www.classicgaragerock

The challenge of this site was to display and play 152 mp3’s from more than 40 bands.

Bill Traut was walking to work in Hollywood in early 1960 when he came upon a line of young people standing in line on Vine Street. Curious, he bought a ticket and went inside. The Shadows of Knight were playing and when they started to play “G-L-O-R-I-A” the crowd went nuts and the kids rushed the stage.

Bill said: “I’d never seen that before. I went back stage after the concert and asked the players if they had recorded that song. ‘No’ they said, I had them in a studio the next Tuesday, the record was pressed by Friday and a week after that we had a number one hit.” During the 1960’s Bill founded Dunwich Records and worked with countless bands and artists to record and perform hundreds of hit songs.

In 1970 he was at a wedding of an associate, he liked the band at the reception and thought the vocalist had a kind of knack. He asked if they had any originals. They said they did but didn’t have a name yet. Bill paid a guy to come up with a bunch of ideas for a name. “‘Styx’ had a nice ring to it” Bill told me. The band went on to record many platinum records, and were popular at the very beginning of the whole stadium-rock scene.

The music library Bill developed has become a very valuable property and he was receiving many requests to license his songs for motion pictures and advertising agencies. He needed a website that could not only play his many songs, but also have bios about the bands. This site handles the huge organizational task by dividing up the mp3 into labels and bands and using a special media player to handle buffering and playback. Flash was used to develop the spinning navigation records and to lend interest to the album covers that parade in on page load.   http://www.classicgaragerock.com