Detroit Rock City (24 page)

John Brannon (
Negative Approach, Laughing Hyenas, Easy Action, vocalist
):
Creem
was like the bible to me when I was growing up. They had the Stooges, Lou Reed, Alice Cooper—all that in the seventies. I would find the old ones and just devour them.

Linda Barber:
I was hired by Barry Kramer on the spot in 1976. I was from Michigan, but I had been working in New York for
Mademoiselle
and
Glamour
. He
was very impressed with my résumé because even though he was into the Detroit scene, he wanted the magazine to be global. Barry was a great guy, but he had a huge temper, very short fuse. So my associate there, Sue Whitall—who took over as editor when Lester left—she told him what I had told her, that my father was very violent and abusive to my mother. Barry would always have these screaming tirades at the editorial meetings. I would just end up like unbelievably freaked out. Once he was screaming about the cover; it was Ted Nugent and he asked that we submit our headline ideas. We had the mock covers, and he just was outraged that this headline saying, “Poontang” was even typed on the markup. All he said was, screaming—he screamed so loud at Sue and everybody else, and everybody, you could see the spit flying out of his mouth I mean—he said, “Do you know what you're saying? Why don't we just put ‘pussy' on the cover?” I froze because of the screaming. Then he put the cover down and he walked over to me and he kissed me on the forehead and he said, “I'm sorry for yelling.”

Cathy Gisi (
journalist
, Creem
magazine
):
Lots of people would say Ted Nugent could be aggravating, but he is who he is and he is true to himself, and back then he never hesitated to answer my calls when I needed something. I did a feature with him and spent a night picking him up at the airport and driving him back to his farm in Jackson. I had two vehicles I could use, one a real hot Camaro, and I thought, “No, he'll kill this thing.” So I had just gotten a brand-new four-cylinder Chevette to run around town that top-ended at seventy miles per hour. Ted won't let anyone else drive. He found gears in that Chevette I didn't know existed. My mechanic husband wondered why there was straw in the undercarriage that night, and it was because we headed for town to get pizza that night and Ted drove through the field. His house was an old farmhouse, and I figured out the reason he wouldn't let anyone drive is because they might know how to get back. He took so many back roads and did it so quickly that I didn't pay attention how to get there.

Mark Norton:
We knew how to rig the phone machine so you'd get a conference call going. You could call one person at A, one person at B, and the phones would ring and they'd both pick it up, and they hadn't phoned each other. So we had Nugent's number, so we hooked up Nugent with Billy Joel. Then we'd all listen in; we'd hear the phones ring, and then we'd hear “Hello?” And the guy who picks up says “Hello, who is this?” “This is Ted Nugent.” “Well, this is Billy Joel. What are you calling me for?”

Dave DiMartino (
journalist, editor
, Creem
magazine
):
People might have said about
Creem
: “Well, they're no good since Lester Bangs left.” I never said those
words, but I imagine others did. So I had to operate, as did Sue, who worked directly with Lester for a couple of years, in his shadow. I was hired as an editorial assistant in '79, so I sat in the desk of their departed editorial assistant, and it happened to be Lester's desk. While I was working at his desk I would find some great stuff, like memos between him and Barry Kramer. I said, “I can't believe I'm sitting in this chair.” There's some YouTube clip I saw in the past three years of Lester Bangs being interviewed about Roxy Music, and it freaked me out because he was sitting at my desk, and I saw some of the same pictures on the wall right behind that are always there. That was kind of cool.

I think Sue Whitall felt massively in the public eye because she replaced him.

Mark Norton:
I was hired in before Dave was, in August '79. I said, “Barry, I gotta tell you something: your magazine used to be great and it really sucks now.” He said, “What's wrong with it?” I told him, “Look, it's 1979, and there's all kinds of great music going on, and you still insist on running these stories about these hackneyed dinosaurs that don't have anything to do with contemporary street culture.” He said, “Do you think you could change it?” I said, “Hell yes, I could change this.” And I discovered that Barry used to keep his drugs in a hollowed-out Bible.

Dave DiMartino:
The first day I worked at
Creem
Sue Whitall, Linda, and I went across the street to a restaurant to talk about
Creem
and what it was all about. Mark, who was not working there at the time—he hadn't even freelanced—happened to be by, so they invited him over too. So we sit down, and I guess he needed to show his license or something like that, for drinks or something. We were all pretty young. He said, “Hey, check out my address,” and he lived with his parents then, in Troy, and his address was 69 Hampshire Place, and he pointed at the 69 and goes, giggle giggle. I said, “Alright! This guy is such a jerk—I love it!” He did it on purpose just to be an asshole, you know what I mean? It was so great.

Mark Norton:
One time Chrissie Hynde agreed to be interviewed, but when she found out Sue was going to do it, she backed out. I was hired there at
Creem
, and Sue Whitall was the editor, and then my brother decides to start going out with her. And when things got bad between them, things got bad for me. One night he just left for Ohio, not telling her—or me for that matter. And then it was just bullshit at work; she was always on me. Dave and I begged Barry to get rid of Sue.

Dave DiMartino:
The first cover that I worked on was Zeppelin, the live shot, the yellowish tint. At that point U2 was starting to be big. I think it was just their second album, and we ran in to do a set-up with them for a photo. They didn't
want to do it unless they could be on the cover, and at that time Robert Plant and Zeppelin was still massive, and Robert Plant was going to give away one of his only three interviews for his solo career to
Creem
, and I said, “Look, I've already promised the cover to Robert Plant.” The U2 guys are like, “Anyone that would put fucking Led Zeppelin on the cover instead of us, fuck 'em.”

Robert Matheu:
My first photo published in
Creem
was Mitch Ryder with Lou Reed onstage at Masonic. Lou was not really real big at that moment, the Street Hassle tour. Even though the Masonic show was sold out, it wasn't really
Creem
fodder anymore. Mitch came out and they did “Rock 'n' Roll” together. On my way out I see Jean MacDonald, the Arista rep. The next day I get a call from Sue Whitall at
Creem
saying, “Hey, Jean tells me you got photos of Mitch singing with Lou last night. I'd sure like to see 'em.” I said, “Oh, great. I'll print some up and bring 'em up tomorrow.” So the next day I go up there about noonish or something, with the prints, and knock on the door and, I'm poking around, and I ask where Sue is. This guy says, “Well, she went out to lunch a little while ago and stuff, and I'm not really sure.” I said, “Who are you?” He goes, “I'm Dave DiMartino.” I said, “Oh,” and I didn't say anything for a second. And he says, “It's my first day here.” Because I was kinda thinking in my mind, “Well, I don't know that name. Dave DiMartino? Am I in the right office? Is this the dentist's office?”

Pretty soon Bill Holdship and John Kordosh joined, and
Creem
was real good with them.

Mark Norton:
Dave had to go interview the Clash at Masonic, and they were just having a bad day. They were on the bus or whatever, Dave was smoking a cigarette and blowing it in Joe Strummer's face, and Joe was saying, “What the fuck?” He was really mean to Dave then at the end, and then he smashed his hand on the tape recorder and walked out.

Dave DiMartino:
It started out okay, and then all of a sudden Joe got really pissed off because he said I was blowing smoke in his face. It's actually incredibly fortunate in terms of trying to document the dialogue, because you can tell he's getting more pissed at me and more pissed at me. Then all of a sudden, when he smashed it, it was like one of those piano-key cassette recorders. It totally sounds like he's smashing something because it didn't just go off. During our talk I was a little cocky, and he kept complaining about their deal with CBS to the point where, if I couldn't elaborate on aspects of the deal, it would just be uninteresting reporting. So I'd say, “What do you mean? What's the deal, what's so bad about the deal?” He could have
just said, “We gotta do fifteen records. And I don't really give a shit.” And I'd say, “Oh, that sucks.” But instead, he's saying, “You're just sitting there blowing smoke in my face, blah, blah, blah, about to go on stage, blah, blah, blah.” Paul Morley, the
NME
writer, was on the road with them too, and after the, uh, incident, he said, “Well, how did it go?” I said, “Not too good. It started out okay, and then all of a sudden Joe got really pissed off because he said I was blowing smoke in his face.”

Cathy Gisi:
We were also buying interviews from other writers. We relied on word-of-mouth recommendations. We used to get unsolicited transcripts from all over the world. This one came in that was so well written and so well done that we got on the phone to talk with the writer. We had never seen him anywhere, and he sent us this fabulous interview with David Bowie. It comes out, and Bowie's publicist calls and says David never spoke to this writer. This guy had sent us hotel receipts and his notes—everything checked out. The writer defended himself to the hilt. I don't know how, but we came to some sort of an agreement with Bowie. They didn't want us to issue any kind of retraction. They realized we had researched this writer, and it was a great article. We ended up paying the writer too.

Mark Norton:
I did some heroin, and Dave and I went to interview Bruce Springsteen. I always wondered if Bruce knew. I was barely awake.

Dave DiMartino:
I talked with Michael Bolton one time. Just before that I interviewed Dionne Warwick of all people, and she said something basically negative about Bolton. So then like a couple months later I had to go out on the road and do a Michael Bolton feature because he was at the peak of his fame. Bolton and I were—it sounds like a such a cliché, it's almost laughable—but he and I were in the back of a limo. I knew I had to ask this because I was told by higher ups to ask it. I said, “Let me ask you something: what do you think about the whole notion of people saying you're ripping off black music? Let me read you something Dionne Warwick said.” I read him something about him stealing music from black people. His eyes started watering and he was just really quiet, and I could tell I really hurt him deeply by asking him that trash question. My heart fuckin' broke.

John Kordosh:
Arista got me tickets to see Dave Davies, who must have totally been fucked up the night I went to see him. That's all I can conclude. He had every reason to totally fucking love me because I was the biggest Kinks fan in the goddamn country and also a big Dave Davies fan too. I'm standing around and Dave Davies comes out, and so I figured, well, I'm not interviewing him, but I'll just go
say hi to him, and so I did. I said, “Hi, Dave,” and he's short, like most of the British rockers of that era. He kind of looks up at me and says, “You're a fucking insect.” And I go, “What?” This was apropos of nothing. Nothing had happened. I hadn't been making a pass at his girl, trying to steal his drink, or anything. Then he had some security guy try to kill me. He did, he absolutely did, he grabbed me by the collar—I was wearing a jacket—and he grabbed me by the collar of my jacket and, like, lifted me off the ground. I'm like, “What the fuck?” He used my face to open the door.

Cathy Gisi:
People took it all so seriously. Bebe Buell called, and we had run a photo of her and her husband at the time, Todd Rungren, and this other guy who looked like he was talking to them seriously. This other person was saying, “Dr. so-and-so assures the Rundgrens the only thing wrong with their baby is ‘It's Alive!'” She called and said, “Do you know how hurtful that is?” And the longer she ranted and raved, the more idiotic she sounded. It was all we could do to keep from laughing, and then it was, “You know this is
Creem
magazine, right?”

Dave DiMartino:
I wrote a caption of a paparazzi shot of Christie Brinkley. She was waving at the camera and she had her hand raised, you know, so I put in quotes: “Married to a moron? Why, yes, I am!” So it looked like she was saying that. Billy Joel called up, and nobody was really believing it was Billy Joel, and he was really saying, “Look you can say whatever you want to about me, but don't fuckin' get to my wife/girlfriend.”

Mark Norton:
When Barry was six years old, his father died at thirty-seven. When Barry was thirty-seven, he died in 1981 and his kid JJ was six. Really, really spooky. On deadline that night—we were supposed to ship in the morning—and Barry walked in and said, “You guys want some pizza?” So we ordered some pizza in, and everybody took a slice. We're all drinking, and it was getting on about 1:00 in the morning, trying to get the captions done or whatever the hell we had to do. And Barry walks in and he opened this pizza box and he said, “Who ate the last piece?” I said I did, and he stomped out of there, and that's the last thing I saw of Barry Kramer. He died at three or four in the morning.