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#162 01/2002
#163 02/2002
#164 03/2002
#165 04/2002
#166 05/2002
#167 06/2002
#168 07/2002
#169 08/2002
#170 09/2002
#171 10/2002
#172 11/2002
#173 12/2002
Publisher/Executive Editor: Mike Shea
Associate Publisher: Norman Wonderly
Accounts Manager: Katherine Poecze
Editor In Chief: Jason Pettigrew
Managing Editor: Aaron Burgess
Music Editor: Jonah Bayer
Editorial Assistant: Leslie Simon
Art Director: Christopher Benton
Art/Web Design: Rob Ortenzi
AdVERTISING Sales: Dawn Marie Burns, Howard Ross
Marketing Director: Aaron Wilson
Subscriptions Manager: Angela Hetrick
MIKE SHEA:
With 2001 behind me, I just had gone through one of the lowest points in AP’s history, and I was fighting one more time to jump-start the magazine into being what it was when it first started-at least in the punk-rock-spirit sense of things.
Norman and the editors had pulled together the AFI/Saves The Day split cover for our 100 Bands You Need To Know issue in February, and readers went bananas for it. We got more positive letters about that single issue than we’d received for the past several years’ worth of covers. Best of all, it felt like the readers were actually appreciating us again; the icing on the cake was that the bands were, too-they were actually grateful for the exposure! We were so used to bands like Korn, Limp Bizkit and other supposed alt-rock gods not giving a crap about our magazine when we put them on the cover. To them, AP was just another trophy to add to the collection.
At first, it was baby-step time: We’d test a relatively unknown band on the cover, then give the cover to another supposed alt-rock heavyweight, then go back again to the lesser-known band, and so on. We were testing the waters-and it was working. The readers responded like crazy to our lesser-known bands, and then everything would fall silent again when we tried to go for the big mainstream sellout move. After a few rounds of going back and forth, and getting final sales information from the distributors and word from the ever-energetic Aaron Wilson, who’d come back from another leg of the Warped Tour raving about the response to the “new AP” from fans and bands alike, I gave the go-ahead to cut our ties with the past few years-we were back to being punk rock again, full steam, and it felt good.
While the editors very enthusiastically refocused the coverage-Jonah Bayer, whom we stole from Law Of Inertia fanzine, was a tremendous addition this year-Norman and Christopher redesigned AP from front to back, going for a more action-oriented look: pieces and parts and blocked-off bits, all in multicolored formats. The older readers felt it was too “busy,” but our new readers totally dug it. Norman, somehow, still on a very small budget, was able to get some of the best pictures anyone had ever shot of these young bands-so good, in fact, that when their careers took off, many a record label would call up Norman, asking if they could use our photos for the bands’ publicity shots.
I had started 2002 not sure if we were going to survive this return to our original punk-rock vision, but by the time we printed our second AFI cover in December, I knew we had turned the magazine around and returned to it something it had been missing for some time: spirit. For further proof, I could see that the staff’s morale had stopped its free-fall and was beginning to climb back up again-I think the new, less cynical spirits of Aaron Burgess, Aaron Wilson, Leslie Simon and Jonah Bayer helped here tremendously.
If you’re doing something you love, it shows-especially when you’re doing it as a collective. Fresh ideas were beginning to flow again in staff meetings (we’d actually stopped having those meetings in the past year or so, because things had gotten too depressing to talk about); and with many of us feeling as though we’d been through trench warfare for the past 10 years, we finally had fresh reinforcements signed on who were ready to take the fight into the next phase.
And over the next year, they did exactly that.
TESTIMONIALS:
Though I’d quit AP in 1999 for the promise of more money (and no Insane Clown Posse cover meetings) elsewhere, by 2002 I was missing my old friend-this is, after all, the magazine I’d grown up reading, and though it sounds kind of corny to say this now, I could sense it was hurting. Evidently, Mike was sensing the same thing, and over the first few months of 2002, we exchanged scores of e-mails about new ideas for AP-some good, some bad, some we’re just now starting to make sense of. Anyway, after a handful of those e-mails and a few in-person chats, the tone of Mike’s replies started turning toward a potential offer to rehire me; and though I was happy with the money I’d been making in corporate hell, I knew my time there was running out (in fact, I found out I was going to be laid off the day after Mike made me the offer to return to AP). When I returned to AP that April, the mood was skeptical and cautious, to say the least, but after a few staff meetings and many editorial/art brainstorming sessions on how we were going to re-launch, things started to turn around, and you could sense that everyone was getting more into the idea of making this thing happen. By year’s end, it felt like we were all working in sync to pump new life into the magazine, and accordingly, we started seeing things we could barely believe: People were buying AP religiously; our numbers were climbing faster than we could keep track of; and we were slowly becoming the sort of magazine bands want to be seen in, rather than the place they retreat to after everyone else rejects them. Frankly, I was terrified-we’d just started taking baby steps toward revamping AP, and already this was happening? What were we going to do when the magazine really started to come together-and when would the bottom drop out? Because, as we’d all trained ourselves to think over the past few years, it always would. Boy, were we wrong. -Aaron Burgess
Like many AP editors, I started out as an intern. Then-associate editor Todd Hutlock needed someone to interview Blake Schwarzenbach about the latest Jets To Brazil CD, and since I co-edited my own zine, Law Of Inertia, he gave me my first big break. I continued to freelance for AP throughout college-even ditching summer school to fly to Europe to interview a little band called Jimmy Eat World-and three weeks after graduation, AP hired me on to work on the Warped Tour. That summer was a blast, and upon returning home, I learned that AP’s longtime music editor, Dave Segal, was leaving. It was either work for AP or try to make it in NYC with the fanzine (which ended up making it without me). Luckily, AP hired me on as music editor, and countless long hours later, I still feel like Jason and Aaron have forgotten more about music then I’ll ever know. -Jonah Bayer NEXT ISSUE: TAKIN’ IT TO THE STREETS
