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Photo by Eran Menashri on Unsplash. |
Back
in the earliest days of the World Wide Web . . . you had to know HTML
coding and you designed sites with MS Publisher, then hosted you wares
on places like Lycos Angelfire. . . .
Those
were the days when there was no
Blogger or Wordpress all-in-one design and hosting services. There were
no Wikipedia or Discogs repositories to get your musical trivia: you
read books, such as the musicpedias from Trouser Press and Rolling Stone
to get your
intel; you collected copies of Rolling Stone and Spin (when they
covered actual music) and, if you worked in radio, like myself, you had
free copies of the trade magazines CMJ, The Hard Report, and Rockpool,
as well as those new-on-the-scene alt-rock magazines B-Side and Option,
at your disposal. Further back when, even before MTV, those copies of
Circus and Hit Parader had the commercial hard rock and metal spectrum
covered. For the hardcore musicphile, like myself, that information was
jotted down in spiral notebooks and legal pads; books were sticky-note
bookmarked; pages were torn out of magazines and slipped inside album
covers for quick reference; you kept an alphabetized accordion folder at your typewriter-side filled with magazine pages and press clippings.
When
making those vanity websites in the nascent days of the web, there was
no right-clicking-and-saving images from online repositories such as
Discogs: You physically scanned album covers and band logos and photos,
then dumped them into MS Paint to edit, so as to
complement the copy you composed in Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.
So, from my not-yet-wireless Internet days of yore when a wireless access port was not yet a gleam in my eye; when I loaded an “initialization” disc into an Apple II . . . here's a somewhat reproduction of my ancient rock biography blasts from the past: part of a website I created for a web design class in the early 1990s.
Yes: I called the site “Rock 80” and stole the logo from that old K-Tel album with cuts from Pat Benatar, Gary Numan, Sniff ’n’ the Tears, and the Ramones.Yes: I had it both on LP, as well as on 8-Track for the tape deck in the old 1975 black Firebird.
I was so clever . . . and cool . . . back when.
Oh, that site was fancy-smancy: I turned the band logos into navigational “buttons” and everything. It
was deemed good enough that the school hosted it for free for a year. I
received over 200 visits . . . which is probably 199 more than I get,
now.
In addition to the old vanity-press website, a few of these entries also come courtesy of my years producing entertainment segments for various radio stations. (Yeah, I pack rat every scrap of paper, and then some.)
Once I began working in radio in the alternative rock format dealing in ’90s rock, the “golds” of the format were many of the punk and new wave bands of the ’80s spoken of on this site, spun on the air. Music trivia was always part of the back announcing shtick back in those disc jockey days, as I additionally produced music news segments that aired throughout the broadcast day. Working for oldies/nostalgia and classic country formatted stations, I also produced “What Ever Happened To . . . ” segments on forgotten songs and artists of those formats . . . because people need to know what happened to one-hit wonders from the 1960s like the T-Bones and southern fried rockers like Doc Holliday from the 1980s.
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