JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Musician Message Forum The Old JPF Days Remembered

The first Pineyfest was built around a set of JPF events where we had tons of writers and Industry Pro's do panels and talk to everyone. I actually encouraged Dawg and Bobbi to do it, and they continued it in later years without JPF involved, so I don't know which version you are referring to. I know one of those Pros (of the 7-8 that were there that were full time pro writers) just somewhat recently passed away, Jimbeau Fisher. He and Marc Barnette were both there. In LA we had tons of stars and industry pros at our events regularly as that chapter was far and away our largest. But unfortunately, post strokes, I don't recall stuff in the same detail I once did. I used to be able to rattle off near full lineups at many hundreds of events all over North America and Europe by simply having someone say the year and city. I don't even know how many showcases and workshops we did, but it was in multiple thousands.

I would normally ask someone who I came across for the year and city we met to zero in on who they were and it was pretty common back then that I could then describe their performance, often recall their songs, style and even lyrics in many cases. I miss having that all in my brain on demand. I am sure age has contributed to the loss, but most of it went in 2010 like a light switch. I could still name entire tour stops for any region/year. Of course the message board once had photos of all the performers playing from 1998-2018 when they deleted our entire site thanks to CD Baby shutting down Hostbaby with only a few hours warning to us. Most people got months, we got less than 17 hours (once I woke up to luckily see the email almost by accident, as I didn't always check it at that stage.

Ours was by far the largest custom site on their entire service as we had our own server and everything was custom. They made us buy our own because we used to get more traffic than the entire rest of Hostbaby combined and were draining them. Derek had asked us to move our site there circa 2000 because he was just starting Hostbaby and wanted us there to attract others, so they hosted us for free as thanks. In the early days that saved us some money so it all worked out. But in their late days they literally forgot about us entirely and one employee we had worked a lot with recalled us at the last second and emailed me or this message board would have been gone too. I only had time to save the message board board, but they promised to put our entire site on a hard drive and send it to me, but they never did. So all those photos and videos and articles, which had 4 backups at Hostbaby (3 of which I supplied then they had their cloud as well) and they pulled the plug on all of them, then ALSO lost our entire server. Yep, after all those years they screwed us over badly.

This was long after Derek had sold. Most people don't know this, but he had asked me to take over CD Baby and to combine JPF with them literally at their (and our) peak. I had agreed to do it, and we were looking for houses in Portland, but by this time he had moved to Europe and due to other circumstances, he had to change. He chose Disc Makers, over Amazon back then. Amazon also offered me a partnership to run their music service, and I often wonder what would have happened in that case. It would have given JPF turbo charged money, access and power, but I am sure there would have been challenges as well. I never offered to sell to JPF, but used to get HUGE offers. But I was never motivated by money. It is just a tool and outside of health issues, I am fine with how it all turned out.

I would have had to walk away a long long time ago had I partnered with any of these people and there's no doubt with the money would have come some unattractive realities. Amazon abandoned their own Super Message board at IMDB which was a huge loss to the film community and no doubt they would have closed any partnership out that we had and long ago deleted everything like they did those millions of articles and discussions.

Brian