Alison Pember: Early Years, Radio & the Rise of The Flavor
Updated: 2 days ago
This interview is part of an ongoing conversation with Alison Pember, tracing her early years, musical education, her involvement in radio and record retail, and the creation and early growth of The Flavor magazine in the 1990s.
Alison would later go on to work as the US label manager for Mo Wax through London Records (FFRR), helping develop the label’s presence in the United States. This first part looks back at the experiences and influences that shaped her before that chapter began.
Jon
You were born in Seattle, in the state of Washington. What do you recall of your childhood over there?
Alison
I grew up in a little neighborhood North of Seattle that was called Richmond Beach at the time, but it's called Shoreline now. And what's interesting about Richmond Beach is that it was sort of an unincorporated area with a studio in it called Robert Lang Studios, which is where Nirvana and a bunch of other people like Dave Matthews Band have recorded.
I have Asperger's so I was not a super social kid. I didn't get diagnosed until about seven years ago, but looking back, that makes a lot of sense now. When you have Asperger's, a lot of times the way you play is by creating projects and doing things. I always put it this way, "I don't like to go to parties, but I like to throw a party." It's control, right? At the time, things like Star Wars [dir. George Lucas, 1977] and shows like Happy Days [ABC, 1974 to 1984] or Mork & Mindy [ABC, 1978 to 1982] were out. So I would write my own versions of those, bring kids together in the neighborhood and we would do plays that were the versions of those things. Growing up in that time period in the 70s and 80s, there was a lot more freedom and a lot less of the world being scared, so you could kind of hang out all day and just be out there in the world.
Was music an important part of your education?
Alison
My dad's father was a musician, he played trombone with a bunch of big bands in Detroit, people like Duke Ellington and whatnot. And when my dad was in college he DJed parties and stuff. He started out his life as a journalist in Detroit, he went back and got his degrees, then he became a professor of media law and journalism at the University of Washington. So he was in the media space and he was very interested in pop culture. My mom was also very into pop culture and she listened to a lot of the same radio stations that I listened to, she'd go to concerts and things like that. Her favorite artists are Elvis Costello and OMD, so she was young at heart with music and she still is.
My dad wanted me to have the education, so when I was a kid he told me that before I could listen to popular music, I had to know my history. So he gave me a giant boxset called The Number One Hits of the 50s, he also gave me the American Graffiti soundtrack [41 Original Hits from the Soundtrack of American Graffiti / MCA, 1973], and he said, "You can start here."
You don't have a lot of visual aids when you're in that time period, so I would listen to that music and try to imagine what it was. I came up in the time of MTV and music videos were becoming popular. I've ended up with a career in marketing, and it makes sense because I'm very influenced by visual mediums. The first thing I was exposed to that combined music and visuals was The Monkees [originally an NBC sitcom that ran from 1966 to 1968 with a fictional band that later became a real band] on TV.
They had a thing here called the Columbia Record & Tape Club. You’d see ads for it in newspapers every week, and you could basically get 10 albums for a penny, then sign up for this long-term thing where you have to pay for them over time. But I didn't understand that as a kid. So I sent my penny in, and the first record I bought was The Monkees album [The Monkees / Colgems, 1966], because I’d seen it on TV and watched the show. I thought, "Oh, I want that." It just showed up at our house and my dad was like, "Where did this come from? And how did you do this?" I think sometimes he was a little proud of the things I did by myself and sometimes surprised too. This time, he was not too happy with the outcome.
Then I was super into The Beatles, and then totally skipped the 70s and went directly into new wave after that. I got in through Duran Duran and things that were more pop, but my favorite of all time was Depeche Mode. So it was only English music because I didn't like American music very much.
The cool area of Seattle at the time was called the Ave, and it was in the university area where my dad worked. When I was in fourth grade I was really into stickers, and they had all the sticker stores down there where you could get things no one else had. My dad would take me down there, so I was really lucky.
But the Ave was also where all the cool record stores were. There was Urban Renewal, and another really cool record store downtown called Time Travelers. But my favorite one was Urban Renewal, where they had all the UK records and magazines. I would read about all these British artists and be like,"Okay, who is this and what's that?"
Timothy Jones [1948-2021] was running it, and he ended up starting the music program at Starbucks. He ran it for years, so the in-store music you hear at Starbucks around the world came out of a program he started after Urban Renewal closed.
When you're a kid it's like the music thing is social, right? There was an all-ages dance club in Seattle that played a lot of new wave music, so kids would go there to socialize. But for me it was also about hearing the records. I was like, "Oh, what's this record? How do I get this one? And who's this and that?" So that was about as close to dancing as I got.
But my biggest outlet was interning at the University of Washington radio station, because my dad worked on the same floor. It's now called KEXP and has moved out of the university as a whole different entity, but at the time it was called KCMU. The people who worked there then were college DJs, some of whom ended up in bands like Green River, while others started Sub Pop.
As an intern, I filed all the log sheets where the DJs wrote down everything they played. I kept a notebook with me, and if there was a record I hadn’t heard of, I’d write it down. After I finished filing the logs, I’d go into a corner, find all the records I didn't know and listen to them. I’d write down whether I wanted to buy them and what I thought of them. I kept a little journal of everything. I was trying to educate myself.
In exchange for the work I was putting in, I got to hear all this music I wasn't exposed to otherwise. I was there all day on weekdays. My dad went into work at 7am, so I would go with him on the bus and stay there all day. I also got my broadcast license, so like if somebody had to run down the street or something, I could cover their show for 10 minutes. That was pretty fun for a 14-year-old.
Jon
Did you notice at the time that you were often the only girl in those spaces?
Alison
I would go into stores and I'd be the only girl. I couldn't really talk about records with other girls as much because there were very few girls my age that were really into it. I always had at least one friend at school who was into it, but I was definitely the leader. I was the person making mixtapes at school and selling them to people. The other people who were making mixtapes were only guys, so it was unusual for sure.
I didn't consider it an issue until I got out in the world more. I started to realize people were maybe underestimating me, and during my life I've kind of used that to my advantage. But it's a weird thing not to be taken seriously because of your gender. It's a very masculine world, and there have definitely been points in my life where I’ve felt left out because I'm a woman and not included in things. It's a little tricky.
Jon
When did you first start listening to hip hop music?
Alison
As I was saying, I listened to a lot of British music, and a lot of those artists were sampling, especially Depeche Mode, who were my favorite. I was completely fascinated by sampling. I just thought it was the coolest thing.
I was on a few different radio stations, and one of them was a high school radio station. I had a show where I basically created my own versions of sampling over records and I did different things. I'd heard hip hop at school from the kids who were breakers. I would make them mixtapes of new wave music and they would play hip hop for me, and I was like, "This is cool, I like it because it has a beat."
But when I first heard Eric B. & Rakim's "Paid in Full (Seven Minutes of Madness Coldcut Remix)" [4th & Broadway, 1987], I was all in. I was like, "What is this? It's amazing!" I became obsessed with it and wanted to find every sample. They had Ofra Haza, whose record I already had ["Im Nin'Alu" from Yemenite Songs / Hed-Arzi, 1984]. It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.
① Eric B. & Rakim’s Paid in Full (4th & Broadway, 1987), ② De La Soul’s 3 Feet High And Rising (Tommy Boy, 1989)
Then it was all US music for me. And right after that, things like De La Soul [3 Feet High And Rising / Tommy Boy, 1989] came out. That was a game changer for me; I went from Depeche Mode to De La Soul. I was just like, "Oh my god, this is the greatest thing. All the sampling and all the skits…" I completely loved it. To me, hip hop was the most progressive and vibrant type of music coming out at the time. A lot of other music felt very stagnant and boring by comparison.
Jon
What was school like for you around that time?
Alison
When you're a freshman in high school, it's kind of part of the deal that you get picked on. I remember having a rivalry with this guy who was in a band called Sleze. They were a hair metal band from school, and they actually ended up becoming Alice in Chains years later.
But after that, it wasn't bad. I had known most of the people I went to school with since preschool because I stayed in the same area. I could move between different groups of people fairly easily, but not really be part of any of them.
Jon
What did your parents think about hip hop music?
Alison
I don't think that my dad was the biggest fan, but he was interested in learning about it. One time he transcribed an interview with Pete Nice from 3rd Bass, and he got really excited, and wanted to hear his music. He was like, "I really like this guy, Pete Nice," which was funny.
My mom was open to listening to it. She listens to everything, including a lot of R&B. Her favorite concert when she was young was seeing James Brown, so I think her interest in hip hop came a little more naturally. But they weren't against it; it was just part of their kid growing up.
Jon
What was the hip hop scene like in Seattle in the late 80s and early 90s?
Alison
It's interesting because Seattle never really had one style. It reflected everything else that was going on, but always put its own stamp on it. Sir Mix-A-Lot and Nastymix Records came out at the end of the 80s, and having an independent Seattle label with a platinum album [Swass / Nastymix Records, 1988] is pretty wild to think about.
Mix-A-Lot really led the charge. DIY is a very Seattle thing, and I think the music that came out of the city reflected that. But I would say that he was pretty much doing his own thing.
Jon
Can you tell me about your time at uni?
Alison
I went to Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC. It's in Canada, so it was far enough away from my parents, but still close enough at the same time.
As a US citizen, you can go to school in Canada on a student visa. I wanted to go there because you could major in Popular Culture, and I thought that would be an awesome major. I also had enough credits that I didn't have to take Math there, which was important to me because I was pretty over Math at that point.
I had already worked at a few different radio stations in high school, so when I got there I immediately joined the university radio station, CJIV. I ended up spending more time at the radio station than in class.
You basically had to show up and prove that you’d already done some things. At that point, I already had aircheck tapes from the different stations I’d been on, so that was a résumé of sorts. It was actually the smallest station I’d been on up until that point, but they already had a hip hop show. They told me, "You can't do a hip hop show because someone is already doing one."
So I did a hip hop/house hybrid show that ran before his, and got to know Maximus Clean, who hosted the hip hop show. We became friends, and I covered his show when he was out of town. That was when I started thinking, "Yeah, I could see that maybe I just want to work in music, and maybe I don't need to go to college." I was only there for a year, from 1989 to 1990.
I was always planning on leaving during the summer and coming back to Seattle to work. I ended up working at Tower Records, and they almost didn't hire me because I said it was only for the summer. But the guy was like, "You have so much music experience, I'll hire you."
I really liked it. I got promoted a couple of times during the summer and thought, "This is my thing. I'll just put college on hold and figure out what I want to do." I was taking one year off, but ended up staying and never went back to college.
My dad was a university professor, so that was a slightly harder conversation, but he said, "Look, if you want to go back when you're 60, I don't care. Do what works for you." And I thought, "Yeah, if I work at Tower Records I can spend more time around music, and this is what I want to do."
Jon
You started working at Tower Records before you launched the zine, but what was your role?
Alison
Most record stores back then used what's called central buying. There was a guy sitting in Minneapolis ordering records for stores all over the country. If you’ve seen the documentary about Tower Records that Colin Hanks made [All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records, 2015], the big difference with Tower was that each individual store had its own buyers. I ended up becoming one.
I started as the singles buyer, then moved up to buying everything, not just hip hop. One thing I did was bring vinyl back into the store. At the time, CDs and tapes were dominant, and while there were still 12” singles, there weren’t many new albums on vinyl. So I was scrounging around for whatever I could find, and we became one of the few places where you could buy new releases on vinyl, like Showbiz and A.G. or whatever.
I was very pushy about getting it into the store, and my boss wasn’t really convinced at first. But people started coming specifically for the vinyl and then buying other things too, and they were like, "Oh, this works." Eventually other stores started doing it too, but at the time it was pretty unusual. I was lucky because I had an amazing manager who gave me the freedom to try things. It was a nice group of people to work with, and The Flavor's office was right around the corner too.
Jon
Was that around the time you started The Flavor?
Alison
While I was working at Tower, my friend Rachel "Mrs. Beasley" Crick got a job as a Sony college rep. Through her, I also got a job working for the local Columbia Records rep on my days off.
We were trying to figure out, "How do we make an impact on hip hop music in Seattle?” There were very few opportunities to be on the radio in general, and they definitely weren’t going to let two white girls have a hip hop show. That was not happening. There was a very popular free Seattle music paper called The Rocket. It had been around for years, but it was focused on Seattle music and wasn’t really covering hip hop. It also had a column called Sub Pop U.S.A., which is where the people behind Sub Pop got their start. So we thought, "Why don't we make something like The Rocket, but for hip hop?”
At the time, I was also doing freelance work, writing about hip hop for The Seattle Times, but I wanted to make more of an impact. We decided that we also needed to cover national artists, because otherwise people wouldn’t know the local artists and wouldn’t pick up the magazine.
I think a lot of people had the same idea at the same time. The Bomb [founded by Dave Paul in 1991] and all these other magazines were coming out then. Everyone was around my age, which was interesting; you’d just see all these people doing it. Straight From The Lip [out of San Diego, CA], for example, was being run out of a dorm room. These were just businesses you could build yourself.
My thing was that I'd put somebody I thought was really great on the cover, and then I could literally see them sell records at Tower. What I loved most about working there was recommending records to people, and then they’d come back because they loved them and wanted something else. I really liked being able to make an impact.
Years later, when I worked with Payday, we were putting out O.C.'s second album [Jewelz / Payday, 1997]. When I looked at his top markets, Seattle was suddenly a top-10 market for him, and it had never been before. We’d put him on the cover of The Flavor [#17, August 94], and I was like, "Wow! Seattle is a top-10 market for him because he was on the cover of The Flavor, there has to be a correlation there." Seattle was not normally a top-10 market for hip hop records, so that was pretty surprising.
Jon
How did The Flavor actually come together?
Alison
Rachel and I started putting it together in 1991, and we published the first issue in March 1992, with Cypress Hill on the cover. We had to put Rachel under a fake name because she wasn't supposed to be doing anything outside her job as a Sony college rep, and there would have been a conflict because she was the one with all the connections.
Part of her job was calling college radio DJs, and her territory included the Bay Area and LA. Rachel is really a people person, so she became friends with Mike Nardone, Jazzbo (Joseph Patel), Jeff Chang and others. Because of her love of hip hop, she connected with all these people, and that helped us build the magazine.
One of the things we did was have DJs submit their charts to The Flavor. That helped get the magazine into people’s hands and spread the word.
The name itself came from Black Sheep’s song “Flavor of the Month” [Mercury, 1991]. You hear "You've got the fever for the flavor." We liked it. A lot of things we did in those days were also based around answering machine messages, so we thought it would be really funny if, when people called, the message said, "We hear you've got the fever for the flavor." We thought that was hilarious.
I also started using the name Cookiehead around that time, after the character Cookiehead Jenkins in Hollywood Shuffle [dir. Robert Townsend, 1987], which I thought was the funniest name. Later, when I saw Dave from De La Soul call himself Cookiehead Jenkins on MuchMusic, I took it as a sign. Once I started introducing myself as Cookiehead for the magazine, people actually started calling me back.
Pei Sun was one of the people who started the magazine, and she designed the first issues. Then there was Tracy Armour, a guy named Specs, and Rachel when we first started, so that was kind of the core group. After the first issue, it grew from there. People like Supreme, B-Mello and Mike Clark joined, and a lot of them had connections to the scene and to local artists that we didn't have.
A lot of zines at the time were run by one or two people, whereas we were really a collective. I think that made us a little different.
Jon
Can you tell me how the magazine was made and distributed?
Alison
At first, we made it at my parents’ house and printed it at Kinko's. We knew a guy there who gave us a huge discount, so we’d make copies in the middle of the night when he was working. That's how we did the first few issues.
Then we graduated to an office right around the corner from Tower Records, so I could go there during lunch and after work. We started doing offset printing, which wasn’t very expensive at the time, and that allowed us to do a one-color cover.
Eventually we switched to newsprint inside with a glossy four-color cover, which was probably more of an expense than we should have taken on. So we quickly scaled back to an all-newsprint version in a larger format.
It was free, so it had to be paid for by advertising. Some months we broke even, some months we lost money, and some months we made money. It more or less evened out. A big part of the struggle was getting people to pay for their ads on time. They wouldn't pay upfront; they’d pay after the magazine had run.
My mom helped make some of the calls, but we all did it. At one point I created a fake persona named Edna and called some people pretending to be from a collection agency, because otherwise we couldn’t get them to pay.
In the beginning, we printed maybe a couple thousand copies. The key was how we distributed them. We had distribution points around Seattle, but if a college DJ submitted a chart, for example, we could send them a box to distribute locally. Trae Abraham, who worked with us, was also on the Tommy Boy street team, and so she got other Tommy Boy street team members to help distribute it. Rachel knew Bobbito [Garcia] and connected with people in New York who would drop them off at different record stores. It was a pretty informal way of distributing it, but we had key people helping us.
February 92, right after the first one came out, I went to London for a vacation and met AJ [Alan Johnson] from Hardnoise. They were like the Public Enemy of the UK. AJ was their DJ and then he became our UK distributor. There was another guy in the Netherlands named Fred Bomber, who distributed it for us. We would send these boxes overseas, and they would distribute them at different places and market stores. I remember AJ would drop them off at Honest Jon's, which was pretty funny considering that's also where James Lavelle worked.
Jon
What made you want to distribute The Flavor so widely?
Alison
As more of these zines started growing, I realized that if we wanted to get advertising money, we needed wider distribution. We had to be able to compete and show advertisers that we had reach. With Dave Paul, I think a lot of his distribution came through industry people, which was good, but he was also one guy and we were a team. He was also the first one, too, and I think we might have been second or third.
Jon
Were most of those connections coming through Rachel, or were you building your own network too?
Alison
Before Baby Got Back [Def American, 1992], Sir Mix-A-Lot signed to American Recordings in the early 90s, and there was a release party in Seattle where they flew in a bunch of DJs. It was right around the time The Flavor came out. Dave Paul was there, and that’s where I met him. Isn't that random?
I’d also heard about The Bomb and the parties they were doing, so a lot of times we would drive down to San Francisco for those [at the DNA Lounge, on 11th Street]. Rachel also knew Matt Brown who managed Charizma and Peanut Butter Wolf through Strong Arm Management, so there were a lot of different connection points.
I was going to those parties as someone who worked at Tower Records, not as someone from a magazine, so I think I would have ended up meeting Dave and hearing about The Bomb anyway.
Jon
Was there much competition between the different zines?
Alison
It was a competition for advertising, and over who would get the first interview. I remember we got Del’s second album [No Need For Alarm / Elektra, 1993] in advance and published a review [#8, Aug. 1993], and one of the other magazines went nuts because we got it first.
When we put Nas on the cover first [#11, Feb. 1994], other magazines were upset too. There was definitely competition around those kinds of things. Magazines like Rap Sheet and Rap Pages were bigger and probably should have had those opportunities, but we would sometimes cover artists very early. We put Nas on the cover long before Illmatic [Columbia, released Apr. 1994] came out.
Jon
Rachel was setting up a lot of the contacts early on. Did the rest of the team get to conduct interviews?
Alison
Rachel was the one setting up the interviews for other people to do. Because she worked in radio promotion, she was really good on the phone, good at convincing people and getting things arranged.
Another early connection came from Maximus Clean, whom I knew from CJIV. He later started Props [Canadian hip hop magazine] and was working with a lot of labels at the time. Right before I left CJIV, I set the station up to start reporting to Gavin Report, and he took that over.
Through that, he met a lot of label reps. He was like, "Okay, you hooked me up with that, now let me hook you up with my mailing list of reps." So we were able to mail out The Flavor to all those people, and that started connecting us directly with the labels. It was really a combination of those different networks.
Jon
Can you tell me about the release of the first issue and how The Flavor was received by the music industry?
Alison
For the first issue [Mar. 1992] we put Cypress Hill on the cover, because they were supposed to play our launch party with Tim Dog [Timothy Blaire, 1967-2013]. The show ended up being canceled because Tim Dog got allegedly arrested, so none of them showed up.
After the first issue came out, I was very surprised because the first phone call we got was from a woman at MCA Records asking how she could get Eric B. & Rakim on the cover. Knowing how much I loved Eric B. & Rakim, you can imagine that was one of the greatest phone calls I could ever receive.
We didn't end up putting them on the cover because they didn't have a new record coming out. We only featured people if they had something already released or coming up. It didn’t make sense otherwise, but just getting that call was amazing.
① Nas & Kurious (The Flavor in-store at Skinz), ② The Flavor’s staff with CL Smooth, ③ The Flavor’s office and staff
Jon
How did the magazine grow to a circulation of around 70,000 copies?
Alison
The magazine went from quarterly to bimonthly, and eventually monthly. As distribution grew, we could attract more advertising, which meant we could afford to print more copies and expand further. It just grew organically that way.
Trae really helped organize the distribution system through the Tommy Boy street teams. Tower Records became another important part of it. The magazine remained free until the end, except through Tower, which took around 10,000 or 15,000 copies from us and sold them for $1. They could distribute it in places we couldn’t reach, so that gave us much bigger circulation numbers and also helped us sell advertising.
A real turning point came around 1994, in the second half of the magazine’s run, when a couple of people joined who really helped us become more organized. Strath Shepard helped with production and logistics, and Sarah Honda came in almost by accident. She was the only person who ever completed Carl Johnson's crossword correctly, and we were like, "Who is this person who can keep answering the crossword puzzle?" We found her, and she eventually became an editor.
As the magazine grew, we also started having what I would call ‘actual writers’ reach out to us. At first, our focus had been on having fans do interviews because we wanted to capture an oral history. Later, people like Jazzbo [Joseph Patel], Elliott Wilson and others started contributing. They had their own contacts and brought a different perspective. It was still all volunteer work, but we expanded the crew and had more people writing for us towards the end.
To be continued…
Interview conducted by Jonathan Boulicot (@djshadowreconstructed /@eikimono) between November 2024 and October 2026.
Unless otherwise credited, all photos are from Alison Pember’s (@apstyle21) personal archive. Additional other images are individually credited. Special thanks to James Gaunt (@jimmyjrg) for tracking down a photograph of Tower Records on The Ave in Seattle.
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