A fare-thee-well rather late in coming ...

For no particular reason, the other day I caught the nostalgia bug and started thumbing through the old music zine that the Captain and I put out with some success back in the late ‘90s. It’s still available online, believe it or not; I’m still somewhat shocked that it still exists electronically, as I thought there would be a colossal wipe of inactive sites done by Angelfire sometime between our last issue in 1999 and now.

No Ugly Babies started a few years after the zine Sponic did, but while we crashed and burned after nine issues due in part to financial distress (we also put out a hard copy in addition to the electronic version), Sponic kept it up and continued publishing well into this decade. The boys at Sponic were our kindreds, sharing a more-than-passing interest in Guided by Voices and most other things indie-rock, and most importantly, writing well about it. They cared as much about getting the word out about decent music as we did.

Anyway, I fell out of touch with that whole scene around the time of my courtship of my wife, subsequent engagement and marriage, and NUB died a somewhat ignominious death not befitting our vision of what it was and could be. I left Bloomington for the decidedly less musically fertile happy hunting grounds of Martin County, and slowly forgot about that period of two years where I felt like I was at my most creative, where I foolishly thought that, if we worked hard enough at it and the pieces fell into place, NUB would give the local alt-weekly a run for its money.

And I forgot about Sponic also.

The point: I read the other day that Sponic, which had since relocated to Denver from Ohio, had folded up its tent about a year ago. (If Guided by Voices had ended its run while NUB was still in existence, we probably would have closed up shop also.) I don’t know if Mr. Wenzel et al will ever see this, but it was heartening to see that someone had kept the torch burning for the last seven years in our absence.