Sour CREEM: The life, death, and strange resurrection of America's only rock 'n' roll magazine, Part 1

ALMOST FAMOUS was probably the big bang that finally pushed it over the top. Doesn't matter that director Cameron Crowe — a former CREEM and Rolling Stone journalist whose semiautobiographical screenplay won an Oscar — presented a fairly Disney-ized portrait of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle of that era. It generally takes a sanitized sweetener to reach the mainstream, and, after Almost Famous, one could refer to both the late Lester Bangs and, by association, CREEM Magazine as "legendary" without fear of being ridiculed.