One of my best friends recently linked me to a page on the Lindsey Buckingham song Go Insane, and it appears to have been untouched by the past 30 years of time.
And this got me thinking of some of the other band sites, and fan club sites, from the mid to late 90s. So I went to the Wayback Machine, and I am going to present you some of my favourites that you can still look at courtesy of the Internet Archive.
- The Monkees Home Page
Spent a lot of time here, especially with the lyrics pages. I didn’t have the best cassette deck growing up, so sometimes it was a bit difficult to get the words right. Bonus: It’s still around! It seems to have been redesigned in the mid 2000s, and doesn’t quite retain the charm of the 1996 version I know and remember as shown in the Archive, but it’s still Good Clean Fun. - California Dreams Fan Page
Wow, the Archive only got the tail end when it was already in the process of being taken down. I was such a fan of this show, and the music. Also, isn’t it amazing that I remembered the exact URL (including the username) after 30 years but I can’t remember what I ate for breakfast? - Garbage
It’s quite a challenge navigating this site on a modern Web browser, because the CSS makes the links almost impossible to click on – only the (mostly invisible) underline is clickable! It is somewhat browsable, though the files (like the RealMedia clips) seem to be sadly un-archived. Also, this is the “non-Flashed” site, because Ruffle does not seem to be happy with the SWF. - Goo Goo Dolls
Oh my dog, Internet Archive even saved the QuickTime snippets. If you want to hear what Puppy Spots was listening to on her PC at the turn of the millennium, now you can! And yes, that’s really how it sounded. That’s what we lived with in the age of dial-up. Note: QuickTime on my Mac Studio won’t play some of them as the audio is so low-quality it doesn’t know what to do with it! VLC and FFPlay both will, so you might need to play around with it.
I thought of a great deal more, but the Archive didn’t have any of the images saved for them, so it was just a sea of broken image icons. Alas. That said, this was still great fun. It’s an era of the Internet that I hope gets more serious archival work and attention from history scholars going forward. It was quite a time to live through.
Please comment with some of your favourites of the past if you had any – I’d love to see more of these!
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