NESP Forum

Gray's site-last day tomorrow? Or April Fool's joke?
Only time will tell....

Taylor and his team will be working on a strategy to keep everyone connected. Wheels are spinning in the background - stay tuned. Everyone realizes the importance of connection and interaction and we’ll do our best to keep the Gray Charles community intact.

The word from Taylor “Graycharles.com will stay up, the lights aren’t going out. Archives will still be up, chat will be up. What the final form will be remains in flux but we’ve built a great thing here and we want to keep it going.”

————–

Tomorrow will be the last day of publication for Gray Charles.

Running this website has been a fascinating experience. I’ve learned an amazing amount about the music industry, promotion, radio, fan bases and tours.

I’m forever indebted to the following people for all the help and co-operation they have given me over the last few months. Jon and Nicole at The Firm, Scott, Chris B. and Chris H. at J-Records, Nate at MusicToday and Noah at Fanscape. I would be remiss without sending a special shout out to my own Bobbi Fleckman, Jennifer at J-Records who has given me her total support and wisdom throughout this endeavor.

A special thanks goes out to Fred O. for his unique ability to wring sincerity out of me despite my resistance.

Thanks to Taylor, Loren, Al, Josh, Brian, Brian, Felix, Melanie, Tim, Jimmy, Jay and Ted.

Thanks to Thing One and Thing Two for your patience with your all too often distracted father.

Mostly, I’d like to thank my wife for her continued support and unwavering belief in me. Without her none of this would have been possible. None of it.

Thanks go out to to all readers and posters who have contributed their thoughts and opinions to make this site what it was. I’ve been alternately bemused, entertained, educated, bored or pissed off - often all in the same day. I’ve tried to be as professional as possible without being boring which is, I’m telling you now, not an easy thing to do.

I’m struggling to come up with an appropriate metaphor for today so I’m planning on just leaving you with some music. Over interpret at will.

In the end, my life is elsewhere - away from the daily chore of running a website and back with the every day peace of family, friends and music. I wish you well.

Gray

I saw that and it is so sad.  

I'm ready to wear a black arm-band with my Modern Whomp GC.com T-shirt in Boston.
But people are still posting on the last thread until it's shut down, so it's not Gone Yet. So maybe I'll add a sticker to my shirt "We're Not Goin' Anywhere". And if I'm brave, I'll say something to Taylor if I get a meet 'n' greet.

Meanwhile, TeelaJBrown has put up a blog
http://www.notgraycharles.blogspot.com/

where she plans to put up daily Runaround and Tour threads until Taylor's people come up with a permanent solution.

That's cool that TeelaJ is doing that. It will keep the group together.
What Taylor's people should do is have Gray be a guest blogger
frequently, and maybe some of the more musical members run
some of the discussions to keep the same flavor...

I can see how Gray needs to spend time with his family though. I
don't even have kids and the Taylor stuff takes a lot of my time and
I'm not half as involved as Gray was. It's nice he did it for as long as
he did

As long as Gray's is still there, we should post our recaps there -- as well as our usual haunts of course.

Gray Charles: We're Not Goin' Anywhere

graycharles.com lives -- there's new audio this morning of Taylor playing the harp with Widespread Panic in Cleveland Saturday:

http://www.graycharles.com/index.php/200...the-music/

I'm glad they're still feeding us videos-they don't want these natives
getting restless!!

I should say not -- the Soulman himself posted an audioblog this afternoon:

In Which Gray Gets To Be A Fan
Published by Taylor Hicks April 2nd, 2007 in Taylor.

http://www.graycharles.com/?p=1150&cp=11#comments

Just went over for my morning visit to Gray's and it's sounding like
they are moving the focus to Taylor's own sites. People can still
browse the archives at GC "indefinitely" and they said Touristas
would be open until the end of the current tour. I couldn't find Touristas
so they must still be organizing and moving stuff. There was a little
thread about MA presale but they closed comments before I could
let people know we have tix if they're stuck.

While I think Taylor should have more control over his own sites, I
hope he's got people in place that know what they're doing. GC was
such a universal clearinghouse of info and musical discussion-it
would be a shame for Taylor to lose that group. LOL of course
the best of GC posters are here now

sniff, sniff....Bye Gray