On Jaan Uhelszki’s first day at Creem magazine in October 1970, she met a fellow new hire: Lester Bangs, a freelance writer freshly arrived from California to fill the post of record reviews editor.

His plaid three-piece suit made him look like an awkward substitute teacher, she thought, and certainly out of place among the hippies and would-be revolutionaries using the publication’s decrepit Detroit office as a crash pad.

“They said with a sneer, ‘We can’t publish you, you don’t have any clips, but Creem will publish anybody, why don’t you go walk down the street,’” Uhelszki said in a phone interview.

What began as an underground newspaper soon evolved under Bangs, the editor Dave Marsh and the publisher Barry Kramer into a boisterous, irreverent, boundary-smashing monthly that was equal parts profound and profane.

The documentary traces how Creem’s high-intensity environment mirrored that of the late 1960s Detroit rock scene, which was centered around the heavy guitar assault of bands like the MC5, the Stooges and Alice Cooper2

Barry Kramer, a working-class Jewish kid with a chip on his shoulder and a volatile temper, was a key local figure: He owned the record store-cum-head shops Mixed Media and Full Circle.

“I liked Barry a great deal, and in fact I wanted him to manage the MC5,” the band’s guitarist Wayne Kramer, who is not a relation, said in a phone interview.

The original idea for Creem came from a clerk at Mixed Media, Tony Reay, who persuaded Barry Kramer to put $1,200 into the venture, which began in March 1969.

“They both had different ideas of what Creem should be,” Uhelszki said.

In 1971, a robbery at the Cass Corridor offices spurred Barry Kramer to move the magazine to a 120-acre farm in the rural suburb Walled Lake.

And Creem writers sometimes scaled the fourth wall themselves.

Geils Band singer Peter Wolf invited Bangs to “play” his typewriter onstage; Uhelszki was gussied up by Kiss in full “Hotter Than Hell” makeup and played (unplugged) guitar onstage for her August 1975 story “I Dreamed I Was Onstage With Kiss in My Maidenform Bra.”.

Snarky photo captions and regular features like the Creem Dreems (tongue-in-cheek pinups of artists like Debbie Harry and Bebe Buell) were clearly intended for — and driven by — adolescent hormones, but the magazine provided opportunities for women writers like Roberta Cruger, Cynthia Dagnal, Lisa Robinson and Penny Valentine at a time when the music industry was intensely misogynist.

“The people who made the magazine, we thought we were equals to the bands in the early years,” she said.

Bangs, who had departed Detroit and Creem in 1976 for New York, died of an accidental painkiller overdose in 1982.

With the magazine heavily in debt, Barry Kramer’s former wife, Connie, sold Creem to an investor in 1986 who moved it to Los Angeles

“We’re all looking for something to capture our attention and our passion, so to me that feels like a really strong signal that the world might need Creem more than ever.”