The first Fan Club web page went up June 10, 1995. The listserver – considered the official start of the Fan Club – started June 20, 1995.Some of us who were in on this at the beginning put our heads together to collect thoughts about the occasion. Hopefully, this will give you an idea of how it all started. As you read through the page, look at the dates and think about what you were doing at the time. It kind of helps to put everything in perspective.
From ALBANY, NY (1992):
Harold Bottomley: “In the fall of ’92 I bought a shiny and speedy 386 with a 2400 baud modem and shortly thereafter found myself logging on to the Prodigy service. Naturally, at that time Prodigy did not allow Internet access, so I was limited to the proprietary stuff they had. Exploring the message boards, I eventually found a post about Pat. A small nucleus of Pat fans began to carve out a tiny little niche on the boards there. I guess there might have been about half a dozen of us that tried to keep Pat threads alive. We had a great time “chatting” about Pat and sharing whatever tidbits of information we happened across. At the time, Prodigy’s pricing structure was unlimited access for a set price. In their infinite wisdom, they decided they were going to change to an hourly charge. In the process, there were mass defections to other services, most notably AOL. This pretty much broke up our group.”
From VIRGINIA BEACH, VA (1994):
Mary Wiesner: “I got my computer in August of 1994. Knowing next to nothing about computers or the internet, I was hesitant to get ‘online’. After hearing so much about email and the internet from my friends and in the news, I decided to go ahead and sign up. My first online service was Prodigy. I didn’t find anything of interest there the month I was on. A post or two about Pat was all I ever found.”
“I wasn’t too pleased with Prodigy. I decided to try AOL next. I found their Music Message Center pretty quickly and sifted through a bunch of posts to find any on Pat. I didn’t have much luck, but there were a few things popping up once in a while.”
“Most people know that on AOL you can have a member profile. It’s a great tool to find others with similar interests. My screen name was PBENATARFN and, naturally, I listed my ‘hobby’ as Pat. It wasn’t long before I received an email from another Pat fan… Gil90805. This was our very own Gil Lucero! We hooked up with another Pat fan, LyricKing, and had our first Pat Chat in March of 1995. That chat lasted 5 hours, and we talked about each and every Pat album that night! Each of us had felt as though we were the only Pat fans left on Earth, so finding someone else with the same interest and passion for Pat’s music was a dream come true!”
“After that first chat, we decided to try to find other Pat fans to come join us. I contacted any Pat fans I could find on AOL and told them about our chats. We would create Pat Benatar folders and try to keep them from being automatically deleted due to lack of activity. (Back then AOL didn’t have ‘permanent’ folders for artists.)”
“It wasn’t long before I had a list of about 10 AOL members for our ‘fan club’. I would take the address list I had built up and send our posts to inform the ‘members’ of our chats and other news related stuff we could find. With everyone’s help, we were able to find out some of the concert dates for that year. We also discovered some Pat recordings we never heard of like Coxon’s Army, Edith Piaff Tribute and a few others. Never before had I realized how beneficial the internet could be. Here we were… Pat fans from around the country pooling our knowledge together and sharing information… information we may never have discovered had it not been for all of these people digging it up. For me that was worth the AOL fee of $40+ a month (no standard pricing then!).”
“Then one of our ‘members’ told me about this guy who was a Pat fan but not on AOL. I figured I should contact him… being a Pat fan and all. . .”
From WICHITA, KS (1994):
Joe Cross: Here in Wichita in early 1994, my main email access was linked through a bulletin board system run at Wichita State University. They had added Internet mail through a batch process. Twice a day, the bulletin board system would disconnect its users, connect to the University’s computer, and access the Internet to send and receive the queued up internet email. It was clunky, but it was the best Internet access to be had at the time. I had set up an automated program to scan all the Usenet groups for the words “benatar” and “benetar”. Every time the scan found an interesting post, I’d email that person to see how much of an interest they had in Pat. Because the connection was so difficult and non-interactive, most of those threads didn’t last long. They also didn’t reach AOL and Prodigy users, since those services didn’t provide access to the Internet at the time.
Meanwhile, two Kansans named Jeff and Kurt were looking for an excuse to move back to the Wichita area. Jeff writes, “There weren’t many ISPs [Internet Service Providers] in business at the time (none in this area). We considered most ISPs we were familiar with to be sloppily run and believed we could do a much better job.”
“We turned up our Sprintlink feed 9/13/94, opened for beta testing 10/13/94, opened for business 10/31/94. (Kurt totaled his Supra the day we turned up the Sprintlink feed – broadsided on the passenger side – I was the passenger. Hairline fractures in ribs made coughing great fun for a few weeks.)”
And thus Southwind Internet Services was born. It became the Fan Club’s first internet service provider.
Southwind started with one full-time employee.
Based on the low cost ($6/month for 5 hours access) and a lot of people’s recommendations, I had subscribed to Southwind in November, 1994, shortly after they went online. I was their 105th customer. It wasn’t my intention to do much other than web surfing with a program called Mosaic. Netscape didn’t yet exist. There weren’t any Windows or DOS based Internet email programs then, and I wasn’t about to learn PINE, so email stayed with the clunky old WSU system for a while.
To add a little perspective, in November 1994, we were still in the bad old days of Windows 3.1. If you were lucky, you either knew how to set up the Winsock interface or you had Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Prodigy was about to begin the process of self destructing. AOL users could not yet send email outside of their own system. It would be almost another year before AOL had a web browser. These were, indeed, the early days of the world wide web!
That same month (November, 1994), my automated Usenet scanner had turned up a guy named Robb McCaffree, hanging on by the skin of his teeth defending Pat’s reputation to other peoples’ antagonistic or uninformed opinions in a Usenet group called something like alt.rock-n-roll.classic. Unlike the short lived threads I’d previously had with people, the discussions between Robb and I lasted quite a while. Feeling isolated, we had an extended dialog about Pat’s past and future.
Having an Internet account and not quite sure what to do with it, I had been toying with the idea of doing something for Pat on this new thing called “the world wide web”. Not knowing how an artist would react to someone doing unsolicited stuff about them, I was going through a “Yes, I should”, “No, I shouldn’t” indecision process. To be honest, my exact thoughts were, “What if I piss her off?” In the middle of that personal debate, AOL got their act together and added Internet mail capability. Shortly after that, I got a message that helped me make up my mind:
From PBENATARFN@aol.com
Mon Jun 5 19:00:55 1995
To: jcross@southwind.net
Subject: Pat Benatar Fans on AOL!
Hi, There!
I hope you don’t mind getting E-mail from strangers, but your name was given to us (the “unofficial” AOL Pat Benatar Fan Club) by Randy (DFunk89835). He asked us to drop you a line and give you the Benatar scoop. We have just set the date for our 3rd Pat Benatar Chat on AOL. . .
Take Care!
Mary
That started a discussion between Mary and I about ways we could all communicate more efficiently. We didn’t want to start a Usenet group – some of us didn’t even know what that was; others of us knew how bad they were! We didn’t really know what else we could do.
And so, on June 10, 1995 it began. Not really sure of what I was doing, I put up a web page on Southwind and sent a request to Jeff Stehman for a listserver messaging service they provided. The response to that request all those years ago changed a lot of people’s lives:
Date: June 20, 1995
From: Jeff Stehman
Subject: benatar-l
To: jcross (Joe Cross)
Benatar-L@southwind.net is up and running. You’re the owner. Here’s the info file (note how one goes about subscribing):
Welcome to Benatar-L, for the discussion of the First Lady of Rock, Pat Benatar, and her band. The purpose of this list is to bring her fans together to share information and facilitate discussion about her.
[Boring Stuff Deleted]
You’re about to get some ugly mail from me on Jade. That’s the owner’s manual. Don’t worry, there won’t be a quiz.
Jeff Stehman
Senior Systems Administrator
SouthWind Internet Access, Inc.
The listserver started operation with six members (Harold, Gil, George, DFunk, Mary and I), open registrations, no digest, and a guy running it (me) who didn’t know much about what he was doing.
Harold says, “Don’t recall how I heard about the web site, must have been the AOL boards, and also think my first message outside a proprietary service was to Joe! I had been pretty depressed about the lack of information about Pat on the Internet. Seeing the Pat pages was almost like a religious experience! I guess, as they say, the rest is history. The listserver was like a little piece of heaven, especially starting out with just a handful of folks. It was a comfortable and friendly place to be, especially since we all basically felt pretty much isolated as Pat fans. It felt great to be ‘connected’ to others and no longer an island. It was the beginning of a community with a shared interest, and felt like the right place to be. Since its start, the listserver has had its growing pains and weathered a myriad of trials and tribulations, but because of the high quality fan that Pat seems to attract, it’s still a pretty friendly community.”
As I said, we started out with six people. At the beginning of the 1995 “Can’t Stop Rockin'” summer tour with Fleetwood Mac and REO Speedwagon, the listserver had 25 subscribers. By the end of the tour, the number had become a “whopping” 52. Surprisingly, a lot of our list subscribers during the tour had come from the Fleetwood-Mac group, where they had been defending Pat to the rest of the FM fans. Every time I saw one of them post a supportive message, I sent them a message of thanks and let them know that we were here. They were hooked!
As a side note, that tour became known to audiences as the “Should Stop Rockin'” tour. Most of the fans were disappointed with the performances of REO and Fleetwood Mac, but everywhere in the audience you could hear people talking about Pat…they couldn’t believe how good a show she put on!
The digest version of the listserver started on August 28. It took longer than expected to get started, teaching Jeff a lesson about saying something would be a “piece of cake”! Southwind was the service we used for the first four years. Besides Pat, they hosted listservers for Paula Abdul, Mariah Carey, brewing beer, making fudge, and a few other things you probably don’t want to know about. In the fall of 1998, a news-only list started.
On March 1, 1998, we became the official fan club. The old, postal-based fan club had atrophied away about 5 years prior, with us filling the gap online.
As with everything in life, things change. Harold, Mary and I are the only ones of the original 6 who are still in contact. Gil has passed away. Jeff Stehman is no longer with Southwind. He left in 1998 to return to Minnesota, where he helped another Internet service provider get their start. He started our listserver and did security for a couple of years. Then the listserver was turned over to Carl Cravens, who also did a great job supporting us. Carl left mid-1998 for a job with a major computer company.
The fan club has left Southwind as well, but with fond memories of the help they gave us getting started. Southwind has since been sold to a much larger corporation and lost their “personal touch”. In 1998, we moved to a web hosting service and registered our own domain name: benatarfanclub.com. Pat picked the name for us. It wasn’t a stretch, but you know how this group of people can overthink things. The regular list and News-only list were moved to Onelist in 2000. That became eGroups and then YahooGroups. The regular list (Benatar-L) was moved first to WorldCrossing, then the EZBoard discussion group in early 2004. Both of those services had their organizational and software problems. After they folded, we ran a discussion forum on our own web site for a while. Eventually, with the increasing popularity of Facebook, all of those activities were shut down. The discussion list is now on Facebook in the private “Pat Benatar Fan Club” group. On December 22, 2014 we added Spyder’s name to the banner, becoming the Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo Fan Club and registering the domain name benatargiraldofanclub.com.
In mid-2014, Maria Hannam accepted the challenge of becoming the Creative Director for the Fan Club with the goal of continuing on with its operation in the event Joe has to step aside. She has assumed increasing responsibility, integrating herself nicely into this new role of responsibility and having the knowledge and tools to do so. She is pretty much responsible for everything now.
The Fan Club has evolved into a resource relied on for various materials and knowledge we’ve collectively accumulated. Susanna Hoffs contacted us asking how to do online services for The Bangles. We’ve provided historical information for several album projects and TV specials. Joe appeared briefly on VH1’s “True Spins”. We’ve helped the touring band by organizing fan events for their shows. Several other people have created web pages with a common interest; most notably Harold’s Le Museum de Benatar, an excellent database and archive of Pat’s work, and Rockin’ Robin’s Spyder’s Soul Kitchen – a tribute to NEIL!!!
Many, many thanks are in order – so many people that we’ll not try to name everyone. The “good guys” know who they are. There are a lot of people who help make this thing work.
Then there are Pat, Neil, Mick, Chris, Ray, Cindy, Frank Gironda, Jeff Worrell, John Malta, Lindsay Rush, Jimmy Johnson, Terry Finley, Frances Bowdery, Julie Peres, Erin Rew, Tom Consolo and his staff, who have all been supportive of us throughout the time we’ve been around. We’re at a loss for words big enough to describe our appreciation of them. A lot of you who have been at a PatFest or Fan Club organized Meet-n-Greet know what we mean. Anything we say would be inadequate. We couldn’t hope for a better bunch of folks to be the focus of our interest.
The most important part of this operation is you guys – the fans, who have made this a success. We should all be proud of ourselves for hanging in there together through the easy times and the difficult, during the highs of concert seasons, the lows between them, and all the other times as well.
See also: the website reveal.