Today's WXPN is not community radio. It is "all about the music." Put another way, it's only about the music.

But in the 1970s and early '80s, WXPN had both music and news, arts and politics. The sacred and the profane were so closely aligned that they seemed to form two sides of the same coin.

Which was the same philosophy that sprung forth from the heads of two twentysomethings who started the City Paper, Chris Hill and me. In a healthy world — one we'd now call sustainable — we believed that culture, politics, ethics and business had to be intertwined.

Chris Hill, an Oklahoma boy with a passion for farming, came to WXPN fresh from a stint at the Philadelphia's ur-alt-weekly, the Distant Drummer . I was a perennial humanities grad student from New York City, who loved to write about contemporary dance, and had an unexplained knack for organization.

When Chris called me on the phone, I remember his voice was gentle and musical, his "hello," more a "hulloo." He needed a dance writer for the WXPN Radioguide , a monthly newspaper that he produced singlehandedly which served the listeners of the station.

When I met Chris later at the station, he needed more than a writer. He needed help. Someone to beat back the chaos that was choking him, and to raise some funds by selling ads. I had no experience doing either, but I learned because I believed.

I believed in Chris because he had a vision of a newspaper that offered a safe haven for thoughtful ideas, for outsiders and for the downright weird. And I trusted Chris. Because this was personal. And for us, this became more than a career path. It was a quest. We were — in a word I came to hate, but have begun again to embrace — committed .

We believed in an alternative culture that would be so sensible that it would change even mainstream Philadelphia. And recently, I've come to believe that it has. The most valuable seeds planted decades ago in the City Paper are now beginning to bud. Ideas about greening, environmental and social justice, public space and mass transit. Localism. Sustainability.

Great ideals. But back then, WXPN was mostly broke.

The station operated on a slow-burning but hot mix of mostly volunteers: earth biscuits, community activists, music freaks of every sort and various post-Vietnam protesters — a bit crispy, but still lively.

The station was beholden primarily to those volunteer DJs and especially to their listeners, because it was the listeners who mostly funded the station. The listeners loved the station, because those on the other side of the microphones were just like them.

And so when Chris and I started the City Paper the following year, in 1981, we continued to revere our readers — even though as a free paper, our readers paid for nothing, and the advertisers paid for everything. But from WXPN, we got the habit of respecting the audience. We felt toward our readers, as Chris reminded me recently, a deep sense of humility.

At WXPN, we were rewarded with loyalty, even love. But that didn't pay the bills for a monthly newspaper that soon outgrew the station's meager resources.

When we went on our own, it never occurred to me, seriously, that the City Paper would ever really be profitable. The road to fielding a viable alternative newsweekly in Philly was littered with corpses, beginning with Chris' old paper, Jon Stern's Distant Drummer .

The Drummer died after Harry Jay Katz slandered an Inquirer editorial board member, though the paper was moribund long before that. Then Katz himself tried with a weekly of his own, called Electricity . Dead within three years. Along the way came — and went — Robert Cherry's PhillyWeek , the Olde City Digest , the South Street Star , and briefly even a weekly from Philadelphia magazine whose name I can't remember.

Still, we left WXPN in the summer of 1981 with optimism, and with the blessing of station manager, Peter Cuozzo, who later helped start WYBE-TV. City Paper was born in my house on the corner of Germantown Avenue and Johnson Street, in a yellow former drugstore underneath my bedroom. We had a glorious 400-square-foot space and an antique typesetting machine. We attracted writers, some boarders, the occasional thief and sundry others who walked in and found something useful to do.

From WXPN came Mary Armstrong and Peter Burwasser, both of whom are still with CP today. Jonny Meister, Russ Woessner and Ann Mintz. Gerald Kolpan, my dear friend, and now a reporter for Fox 29. Into our doors walked feminist film reviewer Victoria Brownworth, graphic artist Anita Bassie, professor Patrick Hazard, journalist Walter Fox. In came Bill Siemering, then WHYY station manager, who brought Tia O'Brian, later of WCAU-TV, and John Barth, later the first producer of PRI's Marketplace . In came Ronnie Polaneczky, now at the Daily News , and her future husband, Noel Weyrich, now at Philly Mag.

In they walked, physically bringing their stories, because there were no modems, and fax machines were expensive and rare.

We also had a garden, out back.

That garden was important, as I came to discover. I dug and manured and planted at Chris' urging and with his help. At the time, I had a black thumb, and coming from New York City, I thought that cities really didn't need gardens. Now I think they're critical for our survival.

That garden was also a metaphor for how we treated talent. We couldn't pay them more than a pittance, but Chris was a nurturer by nature, with the patient temperament of a gardener. He'd help you make sense of a longing that was searching for a voice.

Making a newspaper then was an act of patience and perseverance. Everything was slow. Copy would inch out of a noisy typesetter at seven lines a minute. A minute. Then the long galleys would be cut into strips with Xacto knives, waxed and pasted down column by column, page by page, all by hand.

For the first two years, the City Paper stayed monthly. Anything more would have killed us. Each month, Chris and I would work nonstop for three or four days. He'd collapse occasionally in a heap. I got along by getting jacked up on a mix of pot, coffee, aspirin and Nyquil — energized by the raw fear of missing our slot on the press.

We delivered the master boards of our first issue almost on time, at about 4 in the morning. We were hallucinating, so I forget who said, "I love the smell of printer's ink in the morning." But that became a mantra when things got bad, which was often.

The boarders upstairs drank, the place got burglarized. I bought a big dog to keep the thieves out, which contracted a disease, and barfed and shitted itself to a horrible death. The newspaper shrunk to 16 pages. We got sued for calling a mob attorney a "mob attorney." And once we had to throw out an entire press run because we'd discovered a slander too late.

Still, people came by, among them Paul Curci, my future partner and now publisher of the paper. And people kept saying, "I love this paper." Which, in addition to our love of printer's ink, lots of luck and sheer doggedness, turned out to be enough to survive our ugly, lovely birth.

(bruce@schimmel.com)