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There are times as a small-business owner when you’re the last one to leave the office at night, and before you turn off the light and walk out the door, you stop just to look around at what you’ve built. In the silence, you walk around and look at your employees’ work areas.
It’s just a weird, exciting feeling, being in these empty rooms at 11 p.m. where, during the day, the creativity and energy are practically overflowing into the streets. You get this overwhelming sense of, “Damn, look at all this. This is really, really cool. And I did this-somehow!”
I started doing that quite a bit in 1990, which turned into a great year for us. It was one of those years where things were happening so fast. “Alternative music” had been deemed the new trend by MTV, and though we’d been named to represent an “alternative” to the other rags in Cleveland, we couldn’t complain when USA Today labeled us as the “bible of alternative music.”
Our covers represented the best of the lot: From Soundgarden and Depeche Mode to Sonic Youth and Skinny Puppy, we covered it all. Editor Joe Banks fine-tuned the coverage, honing in on only the best in the underground and the creeping-toward-the-mainstream alt-rockers. Yet, we still had the heart of a fanzine as exhibited as such when we ran the two-issue Revolting Cocks tour diary. Speaking of which...
Senior editor Jason Pettigrew was firmly establishing himself as our star writer with his acidic wit and take-no-prisoners attitude toward whatever he was writing about. The more bands that added him to their hate lists, the more our readership wanted to read more from him. With that in mind, when the offer came up to put Jason out on the road with Revolting Cocks for a month-long tour diary, I couldn’t turn it down. It ended up being one of the most popular features AP’s ever published.
Just as the hardcore crowd had its gangs, Cleveland formed its own little crew in the early ’90s. For us, it began when we met Trent Reznor. Trent had been living in Cleveland, playing with the Exotic Birds. His manager, John Malm, called me up and asked me to check out some early tracks from Trent’s own project, Nine Inch Nails. Over a four-month period, John, Trent and Sioux Zimmerman, Trent’s then-publicist at TVT, built up a close relationship with AP, to the point where we launched Trent with his first national cover. And to the point where he asked us to sponsor his music-industry-debut show in NYC at the New Music Seminar in July (where we also ended up leaving Pettigrew out on the street-SeeTestimonials). Within 30 days, I knew we had tapped into an artist that was going to explode, and I was right: The NIN cover ended up being our biggest-selling issue ever (it recently sold for over $100 on eBay). AP & NIN grew up professionally together, and I think we’ll always be joined at the hip. I think Trent was the first major performer ever to give AP props from the stage, too. I don’t forget stuff like that.
I knew I had arrived when, mid-year, we got a subscription order from Spin publisher Bob Guccione, Jr. from his home address. I hated Spin with a passion, and here was their leader, subscribing to my magazine! I waited a few months, and then I figured, what the hell. I sent him a care package with an AP shirt and a nice little note. He wrote me back, saying, “I enjoy your magazine tremendously, and at the risk of offending your alternative sensibilities, here’s a copy of the next issue, in which I wrote the cover story about Bon Jovi. A Spin T-shirt will to come to you shortly... Good luck with everything.” I never got the T-shirt. Fucker.
