This is the root of a new and ever-growing project to collect the memories and artifacts of a strange little town called Kalamazoo, Michigan, and the incredible music and energy that exists there.
I've written about the Kalamazoo music scene in other blog posts, and have even started collecting links to Kalamazoo bands as they are now. As much as I'd like to claim this is my own unique and original idea, there's actually at least one other key site doing something like this, Jeff Till's Leon's Temple. Jeff's got a couple of great things happening that I don't have - he's still in touch with people from Kalamazoo where I basically have a yawning black hole in my life that stretches from 1994 until the present, for one thing. For another, he's got megabuttloads of original Kalamazoo music. As time goes by, I may try to slide that stuff into a database for him or something and display it here; right now I've got way too many other projects on my plate to take on something of that magnitude. I shouldn't even be doing this.
As time goes by...who knows. I might start some kind of forum or website or something where people can get together and find each other. If that's the case you'll hear about it here first. In the mean time, there are about a million stories to tell. What I'd like to eventually do is get various authoritative folks together to tell their own stories in their own words here, and eventually build and track the history of the "Kalamazoo Music Scene." I could do much of this myself from memory, but memory is a fragile thing, and I've got the whole rest of this site to tell my story.
As relates to the Kalamazoo Music Scene (it's so annoying when I capitalize it like that, isn't it?), my memories begin hazily in the late 1970's with my older sister's husband, progress through the early years of my own musicianship and participation in that whole scene in the 1980's and '90s, and most of what I know after that is hearsay as I moved to North Carolina in August of 1994 and haven't spent significant time in Kalamazoo since then.
This page, then, will be a sort of portal to whatever I can bring together, starting with a small collection of links and a lot of my own writing from this site.
Leave Your Kalamazoo-Related Link Here!
JH Remembers...Sorta
People
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John Riemer - Guitarist for Tongue and Misanthropy back in the day, now working with Torso in Chicago.
- Jeff Till - Overman, Screwtape, and now The Till Action Science Media Labratory (TASMLab). Finding Leon's Temple, Jeff's Kalamazoo music site with lots of people and music from the 89-95 period was a huge step in my ongoing quest to reclaim the first two dozen years of my life. He's already done a lot of the work that I would be doing here; I'm just hoping to present a more formalized and organized approach to it. Plus he's got scads more bandwidth than I do, so he can host all those MP3's.
Other Links