To celebrate the eighth anniversary of the founding of GLONO, we’ve asked some of the original contributors to share some thoughts about eight years of publication. We were all excited when Stephen Macaulay joined the crew. Mac was (and is) a real professional who had subscribed to Creem when Lester Bangs was the editor, and he’d seen the Faces live. The fact that he thought what we were doing was something special gave us a boost of confidence that we needed in the beginning.
—Jake

Eight Years After

No one is going to want to admit it, but essentially, Glorious Noise started out on a medium that was far different from the one you’re looking at now. Think of it more along the lines of Dixie Cups and string. The clever part was that whereas the cup-and-string routine is limited to pairs of senders and receivers, in the early days Glorious Noise actually had a drunken spider’s web of strings hooked up to a number of cups that you could count on both hands and have some fingers left over. Really.

Early on, it was sort of like a slightly elevated version of a dorm room flame session where one of the guys—yes, in the early days it was all guys, not a co-ed floor—would say something about someone (and as it was a guy thing, there were plenty of posts about Madonna, Alanis, Britney), with the others either piling on or positively chiming in. The idea that it was anything more than a means by which people were communicating across town in Chicago or across the lake into Michigan was something that was seemingly not all that considered. It was good, lively fun that could be accomplished from the comfort of one’s room, closet, or other space where there was a string, electricity, and, alright, a keyboard. Really.

As time marched on, it crushed those early notions of what was what sort of like the Germans marching into Paris. The city looked the same, in effect (the tower was still there), but it was entirely different. The whimsical toss-offs were replaced by studied analyses. It was along the lines of You Can’t Stop the Kant. More or less. Really.

In the nascent days, the whole idea of reviewing discs was thought to be something that just wouldn’t be done on Glorious Noise. At least not consistently. If someone happened to have a disc that they wanted to write about, or needed an excuse to write about, say, Wilco (actually, any excuse would do, like someone might say, “Hey, Sab’s given name is Jeff. . .which reminds me of Tweedy. . .”), then it was done. But when you’re working with the string and the paper cups, well, doing something on a regular basis seemed downright crazy. Funny how far we’ve come. I mean funny as in funny. Really.

Here’s a thing. We’re eight. That would put us in, what?, elementary school, third grade. Who celebrates their eighth in a big way? The traditional wedding anniversary gift for eight is bronze and pottery. Sort of like an Etruscan celebration or something. The modern anniversary gift is linens and lace, which cycles back to some of the earliest posts on Glorious Noise. Think about it for a minute. Really.

If we make it to ten, skip the tin and aluminum and send us the diamond jewelry. Really.

See for yourself what the first few months were like: February, March, April, 2001. Good times.

Previous birthdays:

• 2002: Happy Birthday to Glorious Noise!

• 2003 :Terrible Twos: Happy Birthday to Us!

• 2004: Happy Birthday! Three is a Magic Number!

• 2005: Glorious Noise is Four Years Old

• 2006 (belated): The Black and Orange Ball: GLONO’s Fifth Birthday Party

• 2007: Happy Sixth Birthday to Glorious Noise

• 2008: And if the Devil is Six: GLONO is Seven!