I was 21 years old in 1973, and I was THOROUGHLY sick of everything about rock & roll from the 1960’s, the music that had given me all that was good about my existence in that decade.
In January of 1973 I was attending Ohio State University (largely to stay out of the Vietnam War draft sweepstakes, something most people won’t admit to anymore). I was working at the parking lot of Doctor’s North Hospital, a substandard medical facility in a rundown part of the Near North Side of Columbus, Ohio. That area was later refurbished into the trendy Short North District, but was then largely populated by lower-working-class families, AWOL GI’s, and street people (as the homeless - now unhoused - were termed then).
Adjacent to the parking lot there was a neighborhood drugstore with a soda fountain where I would eat my dinner (french fries & a Mountain Dew) and peruse the magazine racks, desperate to find a rock & roll magazine to replace the long-lamented, lame Rolling Stone I had grown up with from 1968 on, but which was now busy writing more about movies stars and the dreaded ECOLOGY than the rock & roll music I worshipped. Then one day that January, there it was - CREEM magazine - the literary outlet I had been searching for the last two years.
CREEM was edited by Dave Marsh, who would become one of my favorite rock writers.
You wouldn’t have known that then, though. The entire staff of CREEM was listed in one little corner of the title page, alphabetically, with the likes of Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau sharing the masthead equally with Iris Charmer and Richard Pinkston (who?), along with Ben Edmonds and Ed Ward, later two of my other favorite rock writers.
That was how egalitarian CREEM was.
CREEM gave me The New York Dolls. They gave me Mott The Hoople. They gave me The Sidewinders. They gave me the idea that 1973 would be the NEW 1964 and rock & roll would turn itself over, re-invent itself, be reborn, and I would never have to listen to The Doobie Brothers, The Allman Brothers, or Pink Floyd ever again. (That belief was totally, painfully, wrong of course, but that’s a whole other blog for a whole ‘nother day.)
Marsh later went on to write great Rock Books about Bruce Springsteen – Born To Run in 1979 and Glory Days in 1987 – and The Who – Before I Get Old, The Story of The Who in 1983. The Who in the 1960’s and Bruce Springsteen in the 1970’s were my favorite rockers on the planet. Possibly more important than those, though, Dave Marsh wrote a definitive article about New York Rock in the December 1973 issue of CREEM, that introduced me to Elliott Murphy, by far my favorite rock & roll songwriter of all time, right up to this day. (Incidentally, that article was also the first mention of KISS in a national magazine, so Colin would also have been in luck.)
I was in a Barnes & Noble bookstore just yesterday, before I heard the news about Marsh, prowling the magazine racks and just wishing I could find something, ANYTHING, to read in a rock & roll publication that would interest me in 2026. I was wishing for a Jim Delehant, a Greg Shaw, a Lisa Robinson, a Mick Farren, a Charles Shaar Murray, an Alan Betrock, a Miriam Linna. I won’t find them.
Dave Marsh, I miss you and your rock & roll brothers & sisters.
from CREEM magazine, December 1973 issue
Ricki C. is 74 years old and has two dresser drawers full of black rock & roll t-shirts, which he wears incessantly. He also has a hand-tooled leather hippie belt from 1972 that still fits. He has congestive heart failure and prostate cancer and KNOWS that all this rock & roll nonsense has to stop someday.
But not yet.