from wikipedia.com
Last month, Faber & Faber published How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter To The Greatest Teen Magazine Of All Time by Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer, and it was like a bomb went off: Suddenly, everyone and their sistah was falling all over themselves to praise Sassy and hearken back to the life-altering moment when they read their first copy. Women of wit and intellect declared their everlasting fealty; Gawker dropped the snark completely to worship at the altar of Christina Kelly; the blogosphere went mental, and comments sections went mental on top of it. Even Atoosa Rubenstein quaked before its might. What was this mystical magazine?
I didn't know; alas, I didn't read Sassy. My college boyfriend, did, however — proudly and unabashedly. His name was Mike Attenborough and he was the entertainment editor and then the managing editor of the school paper, and made me one of the best damn mixtapes I've ever received from a boy (it had fold-out liner notes with a complex story built out of the tracks — he called it an "indie rawk opera" in a nod to my showtune habit and oh, my God, am I embarrassing him right now). He'd flip through Sassy with his feet up, and though he took a lot of ribbing he never apologized for it, and kept a stack of them on his desk front and center until he left the paper. I wondered what he'd thought of the book, and if Sassy had changed his life. Thirteen years later, I asked him if he'd be interested in sharing his recollections (oh, please. You keep the smart ones around, always). From his igloo in Toronto, he filed this report.
The spring issue of Magnet magazine is out, celebrating its 75th, and it looks back on as many self-selected lost indie classics of the past 14 or so years. Seam, Velocity Girl, Chavez, Calvin Johnson — artists I remember reading about in Sassy magazine at the very time they were being mostly ignored the first time around. The bands, not Sassy. Definitely not Sassy.
Five of the bands named on the Magnet cover were interviewed in Sassy, and a couple more if you count members of those bands who split to start making records on their own. And inside the magazine, on top of stories about Iggy Pop, Bob Pollard, Unrest and Henry Rollins, there's an ad for the new Julie Dorian record and a letter about a review of the new Sloan album in the last issue. All bands you'd have heard of if you were reading Sassy in the mid-90s.
Yeah, guys too. How could a college music fan worth his Pumas not read Sassy? Reading it was a rush. Did Thurston Moore just threaten to whup a stranger? Look, Mark Robinson has a sense of humor after all! Hey, I think these guys are playing our local shitty dive bar this weekend! I wasn't getting that in Rolling Stone or Spin; maybe in Q or NME but they cared as much about U.S. indie then as they do now, which is to say they don't. So what was I left with?
Not much, especially as a Canadian wanna-be rock writer. There was a group of us nerdy, covetous, detail-oriented music addicts at the school paper (The Gazette at the University of Western Ontario, if you're detail-oriented, too) who would pass around the office copy every month. We — me, anyway — were pretty much hooked by the time the rest of the office figured out that Canadian acts like Sloan and Eric's Trip (which gave us the aforementioned Ms. Dorian) got more space in Sassy than they did in most Canadian publications.
I was into Spy and the Beastie Boys' glossy fanzine Grand Royal and Sassy wasn't much of a stretch. They were all culty, insidery, clever and hilarious. Sassy was in the rotation in no time. Flip to the CBA! Check out "Dear Boy" for more threats of righteous violence by underground celebs; read through the feature if it was a musician.* Check out the parade of indie-act features: Guided By Voices; The Ramones; A Tribe Called Quest; Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, in their only magazine cover. They caught him smiling, for God's sake.
Of course, focusing strictly on the music avoids the obvious elephant in the room: That guys read Sassy. Apparently this is now accepted fact, but try explaining to your editor in chief why a music section run by three college-age guys needs a subscription to a magazine for teen girls. It was hard to admit, yes, but it was an easy case to make when you pointed out that a strictly teen magazine 
wouldn't run a feature interview with a sloppy, forty-ish frontman who was, at the time, incapable of performing live if he weren't openly and completely plastered. (And SNL had done its part too, with Phil Hartman as "Russell Clark, senior editor of SSSSassy Magazine," though that had given my co-workers plenty of ammo for a rather unfortunate nickname). But the trump card was the display ad for Social Distortion's Somewhere between Heaven and Hell. It was practically their prison album.**
All of this came back to me reading How Sassy Changed My Life. I take comfort that Spike Jonze read it. And Hank Rollins. And come on, you don't think Evan Dando was checking it out? (Christina Kelly basically made sure of that.) But also, some of our favorite females read it, our friends or girlfriends or sisters. That was endorsement enough for a lot of guys — not to mention enticement (well, not for sisters). In the book, Jonze put it best for every male Sassy fan who did or didn't know who Bob Pollard was: "It was a window into how girls thought and felt." It was nothing if not honest, which helped a lot if you were into smart girls (yeah, we were, and Thurston was proof of that ).
I didn't know much about the magazine itself beyond the music and the odd memorable feature, unlike the girl who introduced it to me, or at least left it lying around enough for me to clue in. She talked about the staff and day-to-day like she was dissecting the latest episode of 90210. I don't know how she knew so much about it in those pre-forum days but Jane Pratt and Christina Kelly were like teen soap characters to her and her friends. The book was interesting to me, but it was written for them: The fans (and clearly, there 
were fans). I imagine that for them, reading the book would be like running into the close friend of someone you used to date and getting enough truth to explain an awful lot.
That's what the book is really about, the drama of how a handful of really young people who had no business running a magazine ran a magazine and did it pretty damn well by most standards, even weathering a boycott by Jerry Falwell (a mark of pride these days) . I wasn't one for the behind-the-scenes back then but for the apparent legion of Sassy hoarders in North America (ever tried to find a back issue? Who knew?), it's a good insiders' look at how it soared, crashed and burned.
It's instructive from a publishing trade point of view, too, how individual pieces of the magazine melted down under the pressure of its success: Editor in Chief Jane Pratt getting caught up in not one but two directionless TV shows; the revolt of the riot grrrl movement against the magazine that had helped give it exposure — for that very reason; how the writers, having became characters in each issue, were expected to keep churning out more and more exaggerated and outsized print versions of themselves. The line between sly, in-crowd reference and self-aggrandizement can be blurry indeed; so, too, can the line between way-cool outsider and too-cool insider. It didn't stand a chance.
I was long gone, graduated, or my version of it at the time, by the time Sassy folded for good in 1996. Goodbye office subscription, and farewell Sassy; I was in the city, with live shows seven nights a week, more great record stores than seemed possible and access to every good music magazine in the English language. It was a transition I think Sassy would have approved of. But by this time, though, Sassy would have had less to interest me; the version that folded in 1996 was not the Sassy that changed lives — that one closed in October '94 when owner Lang Communications sold out to the Petersen Publishing Company, owner of the chipper and mainstream Teen magazine. "In the last year or so, Sassy became more of a fringe publication rather than a cutting-edge magazine," Petersen's Jay Cole, Sassy's new executive publisher along with Teen, told the New York Times. "It missed a large part of the teen market and concentrated on a small number of teens that don't relate to the mainstream." In the history of magazine publishing, has any executive publisher understood a magazine less?
The magazine shut down for a few months, re-emerging with a chipper and mainstream version in March '95, neutered with diet tips and the bland teenage boosterism it had stood as such a violent reaction to. (Here's how writer Lisa Jervis described it in Salon: "It was as if a best friend, someone we used to go on pro-choice marches with, staying up late eating Mallomars and talking about vibrators, had turned up after a long trip with a bad case of amnesia — giving us blank looks when we started talking about "restrictive gender roles" and blowing us off to go to the movies with her boyfriend.") True believers dubbed it the "Stepford Sassy"; circulation dropped; Thurston Moore was nowhere to be found. A year and a half later, Petersen folded it into Teen. To quote another Canadian, it's better to burn out than to fade away; Sassy's demise was somewhere in between.
I wondered briefly what Sassy would look like today, on the Web, with a worldwide audience, pop culture strawmen/anti-fem celebs like Lindsay Lohan and TomKat to poke at and access to more small label musicians than you can shake a MySpace page at. But that's probably like wondering what Kurt Cobain's opinion would have been on digital rights management and iPods. It kind of misses the point.
Mike Attenborough is a writer in Toronto, Canada.
How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of all Time [Amazon]
Related:
Why Jane Pratt's Jane never quite lived up to Jane Pratt's Sassy [Mediabistro]
Too Young to Know: The Selling of Sassy [Radosh.net]
Q&A: How Sassy Changed My Life [Jezebel]
*From Sonic Youth frontman Moore's "Dear Boy" column, wherein he answered a letter from a girl whose crush dissed her in public and groped her in private: "The guy's a jerk. I know that won't discourage you from liking him, but he's got a major personality flaw: disrespecting you. Next time you're alone with him and he tries to get 'friendly,' tell him your friend Thurston Moore wants to kick his ass. And then tell him why."
**RS: Checking out this link, I just realized that Mike put "Bye Bye Baby" on the mixed tape he made me. I had no idea of the significance of the song, or the album; alas, I did not read Sassy.
"Dear Boy" photo from Gawker.com; Sassy spines pic from How Sassy Changed My Life via Amazon.com; Sassy mag covers via eBay.
