Blender magazine folded last week, placing Cleveland-based
Alternative Press indisputably in the top three glossy monthly
music mags.
The independently owned AP consistently ranks second in bookstore
sales, behind Rolling Stone, above Paste and far beyond
Spin. It doesn’t have the size or cachet of Rolling Stone or Spin, but it has the best track record for breaking bands,
especially since the millennium turned. It has single-handedly owned
the Warped Tour generation and has served as a tip sheet for other
magazines, chronicling bands like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance.
In the late ’80s, AP also caught the alternative wave before there was
a word for it.
As Rolling Stone and Blender downsized, AP held
its own. Blender‘s February issue had a mere 76 pages, down from
120 a year earlier. AP’s had 120 — down just eight pages from its
February 2008 issue. Founder/president Mike Shea says newsstand sales
are down 7 percent, well below the industry average of close to 35
percent. Its circulation is holding steady at just under 300,000. While
Blender cover photos alternated pop stars like Lil Wayne with
“celebrities” like Tila Tequila, AP kept ferreting out emo and punk
up-and-comers like a Day To Remember. Shea says they’ll remain on
course. (Full disclosure: This writer has contributed to AP here and
there.)
“I don’t think [Blender‘s demise is] going to mean much for
us, in all honesty,” says Shea. “We’re a niche magazine that caters to
a certain kind of crowd. And Blender was everything to
everybody, and it was more pop than anything else. Does it mean we’re
going to get some ad dollars out of it? Possibly. Does it mean we’re
going to get subscribers? I doubt it. The reader was totally
different.”
Another reason the Cleveland magazine can compete with New York- and
Chicago-based pubs: the good ol’ fashioned blue-collar work ethic.
Blender’s masthead listed 37 positions for just editors, online
producers and publishers, including six staffers specifically
designated to handle copy. AP has 14 people for comparable positions,
with one copy editor. As music magazines and newspapers collapse and
downsize left and right, AP hasn’t made any staff cuts. (Somewhat
curiously, it hasn’t had an influx of offers from would-be
writers.)
Of course, Shea says the magazine’s future is bright. But even the
haters are grudgingly acknowledging its strong hand. In its South By
Southwest music festival coverage, the erudite Village Voice noted that the AP showcase had the rowdiest line and declared: “Try not
to act surprised when Alternative Press is the last music
magazine standing.” — D.X. Ferris
CLOSING IN ON AMY’S KILLER?
Nearly 20 years ago, Rick Burns waited patiently for the police to
return to his auto-body shop across the street from the police station
to show him photos of the man he saw with Amy Mihaljevic the day of her
abduction. But they never came.
Burns maintains that a strange man with shaggy hair parked a sedan
in Burns’ personal space, closest to the Bay Square Plaza, on October
27, 1989. He remembers the date because it was also the day he brought
his newly restored truck to the shop to show off to his buddies and was
miffed to find his spot was taken. Burns says the man later pulled
around the shop to the pumps, where he was standing. In the back seat
was a young girl he believes to have been Amy Mihaljevic. The man asked
Burns for directions to I-480 and then left.
Two days after Amy disappeared, FBI agents came to Burns’ shop and
took all the receipts for the previous two months. They took his
statement. And that was that. He never heard from them again.
Last week, at the request of Channel 5’s investigative reporter
Duane Pohlman and Scene, Burns reviewed a series of photographs
of suspects and non-suspects. Without hesitation, Burns picked out
former Amherst middle-school science teacher Dean Runkle as the man he
saw at his shop that day. In November, Scene identified Runkle
as the prime suspect in this case after speaking to sources familiar
with the investigation and with Runkle himself, who now manages a
Wendy’s in Key West. (Photos of Runkle are posted on the
Scene&Heard blog at clevescene.com.)
Bay Village police have so far downplayed this revelation, stating
that Burns’ memory is not reliable. But Burns isn’t the only eyewitness
to ID Runkle. A girl from Amy’s school saw Amy with her abductor that
day. Recently, she was shown a lineup of 30-plus individuals. She too
went right to Runkle’s picture. Later, she told Scene that his
picture was so similar in appearance to the man from her nightmares
that she wished the police would take a hard look at him. Following our
coverage in November, the FBI did send an agent out to Florida to
re-interview Runkle, but instead of sending someone intimately familiar
with the case, they sent an agent from headquarters with little to no
experience with the investigation. — James Renner
CLE ROCK CITY
To drum up regional support for the upcoming Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame Inductions, tourism-promotion group Positively Cleveland hosted
what it called a “fam tour” (fam as in familiarization) with area
journalists last week. The day started with a Rock Hall press
conference about the inductions that included handing out proclamations
to Bootsy Collins of Parliament-Funkadelic and the O’Jays’ Walter
Williams, both previously inducted. From the Rock Hall, a bus took the
writers to the Beachland Ballroom where co-owner Cindy Barber talked
about how she and partner Mark Leddy, who quietly manned a pair of
turntables and spun old-school soul singles, had transformed the
Croatian dance hall into the area’s most happening music joint. Their
hope, she said, was that the entire Collinwood neighborhood would
become a haven for artsy types.
To prove her point, she took everyone on a tour of area shops,
including indie record store Music Saves, offbeat toy, gift and T-shirt
shop Shoparooni, and the newly opened vintage-vinyl store Blue Arrow,
as well as Exit Stencil, the local record label and recording studio
manned by Ryan Weitzel. From there, local musician and scholar Lawrence
Daniel Caswell took over, leading the group to Zombie Proof Studio, the
St. Clair loft space where his band, This Moment in Black History, has
recorded at dirt-cheap rates. Then, as if to provide contrast, he led
everyone next door to the more refined Ante Up Audio, where one of its
well-dressed owners noted that millions of dollars had gone into its
state-of-the-art gear, which has attracted national acts such as Dave
Matthews and Kelly Clarkson. Pulled from a Chicago studio where
Loverboy and Def Leppard once laid down tracks, the mixing board alone
is worth a small fortune.
The tour-takers also met Vincent Slusarz, who plans to open Gotta
Groove Records with vinyl-pressing equipment he bought from a plant in
New Jersey. Gotta Groove will be one of only 11 vinyl pressing plants
in the whole country.
After a stop at House of Blues, including its VIP Foundation Room,
the group went on to Tremont’s Prosperity Social Club, where locals
Martini Five-O played a mix of covers and lounge originals. Afterward,
the group split, with half going back to the Beachland to check out
singer-songwriter Glenn Tilbrook and the other half heading to the
Brothers Lounge on the West Side to see local rockabilly acts Lords of
the Highway and Madison Crawl.
While “tour guide” isn’t a usual gig for Caswell, he was well-suited
to the task. Here’s to hoping it’s not the last time he gets to drop
some science about the city’s rock ‘n’ roll history. — Jeff
Niesel
STILL PROUD?
Bob Serpentini, Mr. American and Proud of It, is apparently so
American that he’s in danger of defaulting on millions of dollars in
loans provided by GMAC financial services to his Aurora dealership.
Defaulting on loans, after all, is the new cool thing to do in this
country, especially when corporations are being handed fat bailouts
ever other week. Strangely, though, Serpentini doesn’t seem to be
cutting back on expenses — his slick mug is all over the tube and
changing the name of Lakewood’s Winterhurst ice rink to Serpentini
Arena couldn’t have been free.
Managers at Serpentini’s dealerships told Scene they’re still
selling cars. But GMAC says their company will no longer loan
Serpentini the cash he needs to put more cars on his lots. “The Aurora
location is in dealership default,” explains GMAC spokesperson Sue
Mallino. “Typically, we provide companies with three months to sell off
their inventory, pay back the money or sell the store. We’re working
with this dealer to give him more time to get through his financial
difficulties. In the meantime, we’re overseeing the inventory.” GMAC
auditors are currently keeping tabs on the books there. GMAC is also
still providing loans to customers looking to finance purchases at the
dealerships.
When reached by phone, Serpentini downplayed GMAC’s tough stance.
“They’re out here all the time,” he says. “We’re still selling
cars.”
What of the other three stores, in Strongsville, Tallmadge and
Orville? Other lenders such as KeyBank finance the cars at those
dealerships. KeyBank reps would not comment on record.
Of course, Serpentini could always sell off his share of the private
club he oversees on Lake Erie, home to a quasi-socialist utopia staffed
with young Russian women on student visas. — Renner
more online at clevescene.com
HAGGLING OVER MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the jailhouse snitch who
testified that he heard Brett Hartmann confess to killing Winda Snipes
was lying to get out of jail sooner (“Deadline,” March 25). But Summit
County prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh is still pushing to have Hartmann
executed on April 7.
At press time, an investigator with the Federal Public Defender’s
Capital Habeas Unit was trying to obtain details from the snitch’s
former lawyer, but the lawyer was resisting, apparently reluctantly, on
the grounds of attorney-client privilege. For details and further
updates, visit the Scene&Heard blog at clevescene.com. — Renner
This article appears in Apr 1-7, 2009.
