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The names of the persons listed here are either on public record or aliases. Aliases are written in bold capitals on their first appearance. I have tried very much to write truthfully, however, if you have a different recollection or you think I got my facts are wrong, contact me immediately.
”I want to know what it is about this.. this Internet thingy.” my boss told me in 1995. Sure, I had heard about the Internet before, but I had never forked out the cash to get access. It was all much too expensive and difficult. BBSes were so much easier - and there were plentiful. A BBS was simply a computer equipped with some special software which was hooked up to a modem. It sat there waiting until a user logged in, did his thing and logged off again. You could download software, leave messages and read some documents. As far as I knew the Internet did about the same thing with the exception that all the computers were interconnected and could handle multiple users at a time.
But hey, the boss was paying, so nothing was holding me back anymore. I got the cheapest Internet access deal available and started my exploration. First, I had to dial up. In those days nobody had a high speed Internet connection, so you used the phone line. A clever piece of hardware called a modem translated those ones and zeroes to beeps, sent them over the phone line where they ended up at another modem who did the reverse. The disadvantage was that is was slow, between 100- or 1000-fold slower than a modern high speed connection. Think about it: a thing that is now done and over with when you glance at your watch took a minute and a half in those days.
Second, since I had taken the cheapest option available I didn’t have a direct connection to the Internet. Instead, I got a connection to a computer which did have connection to the Internet. And you needed to give that computer commands to make it work, just like MS-DOS or cmd.exe. Consequently, all you got was text, no images. Even the World Wide Web (yes, that is what ”www” means) was plain old text. Still, there was much to be found. The best thing since sliced bread was alt.music.the-doors1, a world wide discussion forum where people exchanged information on my favorite band, The Doors.
The World Wide Web was not so very interesting in those days. There was no Google, no Facebook, no Wikipedia, no information on The Doors whatsoever, apart from The Doors Collectors Magazine2. Yes, even The Doors themselves didn’t have a website. Even my dad couldn’t find any information on his hobby, growing cacti. And setting up a website yourself was next to impossible - and very expensive.
Since I was some serious fan, I didn’t just have a large collection of CDs, but also many books. One of them was ”Dance on fire” by Ross Clarke. It featured an article on the DQ fan club, written by Rainer Moddemann. But I never was a fan club guy, honoring the adagio ”I don’t want to be a member of a club that accepts people like me as a member”, so I quickly forgot about it.
In the meanwhile I was contemplating to go to Paris on the third of July, just to meet other fans. And in the summer of 1996 I did just that.
I arrived at Jims grave around 10:00 am. I saw somebody with a copy of ”The Doors Quarterly”, an English language mag about the Doors. ”Do you know if any coverbands are playing tonight?” I asked him. He didn’t seem to understand. I rephrased by question but didn’t get any answer. Must have been my French. In desperation he told me he had gotten the mag from a bearded guy behind Jims grave. Seemed interesting enough.
I already recognized the man as I approached him. It was Rainer Moddemann, chairman of the Doors fan club in Germany. I shook his hand and asked for a copy. He did and added a few stickers. ”Are any coverbands playing tonight?” I asked. ”May be the ’Creats’ are coming.” he said ”But I don’t think so.”
After that, I met him again during my stay in Paris and finally asked him the $64,000 question: ”Do you have a website? That becoming quite a thing, you know.” ”Not yet.” he said ”But we’re working on it.” OK, cool. I’ll wait. I met him again in December 1996. Same question, same answer. Well, I wasn’t in a hurry.
I met Rainer again in the summer of 1997 when I returned to Paris for the 3rd of July. This time he has brought along his printer and art-director Jochen Maaßen. We drank a beer together, I expanded my sizable collection of Doors books by buying his ”Impressions of an anniversary” and again, the subject of a DQ website came up. ”Well.” Rainer admitted ”I really want to, but I don’t know how.” In the meanwhile the Internet had become as familiar to me as the back of my hand, so I said ”I think, I can do that for you.” And to my surprise, Rainer accepted the offer.
True, I had created some web pages at work. Before there was intranet, there were a lot of incoherent documents scattered around the workplace. I had recognized the capacity of the intranet early on and had started to publish them on the intranet. In those days, there was no Firefox, Internet Explorer or Chrome, we had Netscape. Fortunately, Netscape came with ”Composer”, a program that allowed you to create simple web pages by offering an MS-Word like environment. You could add titles, use different fonts and even include images, but that was it. Nothing fancy.
In those days, web pages had to be fancy. You had to offer your user an experience that was beyond anything paper could provide. It was much more influenced by the CD-ROMs that were popular in those days. There had to be nice colors, movement, sound - all those things you could not easily squeeze out of ”Composer”. If you want a comparison, a web page had to look like a walk on the Las Vegas mall.
But I know I can learn those things pretty quickly, so I didn’t see any major problems. I simply switched to an editor that allowed me to type in HTML code and see at the same time what it looked like - which is called a ”preview”. Rainer and me decided to put the ”Paris guide” online first. Then the next problem came along: where am I going to host it? Web space was still expensive in those days. Fortunately, I was contacted by another Doors fan who had his own website and after a few email exchanges, he offered to put it on his website. Hurray, we were online! It was the 7th of July, three days later. Still, it was only text, no images.
Rainer gave me the DQ magazine, where the ”Paris Guide” had been published, so I could scan all the images. I had recently bought a 6000 euro state-of-the-art computer with a tape drive, a massive 4 GB hard drive, a giant 17” CRT screen and a Logitech scanner. There were two major scanner types in those days. First, the inexpensive hand scanner, which forced you to move the device manually over the item you wanted to scan. Second, the very expensive professional flatbed scanner. Mine was in between the two. It had a slot where you inserted the item you wanted to scan, which was pulled over the sensor like a fax machine.
After that, I fired up ”Paint Shop Pro”, a low cost Photoshop equivalent to make the final corrections. Note ”Paint Shop Pro” only featured the most basic operations, like rotation, scaling and color adjustment. It had few filters and no wizards. But it had to do, since I didn’t have anything else. I quickly picked up on web design, which had more constraints in those days than I care to remember.
Since it was very slow, you had to squeeze as much as possible in the very little space that was available. If your website took a lot of space, it took ages to download. Most users would get impatient after a while and go somewhere else. So you had to take care your web page was downloaded and displayed as soon as possible. That took skill. There are techniques to make pictures very small, for instance by restricting the number of colors that are displayed. E.g. if you restrict yourself to 255 different colors, your picture will load four times faster than when you use the full spectrum3. If you make your pictures small, e.g. 200 by 100 pixels, they will load faster than when you use the entire picture and let the browser scale it. If you reuse a picture, it is displayed twice, but it needs to be downloaded only once.
But there were troubles on the horizon. The user who had kindly hosted the DQ website soon became collateral damage in a war between the different egos that occupied The Doors universe in those days. In the end we all decided that it was better to move DQ to a place of its own. Rainer granted the unfortunate fan the privilege to indefinitely host the ”Paris Guide” on his website, but there would be no further expansion. The hunt for web space had begun.
Shortly after I had returned from Paris, I had put up a web site of my own4, so I knew fairly well what was needed to make an attractive web presence. In the meanwhile I had acquired full Internet access, adding a TCP/IP stack to my Windows 3.1 installation by installing Trumpet Winsock and several client programs like Netscape, Free Agent and WS_FTP. So I was ready to rock ’n roll!
The main problem was I had zero budget and I wasn’t willing to put my own money in it either. Fortunately, the ”Internet bubble” was at its top at the time, so a lot of small companies surfaced offering all kinds of services for free. Just what the doctor ordered. My own web site was hosted at Geocities, which later merged with Yahoo. The problem with Geocities was that only personal web sites were allowed without any commercial objective. Since Rainer wanted to promote Doors Quarterly, that just didn’t fit the bill.
Another alternative was Angelfire, which was later acquired by Lycos. The problem with Angelfire was that it was tiny, a few hundred kilobytes at the most. It was definitely not the place to create a major Doors web site that could compete with anything on the web, but it was a start. October 1997 we went online with just a few pages on the Doors Quarterly fan club.
A new web site was created at Geocities, where we made a web site that looked like the personal website of Rainer Moddemann, but essentially was just the repository for the large Doors website we wanted to create. All non-commercial stuff, like the ”Paris Guide”, was to be placed there. It went online in November 1997. The Doors Quarterly menu on Angelfire simply linked to Geocities, so the user experience was preserved. In order to save bandwidth the background was a small .GIF5 file, that was tiled.
It also featured the famous ”lion head” of Jim Morrison with moving eyes. That one was created by erasing the irises, placing new dots at the appropriate places and creating an animated .GIF. It startled a lot of visitors at first, because the effect was very subtle. For several seconds nothing seemed to happen and then a brief succession of images that made Jim look left and right: ”Did he move his eyes?!” Another feature was the infamous ”WAKE UP” cry, a small sound bite that probably has frightened and embarrassed thousands of visitors. Both of these gags took about 20 kilobytes and consequently loaded very quickly.
Since I didn’t have a fancy graphics program, the only way to make professional looking graphics was to be inventive and creative. By accident I found out that when you applied several unrelated filters, only the contours of the characters were left. By transposing the original 2D graphics over these contours, you got a professional looking 3D effect. I also used a WordPerfect6 graphics editor to create some interesting basic effects.
Since Rainer did not have an Internet connection, people were unable to communicate with him, which was unacceptable. Fortunately, one of the freebies on the web was an email-to-fax service. You just sent an email there, wrapping the phone number in the username and a fax was sent to that subscriber. Since we wanted to fake to be a more professional organization than we were at the time, we also subscribed to a free email-redirect. There you could get a ”real” email address like doors4ly@cryogen.com, which automatically redirected any mail to the free email-to-fax service, which in turn sent a fax to Rainer.
What we didn’t know at the time was that the free email-to-fax service didn’t send a fax immediately, but instead took advantage of the lower nightly rates. So at one night Rainer was soundly sleeping in the room next to the fax when the machine suddenly came to life, spitting out faxes incessantly at such a rate that he needed to change rolls several times before it became quiet again. At least we knew we had an audience..
Another disadvantage was that those free web hosting sites had horrible URLs no living man could remember. We pulled the same trick there: we signed up for a free URL-redirect, so the user could type http://visitweb.com/doors4ly and end up at http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palladium/1409. Rainer desperately wanted a counter, so (yes, you guessed right) we signed to up for a free counter.
All those freebies proved to be a very fragile construction, because in those days such free services sometimes didn’t last that long, so we needed to find a new, free service for the component that was now lacking, change the HTML code accordingly and upload it to the site again. A simple counter was just an hour work, but sometimes even the URL redirect went out of business. That was nerve wrecking, because we would have to communicate the new URL to our audience. All in all, we were quite lucky with Angelfire and Geocities, because those companies stayed in business for several years.
Rainer was determined to become the number one Doors site on the web and asked me to undertake a major project: to convert his ”Stages” book to the web. ”Stages” was a kind of Buyers Guide to bootleg CD’s with hundreds of listings. Fortunately, he had a digital copy of it, so we didn’t have to scan and OCR7 the whole thing, which saved a whopping amount of time. Still, it was a document, not a web page.
The normal procedure was as follows: I would receive a WordPerfect 5.18 document from Rainer, which I would convert to plain text. Then I would add all basic HTML formatting and finally I would insert all the bells and whistles like graphics and MIDI9 files. MIDI files were just perfect for the users listening pleasure, because they were small, could be repeated endlessly and hold minutes of music.
But this was different. It was almost impossible to format it manually - too much work! So I wrote several small programs with my 4tH compiler10 which each handled different parts of the formatting. What was left was too diverse to format automatically, but manageable. In those days I was still commuting two hours a day and I used this time to complete the task. In June 1998 the CD-Guide was online.
Then VALERIE came into the picture. Valerie was one of Rainers contacts in the USA. At first she was happy to see the DQ web site, but that changed very quickly when she came to the conclusion that there were ”errors”, especially where the ”Paris Guide” was concerned. The problem is that I handle those problems very straight forward. It was my responsibility to get the web site running and keep it running, but the content itself was Rainers responsibility. So, if anyone had a problem with ”-ize” or ”-ise”, I told them to contact Rainer. If Rainer said, she was right, I’d change it. Very simple.
When the first ”I KNOW I’M RIGHT, I STUDIED ENGLISH AND IT’S MY NATIVE LANGUAGE!!” messages came in, I answered them politely and forwarded them to Rainer. However, when the ”IT’S NOT SHOWING UP AT ALL IN MY AOf**kingL” flames started, I simply did what every web master would do: try to replicate the error. I couldn’t replicate it, not even in the exact browser she was using, so I closed the call. I told Rainer to get her off my back, because this wasn’t really helpful. The constant flow of messages diminished but never really stopped. No problem, we have a ”kill list”.
In the meanwhile Rainer had gotten tired of his ”email-fax” and got connected to the Internet as well. That really simplified everything since he could now send me stuff instead of using snail mail. The problem was that he had gotten a top of the bill connection11 which required a huge, proprietary driver. His ancient Windows 3.1 PC didn’t handle that one very well, so it bombed out very often - especially when he used Netscape. Yes, very annoying, but it was worse. Sometimes the PC wouldn’t come up anymore or the driver wouldn’t even start, or the driver would start and Netscape wouldn’t and bomb out with an ”Error 2” (which wasn’t very helpful).
Since there was only that much I could do being 200 clicks away, I was often forced to visit him and get the darn thing up and running again - only to hear it broke down again two days later. Imagine, having to work five days a week like any drone and then travel 400 clicks each weekend in order to do some more work. Still, I have to admit I didn’t hate it. I always felt very welcome and it was extremely exciting to be part of something like this.
In October 1998 we had a few new additions. We turned Geocities into a real personal web site for Rainer, with a proper menu and a FAQ, put Rainers review of The Doors Boxset online and added a guest book. The whole thing was slowly getting some substance. Although Rainers Internet connection was still somewhat flaky, he was very busy promoting the site on the web. For that purpose, we created several banners, featuring our ”moving eyes” trademark. But this was only the beginning. The best was yet to come..
Rainer had an amazing amount of material on the Miami trial and we decided to put those online as well, since those were hard to find anywhere. Even now, so many years later, I can’t remember encountering them somewhere else on the web - ever. The ”Miami papers” (as I will call them) consist of several documents. First a transcript of the concert itself and second, the testimonies of all members of The Doors, including Jim.
Since I didn’t want to give each page the same layout I experimented with the graphics here. I took a picture of barbed wire, a newspaper photo of Jim and a WordPerfect generated logo and tried to integrate all elements. Considering the technical limitations at the time, I wasn’t too unhappy, but nowadays I would do much better with the software I have at my disposal. I also tried to replicate the layout of trial papers in HTML, which worked very well.
In November 1998, the ”Miami papers” went online, celebrating the first anniversary of the DQ website. However, I wasn’t really aware of that at the time. I used to be a frequent visitor of the HCC days, an annual computer exhibition of a Dutch computer club12, which was at that time one of the biggest in the world. The exhibition was traditionally held early November and featured a market where almost every shop in Holland had a booth. There were ”special offers” all over the place, so if were a nerd and wanted to spend money, this was the time and place to do it.
The first day I came across a parallel port flatbed scanner for only twenty euros. When I told my father and Rainer that evening they both wanted one, so next day I returned to buy two more. The following weekend I went to Rainer to install it. That night we scanned in several rare Morrison pictures. One of them was later converted to the background of ”Quiet days in Paris”13. Not long after Valerie reported to Rainer that we turned up on top in the Yahoo search pages. In December 1998, we were having over 2000 hits a week, which was pretty much at the time. It seemed we were really going places.
I took a break and went to Berlin for the holidays. I slept for two days straight, coming out of bed only for taking a leak or having a bite of food. I was simply exhausted.
In January 1999 we put up ”Quiet days in Paris”. I had picked up a on new trend in web design, more press oriented, simple and elegant and decided to follow it. The bandwidth had slightly increased, which made more elaborate designs possible. The ”Las Vegas” style was definitely gone. I experimented with translucent backgrounds, which I achieved by turning the contrast way down and decrease the gamma14. That way black text was still easily readable. Some browsers also allowed you to keep the background static, so the text seemed to glide over it, which was pretty neat.
The same design was also applied to the ”Robby Krieger Interview” and ”Last Recording Session” we released in February and March, while the ”LA Guide”, released about the same time, was still having the old one. Rainer also started a ”mailing list” - although it was actually a ”distribution list” since no one could respond. But he was quickly stopped by his provider because he had send over 100 messages a day. Of course, he contacted his provider, explaining everything, but they still didn’t bulge. In the end Rainer had no other option but to let me send his messages around the world since my ISP didn’t mind how many messages I sent on any given day.
In May 1999 I received the following message:
Well, I thought, not too bad for a web site made of spit, duct tape and rubber bands.. But there was a little problem at the horizon. Until now we had the luxury of using Rainers digital material and that source was quickly drying up. We could hardly use the stuff he hadn’t published yet in the paper version of DQ, so we had to find other sources. One of them was an interview Rainer had had with Ray Manzarek. A fan had been so nice to transcribe the tape, but instead of using a computer or typewriter, she had written it down. Rainer gave Jochen and me the manuscript and one summerday we sat down and started typing. I’m a pretty good typist, but this thing was huge and Jochens workplace was not very ergonomic - at least compared to mine. It resulted in the worst back pain I had experienced in years. Jochen put several pillows in my back, but at a certain moment the pain became unbearable. ”That’s it.” Jochen said ”That’s enough for one day. Let’s get a beer.” Rainer decided to put up whatever we had and add the missing part later on.
In that same month, August 1999, we added a chat room (another freebie) and I redesigned the main page because it had become pretty crammed. I had found the ”Flaming text” web site15 on the web, which allowed you to generate some pretty sophisticated logos with little effort. It was simply a front end to the excellent ”Gimp” graphics program16 which I would get to know more intimately not much later. I also planned a major overhaul, where all web pages would get the new, translucent design, but this had been enough work as it was. Still, it had been worth it, since I got the following email from Rainer:
There seemed to come no end to Rainers success. That very same summer he associated with the ”Bootleg Doors”, which would become one of the most influential cover bands in Holland - or Europe for that matter. And I was coming along for the ride, having back stage parties and everything that came with it. Not too bad a job, being web master, huh?
In the autumn of 1999 we released several more pages, including the essay ”Cooked Over in a Woman’s Kettle” and the ”The Gilles Yepremian Interview”. All seemed fine, but there were some dark clouds at the horizon. Rainer treated me more and more as his personal web master. I didn’t mind doing a thing or two at the side, but I wasn’t intending to maintain every wimp he came up with. Consequently, Rainer took up web development himself, which was alright with me. Even if that meant that one day he wouldn’t need me anymore. There was a life beyond DQ, as far as I was concerned.
But my concerns - if any - were unfounded. Rainer had never any intention to kick me out of the team. But the end is always near. And danger always lures in the corner where you don’t expect it to be.
We all had our personal problems at the time. Sometimes it felt like I was living a soap opera, where every day, every hour a new drama unfolded. It was slowly taking its toll on the team in general and DQ in particular. In July 2000 the ”New York Guide” was released with full color pictures, courtesy of Jochen Maaßen. I had upgraded my computer late 1999 and permanently switched to Linux17. The ”New York Guide” was the first page created with the KDE18 ”Quanta” web editor19 and the ”Gimp”, which made it even easier to create translucent backgrounds. I had even added some glare for dramatic effect. It was the most beautiful page DQ had ever seen. It would also be Jochens last contribution to DQ.
In September 2000, Jochen decided to leave the team, which had serious repercussions for the paper version of DQ. First it was delayed, then postponed and finally no one believed there would be another DQ - ever.
After that, changes came in far between, usually just an announcement of another ”Bootleg Doors” concert or an exhibition. I visited Rainer less frequently, the emails dried up and finally I forgot all about it and went on with my life.
I still went to Paris and in 2001 I met a representative of DCM, with whom I developed an amicable relation. Although my name had been synonymous with DQ, I had always ignored the crevasses that ran through the Doors community. I wasn’t dependent on it for my livelihood, to me it was all for fun. In April 2002 I was invited by DCM to visit LA, which I did.
One afternoon I was looking out of the window of the Doors offices while I was having a chat with Robby Krieger and Danny Sugerman. Then I knew it. It would never get any better than this. This was it. This was the top of the hill. Only a few years ago, I was just an anonymous fan. Now I was standing here, in the center of the universe, talking to the ”gods” - who all knew my name. The strange thing was, I didn’t feel sad.
No, the Doors community didn’t forget about me. I was still invited to festivals, asked to do book readings and I also played a important part in the publication of Jochens book ”Wild Child in the City of Light”20, which was released in 2006. I was part of the ”Matrix Doors” posse for years, until the band broke up. My last visit to Paris was in 2009, but I felt a bit like a stranger. My fault, I must admit. Jochen and I did an interview for Spanish TV, but my heart wasn’t really in it. There were other things that I wanted to do, other things that interested me.
But I still have the fondest memories about my time with Rainer in particular and the Doors community in general. If I could do my life all over again, I certainly wouldn’t want to miss it. There are lots of other stories to tell - much, much better than this one - but until all participants have deceased I will keep my mouth shut.
Note the DQ pages are still online and maintained by Rainer, so if you have become curious, just surf to: http://www.angelfire.com/de/doors4ly/