"America's Only Rock 'N' Roll Magazine"

Having said all that, I surely do appreciate those people who spend such a large portion of their lives nutting out why a particular sound gets their blood up. This territory is almost exclusive to men — Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lester Bangs — but there are a few women interlopers as well, and as is typically the case, Patti Smith is well worth seeking out on this issue.

I suspect Smith and Bangs are at their best in the back-pages of Creem: America's Only Rock 'N' Roll Magazine. Their intelligent and/or semi-intelligible musings are recommendation enough for this, uh, handsomely bound retrospective, but I am also drawn toward the book out of prurient curiosity (Santa, take note). As I mentioned in the earlier post, I was more inclined to read Starlog or any of Forrest J. Ackerman's many publications than I was Creem. But as is typical with mid-life hindsight, I now wonder if Creem wasn't an inescapable chimera that blew through my (and countless others') adolescent zeitgeist. Surely there are trace elements in my consciousness that relate directly to that shoddy little magazine, the way trace elements of plastic float around in everyone's bloodstream.

I typically follow a simple mantra in these matters: "Identify and move on." Stay tuned to see how this episode concludes (probably sometime in January).