I really miss the early days of the Internet. I really miss how primitive it was when it first started. Lately I find myself longing for a return to the time before Facebook and Twitter and all that other horseshit came along. When I first started online back in '97, I had to literally feel my way around the damn thing with no clear guidance other than a few rudimentary search engines, which in retrospect was part of its initial charm. I was learning how to build a website and at first it seemed like a joke for an obscure Mexican rock band to have one. Would anyone even care? And where the hell was I to promote it? Message boards and online email groups were the era's social media. I joined two groups which discussed garage and psych music, Bomp Digest and U-Spaces, and built an early audience there (and finally heard "Smog" in the process).
Really, it should've been a huge struggle to get my online efforts off the ground all those years ago. But miraculously, my work found the right people at an incredibly fast rate, and the best of them were coming not from these little message groups, but right out there in the wild. Folks who, like me, were feeling their way around the web using little more than basic instinct, who found me and others just by seeking us out. It was all a matter of fate placing the right people at the right web pages at the right times. It all seems so pure and simple now, looking back at it in this complex, mentally challenged social media world.
Before I started, all of the other people I knew who liked Los Dug Dug's had been folks I'd turned on to them myself, but now I was meeting people who'd discovered my all-time fave Mexican rock band without my involvement. And by far the most colorful gringos my site ultimately attracted were a group of insane obscure music fanatics from right in my home state of New Jersey, people so deeply into crate digging that they themselves had found Los Dug Dug's in much the same way I had (minus the trip to Mexico, of course). My initial contact from this bunch, just weeks before 1999 gave way to 2000, came from a man who identified himself as The Mickster. He had a radio show on Saturday evenings called "The Dangerous Rock & Roll Show" on WNTI-FM, broadcasting from Centenary College near the NJ/PA border. He invited me to tune in that weekend and when I did so, much to my pleasant surprise, I heard him spin Los DD's and then give a heartfelt plug for my website!
Sounds like a pretty simple story so far, but it was about to take a major, unexpected twist. The Mickster's co-host was a man identified only as Rob the Foil. Well, when I called in to the show to express my sincere appreciation for their free publicity, Mick and I ended up talking for a good few minutes and somehow we got to talking about the fact that we were both musicians. That was when he revealed the Foil's big secret to me: Rob was once the frontman for TV Toy.
TV TOY! It had been quite awhile since I'd last thought of them, but oh what a memory jog. They formed about half an hour's drive away from me in the city of Dover in the mid-'70s, and started off playing pure progressive rock. But seeing the Ramones and Talking Heads at CBGB changed their lives, and soon they were forging their own very unique and masterfully crafted blend of prog and punk, at a time when such musical hybrids were unheard of.
Back in the Channel 68 heyday of the Uncle Floyd Show, around 1979, they'd appeared on an episode which Tommy Koprowski (there's that man again) and I had happened to catch. We'd sent away for their EP and were knocked out cold by its A-side, "(Don't Blame It On The) Weekend." I, in particular, loved this song so much that I actually made it into a weekly ritual: every Friday afternoon, as soon as I got home from school, the very first thing I did was fire up my stereo and blast "Weekend" as loud as the neighbors could withstand. The lyrics said it all: "I know the weekend goes too fast... but this time the weekend's gonna last!" It was a truly inspiring and uplifting song, and the ritual was a beautiful reward for making it through another shitty school week. Furthermore, the song's significance went that much deeper by virtue of the fact that it came from a band on my home turf, a fact none other than the late, great John Peel once noted accordingly: "A Jersey band who doesn't sound like Springsteen? That's a measure of their courage, I think!"
Never in my wildest dreams did I think my love for Los Dug Dug's and TV Toy would intersect in such a way, but lo and behold, I now had a line on Toy's fearless leader, Rob Barth, and the story was about to become gloriously complicated from there. Soon after, I was invited to bring my love of all things Dug Dug's to the Dangerous Rock & Roll Show for a two-hour special focused exclusively on the band. I was so thrilled by the opportunity, I had Armando Nava himself do a promotional ID for the show, which we recorded long-distance over the phone from Mexico City to New Jersey. The show aired over WNTI on February 5, 2000, and while it generally went well, I frankly admit to cringing a bit when I play back the aircheck now.
Mick and Rob were nice enough guys but they insisted on sprinkling their slapstick on-air humor throughout the program, and there were times when I honestly wanted to slap them both. But I did succeed in blasting the Jersey airwaves with roughly two hours worth of Los Dug Dug's, and I'm still proud of the accomplishment itself, especially since we were able to present it as a worldwide broadcast over the net on WNTI's web stream. Indeed, the night's biggest thrill for me, even more so than meeting the man who sang "Don't Blame It On The Weekend," was receiving an email from a fan of my site in Mexico whom I'd befriended, saying he was listening to the show down there and totally loving it. How fucking cool is that, folks?
But the story of my relations with Mick and Rob had only just begun. The very next week, they called me and said, "You're such a big TV Toy fan, how would you feel about creating a website for them?" To say I was startled by this request is an understatement. "I'd love to," I replied, "but shouldn't that be Rob's task?" After Toy broke up in '84, he'd left the music scene for a career as a renowned graphic designer, and I told him honestly that I thought he could do a much better job than I, given his designing skills and the fact that he could just write the whole story himself. No, he insisted, that would not do: "We want a site with the same fan perspective as your other sites." Fair enough, I reckoned. I thought about it for a day or two, then agreed to do it.
Just as with Los Dug Dug's before them, my role as TV Toy's webmaster gave me access to a fanboy's dream lot of very cool and personal stuff. Rare and unissued recordings, cassettes and vinyl and CD-Rs, original press kits and posters and stickers, news clippings, even a few authentic Max's Kansas City handbills. I interviewed Rob over the phone and weaved it all into an overview of Toy's history. Word of the project quickly spread to all the other former Toys and all pledged their full support.
Meanwhile, I was becoming the toast of the Dangerous Rock & Roll Show. Every week Mickster would plug my websites, often playing our favorite Mexican band and eventually hyping up the TV Toy site as it neared completion. The show's biggest fan by far was a man named Bill Kopp, who religiously taped the show each and every week and had a huge archive of DR&R Show airchecks. He became probably the second biggest Jersey-based Dug Dug's fan after myself out of all of them, completely in agreement with me that "Smog" was an all-time rock masterpiece. He also designed the famous "I Dig Dug Dug's" button, which started as our own little exclusive thing and has since been spotted on leather jackets in Mexico City! (Bilko, if you're reading this, please hit me up sometime. It's been ages, my friend.)
Work on the TV Toy site progressed very quickly, and creating the content was no problem, but the matter of designing the site worried me greatly, and for good reason. I'm good at writing, of course, but I am not a graphic designer by any reasonable stretch of the imagination. I know nothing about creating logos or any of that stuff -- hell, I can't even draw a straight line! Right from the start I'd been designing my sites from the seat of my pants with no idea at all what the fuck I was doing. I was just experimenting with the various design programs I was learning and just going with whatever looked stylish to me. And now I was expected to create a web layout which would please a pro designer who had Netflix and AT&T among his clients. This, in fact, was the main reason I wanted him to do it. Oh lord, help me, what have I gotten myself into?
I did my best. I was determined not to admit defeat. I messed around with some graphics I'd found online and by some miracle came up with a neat Javascript rollover design, a staticky TV which "switched channels" to band photos with a move of the mouse, and a big scan of the band's TV Guide-spoofing logo placed next to it. (As big as the original designs looked on the ancient desktops on which they were produced, they look shockingly miniature on the laptops of today.) I put up a test version online at a secret link, sent it to Rob Barth... then held my breath.
The verdict came quickly. And guess what... he loved it. And not only did he think the design suited TV Toy perfectly, but he even praised the fancy rollover effects! I took it as a huge compliment and breathed just as huge a sigh of relief. And so on May 5, 2000, exactly three months to the day of the Dug Dug's radio special, The TV Toy Channel officially launched to everyone's delight and satisfaction. Over time we eventually expanded it to include a history of Morris County's "Moco Scene" of the '70s and '80s which spawned Toy, complimenting its complete history of the band. It's unfortunately been relegated to the web archives by now, but I'm still trying to find all my original master files for the whole site, and perhaps I'll get it back out there someday, though for sure it would need some serious editing and updating first. In the meantime, there's this only partially functional "bootleg" of rather poor quality to go by, accessible via this blog's menu. View it at your own risk, folks.
I still think it was a great site, and one very close to my heart, and in a more perfect world it would've sparked the same sort of revival for TV Toy as my Dug Dug's site ultimately did for them. It did, however, reconnect various band members to old friends they hadn't heard from in ages, and attract a British fan who'd taped a TV Toy track off John Peel's show on the BBC and was thrilled to finally track down the band over 20 years later. In the wake of all this, Toy's ex-drummer Steve Peer compiled a superb collection of their music spanning the years '76-'84, called "Shards." It's a truly stunning document of some very original and courageous sounding high-energy Jersey rock that doesn't sound like Bruce. You should also grab any and all original Toy 7-inchers you find in your crate digging travels -- there's not a bad one in the bunch.
(As I wrap up this latest chapter in my online saga, word has reached me that a 35-minute TV Toy documentary once thought to have been lost forever has just been discovered in someone's garage, and that said film will soon be available for all to see. This is the absolute Jersey music find of the century as far as I'm concerned, and I can't wait to see it! I'll post more about it here when it drops. Plugs are also in order here for ex-Toy drummer Steve Peer's awesome Steve's Theme Park project, a rollicking yet poignant reflection on old age as seen through the eyes of a bunch of old punks -- if you are one, it'll getcha right there for sure. And if you're ever in Ellsworth, Maine, check out the new pub Steve just opened there, Black Moon Public House, and his current band the Crown Vics. Tell 'em Brazen said hi!)
