Ah, time to get all sentimental and weepy, this being the week of the 8th anniversary of the launch of Donewaiting. Very few people are still around from the early days of the site (where in the world is Charlie Tokyo?) and the first message board (Penny from the Block?). That’s all before Duffy really got his shit together and turned this into the gold that it is today.
Just for fun, I hopped into the wayback machine (aka archive.org) and did some digging around to see if I could find my first contribution to the Donewaiting that we all know and love today. Lo and behold, I found it.
January 23, 2003
Day 1: Start with random linksAs an introduction to the thoughts of Atomic Ned, please allow me to present you with the following links:
* I want to party with Elijah Wood. Okay, well maybe I don’t want to party with him but I would like to hang out at his place and listen to CDs with him. Seems as if Frodo has a pretty decent CD collection. Another Verbena fan, wow! Here’s what Elijah has to say about the band’s debut, Souls for Sale: “I came upon them by accident, reading an article in a magazine. That’s what I do: I read about all different kinds of music, then I go out and experiment. It didn’t exactly sound like my thing, but I liked their enthusiasm, so I bought it. This is just a brilliant record.”
* My introduction to the sounds of Verbena came via Blake of Fig Dish (R.I.P.). After Fig Dish broke up, Blake and Mike started a new band called Caviar who you may remember as the “Tangerine Speedo” band. Well, seems as if Island/Def Jam wasn’t quite sure what to do with Caviar (how could they have not given them budget to do a video for “Tangerine Speedo”???) and dropped them like a bad habit last year. The boys in Caviar received some major label interest, reportedly from Capitol Records who decided to sound the Caviar sound-a-like OKGo instead. Blake tells me that OKGo has a rehearsal space in the same building as Caviar’s. Hmmm … think the OKGo guys had a glass up to the door while Caviar was recording demos? Brilliante Records, a small upstart indie label out of Chicago, has agreed to put out a series of EPs by Caviar starting this March. This move — releasing a series of EPs rather than a full length — may have been inspired by The Damnwells, a band that is managed by Wes Kidd who used to front the band Triple Fast Action (and who is good friends with the Caviar fellas.) Makes you go “hmmm”, doesn’t it?
* The Damnwells have a spankin’ new website. Quite an improvement over their previous website (designed by yours truly). Kudos to the folks at Feremone.com for making a snazzy site with all kinds of downloads. The Damnwells are going to be hitting the road in February for a series of dates with Cheap Trick. Sweet!
* A carry-over from the “old” Atomic Ned site — Avril covers System of a Down’s “Chop Suey” and, surprise, it’s not very good.