BRATTLEBORO--It is a good bet that if you were to visit Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro, one of the people you would find planted in front of a computer screen would be Alan Lewis, scouring cyberspace, researching data for his funky and informative Web site, The New England Music Scrapbook (www.oocities.org/nemsbook/home.htm).

Lewis' time-consuming hobby is most assuredly a labor of love. For no financial gain whatsoever, Lewis spends long hours searching online publications, writing bits and fashioning a comprehensive weekly newsletter--for the simple pleasure he finds in informing folks about the rich history of our region's music and exposing fans to the latest goings-on in the music world of the Great Northeast.

Last week, I met up with Alan in front of what has become his second home--Brooks Library. In a rambling conversation, we touched on the origins of the New York Times, the pleasures of Maine radio, the tragic deaths of rising folk star Dave Carter and Morphine frontman Mark Sandman, the music our parents loved and Carl Sandburg's guitar.

Lewis barely mentioned the Web site before time ran out--so I followed up with some questions via e-mail.

It turns out that Brooks is also the unlikely birthplace of NEMS. "I built the original site keying in data from the catalog terminals," explained Lewis. "The library has a fantastic book, HTML: The Definitive Guide. At the time, one could still access and use the Geocities editor from text-only terminals; and since they were text-only, there was not a lot of other demand for them. So I used the HTML book to put italics and other features into an e-mail newsletter. One thing led to another, and finally I abandoned the newsletter in favor of building this site."

Lewis was born 56 years ago in Maine and raised on eclectic AM radio. Like many aficionados, he tried his hand at making music. "I have neither the voice nor the dexterity to do at all well as a performer, but I've always wanted to be involved in music somehow. I used to work at the Retreat where, altogether too often, I sang and played guitar for patient groups. There ought to be a law against my performing, but somehow I got away with it."

Before the Legislature could act, Lewis traded his guitar for a typewriter. "I wrote for the Boston Rock and Roll Museum and managed to get a couple reviews past the Boston Globe editor. I contributed to Sing Out! in the '70s--real junk--there ought to be a law against that, too."

What Lewis lacks in confidence, he more than makes up in encyclopedic knowledge of music history. His specialty--a pre-Civil War vocal group. "I love early American music up through to the present--William Billings, Stephen Foster, Scott Joplin, about a zillion early blues and jazz musicians. ... My favorite group ever is the Hutchinson Family singers, whose career peaked in the 1840s. I've been researching that group, off and on, since 1969. Last time I checked, my Hutchinson Family home page had well over 5,000 visits--decent for a group which reached its peak 160 years ago."

His modest, handcrafted Web site has slowly gained a world-wide audience.

"Our readers are pretty much pop music fanatics," said Lewis. "So a thing we can count on is a lot of enthusiasm. We've gotten e-mails from England, France, Germany, Sweden, New Zealand, Australia and Singapore. Some are special cases, such as a professor in the Principate of Oman. A French Web site links to ours. We're the School for International Rocking, I suppose.

NEMS has become a great deal more than the singular efforts of its founder. "Instead of being my site, I wanted a team with other points of view," explained Lewis. "The team is like the rings of water caused by throwing a rock in water. The number of people you'd say are involved depends on how far out the ring you're talking about is. We have hundreds of people who are involved in some way.

The diverse core team includes JoEllen (no last name), host of "Rockin' in Boston" on Allston-Brighton community radio; Miss Lyn, editor of Boston Groupie News, a publication that was an essential part of the punk community that rebuilt Boston's club-level rock scene in the 1970s; Maria McLaughlin, a roots music fan; Nancy Neon, tambourinist, go-go dancer, and free-lance music journalist, along with renowned media historian and Emerson College professor Donna Halper.

You can also find some well-composed contributions from a certain Southeastern Vermont music columnist...

Web site hit counters cannot fully measure the impact of the behind-the-scenes contributions of music fans like Alan Lewis and his NEMS team.

"Every now and then we'll hear that something we posted at our site or circulated in our newsletter has helped a musician or someone else in some tangible way," added the humble Lewis, whose small rings or water keep reaching farther and farther out.

Dave Madeloni writes a weekly music column for the Arts & Entertainment section. He can be reached at madeloni@aol.com.

This column by Dave Madeloni was first published in my local newspaper, Vermont's Brattleboro Reformer, on Thursday, June 26, 2003.

Dave Madeloni's column--our first print publicity ever--allows for a great opportunity to say a little more about the New England Music Scrapbook. To start with, I really like his description, in his opening paragraph, of our Web site--"funky and informative." We try on both counts. Later in his column he called our home on the 'Net a "modest, handcrafted Web site." That's right. We like to keep our Web pages simple, and I still create them by typing in the HTML tags and CSS styles by hand.

It would be hard to overemphasize how much Brooks Memorial Library means to us as an information resource. I personally make substantial use of the library from my home computer and also go in daily.

There's a little adjustment called for concerning my age. I am, in fact, 54.

The age and origins of the site are a more complex matter. Many of our readers know that New England's music community was in some degree of disarray, following the failure of the major-label "Boston Sound" promotion of 1968. The rebound was quite slow, though the commercial or grassroots success of acts such as the J. Geils Band, Bonnie Raitt, Boston, and especially Aerosmith helped get the old engine running again. At the level of the Boston-Cambridge local circuit, it was the Rat and the Club which booked punk and original-music bands. Miss Lyn was then, and is once again, the editor of Boston Groupie News. She was--along with Blowfish, her colleague in that enterprise--an important part of the resurgence of rock and roll on the club-circuit.

I live in Brattleboro, Vermont, a very folkie area. In the '70s, the music here was heavily dominated by a coffeehouse, the Chelsea House Folklore Center. Various types of acoustic country stringbands were everywhere on the folk circuit, while bars, when they were not booking cover acts, were heavily dominated by what were then called boogie bands--blues, R&B, and funk outfits that were often skilled but not necessarily original. About the time I decided to go back in more of a rock and country direction, Steve Morse started regularly free-lancing with the Boston Globe. Then the Cars released a hit debut album, and the new wave rock scene, in Boston in particular, practically exploded. My archiving efforts exploded along with it. Then life got busy; and while my archive kept growing, I wasn't doing anything with it except filing (if you can call what I do filing).

It was at just the same time that Miss Lyn came off a very productive period, as editor of Boston Groupie News, and followed her heart right out of the region. I never met her, but well do I remember seeing copies of BGN the first few times I stopped in the original (and at the time, the only) Newbury Comics store. Nancy Neon had been based in Boston for part of the '70s, but she, too, was gone by decade's end. This also would have been just a short time after Donna Halper returned to Boston. I was hanging out a lot in the Pioneer Valley, and JoEllen was going to school there.

Fast-forward to the 1990s. I was contributing book reviews to my local newspaper but wanted to get back into writing about music. That meant, among other things, checking the Arts section of the Boston Globe daily. It was the very day I decided to go for it, as I recall, that the Globe announced the death of Mark Sandman of the band, Morphine. Even now, I can't account for how badly I was shaken by the news. It was like the end of an era. Just a few weeks later, Mickey O'Halloran agreed to let me contribute profiles to the Boston Rock and Roll Museum. And a couple weeks after that, Dave Madeloni started contributing a weekly music column to our local newspaper, the Brattleboro Reformer. Interesting timing.

As Mickey O's health declined and he was less and less able to keep up his day-to-day activities with the Museum, a general drift toward starting my own Web site got under way. First came the newsletter, Crumbs from the Land of Cake; and it was followed by the site, Merry Melodeon. (I still love those names!) Neither worked out. The New England Music Scrapbook replaced the old site; and after a couple months, it started showing signs of life.

A dear friend to this organization, Miss Xanna Don't, introduced me by e-mail to Miss Lyn in January 2002; and we just never stopped writing each other. Boston Groupie News has since come back to life online, with Blowfish, a Boston legend, taking charge of the Webmastering. In February, I made the e-acquaintance of media historian and radio/management consultant Donna Halper. Donna has supplied us with a good deal of archive material, and she wrote one of our most popular articles, a learned piece about the very earliest days of Boston radio. Along came JoEllen in August. We met her courtesy of Benjy Kantor of RadioBoston.com, where JE hosted a regular Webcast. JoEllen is our authority on video channel V-66, and she currently hosts the Rockin' in Boston broadcast/Webcast on Allston-Brighton Free Radio. In September, Joe Viglione suggested that we contact Nancy Neon, a free-lance writer who may be the Jimi Hendrix of the tambourine. NN is a bit of a traditionalist. She once told me, "Nothing is more modern than the '60s." Allen Devine introduced me to Maria McLaughlin in October, in connection with her own newsletter, the Weekly Band E-Mail. Maria, our authority on roots acts and especially Fred Eaglesmith, likes her music spiced with twang. And that's the New England Music Scrapbook gang so far.

I tell people that Donna is a member of our team to the extent that, as far as I know, she has never publicly denied it. And while she has never officially joined, either, she's a very important part of what we do.

An amazing thing about the Internet is that, while I often work closely with each of these women, the only one I've ever actually met, in person, is Donna. (She's got a great DJ voice.) But I started making their e-acquaintance at a very fortunate time.

Dave Madeloni also slipped into his column the fact that a number of his own pieces have been reprinted in our newsletter, on our Web pages, or both. That's a big step forward for us. Dave has been contributing a weekly music column to the Brattleboro Reformer since the middle of September 1999, and those pieces contain a wealth of information. He is allowed a decent amount of space, which he uses very effectively. Our account of the local Brattleboro Vermont music scene is built around his columns, and many of his artist profiles are of a sort that we could have never pulled together ourselves.

That's a big part of our story so far, and we hope there's a lot more to come.

Alan Lewis, July 23, 2003