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THIS, TOO, SHALL PASS

MIKE SHEA:

Something had to give.
Maybe it was the gray hair I was getting. Or maybe it was the at-times insurmountable odds we had stacked against us as a small indie publishing company. But I was finding it so hard to believe in anything positive anymore.

Rob Cherry, our editor, had burned out and left to join the freestyle world of freelance writing; his wife, also our advertising director, Carla Nocera, had resigned before him. There were fewer bands than ever before that we really loved and wanted to cover. Advertisers and distributors wanted us to sell more copies, while readers wanted more credibility. We couldn’t please both, so we got caught in the crossfire—and found ourselves unable to get out of the trenches in the process.

Our marketing director, Aaron Wilson, had been out on the Vans Warped Tour running the AP booth for the past two years, and he was reporting back with some attention-grabbing news: AP readers were coming to our booth and telling him how much they totally dug our more punk-rock coverage—our Blink-182 and Weezer covers being standouts. These readers were complete fanatics of the bands they followed. Aaron felt there was something here we should be thinking about, but there were so many fires back in the main office to be put out: From bills to be paid to cramped working conditions, to personality conflicts and beyond, his news just wasn’t getting through.

As the owner of a company, you just can’t walk out. No matter how much you’re sick of it, or how much someone pisses you off, you can’t just yell, “I quit!” and leave. My fire was definitely dying out; I knew that. I can remember one day at work, psychologically going through the motions of cleaning out my office: I took home personal items, took everything off the walls—just tore the room down to the basics. I just had to feel like I could walk out.

At night, back at home, I’d sit there and ask myself, “How am I shaking things up anymore?” I had started AP to become this definitive source for new music, and it had become that. We had outlasted many of our supposedly bigger competitors and even ended up with our own place in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame And Museum as one of rock history’s seminal music magazines. If we wanted to grow bigger, we were going to have to completely sell out, and I didn’t want to do that. I felt we had already pushed that envelope a bit too far at times. Now, sure, if we did sell out, I could see a nice payoff; but money was never a big concern to me. It was more what I did each day walking into work than how much I was being paid for doing it. Even when we were flat-ass broke and our paychecks were getting held for two weeks, I still loved what I did, no matter how much it sucked having to borrow money from others.

So I spent a lot of time reading books with titles like I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was. I started counseling to see if there was some secret career I really wanted to do and was just refusing to accept as reality. Yet none of this researching and soul-searching seemed to matter, for all it took was one phone call from a publicist about a new Nine Inch Nails record, and I was spring-boarding right back into dedicated AP-Land. That would last 36 hours, and then the buzzkill and melancholia would return—which just goes to show you, when it sucks, it sucks, no matter how many Nine Inch Nails records come out.

So why didn’t I just give up? Two things: First, I don’t give up when it’s something I really believe in; and second, I was afraid. The first part is self-explanatory, but the second part, well, it’s a bit heady, but essentially, when you birth something, it is you. It’s part of your DNA. So when you have to decide whether to kill it—damn, it’s like pulling the plug on your comatose child. I just couldn’t do it. I just kept thinking that the magazine was going to somehow find that one way to grow and yet keep our integrity.

It was the week before Labor Day weekend in New York City. I had gone up to do some work and was sitting in the public area next to the Starbucks inside the Sony Building on Madison Avenue. I was sitting there between meetings when it just sank in on me: The fear of letting go was gone. I don’t know what finally caused that moment to happen, but it just hit; that total epiphany. I felt that I could actually let AP die and I could—well, would—survive. Somehow. I had no idea how, but I was no longer worried about that. I knew I would be okay. Later in the day, I went down to the World Trade Center and looked around at all the suits leaving work, thinking to myself, “Am I going to be able to fit into the corporate world?”

A week later, 9/11 happened, and I was knocked on my ass. All I could think about were all those people who jumped; the ones who woke up every day, thinking, “Yeah, someday, I’m gonna…” and they never did it. All those unfulfilled dreams. I’d bust into tears just thinking about that whenever I saw a picture or video of someone jumping. Over the next few weeks I realized that I was so freakin’ fortunate to have been doing AP, and that this was a massive dream come true. And if sometimes dreams have to die, well, screw it; it’s going to die my way. I started it the way I wanted to so, if I had to, I was going to end it the way I wanted to. On my terms.

It was now October, and our next 100 Bands You Need To Know issue was around the corner. I had always liked thematic covers. I had originally come up with the idea of the 100 Bands issue as a way to give our core readers something very cool to read, while giving us something very cool to work on, for once. I started thinking about my conversations with Aaron Wilson about the readers he’d met at Warped. They were crazy, ultra-dedicated fans. For the past four years we had been trying to be something we weren’t and never wanted to be in the first place (i.e., Spin-like). So, the idea? Return to our punk-rock roots; the ones we were founded upon. Now, all our focus was on finding two bands that were cool, full of integrity and unknown to the NYC rock-media elite. Norman and the editors came back with AFI and Saves The Day.

I didn’t even know if this was going to work, but I was no longer afraid of AP’s possible death. If this idea didn’t work and we had to close the doors? Hey, like the song goes, I did it my way.

I had given half of my life to AP. I had given up time with family, friends and vacationing for this thing. I had given my sanity, my health, and sacrificed possible relationships, as well. I now realized that the only real thing I could not give anymore was up.
That’s when former assistant editor Aaron Burgess e-mailed me, and it turns out he had been thinking, too. alt

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