The Galaxie 500 Mailing List (Est. July 1995)
From the archive - how we built a fan community in the early days of the Internet.
A Head Full of Wishes, as a web site came to life in late 1994 and I sort of celebrated its 30th birthday at the tail end of last year. As important however, during the early days of AHFoW, was the snappily named Galaxie 500 Mailing List that came into being in July 1995 - which means that too has just arrived at its 30th birthday1!
After the website had been happily ticking along for six months and slowly garnering a bit of a following (or at least that’s what those hit counters we used to put at the bottom of our websites suggested - that and the email I was getting from other fans) someone, I can’t remember who, suggested that maybe we should start a mailing list and so, since I was always happy to take on a challenge the Galaxie 500 Mailing List was born.
Not knowing how else to do it I wrote a bunch of Arexx scripts for my Amiga and ran the mailing list using my dial-up internet connection. The first post was made on the fourth of July 1995 and began… “OK, so far it’s just the four of us”.
While the mailing list was being run from my Amiga and using my dial-up internet connection using my shiny new 14.4K modem it meant the list only ran when I connected to the internet - briefly in the morning before I went to work and for a few short periods in the evenings. If I went on holiday discussion stopped for a week!
Despite this, within three months there were 60+ members and by the time of the release of Penthouse there were over 200 subscribers.
In spring 1996 my Amiga suffered a catastrophic hardware failure that I speculated would put an end to the mailing list so we started an alt.music.galaxie-500 Usenet newsgroup to fill the void. I did actually get the computer, and the mailing list, back up and running in a couple of weeks but after that I had a script that cross-posted the mailing list to the newsgroup as a safety measure, I don’t think I asked anyone’s permission. The up-side of this is that you can actually read a fair bit of mailing list content on line - although you have to wade through the spam that Usenet frequently became.
By May 1998 things were getting a bit much for my poor Amiga, and our dial-up connection. One of the list members (Matt) worked for Listbox, a mailing list company, and set up a list for us, for free! Things ran very smoothly on there until January 2010 when I received an email informing me that the list had been “suspended for non-payment” - it seems that Matt had left Listbox ten years previously and while doing an audit they had come across my list with its twelve years of non-payment. The $17 per month they were asking was too much for a list that was already losing a bit of traction so I moved it to Google Groups where it sank slowly into obscurity. Technically the mailing list still exists (and has 148 members) but hasn’t had a post since 2016.
If you had a mailing list you invariably had a Frequently Asked Questions to accompany it. The thinking behind it was to discourage new subscribers from asking the same questions (or at least having somewhere you could point them to for an answer). Some FAQs where huge, rambling, overblown, and over-detailed things. Mine wasn’t. So I called it a miniFAQ (what’s with that capitalisation!?) to set expectations. This is the earliest copy I still have, dating from June 1996, but it’s version 1.2 so it had been running a while before this.
Here are a few observations about that miniFAQ
Ryko had just announced the Galaxie 500 box set but its release was still three months away.
The FAQ dates from before my ISP, Demon, gave us free webspace so the website was transitioning from the Turnpike URL (as all freebie Turnpike accounts were being closed) to some space provided by a fan, Matt (on his work server).
As well as a mailing list I also ran an automated email fileserver where you could request “all sorts of Galaxie 500 product” - I’m pretty sure this was just pictures and text documents - including the miniFAQ, and a text version of the website’s discography.
I don’t think that URL in the What is a Galaxie 500? section is quite right!
By 2000 the FAQ had become huge, rambling, overblown, and over-detailed!
I’ve been flicking through some of the old posts via the Usenet Archive and getting quite teary eyed. Here are a few of my nuggets of wisdom as posted to the Galaxie 500 Mailing List:
> Can anyone give me any info on Luna's new drummer?
All I know is what's been posted here...
1. he's a mate of Sean's
2. his name's Lee something
3. he used to be in a NYC band called '44'
4. err that's it
—Galaxie 500 Mailing List (6th December 1996)
… and later…
I've been exchanging emails with a relative of Lee Wall, the new Luna drummer, and I'm hoping to have some dirt to dish - or at least a run down of his musical history - watch this space!
-Andy
—Galaxie 500 Mailing List (28th February 1997)
I literally have no memory of emails with the “relative” or any dirt dishing that came out of it!
The archive covers the time when Adam was born (May 1997) so…
I've been introducing the youngster to some cool music - but, bizarrely he is the first human being to actually LIKE the sound of my singing voice - so I'VE had to sing to him - sadly I can't get that falsetto of the G500 tunes so I've had to resort to Tindersticks and Forster to send him to sleep!
—Galaxie 500 Mailing List (4th June 1997)
At one point I made disparaging remarks about Ultravox that unexpectedly brought out some fans to shoot me down:
I learnt my lesson a while ago with the Ultravox thing (and this isn't a cue to start that up again!) - no matter how crappy you think a band - and no matter how far detached from the list's ethic they seem there is ALWAYS a fan out there willing to defend them, except it would seem Pearl Jam - but that goes without saying!
—Galaxie 500 Mailing List (29th July 1997)
The list was also the place to think out loud…
Luna's "Pup Tent" is an album that I've yet to work out totally - again I don't feel in the least bit let down by it, and I like the fact that it's sufficiently different from "Penthouse" to really challenge my perceptions.
—Galaxie 500 Mailing List (20th December 1997)
On a couple of occasions band members would turn up on the mailing list, Matt Quigley had a short, but quite fiery appearance on the list during his two-show tenure as Luna’s bassist, and Britta became quite a regular contributor after she joined Luna. Dean too was there in the early days, although not for long, and we didn’t know:
Yeah, I'm online. I have email and all that. I've bought books over the Internet. It's kinda nice. What's annoying is talking to somebody after a gig, having them ask you questions and stuff, then you go online and find that they've reported it all. I mean, are you asking me as an Internet journalist? I subscribed to the Galaxie 500 mailing list for a little while, but it was like peeking in on my own life and getting all the wrong information about it. It just got to be too infuriating, wanting to post corrections all the time. That's the thing about the Internet: there are no fact checkers and everyone is a journalist.
—Dean Wareham interview for Wisconsin Assault issue #1 - 1998 (my emphasis)2
In those early days we were all learning how to use this new form of community, sometimes we weren’t that good at it, but we were getting better. Sadly, capitalism destroyed a lot of that and made us forget what we learned.
I really miss the camaraderie we had back then, it was a small community but active and (for the most part) fun and friendly - the list was as much a general music list as a Galaxie 500 / Luna / Damon & Naomi one - and was all the better for that - I discovered so many bands I still love to this day thanks to the mailing list. Modern social networks have nothing on what we had back then. I know this makes me sound like the old, old, man I have become but DAMN! I MISS THOSE DAYS SO MUCH!
Obviously a browse through the alt.music.galaxie-500 pages in the Usenet Archives (which are very, very far from complete) will also show you all the bits I don’t miss as well!
It does, technically, still exist so it can still have a birthday right? Even if it’s been sleeping for almost 10 years?
I found this quote in an email to the mailing list, with a link to a website that no longer exists and sadly isn’t in the Wayback Machine - further research was hampered by the fact that searching for Wisconsin Assault would take you to some very dark places.