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(Απομαγνητοφωνήθηκε από TurboScribe. Αναβάθμιση σε Απεριόριστο για αφαίρεση αυτού του μηνύματος.) Are we on?

Yeah.

Oh, I've got to start the record.

Here we are in downtown Detroit at the Cream Complex.

We're going to introduce everybody.

What are you doing here?

I sell dope downstairs.

This is our editor down here.

Hi, man, how are you?

Hi, hi.

What's happening?

What are you doing?

What's happening?

You're on TV, Dave.

You want any more beer, Bear?

That was Dave Marston Brings.

And over here we have Robbie.

Say a few words, Robbie.

Say a few words.

Welcome to Cream.

I hope you enjoy the tour.

Cream Magazine was our Facebook.

It was our social media.

Who's doing what?

Who did something cool?

Who did something stupid?

Cream Magazine, they felt like these are partiers.

They looked like they were having more fun than I was having,

so I needed to tap into that.

I wanted the drug, sex, and rock and roll part,

and the way that they served it up was very palpable

for a young, impressionable teenager from Detroit.

There was a real attitude.

It wasn't just a magazine.

It was a rock magazine with a capital R.

They were going to tell you the truth,

and they were going to be funny about it.

Even if they weren't telling you the truth,

they were funny about it.

The pages were so full of folly,

superfluous, petty, hippie, non-musical folly.

Cream was street.

It seemed like the people's magazine.

If Cream says it's cool, it's cool.

There's a weird balance of playing up the rock star image,

playing into the hedonistic, fucked up,

and then tearing it fucking down.

Buying Cream was a little bit like buying Playboy.

You didn't want your parents to see either one of them.

If you're 13 or 14, that's exactly what you're looking for.

Cream was great at highlighting

the gender fuckery of rock and roll at that time.

I don't know who was distributing them,

but there they were in the PX on the Army base

where my mom and dad shopped.

I remember my grandmother walking by

and looking at a picture of Alice Cooper.

She looked at that picture, and she said,

he's going to burn in hell.

And I was instantly, I want to know all about Alice Cooper.

America's only rock and roll magazine.

All right.

Yeah.

It's 1969, okay

All across the U.S.A.

It's another year for me and you

Another year with nothing to do

It's another year for me and you

Another year with nothing to do

I didn't really have a crowd in high school.

Cream felt like the idea of what a crowd could be.

Pizza on the table, stay up late, get the work done,

crack jokes, watch a little TV, back to work people.

Are you filming?

I'm taping it, yeah.

Cream magazine, it was like it was written

by a bunch of convicts in Joliet State Prison.

Cream magazine was cream because of the people there.

The people that were a little left of norm.

We were all a little crazy.

You know, we used to make these jokes that, you know,

the people that read it were all kind of misfits, just like us.

I feel as if Cream was a tribe.

I think it was a spontaneous confluence.

It looked like an opportunity was developing,

and we all said, I'll be part of that.

It's a hit!

It's a hit?

I think it's a hit!

Oh!

There was this very, very cool record store

and head store on the campus of Wayne State,

and this was one of the coolest places to go and hang out.

It was the greatest store.

It was right in the middle of Detroit.

Detroit in the late 60s was a barren landscape

for counterculture.

A thing like mixed media would start up

and stood up like a flare against the landscape.

What's this?

That's a hit!

Another hit!

Hit it again!

What's that?

It's a hit!

Hit it again!

In my mind, because I was a hippie,

Barry was a capitalist.

He wore a suit and tie.

He was a straight guy, and we were the hippies.

There were these very edgy entrepreneurs,

and Barry was a player.

I was a merchant.

I had four, what they call, head shops.

It took me two years to build them,

and it took me one week to get rid of them

when I woke up one morning and I found out I was a merchant.

That whole diversity of talent, I mean, like...

But we're still a business, and we have to run it like that.

Come on!

Come on!

It was a hangout. It was a destination.

You'd go there and hang out.

I mean, it was records, candles, and blacklight posters,

and it was Barry Kramer.

You can't, it all can't be good.

You wouldn't have a magazine.

Come on up here and see.

Behind the counter was an English guy

who looked like he was like a rock star.

Tony Ray had come to Barry

with this idea of doing a music magazine.

The name Cream came from Tony Ray.

He loved the group Cream,

and then decided to have it spelled differently.

Rolling Stones started a year before Cream,

named Rolling Stone after the Rolling Stones.

It was a fuck you to Rolling Stone.

One day R. Crumb wandered into mixed media

looking through the aisles.

And at the time, R. Crumb,

he was looking for medical treatment,

and he was given a deal

that if he would draw something for Cream magazine,

we would come up with the funds he needed

to go and see a doctor.

Aside from being like one of the all-time greatest cartoonists

in American culture,

I knew who Robert Crumb was before I knew what Cream was.

I said, oh, Cream must be cool if this guy's involved.

Cream magazine and Robert Crumb and Underground Comics

comes out like a tornado of people going,

finally there's some shit to look at

besides the old life magazines at my parents' house.

We loved Boy Howdy.

He became our mascot.

It was irreverent.

We felt like it captured the way we felt at the time.

Prior to having Boy Howdy

to use visually and verbally everywhere,

we used to answer the phone by saying

Cream Eugene's Boys and Girls.

And Barry always had ambitions

to expand the circulation eventually to nationally.

He got outlets all over Metro Detroit,

Northern Ohio, as far as Cleveland.

Tony wanted a niche magazine for blues rock aficionados.

When Tony said, no, this is an artistic thing we're going to do,

an intellectual magazine,

Barry said, no, it's not.

That's not what it's going to be at all.

It's going to be a slick rock & roll magazine.

Tony, who had the idea originally of The Germ, he was out.

Barry had specific ideas of what to do with the magazine.

Upstairs, upstairs!

Got a newspaper to get out!

Out of the city roads!

Got 47 miles of barbed wire

Here's a cold breast steak for a necktie

Got a brand-new house on the wrong side

I said it's made out of rattlesnake hide

Brand-new chimney, baby, built on top

I said it's made out of...

The rest of the country wasn't paying near as much attention

to the MC5 or the Stooges or SRC or, for that matter, Bob Seger.

So much great music came out of Detroit.

It was probably the most important city for music in the 60s.

The Michigan music scene is certainly exploding on the world right now.

It seems to be the only city in the world that really has...

I don't know whether organic would be the right word,

but it's certainly got a real, alive music scene.

Being from Detroit was like being from that time period's

center of the rock & roll universe.

Detroit has always had something

that's always moving forward.

P-Funk.

George Clinton.

Charlie Hooker's from Detroit.

Motown.

Temps, Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye.

You can go on and on and on.

You got arguably the first two punk bands in the MC5 and the Stooges.

Ted Nugent.

Alice Cooper came out of that.

These original, boundering, pushing artists

is indicative of the city,

and this is a boundering, pushing magazine.

But if you live in the Midwest,

the realities of the situation will force you to understand very quickly

it's not all laid back and peace and love and good vibes and groovy.

It's hard work, it's discipline,

it's making something out of the ugliest part of the universe.

Cream Magazine being based in Detroit, you know, it gave it the grit.

It was a very different vibe,

and it didn't have the cultural cachet of the coast.

Detroit set itself in opposition

to the big tastemaking cities of New York and L.A.

I think part of being from the Midwest

is to have at least a one-strike count on you, maybe two strikes.

We don't have everything that they have on the coasts,

and we do just fine, thanks.

Life in Detroit was the American dream fulfilled.

It was a boom town, 4 million people there.

There were great union jobs.

If you wanted it built, we could build it in Detroit.

All things were possible.

As governor of the state of Michigan,

I do hereby officially request the immediate deployment

of federal troops into Michigan

to assist state and local authorities

in reestablishing law and order in the city of Detroit.

When the reality of racism exploded on the streets of Detroit

with the rebellion of August of 67,

a kind of myth exploded with it.

This fantasy of what life in America was,

the reality that big city police departments

were the biggest gangs in town,

that they ran over people's rights and bodies regularly.

Come 68, and we have Martin Luther King Jr.

and Robert F. Kennedy assassinated,

maybe we all dove into music all deeper.

There was a cultural crack,

and that crack went right down the dinner table.

Fathers were angry at their sons

because their sons couldn't justify the war in Vietnam.

Mothers were angry at daughters

because they wanted to go around without their brassieres,

and they all wanted to go and see the MC5

and all these wild new rock bands.

All of a sudden here were these high-energy rock and roll bands.

The great scene about Detroit was the fact

that everybody was great friends.

There was a real community.

All of the Motown acts would come to see the Rock Acts,

and we would go to see Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.

The beauty of having all these disparate cultures

coexisting in a place is that musicians are pretty open.

Someone had arranged for members of Pharoah Saunders' band

who were playing in town to come jam with some of the guys from the MC5.

It was music that I'd certainly never heard before or after.

If you could make it Detroit, you could make it any place.

Detroit audiences, there was nothing like them in the world.

You better put it on the stage or get the hell off.

You had to bring it.

When you played Detroit, it was like the show of your life.

There's an energy level in Detroit that is,

if you could bottle it, you could make a fortune.

It's almost like combustive.

You never know what's going to happen next.

There was a period in time where Detroit was the place to be from.

We did create a unique sort of music.

Don't say that you survived, yeah

You were one of the guys

Cream was as synonymous with the rock scene as any of those bands were.

It was so much a part of our life.

Our community was very much involved with everybody in town,

everybody in Ann Arbor.

It was thick. Everybody was on the scene doing their own thing,

but everyone was interacting with each other.

I loved that scene.

It really spoke to me of the kind of explosive powers of rock & roll.

♪

Barry recruited Dave Marsh,

who worked for the college newspaper at Wayne State University.

He had a local radio show.

He was distinguished because he had played Can't Explain 23 times in a row

and got fired from it, and that was the perfect guy for Cream magazine.

No!

Who was there at WDET that would put me on the radio

and risk their fucking...

Barry just made shit up. That's part of the problem.

That was like, we have no money for a payroll this week.

It's just a lie.

I could go find a way to feed myself, probably.

That's not what I wanted to do. I wanted to write.

They had no rudder for their ship.

They need a captain for the ship. They need a rudder.

They need somebody to steer.

There was no reason why Dave should have thought of himself as an editor.

Barry looked at him and said,

Poof, you're an editor.

And it was really a masterstroke.

You can strike a balance between approaching music as politics

or approaching music without being able to separate it from politics.

You can't. You can't separate it, though.

See, the thing is, if you separate it, I mean, what's the point?

Because if you separate it, what value does it have?

It's just another piece of music. It ain't no better or worse.

Separate it from its context, though,

and its context is decidedly, if not political, sociological.

Dave Marsh, he really brought the politics into early Cream.

I had a vision about what the magazine could do

for kids who were out there being ridiculed and beat up

and all that shit.

The idea I had about Cream was that even in rock & roll,

it had come to pass that there was a

stuffy ways of dealing with people.

And I thought that part of your job as a human being

was to oppose that.

And if it meant you bled a little for it, so what?

Because there's some other kid who's going to read this thing

and be freed by it.

I first saw Cream magazine, I was in detention in high school.

From that moment forward, my entire life shifted and changed dramatically.

I distinctly remember a photograph.

It was a picture of Patti Smith against a wall,

and she's absolutely, shockingly incredible beauty.

And I was like, what world is this?

Most people want to fit in somewhere.

Because of my otherness, because of my queerness,

I was trying to find that gang.

I wasn't going to find them in my high school.

I found them in Cream magazine.

Cream magazine, I felt like those were sort of my people.

It was biblical for a kid who loved rock & roll music.

I grew up in north central Montana in a town of 800 people.

The closest magazine store was 35 miles away.

I would have Cream, and then my friend Reggie would buy Circus.

And so you'd trade those magazines around.

That was sort of all the information I was getting

about what was going on in the rest of the world.

That's right, Cream magazine, if you want a free copy,

3729 Cass Avenue, clear out their offices.

Don't cost you any money, just send them a letter

with your name and address to where?

3729 Cass.

In Detroit, Michigan, the Motor City.

You like it here on Cass Avenue?

No, I don't, it's very dangerous.

It's terrible, it's terrible.

As a matter of fact, I'm scared most of the time.

On the bottom of this building,

there was all these hookers walking around all the time,

and we got to know them pretty good.

We were always trying to talk them

into coming up to the third floor.

No, I don't work for free.

It was just part of the neighborhood.

This was a decrepit war zone of slums.

When the sun went down,

any business on that street closed, gone.

It was scary.

The women, girls at the time, ran the risk

of getting literally grabbed on the way into the building.

You walked in this 3-story cast iron building.

There's this very, very long terrazzo staircase

filled with musty stuff.

What had seen much better days was Barry's office.

It's a giant wooden desk with tons of stuff all over it.

The amazing thing about Barry was,

with all those piles of stuff,

he knew exactly where in each pile everything was.

The thing about the Cass Avenue offices

is that it was essentially a crash pad.

There are couches, people lying around, waking up.

Dogs walking, there was mattresses on the floor,

and this was office central for cream.

I mean, it was as funky as you can get.

Barry paid everybody $5 a week.

Dave got paid his $5,

and he goes to the laundromat on the corner,

and just as he gets in there,

some junkie comes in there with a .45

and puts a gun to his head and takes his $5.

He comes back, Barry's going, well, that's your pay.

My dad loved to stir the pot and create chaos

and then attempt to corral it and control it.

How long was I there, 8 years?

I was mad at him, better part of that.

But I think that was the routine of Barry Kramer,

his relationship with all his employees.

You would feel anger, but also a lot of love too.

When Barry would meet you, he would say hello, motherfucker,

just to see how you'd react.

Ignoring him wasn't an option.

Being shocked wasn't an option.

Barry was always an explosive character.

He always had an explosive temper,

but also a lot of sense of fun.

That sense of fun is what was so magnetic

and charismatic about him.

He had a tremendous inferiority complex.

He thought he was behind the eight ball

because he was from the Midwest, I'm from Detroit.

He had to prove over and over that he could do things,

that he was smart, that he was capable,

that he could be a success.

Barry liked to have his needs anticipated.

Oftentimes, I would be doing A,

and he would think I should be doing B.

He would yell at me, so I would yell back.

And it was a mixture of you're fired, no, I quit.

But then neither one of us would leave.

And the next day, we would start all over again.

The real skill of a publisher is getting the damn thing out,

getting the actual literary product

into a form that can be reproduced and sold to people.

Barry did that. How did he do that?

Barry managed to improvise a way

that it really ended up standing Green Magazine

in good stead for another 15 years.

He put together this team of people

who were all a little off,

who all needed a little bit of guidance.

He assembled this band of misfits

that somehow, someway went out

and created this beautiful music together.

None of them had any business

running, editing, or writing for a rock magazine.

I had no credentials at all.

Bursting with ideas,

many of them impractical at the very least.

I applied for a job at the college newspaper,

and they told me I had no experience,

and they told me to go down the street to cream.

It didn't matter if I didn't have any experience.

I knew Jan would be a good writer, but she didn't write.

At some point, you better get started.

So I said to Jan, this is it.

What do you mean, this is it?

I said, this is your story.

The Miracles were going to break up,

and Smokey was going to become a solo act,

and there was going to be a press conference

downtown in Detroit.

So I sort of had to give her a deadline

of the very next day,

so that she would not be able to chicken out on this.

In 1966, it was Smokey, me, and unrequited love.

What a threesome.

You were my dear Abby, my Ann Landers,

my prime confessor.

You had more impact on the teenage dilemma

than Claricel.

I was this very sheltered little Jewish girl

from the suburbs,

and he was the ultimate bad boy,

to the extreme that I remember clearly

him offering me my first joint,

and my looking at him and saying,

I bet you give that to kids on playgrounds, too.

There was nothing small about

Barry Kramer and Connie Kramer.

Everything they did, they did large.

You would always hear them screaming,

you motherfucker, I can't believe you did that.

Cream being what it was,

when boyfriend and girlfriends were in the office,

we would have fights with each other,

we would have fights with other people,

we would have fights with the editors and the publisher,

and Barry and Connie being married,

of course it was no different,

they would have fights in the office.

Connie was such the brains behind the man

who had an abundance of brains himself.

They took their work home with them.

They were never free of the work.

There was an enormous pressure on both of them.

Maybe a couple times a year

they might go to Las Vegas and gamble,

something really relaxing,

because they were gambling all the time in their life.

They were gambling with a magazine,

they were gambling with people's lives

because we had a staff that they supported.

Who's that?

Oh, that's the president of the Stooges Fan Club.

The Stooges Fan Club?

The Stooges forever.

Say a few words.

I am so proud to be the president of the Stooges Fan Club.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Lester came into this situation,

turned it into a playground,

with this wild sense of humor.

The lack of respect.

Everybody, whether it was Grace Slick or Olivia Newton-John,

into this wonderful game of mocking everything.

Lester Bangs and I started the same day.

Lester had been freelancing for the magazine.

He was one of our few non-Detroiters.

And when he came to town,

I remember him telling me that he'd never seen

uglier people in the world.

Than Detroiters.

I learned to speak this way for television

by going to Wayne State Television School.

If you go to Wayne State Television School...

Once Lester came to town,

he wanted something entirely different.

He always saw the irony in the situation.

I didn't think he felt like he had the mantle of teaching

society about culture.

It was more like, let's fucking be in the culture.

Lester was a very complex person.

He could be a big asshole.

Lester alienated a lot of people.

A good example is,

he started with Steven Tyler's teeth.

He also didn't like Freddie Mercury's teeth.

Then went on to suggest that

Phoebe Buell, who was pregnant with Liv Tyler at the time,

would benefit the universe by maybe having an abortion.

But can I tell you, I'm not a huge fan.

You never knew which Lester Bangs you were going to meet.

And so I'd run into Lester,

and Lester knew how to get nuttier than anybody else.

All or nothing at all was with Lester.

I did find Lester Bangs intimidating,

particularly when he told me

not to make friends with the rock stars,

and to make a career out of being friends with people like that

will kill your writing and kill your writing voice.

I found him profound.

And Lester ended up inviting us to hang with him and a rock star,

Bill Spooner from the Tubes,

in this hotel for hours and hours.

He was friends with Bill Spooner.

I'm like, okay, all right.

So there's exceptions.

There would be moments where Lester Bangs

would get into a musical honesty.

And I really got the impression that

he loved other musicians more because they smoked dope together.

We finally got an album out.

Lester Bangs reviewed it as a tragic waste of plastic,

which we all doubled up laughing over.

He said, that is a great, that's a great review.

There was an irreverence that was really refreshing,

although not if you were on the blunt end

of a Lester Bangs review, it probably wasn't.

I think he kind of liked going against the grain.

What's popular?

You guys suck, you're bloated, you're over.

Our first album came out.

I was tripping on acid when I read Lester's review.

These boys so the line ran could play their guitars

like John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders played sax.

For my money, they come on more like blue cheer than Trane and Sanders.

But then my money has already gone for a copy

of this ridiculous, overbearing, pretentious album.

He said we couldn't tune our guitars.

And that really burned me up.

We were doubly blessed in Detroit to see Cream publish.

This was homegrown.

These were our friends.

Lester moved to Detroit and became part of the Cream team

and embraced the entire Detroit aesthetic

and apologized and took it all back

and became a great personal friend over the years.

Lester would talk shit down one week, he'd hate some band one week

and then he would love them the next.

Take Emerson Lake and Palmer.

Here is like musical sterility at its pinnacle.

A band that has absolutely no soul.

It was just stunting, it was just breaking windows in the culture.

For all the chaos that surrounded him,

he had clear thoughts, he had vision.

I think for Lester and for the writers of Cream,

they were artists, they were expressing themselves

in very exotic ways.

I remember getting into a thing with Lester about writing.

I said, well, hey man, you're welcome to come up on stage

and you get a different perspective.

I said, yeah, Lester's going to come on stage

and do the review on stage.

We finish the songs and we take our stage bow.