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Jim DeRogatis

Born the year the Beatles arrived in America, Jim DeRogatis began voicing his opinions about rock ’n’ roll shortly thereafter. He is an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago, and together with Greg Kot, he co-hosts “Sound Opinions,” the weekly pop-music talk show heard on 150 Public Radio stations and via podcast. DeRogatis spent 15 years as the pop-music critic at The Chicago Sun-Times and has written 10 books about music, including “Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly”, “Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs” and “Turn on Your Mind: Four Decades of Great Psychedelic Rock.”

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Inside the Motor City Madhouse

Creem magazine upends journalism

Getting in the Van

The ethos between rock bands and their transport rolls on

Attending to the Smallest Details

The White Stripes’ colorful minimalism goes mainstream

Stories

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Tull in Campfire Mode

“No way to slow down,” Ian Anderson shouts with a dramatic flourish at the end of the classic-rock staple “Locomotive Breath,” concluding a half-hour performance at Wisseloord Studios in Amsterdam captured with pristine sound and video quality for Dutch TV in 1999. 

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From Acid-Rock Icon to Country Squire

“Who is David Gilmour?” one of the most distinctive guitarists in rock history is asked near the start of the 2015 documentary, “Wider Horizons.” A man of famously few words, he struggles to answer — “I wish I knew; I have no idea” — before finally offering, “Someone who’s spent his life driven by music.”

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Flying Sideways Through Time

“Time is a flat circle,” Matthew McConaughey’s Det. Rust Cohle says in the first season of HBO’s “True Detective,” smoke in hand and a can of beer perched before him. “Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.” Whether or not this Nietzschean proclamation holds true in most of our lives, it’s certainly an apt metaphor for the long, snaking history of Hawkwind since it first came together in 1969 — 53 years, countless ex-members and three-dozen-odd studio albums ago.

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Barrett-Era Floyd Lives!

Given the sad but enduring enmity between David Gilmour and Roger Waters, and the death of keyboardist Rick Wright in 2008, Pink Floyd fans have long accepted we’ll never experience the legendary British band in concert again. Indeed, even though I saw the group perform live once, in 1980, the core quartet, completed by drummer Nick Mason, was augmented by eight additional musicians, and they played “The Wall” and only “The Wall.”

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Ferocious Ultra-Minimalists

Though the White Stripes earned a place beside the Strokes as the most successful band to emerge from the garage revival of the early 2000s, casual listeners often made a few big mistakes when assessing the music of Jack and Meg White, beyond the fact that they had been husband and wife, not brother and sister as was once rumored. Taped in 2005, the Detroit duo’s set for Nigel Godrich’s “From the Basement” performance showcase gives us a welcome chance to set the record straight.

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Everything Ahead of Me: The Van Diaries

“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”  Credit Jack Kerouac for instilling the wanderlust when I read “On the Road” in high school circa 1980, though my mother would have said “blame,” given that it spurred an atypically irresponsible urge to abandon home, job and all commitments to climb in the van. Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” helped, too — “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold” — but I was never that irresponsible. Psychotropics weren’t necessary for what Kerouac called “the restless search for kicks” and Thompson deemed “a savage journey to the heart of the American dream.”

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The Greatest of the Gonzo Rock Critics

Despite the long list of brilliant writers published by the snarky but passionate rock rag from Deee-troit, for many who loved Creem during its two-decade run from 1969 to 1989, the magazine and its R. Crumb-drawn mascot have become synonymous with one above all others.

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Everyone’s a Critic — Even Rock Stars

As befits a magazine that saw no separation between artists and fans, several soon-to-become-legendary musicians appeared in prose in the pages of Creem.