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22. Voices of the Counterculture Creem was the brainchild of Tony Reay, a former musician from England, who was working as a clerk at a head shop called Mixed Media in the spring of 1969. The store was owned by a music enthusiast named Barry Kramer. Like Kramer, Reay was caught up in the artsy community happenings around the Wayne State University campus in the late sixties . He was associate music editor at the Fifth Estate, wrote a music column for the Detroit Free Press, and could be heard on the Mixed Media–sponsored Tea Party radio show on WABX.1 Reay noticed that the Detroit music scene was incredibly scattered , spread throughout the city and suburbs. He came up with the idea for a locally focused, music-oriented newspaper that would unite all the musically hip kids. He took his idea to Kramer, who showed little interest. Reay took it upon himself to get things going. His friend and a former bandmate Chuck Pike helped with the layout of the ‹rst issue, which they produced in Tony’s apartment on Gladstone Street. Dated March 1, 1969, the cover displayed the word Creem growing up like a vine from the open mouth of a hippie character. The paper featured pro‹les of local bands, record and concert reviews, music-oriented news items, and gossip.2 When that ‹rst issue quickly sold out, Barry Kramer stepped back in to the picture and funded the second issue, which was produced in the basement of his Full Circle Record Store at 4860 Cass Avenue. Tony continued to produce the publication but now under the direction of Barry Kramer.3 According to Reay, the paper had started off serving “the entire community: the music, the artists, and the consumers (mass and otherwise),” and it “paid for its initial print run on newsstand sales alone.”4 Reay says that Creem had such an immediate impact because “even the existing radical broadsheets were still precari202 ously balanced on the cusp of good journalism . . . or plunging headlong into the morass of political rhetoric.”5 The paper’s somewhat irreverent approach and support of local bands made it stand out. Reay commented, “When Creem began, many words saw the light of ink that perhaps were not in the best fashioned grammar, or even good enough English to deserve print in any other vehicle . . . but what they said needed to be written and read and that was enough reason.”6 Soon though, Reay began to butt heads with Kramer over the direction the magazine should be taking. Although they continued to cover the local counterculture scene, “Creem magazine’s importance to Michigan was short lived,” according to Reay, because “Barry [Kramer] never had any interest in publishing a local magazine.”7 Feeling that his original vision was being hijacked after only a few issues, Tony Reay left the publication to which he had given life, and Barry Kramer cemented his position as publisher and guiding force of Creem. Dave Marsh was a self-described “skinny nineteen year-old suffering from overexposure to LSD and the MC5, with absolutely no prospects” when Kramer gave him a job at the publication. “In those days, this magazine was not so much a job or even a publication as it was a non-stop raving, brawling family,” Marsh later recalled.8 In addition to Marsh, the early staff included Charles Auringer, who handled graphics and photos, and writers Richard C. Walls, Richard Siegal, Robin Summers, Debbie Burr, Deday Larene, and Sandra Stretke. The Boy Howdy image became an identifying signature of the publication. Most of the Creem staff lived and worked in a dilapidated threestory cast-iron loft building at 3729 Cass Avenue, where, according to Dave Marsh, “Barry Kramer was the architect and center of everything that went on.”9 Marsh described Kramer as the “eternal psych student” who “enjoyed creating chaos and attempting to control it.”10 Kramer produced an increasingly professional publication, re›ecting the raw energy of Detroit rock and roll, while giving it a more national appeal. “When we saw something that scared us, we moved toward it,” said Marsh, describing Creem’s pioneering style of rock journalism.11 Voices of the Counterculture 203 As for WABX, after a year with a “free-form” music policy, and despite new competition, the station remained the favorite among Detroit’s alternative community. In June 1968 WKNR-FM hired John Small as program manager and started moving in on WABX’s...

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