AS TOLD BY TRISHY GDOWIK: It was 1996, and I was living at my parents’ house in the suburbs, working as a lowly administrative assistant for a jewelry magazine. I was trying to save enough money to put a deposit on an apartment and rejoin civilization – e.g. move to the city. At least I had a car to escape, but I barely knew anyone back in Philly after I returned from college, and the people I did know were all pretty boring.

I vowed to make new friends who went out and did interesting things but it wasn’t easy at first. Each week, I scoured the City Paper and Welcomat/Weekly listings for interesting shows and made notes. I religiously collected the Khyber and Grape Street Pub calendars and kept them in my purse at all times in the hopes of rejoining some kind of arts scene where things were happening. But while there were many bands playing around town, and reviews of different bands each week — there was no great archive to be found of music reviews. What if you wanted to see Lenola or Caterpillar or The Inflatable Men, and missed the last write-up in the paper from six months ago? What was it like to hang out at the Firenze, the Astrocade, or the North Star? How would an “outsider” to the scene ever know if these bands were any good or the beers were completely overpriced? Where were the archives when we needed them? I wanted to look everything up in Alta Vista (later Google) and have all the answers at my fingertips! Other people must have felt the same.

Groove Lingo started as a way for me to document which bands were good, which ones would be worth watching again, and which ones to never, ever, spend any more money on. It was a way to remember which venues had good beer selections and videogames, and which ones you shouldn’t go to alone as a single female. It started as a small page on Netreach.net with a handful of write-ups and stories, and eventually grew into a medium-sized site with about 75 local band reviews, live venue reviews, a weekly calendar of show highlights updated frequently, and some band interviews. After its first year, Groove Lingo joined forces with PhillyMusic.com and I wrote a column which added a “personal” voice to the database-y element of that site. And in typical self-referential Philly style, the site moved to Martnet for hosting around 1998 until its demise in 2008. Groove Lingo launched its e-mail discussion list for sharing events and reviews on Onelist (now Yahoo! Groups) in 1999 and still gets traffic today.

Groove Lingo eventually became the “host” for Launch.com in Philly, until Launch went bankrupt during the big dot-com-bust of the early ’00s. It also allowed me to meet many interesting artists and musicians, many of whom became my friends.

In the early to mid ’00s, more and more local websites started popping up and archiving their music reviews. At the same time, my time was getting scarce and I didn’t always have time to write thorough reviews. I turned my focus into other more collaborative efforts, which included curating and throwing several questionably legal “Art Parties” in West Philly, along with Gina Renzi, who books the Rotunda at Penn; learning to DJ and spinning great independent music; and let Groovelingo die a slow death… finally pulling the plug this May.

Check out the old Groove Lingo site on The Wayback Machine here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 at 12:31 pm.