The following transcript comes from a conversation I had with Exposé editor Peter Thelen recently. I had interviewed a few big names in the prog scene for a paper I was writing on the affects of the Internet on Progressive Rock for a communications class, and Peter's history of Exposé, and his insight were too good only to be read in excerpts by my professor. So here's the full conversation; please keep in mind the original slant of the questions, and enjoy. Oh, and subscribe to Exposé.
 
 

How did you discover Progressive Rock / Avant-Progressive music?

Peter Thelen: It just sort of evolved out of the music I was listening to at the time... in '68 and '69, underground rock was all cool, and some of the bands had a more unique sound, concept albums, sidelong tracks, weird experimental ideas and stuff like that. Some of that might be called psych or hard rock by today's standards. Hendrix, Cream, Iron Butterfly, Doors, Zappa, Beefheart - that was progressive in its day. Later some of the bands started experimenting with more far reaching ideas, incorporating jazz elements, classical elements, folk mixed with rock. Bands like Fairport, Renaissance (the early band), Soft Machine... some proto-electronic guys too. It was all underground and cool. Floyd, Tull, The Nice, It's a Beautiful Day, Manfred Mann Chapter 3. So much of the music then was really innovative in the context of the times.
 

How did you find information on it in the 70s and 80s (i.e. before the internet)? Was there any mass media coverage of this style of music?

Peter Thelen: In the early part of the 70's, the programming was still pretty innovative. I remember living in NYC in '74, there was a station there called WNEW, they had a show every night called "the night bird", she introduced me to PFM, Tangerine Dream, Caravan, really hundreds of bands. That all pretty much died when the two pronged assault of punk and disco put the stake through the heart of innovative music. Around '75. It was commercialize or die... the few artists doing anything original started going further and further underground at that point, no radio coverage, no media coverage, nada squata.

Expose is the premier magazine/newsletter in the US covering Progressive and experimental music. How did it come about?

Peter Thelen: Around 1988 there was still this dude on the radio on KSJO (San Jose, CA) named Greg Stone. He was an old progger... back in the late 70's and early 80's he used to play some pretty cool stuff on his radio show. It was 3 hours on Sunday nights. By the end of the 80's, though it was to the point where EVERYTHING he played was stuff I already had... really predictable - Yes, Tull, ELP, Genesis, Kansas, like that. The same songs over and over every week. It got to the point that on any given Sunday night at a quarter of ten he would either be playing And You and I or Cinema show. I used to get together with like minded friends to listen to music, and we'd play this game... like, OK, it's 9:30 PM, what song is Greg playing? We'd all take our guesses then turn the radio on for a minute; somebody would always get it right... we'd have a good laugh. But against this backdrop, there was a guy I met at my company on sort of an internal music newsgroup, his name was John Szpara. He always listened to that show and was also frustrated at how stagnant the play list had gotten. He was into satellite stuff (installed receivers as a sideline) and wanted to do a radio show that had a similar focus on a satellite channel. I befriended John and played him hundreds of progressive albums he'd never heard before. They just blew his friggin’ mind; he'd NEVER heard a lot of fairly commonplace stuff, because this dude with the radio show (Greg Stone) had never played anything adventurous. So he was stoked... he started planning a radio show, eventually taking some radio programming courses at a local JC. Still couldn't play the stuff he wanted to though, so he decided he would try and put together a syndicated progressive rock show. There were two other guys working with us too, Ken Welchoff and Shayne Schecht. Shayne had some radio experience, and Ken - who owned a progressive specialty record store in the next town (and a label too: Progressive International), had a real smooth voice and was going to be the announcer. John would be the manager/promoter/hustler, and Shayne and I would put the music program together.

We spent weeks trying to figure out a name for the show, finally Shayne came up with "Exposure", we all liked it, so that was it. Shayne dropped out shortly after that, moved to Albuquerque. Ken, John and I continued - we made some demo tapes at this stage, with Ken as the announcer. Eventually Ken got pretty unreliable, said he had some leads on interested stations when he really didn't, other problems too. John got fed up with it all and blew his stack at Ken, and then Ken was gone.  Just me and John now, looking for an announcer. I suggested my ex-wife, who was a little knowledgeable about the music and had kind of a sultry voice. We did a demo with her, but around that time John decided he wanted to do the announcing himself, so we produced some more demos and John started to shop them to radio stations all over the country, but there was little interest. At one point he linked up with a professional syndicator who was giving john some tips on how to approach radio business people and such, and that guy suggested that we start producing a little monthly newsletter to support the radio show - basically just an editorial and play lists for the previous month, maybe 8 pages, a review or two... Sounded like a good idea. I had some Internet friends named Mike McLatchey and Mike Borella, and asked them if they could contribute a few reviews or something, just stuff they had already written in the Gibraltar email weekly digest. Around the same time, the first progfest happened. John and I went to it, with both Mike's too. Anglagard blew John's mind, made him even more determined to do this. Mike Borella wrote a review of the event, and that became the cover story of the first newsletter, which came out around October of 93; we called it Exposé, establishing a connection with the Exposure radio show, which wasn't on the air yet.

That's how Exposé started. Issue 1 was like 12 pages. John was the editor/publisher; he had some desktop publishing experience. Mike, Mike and I were the writers.
 

How did it evolve from there?

Peter Thelen: Around the time of issue #2, John picked up our first station - it was in Key West Florida. We got more and more writers as time went on, and John picked up a few more stations... Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Chicago, Plattsburg - eventually Florida keys dumped us (format change), all this time I was working with John on the radio show too, putting together the music program, with some input from him. Eventually he got a gig in San Jose on KSJS on Sunday night, just around the time Greg Stone's show disappeared off the air. I used to go there to the station and hang out, but I never announced, he would do all the announcing. Through that time I got more and more involved within the publication and after a few issues was doing all the editing too - John was just doing the desktop publishing, and eventually lost interest in that even, so we decided I would take the magazine and he would program his own radio show, and theoretically both would be better as a result; that happened around issue 10. He still did the desktop publishing on #11, but with issue #12 I started working with a new guy Brad Owen and we totally changed the look, keeping some, but totally overhauling it. Brad really loved Exposé, he was a graphic artist, doing packaging and such, but he didn't really have time for it. He did an awesome job on issue #12, which to this day it remains one of our best looking. But on #13 he delegated it to an employee who screwed it up royally. On issue #14 Brad took it back, but then never had time to finish it... it was like 2+ months on his desk. Finally I asked Paul Hightower, who was one of the staff writers, but also an advertising design professional, if he could take over the publishing, he said yeah. He has done issue #14 and every issue since.
 

How do you market Expose? How do you go about making the general public, as well as the underground community aware of your publication?

Peter Thelen: John smooth talked a deal with David Overstreet, who was involved in the first progfest, whereby every attendee got a little postcard to mail to us for information on the Exposure radio show - see, at that time the radio show was the main thrust of everything, there was no newsletter yet. Greg also gave John a list of everyone who signed the sign-up sheet at progfest. When the first Exposé was published, John sent it out free to everyone who attended Progfest and signed the sheet, or who sent us the postcard. At that point there was a little email activity too, but it was minor. It was free. Later, with issue #2 and beyond (by that time the radio show was on the air in the Florida keys) he would advertise it on the radio show, and that helped it grow some more. The size of Exposé grew with each successive issue, as well as the number of subscribers; I forget how many pages we were by issue #2, maybe 24? By issue 4 or 5 I think John had a couple more stations on the air, in way-upstate NY and on a little station in Chicago south side, both college stations. He was sending the show out on VHS tape every week. More people heard about exposé across the country and world, and by around issue #3 or #4 the thing had really developed legs of its own, apart from the radio show. Hell, we were picking up some subscribers in Europe, Japan, and South America. Nowadays its word of mouth mostly... I swap ads with other magazines; attend as many festivals as possible, and we have a decent web page to support exposé (now an 80+ page magazine, still in a sort-of newsletter format). A lot of people search the web looking for their favorite artist, and happen on our web page, and subscribe. Gary Davis at the Artist shop has brought us a ton of new subscribers also.
 

Has Expose been available in any major mass media venues? (Book stores, record stores). Do you feel that has helped raise awareness of the publication?

Peter Thelen: From issue #5 thru issue #10, exposé was available in Tower records nationwide. I terminated the relationship - I would send them 300 copies and they would send back 150 torn off front covers and want full credit for ones they didn't sell. I wanted full magazines back so I could resell them. That's why I have no copies left of the first 10 issues... to me it didn't seem like tower was making ANY effort to get them into the right stores. I was constantly getting mail from readers who said they went to their local tower store and couldn't find it anywhere. Yet Tower is sending me 150 torn off covers back. Something's not right here.

I've got it in several other independent record stores in the US, Canada, even one in Japan, and it's doing OK in those stores, though mostly it's 10-20 quantities for each store. A local store here in Sunnyvale moves between 50 and 70 of each issue.
 

How many subscribers do you have?

Peter Thelen: 621 as of today, plus I have about another 300 that go out complimentary, labels, merchants, advertisers, artists we cover in that particular issue, and the writers that volunteer their time to make it happen. Subscribers are growing at a slow but steady pace. The store & mail order sales have declined a little bit as some of those folks turn into subscribers. The store in Sunnyvale used to take 90 and move them all. Today they take 60 or 70 and have a few to give back when I deliver the next issue.
 

How many bands/artists get in touch to have their releases featured in the magazine? How many reviews do you print per issue?

Peter Thelen: We can do somewhere around 300-350 reviews per issue... that's a swag. Let me check the database to be sure... ok, in issue 22 we reviewed 291 different releases, some of those were multiple reviews - Roundtable reviews where 2 or 3 different writers each contribute a review to a single release... we do between 12 and 18 like that every issue.

I know in some issues we have done well over 350 reviews, especially when we review entire labels' outputs up in the feature section and like that. Our page count varies from around 84-92 pages, so that will have some bearing on how many as well. To answer the first question, probably a quarter of the promos we get are never reviewed, either because they are way outside of exposé's focus (either too in or too out), or because we just don't have resources to review that many and/or print them. A lot of the ones we don't print turn up on our web page "extra!" section.
 

Approximately, how many subscribers did you have to start with? How many did you have when you made is available through subscription?

Peter Thelen: Zero - the first issue went out free to anyone who asked for it & folks who attended the first progfest. People started subscribing immediately after we started sending out issue #1. In those days the subscription cost was like 12 issues for $12. John Szpara wanted it to be a monthly LOL. We honored all those early subscriptions, right up to issue 12 when the cover price was like $4.50 and subscriptions were $18 for 4. Those early subscribers got a REALLY good deal ;-)
 

How do you feel the Internet has influenced today's Progressive Rock / Avant-progressive music scene? Are there more fans of this music, or are they simply able to find each other and information easier?

Peter Thelen: No, I think there were a lot more fans in its heyday. People shouldn't kid themselves. Yes, ELP and Crimson used to sell out stadiums with thousands of seats each on nationwide tours... hell, they still do. A lot of those folks coming to see Yes are loyal fans from the early days who will keep coming to their shows no matter how shitty they get. But take a "current" prog band like Deus Ex Machina or Anekdoten for example, give them a venue in a populated area and your lucky if 150 people show up. But if it weren’t for the Internet, these bands wouldn't be showing up in America at all.

Two thing have fueled the so-called resurgence: first is the advent of the CD medium that allowed many great titles that had been out of print for years to be available once again, so you have a whole new generation discovering bands like Gong and Mezquita and Tasavallan Presidentti and so on. The second is the Internet, so information about these older bands and newer or current bands playing similar or more challenging music travels fast. But don't kid yourself... compared to the way it was in 70-73, this is a major underground thing. Radio support and mainstream press support just isn't there. I guess if mainstream press support WAS there, then exposé would be out of business, so I'm not complaining ;-)
 

- Mike Prete [December 2001]