As a publisher, you know you’re doing something right when: you can grow your magazine’s circulation without paying off retailers to take copies; your letters-to-the-editor mailbox is always full; publicists, desperate to be associated with the “next hot magazine,” start pitching you on bands that aren’t even right for your publication; and your editorial staff spends more time answering the phone than dialing it.

I really have to commend Joe Banks, our editor at the time, for nailing AP’s voice in 1993. He put together a group of writers who, besides being talented and having loads of music (and music-trivia) knowledge, were just light years ahead of everyone else with their tone-a funny, sardonic style of writing that magazines like Maxim would end up making famous. Sometimes I think Joe based his decision to keep writers around specifically on how much hate mail they received from our readers. This AP version of the Algonquin Roundtable consisted of Eric Gladstone, Tim Stegall, Dave Thompson, Jo-Ann Greene (Dave’s wife), Michael Mahan and Jason Pettigrew.

It wasn’t that any of these writers was deliberately out to say nasty things about any particular artist; it’s just that they were so brutally honest with their opinions. They weren’t often kind, and publicists would actually beg the editors not to let their releases end up in these journalists’ hands for fear their prized bands would end up being humiliated before AP readers nationwide.

Despite the less-than-serious tone some of our columnists took with their subjects, in 1993 AP read and looked like a real alternative music magazine should. Fancy fonts were used in places you wouldn’t see in mainstream magazines; the editorial content was directed toward the readers instead of the advertisers; and Norman Wonderly, our photo editor, was fighting to make sure our covers weren’t flat and overproduced like a lot of music mags’ cover photos were (the Dead Can Dance issue is one of our best early covers). Plus, we had tons of columns that covered just about every audio format at the time-from 12-inches to 7-inch singles to demo tapes-and we covered just about every “alternative” music style we effectively and knowledgably could, from indie rock to punk to industrial, metal and jazz.

So, eight years into our existence, it felt like we were kicking butt. Our circulation had reached 54,000 copies by the end of year, and our subscriptions finally boiled over 4,000. A lot of our competitors were talking shit about us to our advertisers and writers, and, in all honesty, the more people tried to hurt us, the more we banded together as a staff and worked harder and longer in the stuffy, too-hot/too-cold, two-bedroom apartment that 10 of us (and a cat) crammed into five days a week, sometimes for 24 hours at a stretch. Unfortunately, we were bursting at the seams, and the staff was ready to throw me overboard if I didn’t do something about the workspace-fast. Fortunately, a friend connected me with a community-development organization that had just lost one of its building’s major tenants and was looking for a fast replacement and waving around a heavily discounted rental incentive.

I think we all drove down the street that day and looked at the office space. Wow, real “office space” for AP? No more working out of apartments? Yeah, this was a real business now, even though it always felt like we were just going to college or something less formal than a typical corporate job. The space was big, with separate offices, and white. Very white. A typical basic, boring, stiff office space.

Nevertheless, the excitement within the office was incredible as moving day came close. We had a lot of memories in this apartment; we had been through a lot together in it. Moving day was, thus, very cleansing: We left behind a lot of our bad memories with the old place. The last, big problem was crawling into our small, damp basement and moving the thousands of back issues over to the new place. AP tends to be a packrat about storage, and over the past eight years we’d kept just about every loose copy of the magazine that was available-just in case. So, like a bunch of panic-stricken South Dakotans in chain-gang formation throwing sandbags up against the encroaching river waters, we passed the boxes to one another up the staircase and through the apartment to the moving truck outside on the front lawn. It was hell, and it took us the entire day, burning us out to do much of anything else for the time being.

When AP moved a few years ago to our current offices-a much roomier and cooler-looking industrial warehouse space a few blocks down the road-we took only the back issues we needed and left the rest there. Fuck it. Last thing I heard, they’re still there.