked those questions and they want to have those conversations

Baltin: Are there artists then that you feel like, embody the spirit of CREEM 2022?

Uhelszki: I have my own favorite ones. The ones that I do think embody CREEM spirit that will, just to be generic, will go there, will give you something unusual, will let you look into their souls almost. And I still think, Neil Young, Phoebe Bridgers is brave and innovative and honest and I’m always looking for that. That candor, that not preciousness. I like Angel Olsen.

Kramer: Yeah, I mean, one thing that’s really interesting as for, sort of going through putting together issue number one, and pulling CREEM forward is like all the new bands that the editorial team is talking about. And frankly, I’m learning about their sensibility, learning about their music. They’re new to me, but they’ve been around for a while, you’ve got like Turnstile, you’ve got Ceremony, Amyl and the Sniffers, really cool Australian rock band. So, there are all sorts of new to new-ish bands, that I think fit within the CREEM sensibility, that we’re really excited to talk about as well. So it’s gonna be fun to go back to some of the CREEM favorites from yesteryear, but also sort of juxtapose them against, what’s rock ‘n’ roll today.

Baltin: When does the first issue come out and then how often does it come out?

Kramer: September. [And] it’ll be quarterly. So issue number two, we’ll be hitting in December. And the way that we’re kind of rolling into launch here is starting in June, we’re gonna be releasing the digital archive, which we’re incredibly proud of, and super psyched to share with the world — every issue from the initial print run, digitized, optimized, and the platform is gorgeous. So we’re super excited about that. That’s gonna launch early June. We’re gonna launch our digital offering in June, as well. It’s not gonna be your traditional media site, digital offering. It’s going to be a highly curated weekly digital offerings, that’ll live on the website. And then quarterly, we’re gonna do the print magazine, it’s not going to look like the old book, it’s gonna be oversized, it’ll be 10 by 14, it’s gonna be big. It’ll be about 132 pages. So pretty much moving from the back of the toilet to center of the coffee table, in a way. Subscriptions launch in June as well.