As many of you know, there's a lot of work involved in creating and managing a website, and for a site like this there's a ton of email that comes in each day, often times asking the same questions.� On November 10, 2000, I reached an agreement with Marshall Tucker Band, Inc. to transfer ownership of marshalltucker.com to the band and its promotion company, Ron Rainey Management. Terms of the agreement excluded the reviews on the site written by Don Stevens as well as all Toy Caldwell files and images, which have been transfered to our new site, toycaldwell.com.
Anyway, it's been one hellava memory for me these past three years and as Chuck McCorkle wrote way back when on his very first website, "it's time to pass the baton." I did my part, and now the time has come.
The guest book at Chuck's site was filled with Marshall Tucker fans stopping by to talk about the MTB, and at the time, it was the only Marshall Tucker Band hangout on the internet. If you go back to Chuck's site, you'll see some very familiar names but you'll also see fans who were logging on, trying to find info on the band. At that time, there wasn't any info at all on the band. Chuck's page was the first gathering spot, period. I first visited his site in the spring of 1996, and kept checkin' back. Finally, on July 3, I wrote this entry in his guest book:
Cruising thru his guest list, it was easy to see that everyone was eager to find a Marshall Tucker hangout! I checked back at Chuck's site from time to time, and finally Michael B. Smith began to include some good stuff that he had researched in interviews for his book, Carolina Dreams.
Michael B's influence was tremendous in beginning an internet presence for MTB. As a writer, a musician, and a true Tucker fan, he provided a much needed forum to chronicle the history of the band. He posted a site at Geocities to promote his band, and created a separate page for the MTB stuff. He has also written two books and a began an internet magazine, GRITZ.NET.
At about this same time back in 1996, Keith Donaldson began a site at North Carolina State University. At the time, Keith had the only MTB webpage and his work included some photos of the band, articles from a number of different sources, the liner notes from Capricorn's box set, and some personal comments about each of the Tucker albums and CDs in his collection. Keith contributed a lot of MTB stuff before retiring his homepage in October, 1997.
Around this time, in March, 1997 I sat down and started my first MTB page on a little known and now defunct site called FreeWeb Page. I started by writing my own Tucker memories, and then developed a page called Cattle Drive on GeoCities.
My very first website devoted to the Tucker Band was called Searchin' For A Rainbow, and I spent the week learning to write html, uploading files, and creating what I can say now were some pretty basic images. Remember, at that time, the internet pretty basic itself.
The original ScubaDog Marshall Tucker site, was developed in March 1997 and was subtitled, Searchin' For A Rainbow. I was eager to produce a site that had some fun with the Tucker lyrics that I've known and sung along with for so many years.
I started with Cattle Drive, a long-time favorite of many Tucker fans from the Tenth album. It's still a favorite among fans visiting our site for the first time so I have continued to include it on the MTB Links page.
As I sat listening to the Capricorn boxed set again one evening I noticed that Love Song has a number of lyric combinations to use! Someday, on the update I'll be sure to include them, along with an entirely different ending.
Looking back on those early days of the Geocities site I never thought that those simple, but creative pages would one day evolve into the host site of marshalltucker.com! I also never thought that my involvement would continue for so long, but there's definitely a burnout factor involved in running a .com site.
Earlier in the year, in January, 1997 the Marshall Tucker Band actually developed an official merchandise page at a site called Carolina Commerce. The site included a selection of MTB merchandise and a guestbook for fans to add their comments. The site continued for a few months, and eventually included tour dates but not really much Marshall Tucker Band info. In fact, there was one studio photo of the band, and a MTB color logo. That's it. Carolina Commerce went out of business, and the site went down in early June, 1997.
Just about a month earlier, Doug Gray emailed me with the idea of using my site as the official MTB page and constructing new pages that would include biographies and updates on the band. Needless to say, it turned out to be a great idea even though the band's management company opposed the idea from the start. It certainlly wasn't easy to create, given the limited material available at the time.
We started with a main index, tour, discography, links, and fan page, then added a guestbook. The Tucker Chat page went on line in late July when I offered Pat Webster the opportunity to become the host. She had just begun a Marshall Tucker webpage with yearbook photos of the band. We added a Bulletin Board in August, Biographies, and Album Reviews in September. Craig Cumberland and I spent most of that fall writing reviews and building an archive of MTB concert tapes from fans around the web. We added a tape traders page, a new Scrapbook, and a Jukebox page in November. To kick off 1998, I developed a Toy Caldwell Tribute page that eventually evolved to become toycaldwell.com. 1998 also saw the beginning of new contests on the site. We gave away autographed CDs in a Chat Page contest. The absence of BB Borden photos on the site prompted Chris Walker to ask, Where's BB? So we turned it into a contest.
At times it's difficult holding together the assortment of Tucker traditions under one domain site. I like to think that we've succeeded.
The takeover of the original MTB site began in the Summer of 2000 when the band's management company attempted a new website at marshalltucker.net. A number of new southern and MTB sites were going on line at the time including hotgrits.com, gritz.net, mtbfanclub.com and southernmusiccentral.com. I had been running the offical MTB site since '97 and it became clear to me that a number of folks wanted to take over the site. By this time, Rainey had secured a web presence for his other bands and he was eager to get the MTB site under his control too.
Of course, giving away the site was out of the question and, at first, the pressure to transfer the webpages was very subtle. For legal purposes, it would be best to protect everyone by having the site under the corporation name, I was told. Of course, I would still run the site if I wanted, but ownership transfer would have to occur. No deal. The main issue would be my eventual successor and I wasn't interested in having the site run by an infatuated groupie or worse yet, an out-of-touch corporate office. Eventually, after more than three months of negotiations, the site was transferred to Rainey's management group in November, 2001. Shortly afterward marshalltucker.net folded and Craig Cumberland was asked to provide web content for the new site under the band's managment company.
Run by Craig Cumberland, MTB Fans now have new territory to roam on the internet, combining Craig's music reviews and interviews with current and original band members. I wish him the best of luck and hope that he's able to operate the MTB Pages for the duration of the long hard ride. A special thanks to Craig and Randy West. Randy is the MTB tape archive man who's a behind-the-scenes hero to a lot of Tucker fans longing for quality, hard-to-find MTB tapes. Also, thanks to Melissa Yon, Randy Davis, Michael B. Smith, and Kathy Holt for their contributions in content, interviews, and page development! They've got a new site now and I hope that you support them in their efforts!
For more than three years, I logged onto the internet everyday, lord everyday, to answer email and update the pages that had grown to become marshalltucker.com It was truly a labor of love and all that comes with it. After more than three years since I wrote my first html tag, the time has come for me to say...
Don Kunstel