Sometimes bad things have to happen for good things to happen. For more than a year, my business partner, Bobby Crist, and I had been fighting non-stop. Sometimes we’d hit a good patch that’d last a month or so, but then another bad patch would hit, and in the end, the bad patches became more frequent. What’s worse, there were six AP staffers crammed into a two-bedroom apartment, so when Bobby and I would get into it, the rest of the staff couldn’t escape.

Eventually, my communication with Bobby became nonexistent, and as 1991 began, it didn’t make sense for us to work together any longer. We just couldn’t agree on a direction for AP. He was a corporate graphic artist who was trying so hard to fit into the indie music world, and I was the father of AP, who felt I knew and understood the mag better than anyone-including my business partner. I was arrogant and selfish, ’cause, deep down, I felt this was still my company. In the end, I learned a valuable lesson-don’t go into a partnership on something you started. You’ll never work 50/50 with your partner, ’cause to you, it’s always going to be yours. So we called it quits. That was very difficult, seeing him move his stuff out. It really was like a divorce. Unfortunately, what I didn’t see coming was the divorce court.

Over the next few months, things at AP changed from night to day. First, there were two newcomers, both of whom are still with us in 2004. Christopher Benton came on first as art assistant and was quickly promoted to art director. I knew we’d found a major talent when, later, European bootleggers started making illegal posters of his designs and selling them to record stores. The other newbie was Dawn Burns, who began her AP career where all new staffers started at the time: record-store distribution. She had absolutely no experience in the magazine field, but she had “It”-that salesperson’s ability to talk to anybody and get them to do anything.

Further signaling the calm before the storm, AP borrowed Trent Reznor’s touring van, and the entire staff piled in and drove eight hours to NYC for the annual New Music Seminar. It was the first time we’d splurged for staff travel, but we still crowded as many of us into two hotel rooms as humanly possible. We had our usual booth in the convention area, where we handed out free copies of AP and in return got free demo tapes from hundreds of bands, adding an extra 25 pounds per person in luggage to take back to Cleveland.

No sooner had we gotten back home than the shit hit the fan. The problem involved the L.A.-based company we had hired within the past year to handle our advertising and subscription sales, Spectrum Media Group. As soon as we were back in Cleveland, though, Bobby (through his attorney) appeared and claimed the right to sell his portion of AP stock to Spectrum without needing my consent. Spectrum, in lockstep with Bobby, stopped sending us our ad and subscription money in order to squeeze us into submission. I had a weak attorney at the time, and he was advocating letting Bobby do what he wanted. I filed a restraining order against Bobby to keep him and Spectrum, which claimed to be flying into Cleveland the next day, from walking into the offices as AP’s new co-owners.

Thankfully, while I was dealing with that, Norman Wonderly (always the calm one) got a hold of his sister, who was a nanny to a corporate attorney, David Inglis, and got him on the phone with me. “This is nonsense,” he said to me within the first 10 minutes. “He has no case.” A meeting was held the following week with David, me, and Bobby and his lawyers. It lasted five minutes: four minutes of us sitting down at the table; 30 seconds of David essentially saying, “Fuck you, you have no case” to Bobby; and 30 seconds of Bobby and his legal team sitting in shock. It was all over. Months later, we ran into Bobby’s attorneys, and they admitted they knew they never had a case and that they were just going for it ’cause they knew I had a weak attorney. Bobby eventually disappeared, as did Spectrum, with thousands of our dollars, and we got ourselves a great attorney who taught me everything I know about how to run a business with a level head. The old lawyer who told me to give in to whatever Bobby wanted is now a big judge here in Cleveland. Go figure...

By year’s end, though, we had a new look, a new(er) staff with fresh ideas, positive energy in the office and, to boot, our own little office kitty, Ogre.