Creem CEO John Martin On The Legendary Rock Magazine’s Relaunch: ‘A Lot Of Fun’

It’s a rarity these days that a new publication launches when other established media outlets this year have either shuttered or restructured and followed by layoffs. Amid this uncertain landscape, however, 2022 marked the rebirth of the legendary and irreverent rock and roll magazine Creem. Having mostly been dormant for over three decades, Creem relaunched this past September under a new model of subscription-only quarterly issues, digital access to its back issues, and merchandise promoting the magazine’s iconic Boy Howdy brand.

Following its first print edition under relaunch, Creem—whose staff during its first incarnation included such renowned music writers as Dave Marsh, Jaan Uhelszki, Greil Marcus, Cameron Crowe and the late Lester Bangs—has now published its second issue Thursday. Oversized like a thick coffee-table book and sporting a cover designed by the artist Jeremy Dean, Creem 2.0’s second issue contains a feature about Henry Rollins and Joe Rogan; a look into the last days of the late Silver Jews musician David Berman; a Stars Cars column spotlighting the Kills’ Alison Mosshart; a Hole/Smashing Pumpkins photo diary by bassist Melissa Auf der Maur; and a profile of the Michigan punk band the Spits.

“It’s been really good. It’s been crazy,” says Creem CEO John Martin about the brand’s reboot so far. “You know, launching a magazine in 2022 seems crazy and doing anything in rock and roll seems crazy. But it’s not. It’s actually really smart and it’s a lot of fun. There’s a huge audience for it. And we’ve got a great team and we’re having a lot of fun doing it. I think this was the year to sort of get the business going again.”

If there has been any criticism surrounding the rollout, according to Martin, it’s from some people who expected the new Creem to be in the same publishing format going back to its founding in 1969. “I think it’s generally an older generation that they’re just clinging on to something, and also people wanting it to be monthly. It would be great to be monthly, [but] it’s not the business model. And it most likely never will be. This is a new way for us to do a print product.

“And you do it quarterly,” he continues. “You do it high quality. You don’t go on newsstands. You go subscription only. So we’re really happy with the magazine being the beating heart of everything we do. And the audience and the press reaction has been really positive.”

Based on the content from the first two issues since the September relaunch, Creem has maintained a balance between recalling its past brash sensibility and looking toward the future by highlighting newer cutting-edge acts. That also includes deep-dive enterprise articles such as a recent piece about the Osmonds’ 1972 hard-rock album Crazy Horses. “Fundamentally, a music magazine should be a discovery device,” Martin explains. “Whether you’re an 18-year-old kid who’s discovering that the Osmonds made a really awesome psych record, or you’re someone who listened to that psych record in 1972 and discovering [New Orleans punk band] Special Interest for the first time—that’s music discovery going in either direction. We’re happy to do that. We don’t want to be just a nostalgia-driven product. The staff really pushes it in a modern direction.

“When you’re thinking about rock and roll through the lens of Creem, there were three eras. There was the classic era for the most part, which Creem covered ’69 to ’89 [the year it stopped printing]. Then there was the era that Creem missed, ’89 to ’20. And then there’s the new era, 2020 on forward. So we said, ‘Look, there should be some representation of acts from each one of those eras,’ because the fun thing is the grand narrative arc of rock and roll and how you got from here to there. For any rock and roll fans or people that like to read about this stuff, it is connecting those dots from the past into the future.”

In departing from tradition, the new issues of Creem are larger-sized and have more pages, and their covers—including Jeremy Dean’s punk-styled artwork for the second issue—don’t feature a particular musician or even a description of the issue’s contents (Coinciding with the new second issue are T-shirts featuring Dean’s designs available for sale). For Martin, that approach was deliberate.

“We’re subscription only,” says Martin. “So really what you get to sell the magazine, you get the cover. The cover just has to be that punch in the face and it needs to make a statement. So we were circling around the idea of, ‘Let’s not have an artist on the cover because no one deserves to be on the first cover of Creem in 30 years.’ No one deserves that. The debate of who would be on the cover would have been, ‘Oh, put Iggy [Pop] on the cover.’ ‘Put someone recent like Queens of the Stone Age.’ It would have been ridiculous and nothing would have worked.

And so we were like, ‘Well, what if we don’t have a band on the cover at all?’ That suddenly unlocked like a real piece of the puzzle for us. Because then we said, ‘Merchandise is a big part of what we do. Let’s make collections.’ We were already down the path [for the first issue] with [artist] Raymond Pettibon to make the statement of ‘rock is dead and so is print.’ And then for the Jeremy Dean cover, we said, ‘Let’s tie a limited edition merchandise capsule together with the cover of the magazine and make it really special and make it a moment…Instead of having bands and artists on the cover, let’s actually have art on the cover.’ On a business level, it’s smart because it opens us up to new audiences who might not know that Creem‘s back and they’re collectible and you want it on your coffee table.”

The magazine’s current editorial staff consists of a generational mix of veteran and younger talent from both print and digital worlds. “Most of the writing about music that’s done these days is digital writing,” says Martin. “But very few of them have had the opportunity to work in a magazine and especially one like Creem, which has a really finely honed tone of voice that really isn’t seen on the internet right now either. And the staff was all really excited because it’s kind of like how writers wish they could write if they were allowed to and not sort of being shoehorned into banal press release regurgitation. This is like really opinionated, funny, strong opinions writing, and that was Creem.

“The secret weapon is Jaan Uhelszki [as our editor emeritus]. She really rapped the knuckles of the team to nail the Creem sensibility and push them to get stuff that passed the thumb test, to come up with concepts in ways of covering artists: if you put your thumb over it, you can tell it’s Creem. Jaan was instrumental in doing that. We needed that legacy Creem sensibility to call us on our bulls***t and save us from ourselves at times and help us along the way. So it was a great team effort.”

Preceding the relaunch was Scott Crawford’s 2019 film documentary Creem: America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine, which also poignantly told the story of its late founder and publisher Barry Kramer. Today, Kramer’s son JJ, who was only four years old when his father died in 1981, is leading the magazine as its chairman. “Aside from Jaan, JJ probably knows Creem better than anyone,” Martin says. “He does have very high expectations for what Creem should be because there’s a lot to live up to that. It was a family business to start with. There’s just a lot to live up to. And we want to that from him. But we hear that from the audience even more: ‘Don’t disappoint me.’ And the moment we start disappointing people, we’ll hear it. But we really haven’t yet. The dynamic is that a lot of old contributors reach out to JJ and Jaan and they’re just very excited that Creem is back. And you know what? They still want to contribute.”

As for Creem’s plans in 2023, Martin says that will include publishing more special edition issues linked to a particular artist, era or genre, such as a recent one featuring David Bowie that was tied to the 2022 documentary Moonage Daydream. He also adds that Creem will mount events beginning with some smaller ones. “And then we’ll do some bigger ones which should be a lot of chaotic fun. Then we get into programming, which is really cool because that’s going to be audio and video and we’re breaking out a lot of new talent and new formats from those worlds. That’s a very exciting thing for us to be able to sort of introduce new faces within the rock and roll space.

“We had this lady named Hether Fortune. She’s great. We just think she’s a really interesting, funny new voice and we want to help build her into something more. And she did a vertical video review of [the documentary] Meet Me in the Bathroom and it was really funny. And we’re like, ‘This is a hit. Like, we need to do 12 of these right now.’ So we’re going to start putting our own formats and taking them to series on our own channels as well as partnering with some other platforms and companies on creating content with them.”

Amid the fanfare surrounding the relaunch, how does the return of Creem fit within today’s music journalism as social media and streaming platforms have now become the tastemakers for today’s fans? “In the way that the Clash was the only band that matters, we should be the only rock and roll magazine that matters,” Martin says. “We’re still taking that to heart and using that as our guideline. There’s a lot of noise out there in the music space online. When Turnstile announces a tour, 20 sites write the exact same article. And that’s cool. It’s not for Creem, though. We want to do something different and not do something that everyone else is doing. It requires more investment on the editorial side.

“We’re not writing about what other people wrote about,” he adds. “We’re the source material. That’s really important to us. So we want to tell stories that haven’t been told before. We want to be the first time an artist gets a big profile. Special Interest in the first issue—that was probably the first time they ever got a big magazine feature. We want to create something that expands beyond niches. We’ve got a Warthog article next to a Terry Allen article. That doesn’t happen anywhere else. It’s like one of them would be in No Depression and one of them would be in Maximum Rocknroll. But they’re both in Creem.

“And that’s really important for us is we’re really sort of trying to hammer home the thesis that rock and roll is a bigger community than we’ve all been led to believe over the last 30 years. It’s still a huge community. It’s just there’s a lot of smaller niches that someone needs to tie a whole bow around and that person’s going to be Creem.”