Does anyone remember Music Plus, the music-video retail chain? Sometime in late ’89 Music Plus management, inspired by the success of Tower Records’ in-house publication Pulse, decided to publish their own in-house magazine promoting CD and VHS titles. I was eventually hired by self-styled publisher Jeffrey Stern to be the senior editor, and we came up with the name Prime. Our fledgling publication, which Music Plus management liked but did almost nothing to promote in their stores, was TV Guide-sized. We worked out of offices in Santa Monica near the corner of Ocean and Wilshire, and then out of an Ocean Park Blvd. office building. I forget how many monthly issues we produced (eight or nine?) before relations between Stern and I started to go south. I worked for him for maybe 15 or 16 months, something like that. I began as an Entertainment Weekly stringer in the spring of ’91, and it’s been nothing but fun and games since.
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Why am I posting a 26 and 1/2 year-old magazine cover (it was dated December 1990) in April of 2017? Last weekend the SRO cleaned out the bedroom closet and dumped a lot of stuff. This is one of the publications I saved.
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