Yes, but I wasn’t here in 2001. I don’t know at what point during the day that Fassbinder posted his message or what the precise contents of it were. I like to think it was in the evening, the same time William Basinski was recording footage of the evening of 9/11 for the Disintegration Loops.

After Fassbinder left, or run off, or whatever (I don’t have the details on this) the board’s main nemesis became a guy named Auberon Suger, who I guess apparently drowned the board, and some of the e-mail comments sections on George’s reviews, with overblown, lengthy essays about how comparing prog rock, or just rock music in general, to classical music or jazz is bullshit....or something like that. I didn’t really catch the tail end of this. He was eventually banned from the board and went off to another board, the similarly named Music Babylon, which I think Brian Burks set up for him. I went over there and had a few sporadic conversations with Auberon, who seemed genial and intelligent but I guess the whole reason he got banned more than anything wasn’t his views but obsessively posting over blown messages. I guess this was also the beginning of people finding George to be a somewhat persnickety character; after this, the people who got blasted the most on the board were E, and then Musicman showed up around maybe 2003 or so?…then there were lots of political fights with Matt around the time Bush got re-elected in 2004 and these weird feuds with this place called the Fuck You Crew on LiveJournal where they’d have you post a list of your favorite albums and if it wasn’t obscure enough they’d call you a fag and then some of the trollier people at the board started submitting fake lists to the FYC under the names of various Babblers and all this resulted in George getting pissed off and disassociating himself from Music Babble which I think was in 2005?…and starting a hidden board that a lot of us were invited to, which Low Carb eventually took over under the name Chem Trails And You which in turn led to the rise of Derrick Stuart and Jamie trolling the board and yada yada yada.

In retrospect, I guess we were all college age and overheated and oversensitive, young dumb and full of cum, and mired in PC vs anti-PC stuff and confused by that and most of what we fought about back in the day was pretty stupid, myself included obviously. I do kind of regret it.

Searching for “Auberon Suger” in quotes on Google will only turn a couple of quotes on George’s site, plus a mention of him in Prindle’s Captain Beefheart page. God knows if it was his real name; otherwise, all traces of him, or at least that persona, have been scrubbed clean from Teh Interwebs. Dunno if Music Babylon is archived anywhere, either.

But yes, the oldest update on his site is September 6, 1998. So he’s been around as long as Jerkcity, then. Which is now Bonequest. Not that anyone here but me would ever read that site at gunpoint. I have a real hard time letting go of the past. In fact, I’ve never let go of it at all. I don’t know if George was a full fledged professor in 1998, his father was a really important guy in that department.