Since a few folks have asked over the years (and since it pretty much used to be our About page, anyway), we here at Space City Rock thought it might be entertaining/enlightening for the detail-obsessives out there if we laid out this little e-zine's history. Be warned, though, that our memories aren't all that sharp these days, so we might screw up a few details or leave people out -- if we leave you out, we apologize, and we (probably) didn't mean to.

Way back in 1995, SCR Publisher/Editor-in-Chief Jeremy Hart was spending the summer between his junior and senior years of college (at Houston's venerable Rice University, although he's not sure the college would still want to claim him) working at the library and hanging out at the computer labs during the day, fiddling around with some little HTML pages he'd created and surfing the then-much-smaller Internet/World Wide Web/whatever. At night he and a few friends would hit local clubs like Fitzgerald's, Goat's Head Soup, Cätäl Huyuk, and The Shimmy Shack to check out bands, whether they were indies making a rare stop in Houston or locals trying to get noticed.

Around the same time, he and a couple of friends from college had formed their very own band, the badly-named but much-beloved (at least by friends) Freshmakers, and they began trying to get gigs around town. In the process, Jeremy (being the anal-retentive list freak that he is) started collecting contact info for various clubs and local magazines and 'zines so he could send stuff out more easily to people. For the heck of it, he put what he came up with online, along with a handful of links to local band Websites -- there weren't many online back then -- and the very first incarnation of "Space City Rock" was born.

Jeremy himself can't remember where the name came from initially, and he's a little unclear as to when it actually popped up on the Website. But he got his font designer/all-round graphics genius friend Chris MacGregor to lend him some fonts and used them to create the site's first logo, a hideous-looking thing with an outer space-y theme and lots of points and circles (he claims that was the font he used, not him). The site, meanwhile, was expanding. Realizing that many of the local bands he loved and admired got zero respect in the local press, with the exception of the venerable Public News, Jeremy started adding little writeups of bands he liked to the site. He'd also grown frustrated at the lack of music listings available anywhere except in ads in the PN, so he started compiling his own list, going off of postings on the houston.music newsgroup, e-mails from friends, the PN ads, and Mark Twistworthy's incredible, awesome Texas Show List. (Seriously, this site probably wouldn't have happened without the TSL. Mark T., wherever you are: you rock.)

Time rolled on, and Jeremy continued to expand the site, fueled by encouragement from friends and visitors to the site. He got a job doing Web stuff after college, and his boss kindly let him dump all of the nascent SCR site onto a company server for free for a ridiculously long time. Visitors were coming to the site in increasing numbers, though, and it turned out that Space City Rock was pretty much the only site of its kind out there at the time. With the Chronicle talking about local bands other than ZZ Top only so they could slam their DIY releases, the Houston Press not yet born (we don't think, anyway; again, fuzzy memories), and the Web still in its early days, there just weren't very many places to go for info on Houston music.

Eventually, the site moved to its own off-site server and domain name, with a redesign in the process and much better fonts, again courtesy of Chris M. (yay, Itto!). It was around then, in the late '90s, that Jeremy (still pretty much a one-man show) started looking around at the various "small" magazines being put out by industrious folks around the country. He'd been devouring the 'zine racks at Sound Exchange on a weekly basis, trying to find other magazines to which he and his band could send their demos, and in the process had stumbled onto a (now-defunct, unfortunately) magazine out of Boston called INSTANT, which combined local Beantown coverage with interviews of known indie bands and seemingly random social and artistic musings. He got a hold of the guy who ran the magazine, Chris Hinckley, sent him some music, and read INSTANT religiously.

Jeremy also met a guy named Michael Houghton, a visitor from the Bay Area who'd come to H-town, for some unaccountable reason, on vacation. Houghton e-mailed to ask him for recommendations of shows to see, and Jeremy said, "hey, why not come see mine?" It turned out that Michael was a photographer and writer, so he ended up taking pictures of the Freshmakers (which later disappeared from the hostel where he was staying, dammit) and chatting in person about various things musical. Michael was at the time working on a fledgling print magazine of his own, Section M, which like INSTANT had both a local and national focus. (Section M also met its demise in 2004, after 31 glorious issues -- their Website doesn't seem to work any more, but if you Google 'em you can look at the cached version and see their list of back issues. Michael has since moved into t-shirt design and doing music videos, we hear...)

While INSTANT and Section M were serious influences on the magazine/e-zine to come, however, the biggest push came from right here in Houston. Local musician Chris Nine (who's since moved to Austin with her band, King Coal) contacted Jeremy and suggested that maybe SCR should be a print 'zine, as well as a Website. They met and threw around some ideas for layout and such, and that got the ball really rolling. Chris had to back away from the 'zine herself not too long after due to other commitments, but the seed had been planted. Jeremy told his friend Josh Denk, another aspiring writer/musician, about the idea, and on a cross-country trip to San Francisco they hashed out the details, then suckering college pal and former band-/housemate Marc Hirsh into agreeing to help out long-distance from Indiana. Space City Rock the print magazine was born. [cue dramatic music]

Unfortunately, the first lesson learned during the process of SCR getting to print was that damn, this stuff is hard. Jeremy managed to teach himself enough Adobe PageMaker to lay out the 'zine, scrambled to find ads from local businesses and not-so-local record labels/printers/etc., and dug deep into his post-college finances to be able to print the thing with the stellar folks at the Small Publishers Co-Op...only to discover that with the format he wanted, a measly run of 1,000 copies would cost him $700 an issue (which, we should note, was actually insanely cheap, just not dirt-cheap like he'd hoped). At the time, it was do-able -- he was on his own, with nothing much else to spend his money on, and hopefully the advertising would make the thing pay for itself (ah, sweet innocence of youth...). Jeremy and Josh both agreed that it made no sense to charge money for the 'zine; it would make distribution difficult, they realized, and besides, the point was to get the information out to anybody who wanted it, so why not give it away?

So they went for it. They recruited friends and acquaintances from the H-town area to write articles, drew up the infamous "Six Degrees of Pop Deflation" map of interconnected Houston bands (thanks, in particular, to Justin Crane, Mike Bonilla, and Will Adams for helping to draw in lines we never knew existed), and pestered indie luminaries like Kim Coletta of Jawbox and Keith Gendel of Papas Fritas (himself a Houston native, it turned out) for interviews. Surprisingly, they agreed to talk to SCR -- although we also ran an interview with Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo, the Papas Fritas interview was the first real interview ever done for the 'zine/e-zine. The two things Jeremy remembers best about talking with Papas Fritas was that he felt like a total idiot and that holy crap, if you ask people to talk to you, they'll actually do it. Over the next several issues, contributors to SCR would manage to finagle interviews with Angelo Moore of Fishbone, Amy Rigby, Errortype:11, The Adjusters, and The Mountain Goats, and against all odds, they turned out to be pretty good.

The first issue of Space City Rock appeared in the spring of 1999. It ended up being (and still is) somewhat of a hodgepodge, throwing together the "Six Degrees" band family tree, a veritable mountain of reviews, the interview with Lee Ranaldo that Doug Dillaman had done about two years earlier, a feature on local label Pinche Flojo Records, the Papas Fritas interview, and a whole bunch of other stuff. It even included the first set of what we dubbed "Subliminals," which started out as a big long line of text that ran through most of the issue and listed stuff that we thought was just plain cool, like Jet Moto 2. (These days, they're the little bubble-looking things up in the top-right corner of the homepage.) The cover was a cobbled-together photo Jeremy shot of a kid's 1st birthday candle with sinister-looking wiring running out of it. We felt so D.I.-frickin'-Y. it hurt.

Friends in other cities offered to distribute copies of the magazine wherever they were, which meant that some very confused people in Indianapolis (Marc), Berkeley (Conor), Portland (Doug), Chicago (Henry), and San Jose (Michael) were seeing copies of Space City Rock appearing in their local record stores and clubs. Here in Houston, the distribution consisted of Jeremy and Josh driving from club to bar to record shop, asking if they'd stock the 'zine, and explaining several times at each place that yes, the 'zine was free, and no, they didn't want any money. Somehow word spread about the 'zine, and more and more people came to the Website (which also included some of the articles).

Unfortunately, the money and the actual work of gathering and laying out content for the 'zine forced us to run on a "quarterly" basis, with a new issue coming out (nominally, anyway) every season. All the best-laid plans, though... The 'zine's publishing schedule's always been erratic, with the first two issues coming out in the spring and fall of 1999 and the next in the fall of 2000. Issue #4 came out in the spring of 2001, and then things got a bit complicated. Not only did 9/11 hit and make all things 'zine-related seem pretty damn paltry by comparison, but Jeremy (still the sole Publisher/Editor/Layout Guy) lost his cushy Web job when the tech market tanked. He'd also met the love of his life, a sweet, wonderful, beautiful lady named Kim who lived in the gentrifying section of Montrose with her two dogs, and they'd started dating, moved in together, gotten married, went on a big-ass honeymoon and sold the house to move to a bigger place in southwest Houston, all in the span of about a year.

Oh, and along the way the 'zine actually won an award or two. A really long time ago (back in 2000 or so), the "old" site won a "Space City Webby" from Around Houston -- that's it over on the right, there, although the Around Houston site no longer exists -- and then we took first prize in the Writer's Digest 2001 Zine Awards, in the "Informational" category. No neato graphic for that one, unfortunately, but it's a pretty cool little kudo even still, considering that it came from a magazine all about and for writers. (We beat out Sock Monkey Magazine and the X-Rated Childrens' Books Newsletter! Woo-hoo!)

Ironically, though, the Writer's Digest award came at a time when the print 'zine version of SCR was itself in jeopardy. With everything going on in Jeremy's life at the time, the 'zine fell by the wayside for a full year, not resurfacing again 'til the fall of 2002, when Issue #5 appeared. This time, though, there'd been some notable changes. For one thing, Issue #5 was only available online -- the print 'zine was gone, dead and buried. Also, the site had been redesigned by somebody who actually knew something about design (i.e., Kim), and for the first time, the articles were given equal billing with the Houston music stuff. The site and the 'zine were finally one, and the days of us all getting our hands covered in newsprint and trying to find space for boxes of not-yet-distributed 'zines were over.

Now, over the years several people have asked why we shifted from the print format to the e-zine, and the answer really boils down to fairly predictable two things: time and money. There was far too little of the latter to keep printing the 'zine without going into serious debt (something that happened to Section M's Michael Houghton; we feel your pain, Michael), and the lead time required for the actual printing meant that by the time the issues were distributed, the interviews and reviews were pretty cold. Being online-only cut overhead considerably while giving us more flexibility as to when we could "publish" the next issue of the e-zine.

Even with that, the publishing schedule stayed somewhat unpredictable, however, with a new issue coming out each year for Issues #5, #6, and #7. 2004 marked the first year when the e-zine was able to get somewhat organized and begin running like a real-live publication, with fun things like deadlines (albeit fairly loose ones). In the spring of 2006, the decision was finally made to drop the whole "issue" format altogether, and SCR became a more "traditional" e-zine, with new content posted more frequently than every three or four months.

As we've gone along, we've learned a lot (even if, as noted above, the first lesson was a rough one). There really wasn't too much in the way of guidance back when we started for people doing what we wanted to do, so we've had to kind of fumble along and figure it out ourselves. Writers have come and gone, but we've been lucky enough to hang onto a solid core of dedicated people -- big "thank yous" are due to Marc Hirsh (now a Co-Publisher and our Managing Editor), Mel House (now also a Co-Publisher), review-writing machine Doug Dillaman (who still manages to contribute these days, despite being a filmmaker and living in New Zealand), Henry Mayer, Justin Crane, and Conor Prischmann. We've also got a bunch of extremely talented, more recently recruited folks like Daniel Mee, Jill Krasny, Ruben Dominguez, Andrew Perkins, and David Cobb, and we're glad to have all of you folks (not just those three, mind you; check the "dedicated people" link above) on board.

From the very beginning, the team behind SCR did their best to stay true to what Jeremy and Josh saw as the underlying mission of the 'zine: to level the playing field. Houston bands deserve as much of the limelight as their NYC-, Seattle-, or San Francisco-based contemporaries -- by putting articles on local icons like Bring Back The Guns, Sharks and Sailors, and Middlefinger up next to those with national names like Hatebreed and The Riverboat Gamblers, SCR's aim has always been to erase the dividing line between the two and change the H-town music scene from red-headed stepchild into equal player. Looking around Houston now, where even the stodgy Chronicle runs major stories on local bands, rappers, and other musicians, that hopeful picture of the future sure looks like reality. There's no way in hell we'd claim sole credit for it, but we hope we helped in our own little way.

That's our story up 'til now. With any luck, the next years will see us continue to grow and change, and folks will keep coming back to the site to see what happens. Thanks for the support...