aphistory




MIKE SHEA:
I started the year with my stress levels at, what I thought, were already their peak. We had run out of money several times because we had no idea what we were doing as a business. Actually, to even claim we were a business would be a stretch. We were a bunch of fans who lived and breathed underground music, and all we wanted to do was write about our favorite bands so all the cool people would know about them. Of course, we didn’t want the “uncool” people to know about them, because then they wouldn’t be cool anymore.

After the last few punk concerts we promoted that year failed to make any money to help finance the magazine, I had to start begging my mom for money to keep AP going: $1,500 here, $2,500 there. My mom was super-supportive of the whole endeavor, and she seemed to enjoy having a bunch of punkers over at all hours of the night putting together issues on her dining-room table and getting spray mount all over her nice tablecloths and on the carpeting, which resulted in our socks getting pulled off as we walked over it.

We managed to produce the best-looking issue we’d ever done (AP 07) early in the year. We had Darryl from the local Cleveland group Numbskull in this killer pose on the cover. Anyway, because of all the money we were losing and my guilt over borrowing mucho dollars from my mom, we started slapping a cover price on the magazine-albeit a cheap one: $1.25. We also got picked up by our first national record distributors, so AP was now nationwide.

We were a legit fanzine. Still, we fell behind with our printing bill (as most indie mags do in the beginning), and we couldn’t print at the same company for the next issue. So, we put on one more show with the Meatmen and Die Kreuzen, made a little bit of money, and walked into this unknown printer in southern Ohio with AP 08; another thick issue, with underground indie filmmaker Nick Zedd on the cover and a price increase to $1.50. To save money, we didn’t have the issue’s text columns professionally typeset; instead, we just printed them the best we could on my dot-matrix home printer (and they looked like shit, too.)

A cashier’s check later, a semi-truck pulled up on my front lawn with a Southern-sounding/looking/acting driver telling me he had my new issue, except he had it on skids and had no way to get it off the truck; and it wasn’t in his job description (or in his union rules) to haul it off the truck. So, while he sat there, I took bundle after bundle and threw the issues on my front lawn as rain started to come down. Finished, I just stood there in disbelief looking at one of the most horribly printed issues of a magazine I had ever seen. I immediately ran inside and called the printer, only to find out it had gone out of business earlier in the week.

All the stress of not being able to pay the bills, begging my mom for money and always being broke added up. I started having panic attacks and developed insomnia. Whether I liked it or not, we had run out of money and time, and my health was paying the price. So, AP ceased publication.

Depressed, I went to work at a major retail store, selling socks and underwear, and got lost in the club scene of the mid-’80s while the rest of the staff also went their separate ways. The only person that kept my spirits up was then-contributing writer Jason Pettigrew, during our long, late-night conversations, where we’d make fun of bad music and play quiz games like “Name three good bands on [insert shitty major-label name here].”

By the end of 1986, AP was almost a memory, though it was still in my blood. I was still getting phone calls from bands wanting to know if they could get in the next issue. I kept telling them there was a possibility of a new issue in the fall, then the winter, then in the new year...