The last issue of the original CREEM came out in October of 1989. Exhausted by the release of “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” and dreading the possibility of an End of The Year Readers Poll placing Simply Red over The B-52’s, we looked inwards—to the Love Shack of our souls—and, with hearts as heavy as a Cetacean Cadillac, we set sail. We wish we could say that we were always around in spirit. Or that, when there was only one pair of footprints in the sand, we were carrying you. But the truth is that we had to take some time to work on ourselves. To find our smile. To get our groove back. To, in the parlance of the day, have what she’s having. We packed up our KISS records, put our Suzi Quatro jumpers on consignment, found a sitter for Lester Bangs’ ghost, and fucked off for greener pastures (a cute little bungalow on the outskirts of Bob Seger’s secret Lincoln Park estate, where faun and fauna were plentiful, the earth fertile, and our landlord let us drink from his outdoor garden hose whenever we wanted).

In our defense, we didn’t know what we’d be missing. We didn’t know that punk would return, rock would return, England would return, that even boy bands would make a comeback, or that there’d be enough time when they weren’t around that anyone would have missed them. How could we know any of this? In 1989, the Pixies were a solid college rock band, not the prophets of songwriting they’d prove to be. In 1989, vampires stayed west of Ventura Blvd. Them claiming to be the world would’ve just seemed hubristic. In 1989 we were taking what Aerosmith was churning out with a creepy boner and a smile, and we were equally grateful to grade Neil Young on a curve. Hell, we were grading everything on a curve. When you’re convinced that rock and roll will never again be as raw as the Replacements were before Bob Stinson left, Great White covering Ian Hunter is like matzah in the desert.

So, yeah, we’ve got some catching up to do. From a to z. From “Arm, Mark” to “Zra, Better Than E.” It’s CREEM vs. the ’90s. The decade so fine, Temple of The Dog has 1,815,245 monthly listeners on Spotify.