The website started up in the 90’s to try to help build the community around the band and more selfishly, help me get more info about my favorite band. Along the way, the community has grown and I’ve met many people along the way I’m glad to call friends, some for 20+ years now! Absolutely amazing how music can bring people together. In the beginning, the concept was to extend the existing fan sites at that were there before and after (Jamie’s Turnip Farm, FreeSoFree.net, Per’s Dino Page, Matt Over Minder, Keeblin.com, Dermont Hanleys’ dino page, Kamada’s Dinosaur Jr page, Toshi’s Blank Generation and as well as his Dinosaur Jr mailing list, among others I’ve surely left off). The center of it eventually went on to be forums (a simpler time) and the front page news was actually pulled directly from the forums from a group of us. As I said, always a community effort. In fact, if you have ever seen any actual cool posts from the twitter account it is most likely thanks to Graham Woollard as he is amazing at finding and sharing cool stuff.
Even members of the band including extended members of the Dinosaur Jr. family were active in the community at times and for a while, we were the official site of the band and at many times, the origin of band news exposure. J once told me his family checked the website to see what he was doing and we even got to give away a signed guitar once!
This was all before the advent of social media, so as folks flocked to different areas for community, the forums sort of dried up. Before that, we had a hard time keeping the servers up a lot of days. Now the bands all have other official sites, teams and ways to communicate official news/tour dates. With that being the case, going forward this site will be dedicated to celebrating the legacy of the band’s past as well as its future from the perspective of the fans that want a deeper dive.
I still have the old forums backed up and running locally, even though there are some broken links between users and comments in some older posts. I may put them back up as a subdomain at some point. Not sure if it will just be a static, point-in-time thing, or made live, but we shall see. Spam was hard enough to fight then and now it is automated with just a few clicks…
Community History