The New England Music Scrapbook's Top 10 has been through several interesting changes since it was last heard from; but unfortunately, I haven't found the time to post the results for a very long while. Today, though, is the first day of the year 2003, and what better occasion to update this page...

Since we first posted a WBCN Rock 'n' Roll Rumble rundown, that item has easily attracted the most visitors. I've come to think of it as our permanent number one page. As it turns out, though, at least one veteran act may have something to say about that. Lately, our Barry and the Remains profile has been steadily gaining on the Rumble. After thirty-six years, the Remains released a followup to their 1966 debut album; and I'd guess that the disc, Movin' On (CD, Rock-A-Lot, 2002)--which both Nancy Neon and I included in our top picks for the year--caught the attention of a lot of rock fans.

The New England Music Scrapbook has just two pages that have been on our Top 10 every time we've checked since the very first time in the summer of 2000. One has to do with the Boston Sound or Bosstown promotion that fizzled in interesting ways in 1968. Though it takes some picking and choosing, some remarkable tracks may be found among the Bosstown recordings. I've heard several examples recently of current acts that have unwittingly developed a similar sound, here and there, among their own recordings. Rising singer-songwriter Rachel Bissex might be surprised to learn that one of her album cuts brings to mind a number by Boston's Beacon Street Union.

The other piece that has been on our Top 10 since the first time I checked is our profile of promoter/manager/producer and everything-else-in-the-biz, Maurice Starr. At some point right around now, Starr is resurrecting his Hollywood Talent Nights. And permit me to add that a member of his family, Cassandra Reeves, placed her debut album, Woman (CD, Bromasis, 2002) on my own year-end Top Ten recordings list.

Our profile of the Crow, a band that was fronted by a very young Donna Summer, has attracted a lot of attention. This past year, visitors included the group's leader, Hoby Cook, in company with Summer, herself. Being a big Donna Summer fan, I feel honored that she dropped by.

It would be hard for a new act to catch up with the veterans on our Top 10 pages; but this past summer, that's exactly what Kris Delmhorst did. Her page has just slipped off our Top 10 (though not by a lot), but mention of her still belongs here. If we may judge by the number of visits to our profile of her, Delmhorst was a real phenomenon along the folk circuit all summer and beyond. At this site, at least, there was a sudden rise, too, in the interest shown to female artists in general. Robin Lane led the way, and Delmhorst was not far behind. Oddly, a lot of visitors who wrote us about Lane didn't know that she and the Chartbusters had reunited; and they didn't know that the debut Chartbusters album has been reissued on CD. So we were able to make a lot of fans happy simply by filling them in. And now, as I understand it, the new album by Robin Lane and the Chartbusters is being pressed. I'm looking for further news.

Only our Rumble page, right after that annual event, has ever had more visits in a single month than our Duke and the Drivers profile had in December. And as far as our e-mail correspondence goes, the band was our hottest topic the last two months of the year. On the face of it, the main reason would seem to be the thirtieth anniversary shows that were held at the Cambridge House of Blues just prior to Christmas; but, in fact, a lot of the people who wrote to us knew nothing about the anniversary/reunion concerts until they got the news from reading our pages. So maybe the whole thing was just meant to be and can be counted among the mysteries of 2002.

Our profile of an '80s band, the Dream, has been a Top 10 item for quite some time, probably in part because of recent recordings and personal appearances by Gary Cherone and Nuno Bettencourt.

Oak is a '70s band that has remained popular long after its breakup. And recently, Rick Pinette has reissued Oak's debut album on compact disc.

I wrote a biography of Gene Pitney at the same time I was pulling together our Rumble page, expecting that both would be quite popular. Did those two projects ever pay off! Over the years, Pitney has earned a following that is remarkably loyal by rock standards.

Pages that came within just a few visits of making our Top 10 include those about the Doo-Wopp Hall of Fame of America^TM, the Boston band the Pandoras, and the early years of radio station WBCN-FM.

The most surprising success story to my mind is Donna Halper's learned article on Early Boston Radio (as in the early 1920s). Oh, I expected the page would be popular alright. The subject matter and writing are both quite interesting, and Donna is a well-known figure in both academia and the broadcast field. But her article has more visits than our page on Aerosmith--and Aerosmith strikes pretty close to the heart of this site. So let me say publicly that my friend Donna has impressed the heck out of me.

Much more so than this page, our 2002 Year-in-Review covers current, recent, and young acts as well as the year's events. My friend Maria McLaughlin, for instance, contributed short items about the nightclub Toad and the SkyPaint pop opera; and nearly half the records on my Top 10 are debut albums (four out of ten). In addition, each of us is involved in the current music scene in various ways--as broadcasters, academics, scenesters, and particularly as writers. This seems worth saying on a popular survey page which brings in a great many acts that flourished anywhere from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s.

How it is that I managed to get all the way through our year-end wrapup without mentioning Damone (formerly known as Noelle) is beyond me. I think it's very likely Damone will hit the big time, and I said so well before news got out that the band has signed to RCA Records. So, I'm tossing Damone in here, hoping that, in some small way, it will make up for my unintended omission in our 2002 Year-in-Review.

One more thing before closing. Our site statistics have been picking up news of a different character. When I first started checking our stats in the summer of 2001, Netscape literally never showed up as the predominant browser used to view any of our pages. That changed with our Jacob's Reunion page and, perhaps, a few others. JR fans seem to be die-hard Netscape users. After that, I noticed a slow but steady rise in the frequency with which Netscape 4 appeared in our statistics reports. Now, clearly that has all changed. Those hearty souls who stuck with Netscape 4, though it was far out of date, seem to be switching in big numbers to the much-improved Netscape 7. Not only that, but I would have to say that there must be a lot of new Netscape installations. Netscape is showing up in our site statistics like never before. So, I'm busily changing the source documents for a lot of our pages such that they'll work better on Netscape 7. Microsoft Internet Explorer has suddenly picked up some serious competition.

Alan Lewis, January 1, 2003

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