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We Shout at the Chat Room!
On a hot night in 1997, Mötley Crüe’s Tommy Lee offered me an indelible lesson in owning your own identity.
Let me tell you about the night I hung out with Mötley Crüe.
Okay, to be honest, it was only half of Mötley Crüe, and it’s not like we were out clubbing it up with groupies and blow. But we were at a club. I was reminded of this story the other day when I happened to hear “Shout at the Devil” on the stereo for the first time in quite a while.
This was June 1997. I was working in New York City as technical producer for a website called Rocktropolis.com (sadly now long deceased). Our company, N2K Entertainment, ran a variety of genre-specific music sites, all meant to drive traffic to our online CD store, Music Boulevard. At Rocktropolis we ran rock music news, contests, curated streaming radio, artist chats, and — coolest of all — live concert webcasts.
Some of our live shows were simply streamed versions of special syndicated radio broadcasts, but more and more we began to arrange our own on-location webcasts. We would get a temporary DSL line installed in the venue (if they didn’t already have one — and they usually didn’t), hump our equipment over there, tap directly into the soundboard, and stream the feed out to users via RealAudio. (Believe…
