As we continue the lead-up to Bob & DylanRadio’s mutual birthdays, Grandpa Walrus is back with another little story for the kids, and a tip of the hat to my Internet brethren.  Back in the ’91 when I first hacked my way onto this thing called the Internet, one of the most popular places to hang out were the Usenet newsgroups.  For you young whipper-snappers, newsgroups were kind of like Facebook groups with less “face” and more “group.”

For Dylan fans, the center of the Internet universe was a group called rec.music.dylan where the finer points of Dylanology were discussed & debated, but the most important fruit of r.m.d, for me anyway, was the documentation of Dylan lyrics in what became known as the “Exchange Dylan Lyrics Internet Service” or EDLIS.  With FTP and Gopher mirrors worldwide, the EDLIS lyric repositories were a veritable treasure trove for fans like myself.  Sleeve-lyrics and lyric-sites are ubiquitous these days, but in those days, it was like finding Aladdin’s cave.  I remember obsessing over Desire’s lyrics that I’d gathered from EDLIS FTP sites including updates from r.m.d.  I also remember the time I got reprimanded for posting a binary to r.m.d like an idiot-n00b.  This binary to be precise!

All this to say that, were it not for the ground-breakers like EDLIS and r.m.d, sites like DylanRadio could never exist.  The most amazing thing about those pioneers is that they endure to this very day!  Eduardo Ricardo still maintains the EDLIS.org website, and the EDLIS Café is still the hub of Dylan fandom on Facebook.  You can even still access the rec.music.dylan newsgroup via Google Groups  Many of the heroes of r.m.d and EDLIS are currently are very active contributors to the ULTIMATE website for Dylan-related news & info, ExpectingRain.com (and if you’re not a member there, you’re dead to me now).

I also recommend reading Ron Chester’s hilarious EDLIS Biography!

Bottom line:  Thank you rmd, EDLIS and ExpectingRain.com for paving the way for fellow fans on the net.  Just being a part of the online fan community is a privilege, but the support and encouragement those heroes have given DylanRadio.com over the past ten years has been an amazing honour.  My appreciation is inexhaustible!