True story: My wife and I were almost married on Halloween back in 1995. We went down to the clerk's office to take out the license, and much to our surprise, the clerk asked us if we wanted to do it then and there. Turns out that in Florida, just about anyone with a pulse is allowed to consecrate a marriage. Something to do with tourism, I guess. We balked, as we didn't know if the preacher brought in bymy wife's dad would have a problem with officiating a ceremony between already-married folks. Turns out he would have been just fine with it, but we skipped the sweet Halloween story in favor of a more traditional one.

Four years earlier on Halloween, I was in New York at the CMJ convention peddling my new creation, Aiding & Abetting. I picked October 31, 1991, as the initial date of publication, mostly because at that time A&A focused on "loud music," something of a catchall term that included punk, metal, grindcore and a few other associated sounds that share the "loud" characteristic.

CMJ had a celebratory air that year, as Nirvana had just passed one million in sales. One million albums sold without any commercial radio airplay, no video and few write-ups in the bigwig magazines. Nirvana was college radio's creation, the first band to sell a million records with only college radio in support. All of a sudden, college radio was at the center of the universe. We thought we were present at the revolution.

Adding to this was what a Geffen rep told us when he saw that we were from KCOU, the University of Missouri student-run station. "You guys did it!" he yelled. He walked over and explained that KCOU and three other stations were the first to report Nirvana #1. More importantly, Streetside Records, a St. Louis-based record chain with stores in Columbia and Kansas City, was the first major chain to report Nirvana #1. The Geffen rep said the store in Columbia sold its allotment of 200 copies within an hour on the day Nevermind came out.

As much as I'd like to claim that I had anything to do with Nirvana's success (after all, I was program director at KCOU when all this went down), I know that it's not true. The in-house review of Bleach (Nirvana's pre-Nevermind album on SubPop) claimed "These guys are the future of music!" Now, that particular reviewer said this at least once a month--and this is the only time that it turned out to be true. Still, he did make the pick. And any fool knew Nirvana was going to be huge after hearing the first piece of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." That riff has become as ubiquitous as "Start Me Up" or "Black Dog." You can name that tune in one note.

So I was peddling this new loud music tipsheet, thinking that I was buying in at the beginning of something big. Boy, was I wrong. After a year of sending out A&A, it was apparent that college radio and the tipsheets that serviced them were on the wane. Big music was in the process of claiming a bunch of our bands--even Sonic Youth, the Replacements, Bad Religion, the Jayhawks, the Flaming Lips, Uncle Tupelo and most inexplicably, King Missile. Commercial radio was playing "alternative" music, and even the Grammies created a special category just for the music that we used to play. As it turned out, Nevermind wasn't the beginning of the college music wave. It was the crest. Everything fell off from there.

After four years of losing a fair amount of money with a printed tipsheet, A&A went Internet-only in 1995. During those first four years, I had slowly been moving away from "loud" to simply "underground" music. Part of this was that loud music fell out of favor as the grunge movement turned rancid, and part of it was that I've always liked all kinds of music.

By 1995, A&A was pretty much what it is now: Reviews of just about any sort of music in the world. When folks ask me what sort of music A&A covers, I like to say "Everything from folk to death metal, avant-garde classical to basic indie whatever." People keep sending me their stuff, and I keep reviewing music. I'm partial to a power chord and air-tight hook, but I can be swayed by just about anything.

I've written about 7,200 "full" (four or five paragraph) reviews and 3,000 one-paragraph reviews during the last 20 years. Sometimes it seems like a slog, but three or four times a month I come across an album that reminds me why I do as much listening as I do. I have been a life-long bookworm, but there's something about music that lights me up more than almost any book. It's not a fair comparison, as books and music affect different parts of the brain. But the electric jolt of amazing music provides a high that I haven't matched with anything else. With the right song in my head, I can do anything.

I still crave that high. That's why I'm still reviewing music. Yeah, a few thousand folks stop by www.aidabet.com each month, but I don't write for them. I write for the people who make the music. I write for my pushers. It's the least I can do.

A&A is 20. Muchas gracias to all the artists, labels, PR types and everyone else who has kept me in music for twenty years. Happy Halloween, everybody!

Jon Worley has been in a love triangle with A&A and his wife for half of his life. That's just as problematic as it sounds.