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The magazine itself was the lovechild of Ian Danzig, the founder and publisher, and a group of his college radio buddies. While working at IBM, Danzig was moonlighting as a host at Ryerson University’s CKLN FM where he found himself regularly arguing about the state of music. And so he came up with the idea for a local magazine as a place to voice those opinions while shining a spotlight (dimly lit and underground though it may have been at the time) on the lesser-known bands of the city – and soon, the country.

“I grew up a huge music fan, and as a record collector,” says Danzig. “I never thought I would be here, though. It started as a fun, part-time side project – a fanzine. It was about turning people onto music outside the mainstream.”

Although Exclaim! magazine’s band of outsiders had a strong idea of what it would represent from the beginning, translating that vision took time. At first, no one could decide on a name for the publication, and it simply went by four symbols: an exclamation point, an asterisk, an apostrophe and a pound sign. The magazine was dubbed “!*’#” for nearly a year before Danzig realized he couldn’t answer business calls referring to the magazine as “f—k,” which is what early readers called it.

It wasn’t the last time Exclaim! magazine would opt for an ill-suited name. Moving online before most in the mid-’90s, the magazine operated under the distinctive though entirely unrelated URL “schmooze.net.” An overhauled website debuted in 2001 with their actual name. And for the first year of its run, if you picked up a copy in hopes of reading the cover story, there wasn’t one – the magazine would feature a musician on its cover with no accompanying story.