Not long after the Boston Globe started publishing, the United States went through a major financial crisis. Charles Taylor guided his young publication through the worst and longest economic depression in U.S. history, and somehow the Globe went on to become New England's newspaper of record. Today, rock and related music genres are covered wonderfully by Steve Morse, Jim Sullivan, and Joan Anderman. Globe free-lancer Scott Alarik may be the best American journalist in the folk field, while Richard Dyer is a world-class classical music critic.

Our Boston Groupie News link went in just hours after we received the Web address for the new site. It's been a year or two since then, and the text that goes along with the BGN link is way out of date. I'm checking in with Miss Lyn to see whether she would write something new. So please check back.

The Boston Phoenix has been an important part of New England's popular music community since the 1960s, when the paper was known as Boston After Dark. At present, the Phoenix features three of my all-time favorite music journalists:  Ted Drozdowski, Brett Milano, and Lloyd Schwartz. I've tried hard to learn from the way Schwartz writes, though I'm not always sure it shows.

Boston Rock Opera - now more than a decade old - has staged a fine variety of theatrical and concept pieces, always placing its emphasis on the music. "Whether through a full blown theatrical production or a nightclub event," says the Boston Rock Opera Web site, "BRO's goal is to explore the joy and excitement of combining the power and risk of rock and roll with the challenge of great storytelling."

Joe Harvard's reminiscences, and those he has been able to collect from area musicians and assorted scenesters, add much to the region's popular-music history. His Boston Rock Storybook is outstanding in its documentation of the 1970s Eastern Massachusetts indie rock community.

One of our visitors named Rebecca wrote to recommend the Duble Network Lyrics site. If you check it out, please let us know what you think.

The front page of the Gemm.com Web site quotes Rolling Stone as saying, "If you can't find it here, fuhgeddaboudit!"   I've never bought anything through Gemm.com; but I have searched the site on behalf of NEMS visitors, and I've found a remarkably high percentage of what I've gone looking for. When I have referred visitors to Gemm.com, those who have gotten back to me have all been satisfied with their purchases. Unfortunately, the great majority of the people I've sent there haven't gotten back to me. So the information I've got is patchy at best. If you follow our link to the Gemm.com site and place an order, please write me to say how it went.

When I first hit Newbury Comics at its original location, no later than 1980, it was a comic-book retailer with a lot of records; and the owners only had the one store. The place was dark with photocopied notices and concert announcements, in varying shades of gray, all over the entryway. I still have and wear original-series Newbury Comics t-shirts.

The Noise is Boston's long-running alternative monthly, having first gone to press way back in 1981. Founder T Max has called his creation "a truly funky little rag."

The Portland Phoenix is, with respect to local music coverage, my favorite of the Phoenix newspapers. Lately, "The Beat Report" column has had lots more stability than "Cellars by Starlight," and Sam Pfeifle is right up there with Ted Drozdowski and Brett Milano, the best of the "Cellars" columnists.

Rounder Records is the little giant of the independent-label world:  big enough to offer great variety and distribution, while small enough to give us a break from the mainstream superstars-of-the-moment.

Editor Pamela Polston and Music Editor Ethan Covey are two of New England's finest popular music writers, making Burlington, Vermont's Seven Days my own personal favorite among the region's alternative weeklies. Robert Resnik, one of Vermont's foremost voices for folk music, is a regular contributor.

"It is a very cool weekly Boston newspaper," wrote Miss Lyn - "lots of music stuff, local and otherwise, very 'alternative' in a punky way."  "The Weekly Dig is very, to use an old-school term, anti-establishment. They . . . are really good, funny, snide-but-smart writers. I love it!!"