Pockets of Resistance

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Message boards and go-go sites were feeding Oehser’s desire to learn more, but they weren’t helping him plan his schedule. What he found was a jumble of fliers, sites that would only approve posts about bands that advertised, and valuable information buried deep in forum threads. So, he designed Gogobeat.com mainly as a way for him to keep his own concertgoing organized.

“I pretty quickly came to the sense that I could do a better job — it was a mess to try to figure out what was going on,” he says. “I’m a technologist kind of guy that knows how to program, and I wanted to keep track of the shows just for myself, that’s essentially what it was. So, I came up with a Wiki and made it public so that other people can see what I’m keeping track of, and make their own entries.”

But just because Tom Cat was accepted at shows didn’t mean other fans jumped at the chance to update his site.

“Part of it is that people are only interested in updating their own stuff,” he says. “I can get them to update own shows sometimes, but even that… they want you to update it. Editing the pages in a Wiki editor, I think it’s simple. It takes me two seconds to make an update. But even promoters that have a money interest in this are not gonna do that. They see it as one more thing. They’re not sure it reaches as many people as Facebook, and it’s more complex.

“I’m mulling over how to make it more accessible, it’s something where I have to present the value proposition,” he continued. “I have good search engine rankings because I know how the Internet works — if you put “DC go-go” into Google, I’m at the top.”

So, the computer programmer’s next move is to try to create an application that allows the site to update when someone emails him an event, negating the need for bands and promoters to register or fool with the Wiki editor. The issue will remain getting people to work with him. “I know a lot of the promoters with the bands, but I have to present it as a value proposition,” Oehser says. “I’m thinking [this is all] gonna take months.”

Oehser has also dealt with changes that make it more and more difficult to keep up. He works for Fannie Mae and was just transferred to an office in Virginia — the longer commute and earlier rise time mean very few late nights.

“There’s the fact that [shows] start at midnight,” he says. “Well, actually, you never know when they’re gonna start. You could get there at 11:30 and it turns out they started at 9, and you get the last three songs, which you find out after you’ve already paid. [Going out] depends on where my job is and to what degree I feel like I can go without any sleep and not function — things like that.”

One of Gogobeat.com’s strengths is its chronicling of young bounce beat bands. But tracking that scene and its many bands is a lot more work than is is to figure out where Chuck Brown’s next gig will be held. Also, the young go-go bands, like all high school music groups do, tend to break up, get back together, and fall in and out of favor from week to week.

“The young scene is all bounce, and the young scene is very fickle — it changes back and forth constantly,” Oehser says. “One day All Stars will be on top, the next day ABM, another day XIB. Tru Xpression will be really hot, and everybody’s into it, and then two weeks later, everybody’s like, eh, Tru Xpression — who cares? And I don’t have some live wire into the psyche of 14-year-old kids. I don’t even understand my own 14-year-old.”

“Honestly, I don’t make it to that many young shows anymore,” Oehser says. “I like to drink when I’m out, and they don’t serve alcohol.”