Haves And Have-Nots

Last night, we stayed late at the office in order to crash a
party upstairs. We were finishing the new issue, too. Needless to say,
we were thirsty. Someone here in the art department (always the
hipsters at any magazine) had received an invitation to the WEA/ADA
office holiday shindig up on the seventh floor.

WEA is Warner Elektra Atlantic, and ADA is the Alternative Distribution Alliance.
In other words, the music biz—or at least Time Warner’s local folks
whose main job is to make sure Best Buy and Target stores get their CD
inventory. We’re told that Best Buy and Target are today the two
largest retailers of music on the planet, followed closely by Wal-Mart.

Now,
we’ve seen our fair share of music-biz hipsters on elevators, and we’ve
gibbered about Pavement and Modest Mouse enough to know how to inveigle
our way into a high-buck party in a swank office with leather couches
and atomic sound systems. We made our way up.

There were
beautiful boys and girls everywhere, and there were framed records on
the walls, and there was a spread of salsa and hummos and celery
sticks, and a god-awful lot of liquor, beer, and wine. We tried to
chit-chat with the powerful people, but the powerful people were
standing back with arms folded over name tags, avoiding eye contact,
trying to make sure—we guess—that no one set the place on fire.
(Smoking! Inside the office! When was the last time you saw that? Rock
‘n’ roll!)

We were overwhelmed by the memory of working more
directly with the music industry, the way we did a few years ago. Any
setting like this is always a study in extremes. You have very
powerful, very wealthy executives in tony offices, with unlimited
expense accounts, surrounded by starving artists and prestige laborers.
That is, the music industry is a star-making industry that attracts all
sorts of good-hearted people who will work
for peanuts as long as they can be in an office that plays cool music,
and allows you to wear leather pants and tee-shirts to work. (The
magazine business is not dissimilar,with one minor difference: We don’t
get filthy rich. Also, leather makes our butts sweat. We hate that.)
The neatest trick is when big money gets paired with a brilliant idea,
and deserving people receive their just reward—from an ingenious
A&R guy, to a cutthroat distribution manager, to a superoriginal band that represents the future of rock ‘n’ roll. It does happen.

This
is a neat trick because it is the rare exception. Money tends to be
conservative, hunger tends to be desperate. It happens just often
enough to be maddening—powerful people with equal amounts of money and
curiosity, willing to take a risk on creativity.

We mention all
this, because we ran into an old friend at the party, Simon Peter
Groebner. He is now comfortably installed in a permanent position with
the Star Tribune, where he writes about music, and god bless him for
it. We’ve known Simon Peter for almost ten years now, and he’s been
through a lot. The life of the writer and editor can be a difficult
one, especially if you can’t pick up and move to another city. Back in
the day, we used to run into Groebner at places like the music
conference SXSW, down in Texas. It was not uncommon to find that Simon
had hitchhiked the whole way, and was sleeping on whatever floor of
whichever record executive’s hotel room he could weasel for the night.
That was certainly rock ‘n’ roll, and we always felt a pang of guilt
for being—at the time—at the front end of the gravy train.

Anyway,
Simon Peter at one point took one of the coolest jobs in the Twin
Cities. He became the editor of FATE magazine—an awesome, pulpy,
salacious little publication that explores the supernatural and the
conspiratorial. FATE is one of the oldest magazines in the Twin Cities,
having been launched back in the forties. In the 1980s, Carl Weschke,
the wiccan head of Llewellyn publishing in St. Paul, bought the
magazine. It seemed like a match made in, erm, a parallel universe. By
the late-90s, Simon Peter was working on the magazine, and quickly rose
through the ranks to become its editor in chief.

This was
right at the peak of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the X-Files. The time
could not have been better for FATE magazine to boldly go into new
markets, and capture young readers. Simon Peter, in his first job as an
editor, put together one of the finest business plans we have ever
seen—laying out just how he and his team were going to take FATE where
it had never been taken before, into the big time and into the
mainstream.

The main problem with FATE was that it remained
inertly earnest. It was a magazine locked in the 1950s. It ran stories
about UFOs and Loch Ness Monsters without acknowledging the exploding,
post-ironic world of pop culture. It spoke to its audience as if time
had stood still for them, too. In other words, FATE was comfortable
with a fringy readership that could not tolerate any real skepticism,
or tongue-in-cheek irony, or even the mainstream popularization of its
subject matter.

Llewellyn at the time was totally cashing in
on the phenomenon, becoming the world’s largest publisher of “occult”
books, especially a series about witchcraft specifically for teenage
girls. It was pretty cool.

So. Everything was perfectly in
place. A brilliant young editor with a great idea and a solid business
plan, and plenty of money at his disposal. The only thing missing was
the go-ahead, the nod of confidence, the “damn the torpedos, what are
we going to lose, money? We can always get more money!*” kind of
entrepreneurial spirit. (*Those, by the way, were the actual words,
uttered three years ago, of our own publisher. Yes, we know how lucky we have been.)

Alas. Llewellyn took a pass, the magazine was downgraded and eventually sold to an old-school FATE steward,
and Simon Peter moved on. Today, he’s a made man, but we can’t help
looking back with deep regrets at what might have been, if his bosses
had had any adventurous spirit at all.

Maybe they could see into the future, and they didn’t like what they saw. Fate can be such a bore.—The Editor in Cheese


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