We used to do these monthly newsletters that we sent out to advertisers and record-company publicists. I recently dug out the one for January 1994, and on the bottom corner of the front page was a list titled “AP’s All-New Resolutions For 1994”:

Work on the sarcasm in the responses to readers in the “Incoming” section.
Okay, this was about me, I guess. I was getting worried about pissing off the readers who were taking the time to write AP. Sometimes our editors would add these responses where they would just cut the person apart, and the editors thought it was funnier than hell. For a while there, practically every issue, I had to lose it and bitch up a storm telling the editors to stop slamming the people that were supporting us. The editors bitched about me behind my back at the time (still do; we just all openly admit it now), but later, when Spin made the near-lethal mistake of slamming Korn’s fans while putting the band on their cover to sell magazines, they got the point. Readers are the bosses-always.

Take down the perverted pictures when people visit the home office.
Again, I think they were talking about me. And maybe one or two others on staff. But they weren’t perverted. They were PG by today’s standards; so, to the editor who wrote this back in 1994, whether still on staff or not, fuck off.

Think of better excuses to tell publicists when their bands suck.
I may be one year off about this, but for the South By Southwest Music Conference that gets held in Austin, Texas, every year (Entertainment Weekly creams itself every year over it), we made up a shirt to give to record-company publicists that included their top lame excuses for why we should cover their shitty bands (see altpress.com for the complete list). Some of the references are kinda dated now, but it’s funny as hell if you were in the music industry 10 years ago when, well, the music industry was FUN TO WORK IN.

Send all AP staffers to a self-improvement course.
You know, they always say that the best magazines are created with passion, and that was the one thing we never ran short on at AP. We were definitely dedicated to this creature we were rebirthing month after month: from the editorial cover-story fights (“What about our integrity?”) to our advertising department’s annual ad-rate-increase meeting (“None of the indie labels will be able to afford to advertise in AP ever again!”) to, well, the fights that were just caused by all of us growing up and out of our youth (doors slammed in faces, desk items thrown, people running out in tears, shouting matches in the halls, grudges held, cold shoulders and power plays). AP was, and still is, a family, and all of the good and bad things that come with that apply to us, too. I’m sure there are a few dozen things each of us wish we could take back, redo, start over or whatever from back then, but all of those things, well, they made AP work, funny enough. Not to be cheesy, but sometimes when I see a 9/11 show on TV and I see the Towers burning, I try to think of how we would have reacted as a staff if we had been above the impact area, and I feel confident that we would have all jumped out at the same time holding hands. These people are my family, and where they go, I go. (Even if they talk behind my back-fuckers.)



OTHER THINGS OF NOTE IN 1994:

“Best Cover Photos...”
It helped tremendously that Norman Wonderly (our photo editor and production manager) had learned how to get bands’ publicists, managers and, in some cases, the artists themselves, to allow us the amount of time needed to do a good cover-photo shoot. The covers from 1994 are some of my favorites of all time: Soundgarden, Beastie Boys, Henry Rollins, NIN (their third for us, BTW), and the Love & Rockets issue later in the year. The more Norman got what he wanted, the more artists wanted their cover shoots to look the way Norman wanted, and so on. It wasn’t always easy; there were some nasty phone calls exchanged between everyone, and there was always some publicist who wanted to give us one half-hour of shoot time so the artist could go shopping or some stupid thing. Did we sometimes protest too much? Maybe, but we were up against a lot; we were underfinanced and still underappreciated in some corners of the music business, so we had to fight scrappily and mean when it was called for. Nobody takes you seriously unless you take yourself seriously, and that’s what Norman brings to his position to this day.

“Life During Wartime...”
Our new, pristine, boring, white-walled, little-natural-light offices did let us somehow blow off steam. They were spacious, and we could run around the halls, blast our music and throw shit at one another while we were on the phone. Jason’s office walls quickly became dented and marked up from all the shitty CDs I kept throwing at him from my office, which was across the hall from his. I just liked hearing the sound of plastic breaking as it smashed against his wall, as he would break into laughter. “Which band was that?” he’d ask. I’d tell him and he’d reply, “Oh, yeah, they deserved that.” We’d both grin and snicker and go back to work. He soon began decorating the wall potholes with marker graffiti. I just wish vinyl would have still been in back then. Whiiiizzzzz!

TESTIMONIALS

JASON PETTIGREW/Senior Editor:
Rollins! Looking back on the cover story Eric Gladstone did with him, I can’t see why H-Ro got his abs in a bunch. The story wasn’t a suck-up piece, but it certainly wasn’t the ripsaw-teardown Rollins interpreted it as being. A few months after the piece ran, Gladstone approached Rollins at some festival in Europe, asking him what he thought of the story. Henry responded, “My only regret is that I can’t break your neck right this second.” Apparently, Hank had heard from someone that we were planning on “taking him down,” when the truth was we wanted to know about the guy who wasn’t hawking tennis shoes and computers and dabbling in movies. I would like to say right now that AP has never had any agenda with Henry Rollins-he has not stolen money from us, nor has he had sex with our loved ones. We wrote about his Rise Above project in defense of the West Memphis 3 a few years ago, yet he still called us “bitches” in his latest book. Whatever. Don’t hate Rollins because of his work ethic, his crass personality, his intense drive, his passion for music and literature, or his sense of discipline. Hate him because his last few albums are generic bar-rock creations, the kind of thing Black Flag sought out to destroy.

ROB CHERRY/Managing Editor:
By 1994, Alternative Rock as a marketable trend had nearly exhausted itself. Seemingly anyone with a fuzz pedal and an entertainment lawyer could score a record deal. Kurt Cobain’s emphatic suicide on April 5 also sent the genre into a downward spiral. When we heard the news at AP (and we really did hear it, since we didn’t have Internet access back then), we were going to print with an issue featuring Sonic Youth on the cover. I don’t remember anyone being particularly surprised by Kurt’s death; there was just a numb disappointment. Jaded bastards that we were, no one believed his suicide attempt in Rome the previous month had been an accidental overdose. An emergency editorial meeting was called, and, despite some hesitation by editor in chief Joe Banks, who prided himself on running the trains on schedule, we decided to literally stop the presses and switch covers at the last minute.