I first became a Kinks fan in 1981 as a 17-year-old high school student. Back
then the Kinks were all over the radio, with songs from Give The People What
They Want, One For The Road, Low Budget, as well as their earlier hits, kept
in constant rotation. If the Kinks were playing a concert near by, you
could be assured to hear about it because the DJs would constantly be talking
it up. If the Kinks were about to release a new album, you would hear about
it on the radio or read about it in a rock magazine.
Fast forward to
the late 1980s... the Kinks' media presence had greatly diminished. I had
no idea Think Visual had been released until I heard it playing in a record
store. And although I had met people who said they were Kinks fans,
I knew nobody else who was as *into* the band as I was. As a Kinks fan I
felt rather isolated, and the lack of information about the band in the media
didn't help matters.
As a Computer Science student at RIT (the
Rochester Institute of Technology in western New York State), and later as
an employee of RIT, I would frequently search the Usenet newsgroups for
information about the Kinks posted by other fans. In early 1990 I noticed a
posting in rec.music.misc with the subject "Kinks poll". Someone
named Neil Ottenstein was conducting a poll of peoples' favorite Kinks
albums -- he asked that we e-mail to him a list the albums in order of
preference. 22 people replied and two weeks later he compiled the list and
posted the results back on the newsgroup. (Village Green Preservation Society
topped the list.)
At the end of his summary of the results Neil wrote,
"By the way, I was thinking of trying to start a Kinks mailing list." I
immediately replied to Neil and asked to be put on the list. Subscribers to
the list would send e-mail to Neil, and he would forward those messages to
everyone on the list as soon as he received them. I no longer needed to
scour the newsgroups looking for Kinks information -- messages from other
fans were being sent directly to my mailbox!
The mailing list was started
several years before most people knew there was such a thing as the
Internet. A majority of the subscribers had university (.edu) address:
myself from RIT, Neil from the University of Maryland, Mark Walsh from
Stanford, Stefano Carro from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, and Doug
Hinman from Brown University. There were a couple computer companies
represented, such as Stuart Troutman from the Apollo computer company.
Slowing we started seeing people coming from AOL and Compuserve as
the Internet became more mainstream.
As the size of the mailing list
grew, access to news and information about the Kinks became easier and
easier. We no longer needed mainstream media to keep us informed about
the band -- we knew everything long before they did!
In 1994, traffic
on the list got to a point where Neil had to stop forwarding individual
messages as they came in and move to a (nearly) daily digest format. So here
we are, 3000 digests and 13 years later... and almost 18 years since the
mailing list was started. Neil has moderated the list these many years,
occasionally having to smooth ruffled feathers or making people cool off when
discussions got heated. The longevity of the list is a testament to
his fairness, level-headedness and dedication. So Neil, many thanks for
the last 18 years, and I'm looking forward to the next 3000
digests.