April 4 • 2019 41
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understand his father who died of 
a nitrous oxide overdose when JJ 
was 4. 
“It helped me connect to my dad 
in a way I had not been connected 
before. Almost everybody I spoke 
to had a Barry Kramer story,” JJ 
says. “He was an incredibly brilliant 
visionary, but also a provocateur. 
He had a lot of volatile relation-
ships. He would push people’
s 
buttons on purpose, reate chaos 
and then try to control and rein 
it in. Not everyone left on good 
terms with him, and some still had 
residual regret and hard feelings.” 
He says the interviews were often 
“therapeutic” for all involved.
A Michigan native, JJ grew up 
in Franklin and West Bloomfield, 
becoming a bar mitzvah at Temple 
Israel before graduating from 
Andover High School in 1994 and 
Michigan State University in 1998. 
After attending Emory Law 
School in Atlanta and working in 
New York, he moved to Columbus, 
Ohio, where he has been vice 
president and associate general 
counsel for Abercrombie and Fitch 
for a decade. He lives in suburban 
Bexley with his wife and two young 
children.

LEGACY GIFT
When Barry died in 1981, he left 
the magazine to JJ, so, at 4, “I 
became the chairman of the board 
of my own rock ‘
n’
 roll maga-
zine,” he quips. His mom, Connie 
Kramer, then associate publisher, 
became publisher to keep it going. 
Over the decades, CREEM had 
its ups and downs, moving to Los 
Angeles, being sold and going 
out of print, and, after a lengthy 
court battle, a group headed by JJ 
regained control of its brand and 
archives in 2017.
Connie, 72, lives in Commerce 
Township and is founder and 
director of RetroDoggy Rescue, 
devoted to finding homes for aban-

doned and lost animals. 
“Before I rescued animals, I res-
cued errant rock ‘
n’
 roll writers,” 
she says. 
She went to Mumford High 
School in Detroit; and her parents, 
Harold and Cylvia Warren, were 
active Jewish community members. 
Connie and Barry were married 
in Las Vegas in 1973 after attending 
an Elvis concert and she still tells 
people Elvis sang at their wedding. 
They were also married in a Jewish 
ceremony by Rabbi Jacob Siegel of 
Adat Shalom at her parents’
 home. 
Reached by phone with dogs 
barking in the background, she 
sounds high-energy, but pauses a 
moment as she recalls the times.
“You don’
t get to do all the ups 
in life without all of the downs,” 
she says. “I look back at things 
now with a lot of love and a lot of 
melancholy. I would do most of it 
again, but I’
d have to be young.”
Asked how she sees things with 
the benefit of hindsight, she says, 
“Every generation has its time, and 
I’
m a bit partial to the generation I 
lived in and grew up in. So many 
young people with so much to say 
came out of a subdued upbringing 
to live with an explosion of creative 
thought. It’
s not so different from 
what is happening today, but it was 
so much rawer.”

LOOKING BACK
While not directly involved in the 
film’
s production, she has seen the 
almost-final cut and approves of its 
warts-and-all storytelling.
“It is damn accurate. Watching 
it with an aged eye, the first feel-
ing I get is I don’
t know if I want 
to live this again,” she says. “We 
were loud. We were loud in our 
thinking, in our speech and in our 
music. The music was everything.
“Barry and I shared ideas and 
concepts,” she says of their working 
together. She handled the adminis-
trative end of the business — sub-

scriptions, promotions, advertising, 
sales — as well as being a cook and 
self-described “house mother.”
“He was not the easiest person 
to deal with,” she shares. “Success 
immobilized him. Nothing could 
happen without Barry’
s OK, and 
he wasn’
t okaying anything. The 
magazine was super-demanding, 
and nothing was giving him peace 
and joy. It was the perfect storm for 
Barry — we were getting a divorce 
though it wasn’
t because we didn’
t 
love each other.
“The day after Barry died, I real-
ized somebody had to take hold 
of the reins,” she says. “I just knew 
this was JJ’
s.” She says she kept 
it alive with the vital help of Sue 
Whitall — who became CREEM’
s 
editor before becoming a writer for 
the Detroit News in 1983 — and 
her father, “a brilliant businessman” 
who headed Paragon Steel.
“I’
m incredibly proud of JJ. He 
spent about 10 years of his life to 
put every block in place to make 
this film. I’
m not just proud of how 
he has handled the details, but how 
he handled the people involved.”
Surprisingly, not only was 
CREEM a product of Detroit, it was 
also a product of West Bloomfield.
“Cass Avenue was the original 
communal space,” Connie says, 
but due to safety concerns after a 
robbery and need for more space, 
the magazine moved to largely 
undeveloped West Bloomfield. Its 
original farm was on the northwest 
corner of Haggerty and 14 Mile, 
housing on the southeast corner.
“I spent most of my time at Cass 
Avenue and the farm dancing — it 
was the best emotional outlet ever,” 
Connie says. 
Affirming lyrics from the song 
“Rock ‘
n’
 Roll” by The Velvet 
Underground’
s lead Lou Reed, 
later given a local twist by Detroit’
s 
own Mitch Ryder, she says, “I truly 
do mean it when I say my life was 
saved by rock ‘
n’
 roll.” ■

Films With Jewish Ties 
A handful of films in this year’
s Freep Film Festival, April 
10-14 at various venues, have Jewish elements to them.
• Who Will Write Our History: In November 1940, 
days after the Nazis sealed 450,000 Jews in the Warsaw 
Ghetto, a secret band of journalists, scholars and commu-
nity leaders decided to fight back, vowing to defeat Nazi 
lies and propaganda not with guns or fists but with pen 
and paper. 
Featuring the voices of Joan Allen and Adrien Brody, the 
film honors the Oyneg Shabes members’
 determination in 
creating the most important cache of eyewitness accounts 
to survive the war. 11 a.m. Sunday, April 14, Detroit 
Historical Museum.
• A Thousand Thoughts: This groundbreaking live 
documentary event combines a musical performance 
by the legendary Kronos Quartet with an immersive film 
experience that explores the contemporary classical 
group’
s career. Oscar-nominated Jewish filmmaker Sam 
Green was born in Detroit and attended University of 
Michigan. 
Green’
s film tells the story of the Grammy-winning 
Kronos Quartet, one of the world’
s most celebrated string 
ensembles, who will be performing live. Newsweek 
described the performance of A Thousand Thoughts as 
“easily the most mind-blowing performance” at last year’
s 
Sundance Film Festival. Michigan premiere. 7 p.m. Friday, 
April 12, Detroit Film Theatre, DIA. 
• Mike Wallace is Here: For more than 50 years, 
Jewish broadcast journalist Mike Wallace went head-to-
head with the 20th century’
s most influential figures and 
became massively influential and widely feared. Avi Belkin 
examines Wallace’
s career and life using archival footage 
showing him on either side of the interview microphone 
as he rose to host of CBS’
s long-running 60 Minutes. 
Michigan premiere. 8:15 p.m. Saturday, April 13, Emagine 
Royal Oak. 
• What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael: Pauline 
Kael, the daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants, was likely 
the most powerful and personal movie critic of the 20th 
century. She ruthlessly pursued what made a movie or an 
actor’
s performance work or not. The film looks at what 
made Pauline’
s work so influential. Michigan premiere. 
Noon, Sunday, April 14, Marvin and Betty Danto Lecture 
Hall, DIA.
• Untitled The Amazing Jonathan Documentary: This 
documentary about the Amazing Johnathan, the uniquely 
deranged Detroit magician/comedian who built a career 
out of shock and deception in the 1980s, becomes a 
bizarre story. Jonathan survives a terminal heart condition, 
and documentarian Ben Berman films the illusionist on an 
epic comeback tour where Jonathan drops a bombshell 
that sends the film spiraling into uncertainty. Michigan 
premiere. 4 p.m. Sunday, April 14, Emagine Royal Oak.
• An Armenian Triology: Local composer Dan 
Yessian’
s life takes a turn when he is asked to write a 
classical composition to commemorate the 100th anni-
versary of the Armenian Genocide. The film, produced 
by Detroiter Ohad Wilner (whose mother, Niva, teaches 
at Hillel Day School), follows Yessian’
s creative path and 
the piece’
s triumphant debut by the Amenian National 
Philharmonic Orchestra in his ancestral homeland. World 
premiere. 12:30 p.m. Saturday, April 13, Emagine Royal 
Oak, 3 p.m. Sunday, April 14, Patriot Theater at the War 
Memorial. 

For a full schedule, go to Freepfilmfest.com.

Barry Kramer died when JJ was only 4.
Connie Kramer and her young son, JJ, back in the day 

