Mike Shea, Founder of Alternative Press, Starts Ruffian Books, a Music-Focused and Cleveland-Based Publishing Company

For the past three decades, Mike Shea has strived to abide by the sibling tattoos he had inked on each of his forearms. Those that read, in graffiti script, "JAMÁS VENCIDO."

Don't give up, as Shea likes to translate the Spanish.

And from 1985 to 2020, that's exactly the credo Shea stuck to as founder and executive editor of Alternative Press Magazine, the Cleveland-based competitor to the East Coast elites of Spin and Rolling Stone. (And of course this publication.) When embroiled in lawsuits with ad agencies. When going into debt. When Big Tech shaped print media into a click-hungry online enterprise.

"There's a good side, which means perseverance. The bad side of it is that you don't know when to stop," Shea, 58, said recently at Visible Voice Books in Tremont. "And that was what I had to learn. I had to learn that the industry was changing so much that it wasn't gonna get better. It wasn't gonna get easier."

It didn't. In December of 2020, with pandemic-onomics braying alongside ever-present financial concerns in the media world, Shea did decide to effectively call it quits. He signed Alternative Press—"my baby and my identity"—over to a Californian media startup owned by the lead members of Good Charlotte. His stint at AP was one of the longest tenures in Cleveland media history.

Shea's attempt to untie himself from documenting (and living) punk lore proved fruitful for only so long. In March 2023, feeling bored and detached, Shea scribbled notes for what would be a natural corollary of Alternative Press. People were reading print during Covid. BookTok proved it. He would start a publishing company dedicated to, as his website now says, "exploring the unconventional" in music history. He would call it, appropriately, Ruffian Books.

"People are like, I like being able to sit down and have a moment, break from these damn phones. So to me it was just like, this is a no brainer," Shea said. "And I love doing books. It's more my style."

Though Ruffian only has two titles to its name so far—one, a primer on seventies punk; the other, a nice coffee table book called 500 Essential Pop-Punk Albums —its spirit dovetails with Shea's current spot in life and career. A spirit that loves the retrospective: publishing generalist dives into subgenres of punk that, it's obvious to say, Shea had a front row seat to in documenting the past four decades.

Born and raised in Aurora, Shea segued into magazine journalism after a professor at Kent State's retirement pushed him away from filmmaking. In the spring of 1985, Shea came down with mono; his right arm was "useless." He vowed to start a publication, one that would cover underground music, as soon as he healed. And one that would, one day, carry the heft of a serious music publication.

"We're not a fanzine, we're a newspaper," Shea and his staff of nine wrote in their first issue, dated June 6, 1985. They framed AP as a remedy for the city's increasingly shaky image as a music mecca: "We figure if Cleveland sits around and continues to moan about its alternative music scene and doesn't support it, how will it grow?"

Before the end of the 1980s, Shea managed to come through on his promise. By 1988, Guns N' Roses and Soundgarden made the cover. The following year, Shea moved his editorial team into a two-bedroom on Coventry, "into real office space," he said.

By 1993, Alternative Press had a global circulation of 50,000. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins had all made the cover—before, Shea likes to point out, Rolling Stone—and had simultaneously catapulted the magazine into a national standing. Even if Cleveland didn't feel that way.

"'Alternative' is not just a word anymore, it's a lifestyle," Shea wrote in the Plain Dealer in 1993. Despite "discovering" giants of Seattle grunge, and being lauded by MTV and fans across the world, Shea, then 27, didn't feel accepted by his home base. "Cleveland media are oblivious to us," he said.

That would change in the new millennium. In a bid to breathe new energy into Alternative Press' brand, Shea began hosting an annual music award show in 2014, attracting the who's who of the anti-establishment stock: Korn, Panic! at the Disco, Fall Out Boy.

Two years into the show, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame debuted its own months-long retrospective, both to commemorate the magazine's 30th anniversary and pay its due, in Shea's mind, for thirty years of music journalism in Cleveland . "Trent Reznor said, if you want to be famous in Cleveland," Shea recalled, "you have to be famous outside of Cleveland first."

Which may be Shea's model for Ruffian. Culled from his experience—and headaches— of managing an alt-press music magazine in the Twitter Age, Shea said his aim is to funnel revenue from his punk primer hardcovers into more niche explorations of regional scenes, or specific subgenres that bigger presses might not print. Ruffian has a "goth book" debuting later this year.

Which also means Shea's sourcing tactics from AP's early days. On a recent Friday afternoon, Shea walked into Visible Voice Books dressed in jeans and a shirt with Van Gogh's smoking skeleton on in. He approached clerks with a copy of Ruffian's Pop-Punk Covers title in the crook of his arm. "We're gonna do a bunch of these," he said. "People are gonna want to buy them for Christmas."

Shea walked over to Visible's music section and sat down half crosslegged on the carpet, as to ogle more at a row of picture books. He grabbed a book called The Album Cover Art of Punk! and flipped through it entranced. You could pinch him and he might not notice.

He held it up in the light. "See? This is what people love," he said. "This is what we want to do. To get people into punk again."

Subscribe to Cleveland Scene newsletters.

Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter