Twenty-five years ago, some current University of Georgia freshmen weren't even a gleam in daddy's eye, because daddy hadn't hit puberty yet. Tiffany's "I Think We're Alone Now" was No. 1 on the Billboard chart. Ronald Reagan was president.

But something different was happening in Athens, a place bursting with great music and art and unforgettable personalities, where the liberal townies were about to revolt against their good-'ol-boy government. Flagpole was here to chronicle it all.

We reached out to more than a dozen former publishers, editors and writers who were kind enough to help us tell the history of Flagpole—hangovers, permanent hearing loss and all. Because it's a magazine that is more than just about Athens. It is Athens. And, to paraphrase William Faulkner, both Flagpole and Athens have not only endured, but prevailed.

Although we're at an age when we ought to be settling down and thinking about maybe going to law school, Flagpole is still bringing you irreverent and insightful coverage of the local arts, music and political scenes. Bring on the next 25 years.

DENNIS GREENIA: Go back to Athens in the '80s. R.E.M. has had some success, but they're becoming a more widely known band. Green had just come out, I think, or maybe Document. Amazing things were happening all the time. The local press wasn't doing a very good job of covering it at all.

JARED BAILEY: There was something called Classic City Live. It was basically advertorial. Only the larger venues that had cover bands or out-of-town bands could get coverage, like O'Malley's. I was frustrated we weren't getting any coverage, not just the 40 Watt, but the music scene in general.

GREENIA: Rick the Printer (Rick Hawkins) had the print shop on Oconee Street and Java (a coffee and print shop where Go Bar is now). He had a darkroom and a bar that served espresso. I worked for Rick running the Java. We had this crazy publication called the Penny Saver, which was sort of the Craigslist of its day. You'd put in whatever classified ads you had and whatever display ads you had, and whatever random stuff you could think of in between. It was really Dadaist, surrealist stuff, like whatever you could think of drinking coffee in the middle of the night. It put a bug in Jared's head: "I didn't have to put ads in the Observer or the Red & Black or the Banner-Herald. I could just put my own paper out."

BAILEY: Dennis was not there at the beginning. I was doing some of the paste-up at my own house before I ever came to Rick. They had better skills and equipment. But when Dennis came along, it became more of a true magazine. I didn't have the time or the skill to make it a true magazine.

I was trying to get some advertisers. Bryan Cook was manager of the Rockfish then. He told me, "You should run it up the flagpole," and that's where the name came from.

GREENIA: Jared ran an article about Shackler being on tour with Wendy O. Williams. It was insanely pornographic, just way over the top. We printed only maybe 3,000 copies. Distribution wasn't very wide, mostly on the club circuit. But some of them got picked up by people who didn't see any humor in the article.

BAILEY: Patrick Keim, who did a lot of cutting-edge, outrageous artwork, did a story about a band called Shackler whose whole mission was shock. There was a gay S&M aspect to it. Somebody like you or I would read it and laugh, but the Athens police saw it. They went and confiscated every copy in town, and they were talking about pressing charges against me for pornography. That scared off some advertisers. It could have died off right then.

GREENIA: After the Shackler incident, it was pretty much on the ropes. It probably would have faded away, but at that time, I decided to stop working at Java. I was doing some freelance graphic design. It was like, "OK, why don't I become your partner in Flagpole?" Jared would be the public face, and I would be the guy who gathered up all the parts and put it together.

People thought it was hip and cool. Bands wanted to have write-ups in it. Through '87 and '88, it kind of came out sporadically. Then different people around town became regular contributors, things like comics. Very early on, Ort started writing a regular column. In '88, it became more of a real publication.

BAILEY: At the beginning, I just envisioned it as a fanzine, but as more people started working on it, it became more than that. Jim Stacy did cartoons for it. Larry Tenner did cartoons for it. Ted Hafer did cartoons for it. Jack Logan did cartoons for it. That was probably my favorite part. There were a lot of talented people contributing.

We didn't have any office space at Java. We were pasting up pages at the counter. Then we moved to—there's a trophy shop there now, at the corner of Broad and Finley. We were in the [back] there. Then we moved to Dixon's bike shop.

GREENIA: Rachel Reynolds, who had worked with me at Java, started working at Classic Screen Print with Larry Tenner. The owner, David, was kind enough to let us work out of the back of the shop. The white flag, our original logo, Larry might have drawn that.

In January '89, we decided to put it out every other week. We decided it should have some kind of regularity. People were counting on it and expecting us to do certain things. It started growing and becoming more respectable in '89.

In '90, we started renting space from Gene Dixon. While we were there, the paper grew in stature in more ways than one. It became more editorially meaty. We entered a phase where artists were doing the cover every week. We had these two little characters, Jeff and Jeff, two little guys wearing hats, who were hidden on the cover.

Around the same time we went from a mini-tab to a tabloid, we started covering local politics. The first fight we got into was saving the old fire station at the convention center.

The 40 Watt would have after-hours dance parties. They wouldn't serve alcohol, but they'd have a DJ until four or five o'clock in the morning. Somebody on the city council decided to pass a no-dancing ordinance. We fought that and won.

We really got behind the [city-county] unification effort. We did a lot of investigative reporting and in-depth election coverage. Around that time is when I started talking to Pete.

PETE MCCOMMONS: Dennis had hired me to be business manager when I got out of the Observer. I found out that Dennis' brother, Joe, thought he was the business manager. We hired a new ad rep, who turned out to be Alicia Nickles. I left, and she stayed.

A couple of years later, Dennis hired me as editor, but I found out he already had an editor, a woman named Stephanie Holmes. But this time, I was determined to make it stick.

Alicia had taken over ad sales by this time, and she steadily made it possible for Flagpole to grow and expand. She has mentored lots of kids right out of college who are working in advertising and related fields all over the country. I think the secret of Alicia’s success and of those who have worked with her, like our current reps—Anita Aubrey, Jessica Mangum and Melinda Edwards—is that they understand what a newspaper is all about: the importance of quality journalism.

GREENIA: We wound up getting Gwen O'Looney elected mayor. We had a slate of somewhat progressive candidates elected along with her. We felt pretty damn good about it. By '91–'92, it had really become part of the fabric of the community.

There wasn't a lot of money coming in, but we always made it look like we were more successful than we were. We put a very brash face on. The realm of what we could accomplish was pretty small, but that didn't change the bravado.

MCCOMMONS: There were a lot of overlapping issues that affected both the downtown community and the music community. A good example was the Classic Center, which riled up a lot of the musicians. Dennis was a very combative person. He depicted the (original, modernist Classic Center design) as an Iraqi bomb warehouse, which was an image that was on TV at the time.

GREENIA: We brought on Steven Crawford, who used to do our first Movie Dope, as editor. He had great lines like, "This movie moves slower than a block of aged cheddar through your grandfather's colon." The stories and interviews with bands got better, more in depth.

HILLARY MEISTER: I started with Flagpole in the spring of ’91. At that time, there had been very little contact with record labels, so my first project was to find out how to get stuff from publicists—press kits, music to review and interviews with touring bands. It was the age of chapbooks, fanzines and local, alternative magazines—a new subculture of journalism that covered the underground wave of art, music, literature, movies and politics. Record labels loved us. Besides college radio, our type of publication was the only thing that would cover all the new bands coming out. Since Athens was already established as a booming music mecca, record label publicists and A&R types were quite good to us.

BAILEY: One of the reasons I phased out was, in '91, we moved the 40 Watt over from where Caledonia is now to where the 40 Watt is now. That took a lot of time and effort. Dennis was supposed to buy me out, but I never saw one dime of that money.

GREENIA: I don't even think we put a dollar amount to the buyout, but perhaps we came up with one. If Jared's point is that he was never bought out with cash, then I would not disagree with him. Flagpole had no cash to buy him out. As I recall, we gave the 40 Watt Club free advertising for more than half a decade to pay Jared for his stake.

LISA MAY: Flagpole in 1991 was an almost desperate little outfit.  It felt more like a cause than a business.  I didn't like writing much, but I was in good shape then so, somehow, I fell into circulation.  At that time, Ort handled distribution, and he was, well... sort of attached to that idea, if you know what I mean.  It was only after then-publisher Dennis Greenia sent me out on my first circulation mission that I realized he had not informed Ort of my new, er, role (that of taking his job).  That was fun. Ort got over it, and everything was right in the world again.

It was around this time that Flagpole began growing in leaps and bounds (literally, this was when the magazine actually changed its physical size, as well as made the move to Foundry Street AND began printing as many as 5,000 per week) and my little car began to be unfit for picking up the entire run at Greater Georgia Printers way out on Highway 78 in Crawford.  

MEISTER: The magazine was 8"x10" and published monthly, but the plan was in place to publish bi-weekly and eventually weekly in a larger format.

MAY: So, Dennis, being the saint that he was, made the big investment: a van.  Namely, a stick-shift, ancient monstrosity that was, quite honestly, a death trap.  Did I mention that I had to hotwire it to start it?  I would pray not to hit the light right before the hill going up Oconee Street when I was coming back with a full load.  With momentum it made the hill pretty easily. From a dead stop, I have no idea how it didn't end up rolling backwards down the hill.  Nobody at Flagpole ever quite understood why I seemed so relieved when I would arrive back.

JASON SLATTON: Most of our editorial meetings were on Fridays, late afternoon, and ended at Frijolero's around several pitchers of beer (hence the aforementioned hazy memories). I met Travis Sutton, Hilary Meister, Ort, Henry Owings and John Murphy around this time, and my indoctrination had, for all purposes, begun.

RICHARD FAUSSET: Editing William Orten Carlton (to mutate a line from the late Dennis Hopper) was a little like eating a flower with a computer inside of it. I remember calling around for the late poet-columnist John Seawright one night, and finally locating him at the bar of the Globe, hoping to ask him if I could reposition an errant comma. The impassioned chewing-out he gave me that night was so florid, biting, wild and beautiful that I wish I would have written it down.

SLATTON: I remember my first story—my first real story—was interviewing Kelly Hogan and Bill Taft regarding their post-Jody Grind project Kick Me. Smoke (with Benjamin) opened that show, and it was the night of what I remember as the first serious ice storm I'd encountered since I'd moved to Athens at the end of 1991. All the trees were shining like Christmas glass, and I remember filing in to the club, marveling at how few people were there. Owing to the inclement weather, the turnout was piss-poor, but the show was easily one of the best I'd ever seen; I immediately fell in love with Kelly Hogan (a love that I harbor to this day, and my wife can attest to this), and with that entire, dimly lit world.

MELISSA LINK: The pay sucked but the hours and perks couldn’t be beat—a job at Flagpole pretty much guaranteed a spot on the guest list and a backstage pass to any show that came through town, and Athens’ friendly bartenders saw to it that we never went thirsty.

Some of the wildest times  included the annual staff pilgrimage to South by Southwest—the 17-hour rides hitched in the back of band vans and the random episodes of less-than-discreet outdoor urination that became necessary in the face of endless lines to get into Austin’s hottest clubs to see the week’s coolest shows. And then there were the in-office Christmas parties with Dirty Santa gifts that included bottles of liquor and punching nun puppets. Mayor Gwen O’Looney was always the belle of the ball and, while it’s impossible to imagine our current mayor dancing the funky chicken alongside the 8-Track Gorilla, when Doc Eldridge ascended to office he always made a jovial appearance at the soiree.

SLATTON: Vic Chesnutt and Vernon Thornsberry took over Pete’s office. Russ Hallauer and I snuck in to hang out with them, and the rest is… a smoky, barely-there mystery.

GREENIA: My wife got hired in 1995 by the Austin American-Statesman to be their film critic. I was going back and forth to Austin and liking it. I became less and less connected to Athens as a place and Flagpole as a thing I was doing.

MCCOMMONS: When it became evident that Dennis’ heart had “GTT” (gone to Texas), he decided to sell his Flagpole stock, and Alicia and I bought it. In doing so, I ruined mine and Dennis’ great friendship by promising more than I could deliver. We finally agreed on a price, but he never forgave me.

LINK: Then-editor Richard Faussett was a true newsman who treated Flagpole like it was the Sunday Times. He awoke in me a fierce sense of cynical criticism and a passion for investigation. In the meantime, I owe my continually growing obsession with local politics wholly to Pete McCommons.

FAUSSET: In 1997, the paper felt like it needed some shaking up, so my first order of business was to issue a public casting call for anyone in town who thought they had a good reason to contribute. In they marched, over weeks and months, into my little office on Foundry Street—a procession of weirdos, slackers, hacks, frustrated poets, human angels, conspiracy theorists and borderline savants.

I think I asked every one of these people if they had any interest in going to City Hall to cover, you know, the news. The only one who said "yes" was a thoughtful, gentle soul and news-reporting neophyte by the name of Zephyr Dorsey. Zephyr did yeoman work for the City Pages for a few weeks until he was struck, one evening, with an almost Biblical vision for reforming the consolidated Athens-Clarke County government, from mayor to dogcatcher.

I’ll never forget the night at the council meeting, he stepped to the podium, announced his retirement from Flagpole with a dramatic flourish and delivered hefty mimeographed copies of his “Zephyr’s Manifesto” to each of the bewildered council members.

MEISTER: We did things with stories that we felt were novel, such as completely fabricate stories or send a then-12-years-old Molly McCommons to interview Michael Stipe. We brought in some academic writing in the guise of “Post Modern Blues” by Jim Winders and offered Ort a blank page to write whatever he wanted to. We were favored by music publicists because we were so… weird and willing to cover or try all sorts of stuff.

FAUSSET: If someone wrote a pissy letter calling us a pack of talentless, pretentious gobs of phlegm—and if the letter was really good—he or she usually received a standing invitation to contribute.

My old friend Jeff Mangum wandered in early on—this would have been just before the release of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea—to write an article with me, based on the old “exquisite corpse” parlor game of the original surrealists, welcoming New Zealand songwriter Chris Knox to town. I’m pretty sure it was unintelligible gibberish, but I was thrilled. My sister’s college roommate Funke Sangodeyi, between life stages as a member of an all-girl hardcore trio and a scholar of the history of science at Cambridge, wrote a few dense and lovely critical pieces. Tom Lasseter, who, Google informs me, is currently the Beijing bureau chief for the McClatchy news service, was kind enough to write a clutch of fine investigative stories, even though we only had space for him to write in the dank basement of Foundry Street.

Travis Nichols basically wandered in off the street to become a cherished, long-time staff writer. Today he is one of America’s best young novelists.

But some of the very best contributors were, and still are, just round-the-way people who happened to be touched with genius. For a while, we had regular contributions from a bread-truck driver named James Blount, who, in a more just world, would have been editing The New Republic. You know how people say they’d listen to Snoop Dogg rap the phone book? I’d have paid to read Blount’s written take on the phone book.

LINK: Athens’ music scene was wallowing in something of a golden age. R.E.M. still topped the charts, Elephant 6 bands were the critics darlings, the Drive-By Truckers were just getting started, Widespread had Panicked in the Streets to eventually spawn AthFest, and a handful of unfinished in-town warehouses played regular host to all manner of outrageous underground rock n’ roll performance art all-night ragers.

THOMAS WHEATLEY: Growing up in Atlanta, I used to read Creative Loafing all the time. When I arrived in Athens in 1999 and saw there was that same kind of publication—biting, honest, opinionated, fun—I was thrilled. Being some metro Atlanta kid riding high on a HOPE scholarship, I didn't know half of the issues Pete and the team were talking about in the news section. (I remember reading about couches on porches and protecting neighborhoods from ne'er-do-well renters.)

In my junior year, I spent a few months reporting and writing a profile for my magazine writing class about Athens-area men who raced pigeons as a hobby. By the time I finished the piece, it was more than 3,000 words. Our professor pushed us to get our pieces published somewhere, and the only place I could imagine taking it was Flagpole. Pete loved it, published it and gave me the motivation I needed to keep writing, keep reporting and keep publishing. In addition to some shorter pieces, Pete gave me the freedom to pursue longer stories that interested me. He let me experiment with long looks about nudist resorts and aspiring professional wrestlers in small North Georgia towns.

MCCOMMONS: That was a period when sprawl was coming along and there were various proposals for development. Every election, it seemed like there was a struggle between the people who wanted to stop sprawl and the people who wanted to intrude on neighborhoods. It was the progressives versus the regressives in almost every commission race. Gradually, during those years, we achieved a more progressive commission.

We had, at the time, Brad Aaron, who kind of led the charge. He was a true believer. It was those green belt stories—the development on Jefferson Road, Oak Grove. A lot was going on with BikeAthens. During that period, too, we had the proposed expansion of Athens Regional. They wanted to tear down 50 houses, which would really change that neighborhood. The concerned citizens not only saved the neighborhood, but became part of the hospital's decision-making.

BEN EMANUEL: Fortunately for a city editor, the single-family zoning ordinance storm had passed by the time I came to the paper around 2005. But there would be other controversies. One of the first during my run was over the proposal to three-lane Prince Avenue from Milledge in to downtown; it lost on a 6-4 commission vote one night at City Hall.

 Those years were the heyday of the City Hall meetings that often ran as late as 2 a.m. It's really not easy to describe the feeling of sitting in one of those old wooden seats, well after midnight, watching presentations on zoning decisions. Speaking of which, also way back when was the rezone-turned-race-war over whether to allow Bruno Rubio to try to turn his vision of a mixed-use, plaza-style (and tasty!) slice of Latin America into reality on Cedar Shoals Drives.

 In 2006, we were thrust into the news of that year's election cycle, when Mayor Davison had more challengers for her seat than she or we could really keep track of. We finally captured the zaniness of that five-way race with an election-week Flagpole cover that I'm still proud of. There was Heidi, holding fast to the eagle weathervane on top of City Hall, while Charlie Maddox and Tom Chasteen scaled the dome with ropes and the other challengers, one in a UFO, occupied the airspace over downtown. I like to think that cover was an intellectual ancestor of Mitt Zombie.

MICHELLE GILZENRAT DAVIS: Through Flagpole, I saw the heart of Athens, and because of that experience, I don’t plan on leaving. But the first couple years were not without challenge. I returned to Athens in 2008 to find a restless scene. The new music business program at UGA was struggling to bridge the town and gown divide while record sales dwindled and gas prices soared. The business of music felt more futile than ever. The economy was in shambles, and the trend downtown seemed to be smaller turnouts despite more free shows. I was welcomed by a sort of parade of grievances—hip-hop artists, Americana promoters, underground venues and everyone else who wasn’t pop called to say, “Why doesn’t Flagpole write about us?”

So, it was my philosophy to broaden our music coverage as much as possible without sacrificing our critical integrity. It helped immensely that Flagpole was no longer limited to the confines of the printed page. Our website got a major facelift during my first year (followed by several makeovers), with a new emphasis on daily content and multimedia. We also joined the rest of the world on Facebook and Twitter and began to (slowly but surely) learn how to maximize our impact and reach our readers in new, more interactive ways.

EMANUEL: Heidi's second term in office brought us the wildest, craziest news item ever during my tenure at Flagpole: Athens' long flirtation with the United States Department of Homeland Security. The controversy over the proposal to build the National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility (a.k.a. the Bio-Terror Lab) on UGA's horse pastures out at the end of South Milledge Avenue was dizzying from start to finish, splitting the community along some unexpected lines and eating up lots of civic energy, weekday evenings at the Georgia Center and copy space. One ACC commissioner later called the NBAF saga "the nirvana of all Athens new stories," and he was absolutely right about that.

My years at Flagpole were also the Sonny Perdue years in Georgia, and they were also mostly years of drought that put a real hurt on the Oconee River and others all over the state. Once, probably in '08 or so, we got an announcement about a "Go Fish Georgia" bass-fishing tournament going forward on Lake Lanier despite low water levels. Always one for fun times at the office, Pete forwarded the email to me with an added message of his: "Go, Sonny! Why don't we just wait until the lake is dry and then hit them with baseball bats?!" The only problem was that he didn't forward it to me—he'd hit "reply" instead. Fortunately the Go Fish Georgia publicist was amused, and she wrote back with an equally wacky, but kind, note about how that would involve cruelty to animals.

DAVE MARR: I'm pretty sure that the week after Ben left, I reported something in City Dope about Paul Broun Jr. bathing in the blood of a horse on the Capitol steps with Michele Bachmann. It was probably about a week or two later that I embarked on my first major news story, which was about a giant pile of dirt in Normaltown. Then I started covering a race for mayor that lasted about a year.

The zoning battles were consistently the nastiest—except for the political ones instigated by Doug McKillip. His rise and fall after betraying his constituents and switching to the Republican party played out like a squalid little Greek tragedy, dominating the second half of my term as city editor.

DAVIS: For 12 solid months (in 2009), Athens faced a barrage of tragedy. There were days I felt my heart could not handle another “memorial” issue. So many beloved artists were lost too soon—Randy Bewley in February, Jon Guthrie in September and Vic Chesnutt on Christmas Day. The usually celebratory Twilight Criterium weekend was marred by a horrific shooting spree, and days before AthFest, the Georgia Theatre went up in flames. Has the Athens music scene suffered a more grueling year?

But the silver lining is this: Through all the loss and heartbreak and struggle, Athens endured. I had to be the bearer of bad news more times than I’d like, but I also had the privilege of seeing the incredible support network of our community come through time and time again. When Athens suffered a loss, the first response always seemed to be, “What can we do to help?” And, of course, the music played on.

BAILEY: It's an interesting paper. I'm not surprised it's still here. If you think of all the talents of all the people who've worked there, it should be indestructible.

GREENIA: The fact that it's still here is a testament to the DNA we created, but it's also a testament to the people who are doing it today.

FAUSSET: Holiest of holies, of course, was the crew who’s still there at the core of Flagpole. But you don’t need me to reminisce about that. You are holding their labors in your hands (or on your tablet or whatever). An old standing item in the Dennis Greenia-era Flagpole was called “They Walk Among You,” and the fact that these bright-burning talents of all stripes are your neighbors is the essence of what makes Flagpole worth reading—and what, more generally, makes Athens the great spirit-emitting blast of nonconformist energy that it has long been, and that one hopes it will continue to be.

So: Holy Alicia Nickles, ad-selling, business-managing, maternal spirit power! Holy Larry Tenner, pure artist, ace production director, magnanimous genius soul! Holy Pete McCommons, indispensable chronicler bard priest shaman columnist obituarist lover poet!

Everything is holy! Flagpole is holy! Athens is holy! Holy, holy, holy!