The Heart of Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Still Beating
A conversation with Creem’s JJ Kramer
There’s a saying about the Velvet Underground’s first album: it didn’t sell a lot of copies but everyone who bought it went on to form a band. Not everyone who read Creem went on to form a band, but almost everyone who ever wrote about rock music in a significant way has a connection to Creem.
Founded in Detroit in 1969 by Barry Kramer, Creem was a finger in the eye to the more established Rolling Stone. Creem called itself “America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine” and its cheeky irreverence matched its devotion to its infamous street cred. Punk, new wave, heavy metal, alternative, indie were all championed at Creem.
Writers and editors who worked for Creem read like a who’s who of industry legends: Lester Bangs. Dave Marsh. Robert Christgau. Greil Marcus. Patti Smith. Cameron Crowe. Jann Uhelszki. Penny Valentine. And on and on and on.
The magazine stopped publishing in 1989 a few years after Barry’s death. A documentary about Creem’s heyday in 2020 helped lead to a resurrected media brand, founded by JJ Kramer, Barry’s son, and launched in 2022. The copy on the first issue’s cover: “Rock is Dead. So is Print.”
Totally typical Creem-assed fuckery. And still totally rock n roll, man.
Arjun Basu: So given who you are and what you do, I’m not sure if I start with you or the brand. Normally I ask my guests about their journey first, but today I think I’m going to start with the brand because it’s so linked. But I think we need to get that story, I don’t want to say “out of the way”—because it’s a great story, and a potentially long story—but let’s talk about Creem first. Why don’t you give us an abbreviated version of Creem’s history?
JJ Kramer: I’ll do my best to keep it relatively brief. “America’s only rock and roll magazine” was—
Arjun Basu: That’s what it says on the masthead.
JJ Kramer: —that’s right. It was born in Detroit’s Cass Corridor in 1969. My dad, my late father, Barry Kramer was the founder of the magazine, along with another gentleman named Tony Ray, who basically founded it in the basement of my dad’s record store/head shop in the Cass Corridor.
Arjun Basu: And he came into music organically. He loved music. He had a record shop and a head shop. And then?
JJ Kramer: He actually had a couple of record shops in Detroit and he was a promoter. He managed some bands. He promoted some shows at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, which is an iconic venue that, unfortunately, is long since gone.
But yeah, so he was in that space in the scene as legend has it, he got upset because he submitted a review to another publication, another underground music publication in Detroit, and they refused to publish it. So he’s like, “Fuck this! I’m going to go start my own rock and roll magazine.”
And that was the genesis of Creem. And it started out as a very regional, I would say it went from local—a very local underground newspaper—then grew to regional, then grew to national. And at its apex, in the Creem golden era, it was second in circulation to Rolling Stone.
But at the same time it was very different from Rolling Stone. Intentionally. The whole “America’s only rock and roll magazine” thing was a not-so-subtle dig at the folks over on the West coast. And so there was a lot of depositioning from what Rolling Stone was offering.
It was definitely the snotty younger brother, in a way, to what Rolling Stone was. And it covered edgier things, stuff that was a little more on the fringe. And I think that helped Creem endear itself to the fans and the artists.
“What Creem stood for—and still stands for—is taking artists out of their comfort zone and having them let their hair down.”
Arjun Basu: It really was a middle finger to—whatever the “establishment” was. You name the establishment, it was a middle finger to it. And it was great. Lester Bangs was probably the most famous editor of the time and he said, “Creem is a raspberry in the face of culture.” And in a sense, it’s a raspberry in the face of itself, in the sense that it didn’t take itself so seriously—and it still doesn’t—which is great. We’ll get to that. But then your father passes, unfortunately, and then Creem goes through … a time.
JJ Kramer: Yes. That’s a great way to put it. It went through “a time.” My dad passed away in 1981, and I was four-and-a-half years old at the time. He actually left—
Arjun Basu: And you were chairman of Creem. You were right on the masthead as chairman.
JJ Kramer: —Yeah. He left Creem to me.
Arjun Basu: The “Last Emperor of Tibet.”
JJ Kramer: That’s right. Yeah. It was really cool during the show-and-tell when I was in school: “What did you bring in today, JJ? Tommy brought in his matchbox cars. I brought in my own rock and roll magazine.” So that was certainly an interesting time. My mom stepped in as publisher after my dad passed and the master plan was she would keep it afloat until I was an adult and could take the reins. To her credit, she did an incredible job.
She had no publishing experience. She was thrown into this. I think, if you were to ask her, it was not something that she wanted to do at all. I think she felt like she had to do it for me, in a way, to keep a connection to my father. And she did an incredible job. She actually increased circulation in the few years. He passed away in 1981, and then I would say like 1982–83 the circulation actually increased.
Then around 1985, things started to get a little difficult. The industry was changing. You had the MTVs coming into the space and the magazine really started to struggle and actually they ended up filing for bankruptcy. And the magazine changed hands after that. It was sold to a group that moved it out to Los Angeles. And they continued publishing until 1989 when the magazine officially folded. And after that time it was largely dormant.
There was a brief effort in the early nineties to revive Creem. Someone had licensed the rights from the folks who bought Creem out of bankruptcy. They published, I want to say, six or seven issues. It was a very different product from Creem 1.0 and certainly a different product from Creem 2.0. So they made a go of it, didn’t work, and then it was just a dead brand. And the rights fragmented, for lack of a better word. I can get into this a little bit more later, but I happen to be an intellectual property attorney and—
Arjun Basu: I find, of this whole story, the irony of what you do is just the cherry on top.
JJ Kramer: —I don’t know if it’s fate or coincidence or luck or whatever you want to call it, but those skills absolutely came in handy as I embarked on this journey. Starting, at this point it was probably about 15 years ago, when I got it in my head that I wanted to do this, I wanted to reclaim those rights.
“Boy Howdy” is Creem’s long-standing mascot
At that point, I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to do with it. I just knew that I wanted to get that back. And again, I think, psychologically, it’s all tied to my connection to my father and wanting that legacy, wanting that part of it. And I set out to do that. And it literally took 15 years to put all of those pieces together. As part of that exercise there were deals, there were lawsuits, there were fistfights, there were—you name it. It was really a series of stomach punches.
Arjun Basu: So was that because you just weren’t buying the brand, but you wanted the archives as well? You wanted everything that had to do with the IP going back to the start?
JJ Kramer: Yeah, and it was because other people were coming out of the woodwork to claim ownership in the magazine. Because once the rights were not well-maintained, it’s a little bit of a free for all. It can turn into the wild west if you don’t protect your IP, the archive, the trademark, so on and so forth. And it took a long time, because I wasn’t doing this full time either, to navigate through all of that.
And it was very financially difficult, emotionally it was very difficult because there were some really low points in that process where everybody around me was encouraging me to step away. It was almost becoming unhealthy. But I pretty much got there and then the voice in my head just wouldn’t let me totally hang up the cleats on it.
And some might call this a mild obsession with actually getting it done, but I just decided to lean into it. Got a little bit of momentum, had a couple things that fell into place with some wins in acquiring certain trademarks. And signing some deals to get some other folks who had claimed interest in the brand out of the picture.
And that’s when—I’m probably around 2016–17 right now—we really started to get some momentum, at which point I was approached by a director who wanted to do a Creem documentary. His name is Scott Crawford who, coincidentally, published Harp magazine back in the nineties, which was heavily inspired by Creem. A lot of Creem contributors wrote for Harp.
And so he was very familiar with the story, with the brand, and wanted to share that story with the world. And we ended up doing a Kickstarter for the documentary, got it funded, spent the next couple of years producing it. And it premiered at South x Southwest in 2019.
And that was the tipping point in terms of, “Okay, this is being really well-received by audiences. What else can we do with this? There’s clearly an appetite for more Creem.” People were asking in a lot of the Q and A’s after we were screening the doc around the country, “When’s the magazine coming back? When’s the magazine coming back?”
And so that sort of shifted us into, “Okay let’s build this out. What does Creem in 2021–2022 look like, in this era? We went out, raised some money and relaunched the brand in June of 2022. And that’s—I know that wasn’t brief at all. Sorry.
Creem founder Barry Kramer—and JJ’s father (left)—with writer Lester Bangs
Creem’s former—and current—editor Jaan Uhelszki, center.
“We certainly want to preserve Creem’s spirit, but it’s a different time.”
Creem’s original Detroit office, circa 1969.
Arjun Basu: No, it wasn’t but I but you managed to weave both you and the brand into a single answer, which is great. So the first issue of Creem comes out and it says, “Rock is dead. And so is print.” So you just go double-barreled on both cheeky and ironic, but very meaningful, which means it’s the old Creem. And so how difficult was it to make sure you had calibrated that properly? You had to assemble a team, first of all, and you weren’t a magazine person. So you had to assemble a team. And then you had to make sure that you really thread the needle on that first one, because you had a lot of people—Creem was influential—so you had a lot of people watching this. But then the reality is you needed a new audience as well. What went into that first issue?
JJ Kramer: A lot. And, full transparency, I think we’re still calibrating, we’re tweaking it all the time. Because it is a new era. And we certainly want to preserve Creem’s spirit, but it’s a different time. Certain things that were commonplace in print back in the seventies, the misogyny, things like that, that were rampant. It wasn’t cool then, and it’s certainly not cool now.
And so there was a lot of discussion amongst the team. What does that look like? And we thought we had a lot of latitude because of the brand, because of the credibility, that we can still go places that other brands, other publications, it just wouldn’t make sense for them. It would be off-brand for them.
And one of the first things I did was ask Jaan Uhelszki to come in as editorial director. Jaan is an OG Creem editor—she was there at the very beginning—and she’s been my Creem spirit guide for many years. Obviously, along with my mom as well, just to get her eyes and her gut feeling on things. Does this feel like a Creem story?
That’s one of the, sort of, big questions we always ask from an editorial perspective, “What makes this a Creem story?” There was a whole lot of discussion about not only tone, but also content. We didn’t want Creem 2.0 to just be stories about Steven Tyler’s dusty jockstrap. There had to be newness involved.
And we agreed internally on, “Okay, we’re going to say, roughly, we’re going to have a third of the magazine be about Creem’s golden era artists.” They’re called heritage artists now. “We’ll have one third of the magazine, or a little bit less on that, and then we’ll also focus on the era that Creem missed.”
So there was that 30 years where we weren’t around it and a whole lot of things happened during that era that I think Creem would have had an opinion on. So we want to make sure that we’re pulling that stuff into the magazine as well. And then what’s happening now, the music discovery of it all. And so we built out an editorial team and brought in John Martin, who’s our CEO, who came up through the Vice Media organization. He was actually the publisher of Vice magazine.
I think old Vice and Creem in many ways are like kindred spirits in terms of tone. So he brought a ton of experience to bear. Not only on the sort of operational side, but he just got the brand. He gets it and knew what we were looking to do. He also knew who to bring in from an editorial perspective. He brought in a colleague of his, Fred Pessaro, who was editor-in-chief of Noisey for many years, which was Vice’s musical arm. And then one of Fred’s colleagues Zach Lipez, who’s written for anyone, from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Creem. He’s got a crazy Substack.
So we put a team together of folks from different eras, so to speak, that had different perspectives, but all aligned with the Creem ethos of still wanting to be that raspberry in the face of the establishment.
Arjun Basu: So it’s interesting, in terms of the content, because Creem championed, not just bands, that whole sort of MC5/Iggy Pop/Detroit noise, but then punk, heavy metal, new wave, alternative, even early rap. Creem would go places that the mainstream wouldn’t, and then you went away. The music business is just so different now than what it was like when Creem was around the first time. I don’t even know where to look. There’s no target anymore.
JJ Kramer: It’s definitely a more challenging environment. There’s so many gatekeepers now that you also have to go through to even get access to some of these artists. Obviously the younger, the baby bands, are much more accessible. They’re really stoked to be featured in Creem. We can have more fun with them. But a big part of what Creem stood for, and still stands for, is taking artists out of their comfort zone, and having them let their hair down, and do things that they wouldn’t do or say things that they wouldn’t otherwise say.
And so that’s certainly been something that we’ve had to navigate and still have to navigate, and we’ve hit some walls. We’ve had to figure out new ways to think about that. If an artist who’s being gate-kept isn’t going to talk to us, we might submit an absurd proposal to their management about an interview, kind of assuming that they’re not going to respond, but that kind of becomes the story almost like a “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” kind of thing.
And we’ve had a lot of fun with that. So to me, it goes back to the ongoing ethos of Creem: you’re either in on the joke or you are the joke. We’re still finding a way, but to your point, it’s a much different playing field because a lot of these artists, they don’t need to be written up in Creem anymore. They don’t need us.
What do we offer that makes them want us and want to play in that sandbox? And, to their credit, there’s a lot of artists that have very fond memories of Creem 1.0 and they want to do it. They’re supportive of us and they want to—maybe they didn’t get to be in Creem back in the day, but now they’re stoked about it. Slash posts Creem stuff from time to time. He wasn’t in Creem 1.0, but we had him as our Stars Cars in the first new issue. And he was totally stoked to do that.
Arjun Basu: So then how relevant—and I’m sure you’re going to say it is, but I just want to read it because I think it’s a great quote—the mission statement from 1970 was, “Our bands are people’s bands. Similarly, we think of ourselves as a people’s magazine.”
JJ Kramer: Yes, that still stands. I referenced that often because I think that Creem is still a populist brand. We believe—going back to the “Rock Is Dead. Print Is Dead” thing—rock isn’t dead at all. We were talking about this the other day. It’s still the first- or second-most downloaded genre of music.
I know hip hop was at the top of that mountain for a long time, but rock and roll is right there. I think the difference is it’s been micro-genred and micro-niched in a way that makes it feel more diluted.
Arjun Basu: It also has an immense back catalog now. Some people are going to hate that I say this, but the first time I visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I really saw it as ground zero for the death of rock and roll. It was like a mausoleum of a dead form and I just thought, Oh wow this is it really is over. And then you have all of the stats where they’re selling more turntables than guitars. Although recently that’s turned around again. And it really did feel like it was on its last legs.
JJ Kramer: And, rock and roll—and this is a big part of what we do—it didn’t really have a champion. At least not in the publishing space. You obviously have music/pop culture magazines out there, but we truly believe that we’re America’s only rock and roll magazine. And we’re happy to carry that flag to champion the genre.
And we’re still a populist brand. And we use the phrase a lot: “Big tent rock and roll.” Meaning it can be accessible to the person who just wants to go into our archives and read about what the Rolling Stones were doing in 1973. It’s also accessible to the person who just discovered Chubby and the Gang. Or something that’s a little more recent. And what we try to do is find through-lines that help people understand that’s all rock and roll.
And you know what? If you like Iggy Pop there’s a pretty good chance you might like the Viagra Boys. And so you’re just turning people on to that, and putting our arms around them, and making sure it does feel accessible to everyone.
“We truly believe that we’re America’s only rock and roll magazine. And we’re happy to carry that flag.”
Arjun Basu: I want to get into the business model, which is the most rock and roll thing we can do. What is the readership? How much of it is the people who remember the first time and how much it is young people or new readers?
JJ Kramer: Yeah, it’s evolved over the past couple of years. And that’s been really interesting for us right out of the gate. I would say over 50 percent of the readership were people who were there for the first go-round. And a lot of those people who initially came in, they ended up churning out after the first year, because they wanted the “Steven Tyler’s Dusty Jockstrap” story. And that’s okay. Some of them have churned out, some of them have been like, “You know what, I just want to hang out in the archive, poke around in the digital archive.”
That’s great. That’s for them. What we’ve seen is, to replace those folks, our sweet spot has really been the older millennial and younger Gen X. And that’s a great sweet spot for us to be. It’s a broad range. And that’s not to say, like, we have subscribers that are 16–76 years old. So it’s a pretty broad swath, but that sweet spot of our new readership, those are people that at least had probably had some familiarity with the magazine. Maybe they didn’t read it, but they saw it in Almost Famous. They recognize the Boy Howdy! logo. They know what it stands for and they’re stoked to have their go at it, to be part of this next wave of Creem readership.
That’s what we’re seeing now. That demographic continues to build. And we’re less about demographics and more about psychographics in terms of what we’re really looking to do. “Are you in a rock and roll? Cool, get on board.” And that’s what I really like about how we’re approaching this from a business standpoint.
A lot of brands are tied to the idea of constantly chasing, now Gen Alpha. Before it was Gen Z. We have subscribers in both demos, but that’s a fickle audience. And you’re constantly in chase mode. So there’s a way where people almost age into a subscription to Creem. They know what they like but they also remain open to a certain amount of discovery.
And we’re having a lot of success in that space. And it’s record collectors, it’s people who are into vinyl. It’s people who have some discretionary income to spend on things that matter to them. And that’s been a really amazing discovery for us in reading the data, like, where we’re going to be leaning into.
Arjun Basu: So let’s talk about the business model. When you relaunched you had the archive which is just tremendous and so rich. And if it was just that, you’d probably get some subscribers. But you have a website, you have the newsletter, and then you have the print magazine—which is quarterly, and it’s oversized, and it’s glossy, and it’s beautiful. And it’s sub-only. You have kept it out of the marketplace in many ways. How did you come up with this model?
JJ Kramer: Our opinion on the newsstand model right now is that it’s pretty broken. You have a lot of magazines that overprint to bolster their circulation to attract advertisers. We’ve talked to folks in the distribution space and the sell-through is dismal on a lot of these magazines—like less than 10 percent. And that was not appealing to us in any way, shape, or form.
Our goal and our objective was to own our customer relationships—this community mindset. We want to interact with these people directly. We want to welcome them into our ecosystem with this community mindset. And through this effort, we see tremendous long term value, with a smaller but highly-engaged subscriber base.
So that was the impetus. If we’re interacting with them directly, it’s less transactional, it’s more relationship-building. And we feel like once we get these folks in, they’re going to stay with us for longer. Now that comes with its challenges as well. And while we’re not considering a newsstand approach, we’ve been approached by many record shops and indie bookstores about carrying the magazine. And we’re going to be leaning into that a little bit.
It feels on-brand for us to support those indie businesses and to start a little wholesale program that will allow them to carry the magazine because what the newsstand does give you is awareness. But the juice was not worth the squeeze for us. We print enough copies to supply our subscriber base and maybe there’s a few hundred that are overrun that we will offer single-issue sales. And that makes our subscribers feel special. And from a collectability standpoint as well, once they’re gone.
Arjun Basu: Yeah, I was thinking about that. We’re getting that a lot in this podcast. When I talk to people, they’re talking about the sensual nature of a magazine. It’s a tangible thing. You touch it. There’s a certain group of people who are tired of screens and the sameness that the screens feel. So we’re reclaiming things. Creem magazine’s coming back into print, vinyl, cassettes, to keep it in music. Jaan said, “Everybody says, ‘You’re crazy because magazines are dead.’” This is when you were relaunching. And she said, “It kills me that magazines are dead. I want them to resurrect. It’s my favorite form.” I think there’s more than that. Because Creem remains a “middle finger” to consensus. And it rejects a certain way of thinking. The tone, the captions are still the funniest thing, and the letters to the editor are hilarious. That irreverent tone in the old days was so important. And it must be equally important now. Maybe especially now.
JJ Kramer: Yeah. That was something that was non-negotiable. In terms of like, when we’re going to be relaunching, the spirit has to be intact. It might look a little different—it’s bigger, it comes out less frequently—but that tone is still intact. And I remember, just looping back to the business model, our decision to go back into print. And to lead with that was fairly late in the game. That was a pivot. That was a big pivot for us, fairly late in the game in terms of our plans to relaunch.
“We don’t need to be the first word on everything. We’d rather be the last word.”
We were, at that point, focused a lot on digital. And then we just had this “aha” moment. I remember it very specifically. I woke up one morning and I’m just like, This doesn’t feel right. This does not feel right.
And I had a talk with John. John was immediately on board because, to John’s credit, when he and I first started talking about him coming onboard Creem, that’s what his focus was. He’s Iike, “I want to do a rock and roll magazine.”
And I’m like, “Okay, that’s cool. Maybe that’ll be part of the plan, but let’s focus on all of these other things.”
And the same way that the newsstand model’s broken, the digital media model is broken. More content to create more clicks dilutes your brand into something nobody ever wants to pay for. You’re sacrificing quality for scale. And that felt antithetical to literally everything that Creem is supposed to stand for.
So that was a big pivot. And a lot of naysayers, people who were chirping in our ear about, “What the hell are you guys doing?” But it just felt like that form, that this medium for this type of content, for this brand—to lead with that felt like the right thing.
And as you’ve seen, we have a digital presence, but we’re not publishing 10x a day digitally. We don’t need to regurgitate press releases. Go somewhere else if you want to see who just announced a concert. We don’t need to be the first word on everything—we’d rather be the last word. And so it’s this evergreen approach where you’re creating content in a tone, in a form that you can pore over. You’re not scrolling through it. You’re not rushing through it. You’re sitting down, you’re pouring yourself a tequila or whiskey or whatever—whatever’s your poison of choice—and taking your time with it and listening to actual stories with a POV.
Arjun Basu: The tone hasn’t changed. So the heart of the brand is still Detroit?
JJ Kramer: It is a Detroit mentality in that there is this grittiness to it. And I think this is one of the things that my dad really stood for, and it certainly has passed along to me, and I think our editorial staff also has this—we’ve all got this perpetual chip on our shoulder from being told that we can’t do things or we’re in the wrong place, the wrong time to do things. Which is a big part of what we were hearing, going back into print. It’s, “What the hell are you guys doing?”
But we had this chip on our shoulders. The same way that the folks back in 1969 consistently heard. Like. “You’re in Detroit, you’re not on the coasts. How dare you think that you can talk about rock and roll as an authority!” And lo and behold, they became the authority in many ways. It’s a lot of rowing upstream and doing something that might seem antithetical to what everybody else is doing, but that’s how the brand was built.
Arjun Basu: It’s still important to you because the spring 2024 issue had “No LA, No New York” on the cover. So it’s still obviously very important.
JJ Kramer: Yes. It’s incredibly important. And down the line there will be a Detroit issue. There’s just so much to explore there. That’s still Creem’s beating heart is that Detroit mentality and every issue we have a “Greetings from Detroit” column. So that’s our quarterly love letter to Detroit. And usually it’s someone in the scene in Detroit that’s reporting on what’s going on. That’s just one small connection, obviously. But it’s important to us.
Arjun Basu: And now Creem was named one of Fast Company’s most innovative companies in 2024 in the music category. I don’t know if that’s amazing or a slap in the face.
JJ Kramer: I’ll tell you what, I now own my first piece of corporate art, my little thing to put on my desk. That was wild. It is an honor that a little bootstrappy, quarterly, indie publication made that list. I think that the industry recognized this reversion back to “analog as innovation through simplification.” What is this brand about at its core? It’s about a music magazine, about rock and roll. Why aren’t we just doing that? Oh because everybody else is, a thousand percent, into digital and going into video and doing all these things.
So that’s what made it truly innovative in this day and age is that we’re embracing that analog spirit and really leaning into it and it worked. It’s working. And that’s not to say that we’re not going to do all of those other things. I think the beautiful thing about the magazine is it’s this IP incubator. You’ve got all these stories and artwork and things that can be spun out into other properties.
There’s 10 podcasts you could probably extract from the magazine. And television shows, “Stars’ Cars,” and the “Creem Dream.” And we’re branching out into experiential events. We just had our second annual rock and roll day party in Brooklyn in August. All of those things are going to be part of what the grand promise of Creem is. But the beating heart is, and always will be, the magazine.
Arjun Basu: I guess that’s the advantage of having a bunch of Vice guys on the staff. They know where it can go, but they also probably know what not to do.
JJ Kramer: You hit the nail right on the head. They were there at the outset and when it jumped the shark. And that’s where our whole “don’t sacrifice quality for scale” sort of mindset comes in. Because we’ve had people that have experienced that and have seen the other side of that. And it can destroy your brand. It can take forever to repair that kind of damage. And so that’s incredibly important to us.
Creem has such goodwill and such credibility with its audience. That’s what we really are constantly protecting. In every decision we make, every partnership that we’re considering, it’s “Does this feel organic?” As opposed to, “Hey, we’re going to throw banner ads on the website and someone’s going to get served an ad for something completely unrelated.”
Arjun Basu: Or the KISS school of brand extensions, so that you can get KISS coffins and—
JJ Kramer: —Space Balls: The Toilet Paper!
Arjun Basu: Exactly. Okay, what are three magazines or media that you’re really digging right now?
JJ Kramer: Our friends at Mountain Gazette. I really, really dig what they’re doing over there. They’ve done a phenomenal job of setting the standard of what a quality print publication looks like in 2024. I’m really into that.
The next one I would say is Maggot Brain. Our friends at Third Man in Nashville—I think they would probably agree that there’s a spiritual connection between Maggot Brain and Creem. And so we really like what they’re doing.
And for the third one, it’s like a revolving door. I’m constantly trying to see what else is going on out there in the indie publishing space. I just ordered a copy of Bitcoin magazine. Ordered a copy of Racquet magazine. So it’s that third slot is that revolving door of, “Hey, what’s new?” I grabbed a copy of gossamer magazine.
You know, TBD whether I’m going to be a long-term subscriber of any of these, but I just think it’s so cool that this space is starting to fill up again. And I do think that it’s a “rising tide raises all boats” scenario. What’s good for them is what’s good for us. And we’re also seeing the Spins of the world coming back into print. And I think that’s very interesting as well. I think it can only help bring more awareness to the rest of us.
JJ Kramer: Three Things
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