Strangefolk fans Andrew Francke & Jeff Olsen started a small website for the group’s followers to download MP3s of recent performances back in 2001 and it quickly grew to become the premier Strangefolk fan site on the web. Strangebase.com featured photo galleries, audio downloads, news about the band and a message board until it was retired a few years ago.
4. Walfredo.com
Jambands.com’s first Fansite of the Month, Walfredo.com was the rare Phish fansite with a West Coast bias. Adam Berger put the site together shortly after Phish’s two-night stand at the Thomas and Mack Center in Las Vegas to profile photos of jambands that his vast network of friends shot as well as the occasional feature, tons of news articles and a fun rumors section. Walfredo.com is still up and running but hasn’t been updated since last year.
5. moelinks.com
Back in the late ’90s, moe. fan Cory Ferber started a website that acted as a portal for fans of the Upstate NY-based band. It hosted audio, photos and setlists and reached a new level when Cory gave the site to a team of three moe.rons that included friend of HT Jesse Jarnow. moelinks actually still exists but makes this list because it hasn’t been updated in years, but was an invaluable resource back in the day.
6. AOL’s Phish Bowl
Before there was PT, one of the more active Phish-related message boards was housed on AOL in a forum called The Phish Bowl. You could chat with other fans in chat rooms, discuss topics on the message boards and download an assortment of graphics, lists and other Phishy files. My favorite Phish Bowl experience took place during May of 1996 when all of the sudden “mginstudio” entered the chatroom and quickly made it clear it truly was Phish bassist Mike Gordon. Gordo told us all about the recording process and kindly answered any questions thrown his way. 14 years before tDB bassist Marc Brownstein started interacting with fans on Facebook, there was Mike Gordon kibitzing with fans at The Phish Bowl.
7. Rosemary’s Digest and Benjy’s Digest
With Phish’s fanbase expanded exponentially in the mid ’90s – along with the popularity of the internet – the signal to noise ratio on the rec.music.phish newsgroup became heavily weighed towards the noise side of that equation. Fans Rosemary Mackintosh and Benjy Eisen helped the situation by wading through the clutter to find the best posts about the band and emailed a digest of these posts to anyone who wanted to subscribe to the digests.
Based out of Britain, Eyes of the World – or perhaps Franklin’s Tower, I was always confused at which name it wanted to go by – was an oasis for Grateful Dead fans worldwide. The site provided an email newsletter that discussed all of the happenings in the Dead world during the late ’90s and into the ’00s. It also featured an active message board that always had good conversations going on. The site still exists but hasn’t been updated in years.
9. Groove Tube
Phish fan Jonathan Healey started a website called Groove Tube on his Arizona State University webspace that offered video podcasts of Phish performances in 1998 – about a decade before the term video podcast became fashionable. Phish vids were hard to come by at the time, so it was amazing to watch rare footage of the band in action. The Phish organization wasn’t such a big fan of Groove Tube and shut the site down pretty quickly – pretty funny to think about in the age of 100 new Phish videos getting uploaded to YouTube each week. Healey went on to work for jambands.com and was the cinematographer and editor for the Wetlands Preserved documentary.
10. Pause Record
If there is one site that helped shape my vision of Hidden Track, it was a popular jam site from the early ’00s called Pause Record. Sadly, the Internet Wayback Machine doesn’t show any record of the site, but it featured news, reviews and features about bands from around the jamband scene as well as classic rock groups and even a couple of alt.rock acts. My favorite part of the site was a list of links to content on the web that jam fans would find interesting that was updated on a daily basis. Our Monday’s Hors d’Oeuvres, Wednesday Intermezzo and Friday’s Leftovers columns owe a debt of gratitude to Pause Record.
What were your favorite sites back in the day that aren’t still around? Let us know by leaving a comment below and maybe we’ll make a second list in a few months…
13 Responses
Thought you were going to make it through the list without mentioning pauserecord. Got to love a site named after DAT recording. Rock on
the original moerons.com was a great one
Good choice of a top 10 list…
wheelies.com used to be a pretty cool site back in the day of the Screamin’ Cheetah Wheelies…that’s definately one band & site I miss. Also used to enjoy newearthmud.net when the band was still touring- the site is still there just not as much action anymore.
What about all the sites that started the whole online CD trading community (led to etree and music on archive.org) like People for a Clearer Phish (pcp.gridpoint.com)?
Not a mention of phans.com
I can’t believe that Hits From The Blog didn’t make this list, or at least get an honorable mention ;o)
@phan – Uh…#1?
Used to visit Pause Record everyday and it was totally erased from my memory until I read this. Nostalgia for websites, who woulda thunk.
phisharchive.com – an old friend used to do this site…but I think she’s gotten a tad busy since.
Pause Record, man I used to frequent that site all the time. What a GREAT site it was. Thanks for the interweb memories Scotty!
Very cool – thanks for the plug on Pause/Record (as well as the positive comments). I was its editor, publisher, founder etc. and one of the things that made me most proud about developing and conceiving it, was that it really was the first site to unite many jam bands’ content under one roof (we actually launched in 1998). With that, we married the tape and CDR-trading (all the rage back then) as well as taper culture.
BTW, ups for this article. We’re constantly looking forward, forward as a society and sometimes looking back is fun too. Faves listed were moelinks and AOL Phish Bowl. Brings you back. I’d also add to this list the recently defunct boards at Netspace.org as well as tapetrading.com.
No gadiel.com/phish?
Add the now cdefunct Umphreaks.com to the list. RIP.
I think it was a fan site, but I used to religiously visit gdlive.com whenever I needed a dead fix.