ABOUT | doubledutchin-staged

About Kim(gerly), &

It's not often a promotional idea comes along that affords me an opportunity to give back to my community. All the swag and gear left over from this event will be dontated to DeFremery Park. So many kids have physical access to this park, but they lack financial acccess to score gear to participate in many of the offerings of DeFremery Park. And so, you want to know why I engage in right-brained activities like this. Well, I tell ya...

I have historically tinkered around with promoting events since my undergraduate days in college radio at WFIT-FM and WREK-FM, and even while getting my ass kicked during the dot-com(edy) in the mid-thru-late 1990s. I do come from a musical family after all, and even studied formally for about ten years on just about all the brass instruments. You could say it's in my blood.

After graduating and returning to Balitmore, MD in 1993, because I was unemployed and couchsurfing, I started a music zine. I mean what was a gerly to do, since the WAY-BEST college radio station WCVT-FM went pear-shaped?! There was a void for local, national and international bands to get their promotional material into the starving paws and auricular canals of the Baltimore underground listenership. And so I took a stab and became a quasi-editrix of The TongueBath Tub--it's still mirrored on my pal's web site in Russia. [Don't laugh, we only had Netscape Communicator for marking up web pages back then.]

At the time, The TongueBath was one of the first music e-zines on the i-net (circa 1993/94).

I think we even posted up the first virtual Flash animated DJ, DJ U. Hell I can't remember, it's all a blur now. Blaster Magazine even interviewed me because all of us hardcore zinesters who had access to personal computers were at a cross-roads. Do we abandon our D.I.Y. cut-n-paste on 'slices of tree' roots, or do we embrace the technology of the time er, QuarkXPress and the web, even though most of our audience still does not have access to personal computers? Aye!

I kept the D.I.Y. attitude, but started converting the paper zine into the web. Our motto was, "We give EVERYONE an honest peep, lap and listen."

This didn't necessarily mean we liked the music, but we understood the need and all the hard-earned sweat that went into producing labors of love. It was the least we could do to give everyone who submitted to our rag some ink--it was up to them to make it work in their tear sheets. All the major, middle and indie labels loved us and all our tonguebathing spit and smack. We even managed to get some notice in rags like our beloved Baltimore City Paper, Blaster, Cactus Prick, Factsheet 5, Flipside, Punk Planet. I never did get around to finish mopping up my HELLA mess on the web. It's still parked on Snow White, my MacBook Pro. Perhaps one day...

So, naturally, the next growth spurt meant gravitating to putting out music, and TongueBath Music was born. And so I did, with my partner at the time, Curtis Bay. [Yeah hon, his pseudonym is a testament to the armpit of Baltimore on the Chesapeake Bay.] I would sometimes blow horn as Anne Arundel and CBay would turn my blats into supreme horn lines. More about us here.

But to promote these musical releases meant we needed to get gigs and get the music into publishing. And so, the music publishing arm, beatsforsale.com was born 3 August 1999. Ja, when I getaminute, I'll get it back up and running...