Zone Out

It’s 2 a.m. on a July night, and Danielle Nelson is finally getting a chance to work on her local-music Web site, thezone.org. She puts in a twelve-hour shift as an electrical engineer from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., then attends classes at DeVry until 11 p.m., so she has a brief window starting at midnight to devote to the resource she launched more than five years ago. A few weeks earlier, she had started to add a group to the page, then realized the band had broken up in the months since she received its information. In the same time span, her post office box, to which groups submitted materials, had closed without her knowledge.

A single mother, Nelson spends most weekends catching up with her three-year-old son, Kellan. Last weekend, she tried to sneak some Zone time into the afternoon, only to be distracted when Kellan said, “Mommy, look at my hat!” She turned to see her boy wearing a peanut-butter sandwich, its sticky sides clinging to his wispy hair.

Now, with Kellan safely asleep, she looks at the scores of backlogged requests. In addition to bands that want reviews and venues that need their shows listed, curious browsers are craving obscure information about long-defunct area acts. Whatever happened to Frogpond? Do you know where the Bubble Boys are now? Where could I find a Daily Grind T-shirt? Do you have a Go Kart CD I could burn? She realizes it’s impossible to accommodate more than a minuscule number of them. Close to tears, she shutters the site, preserving only its message board, and leaves the message “I have very little left to give. I apologize to everyone.”

Last week, Nelson revived a slightly altered version of the site, but that move was for archival purposes and carried no promise of mass updates.

“It’s been hanging on its last breath for the past year,” she tells the Pitch. “It was like cutting off the respirator. I was always having to apologize and make excuses, so I wanted to stop the stream of submissions, at least for a while.”

The response, she says, was immediate. “A lot of people said they wanted all the listings back, but there were very few offers to assist me on that,” she says. Helped at various times over the past few years by columnists Danny Alexander and Dana Detrick-Clark and writer Mark Cuthbertson, among others, Nelson now works alone. Given the Zone’s professional-looking design and its expansive mass of data, most surfers assume there’s a sizable staff, or at least a decent number of volunteers.

“People think it’s this whole huge business, an eight-to-five operation,” she says. “When I realized I wasn’t going to be able to keep up with it, I asked for volunteers, and I got tons. I would give these easy assignments, like update ten bands per month or turn in one review or column per month, and people would do it for a month or two, then quit. I appreciated the help, but I could never find anybody that would commit.”

Nelson devoted full-time hours to the site before Kellan’s birth. In its early years, she had a “very part-time” job that took up only six hours a week, allowing her to make constant improvements to the Zone. During the height of its popularity, roughly three and a half years ago, the Zone hosted weekly alt-rock shows at the Grand Emporium. Nelson attended every one. “Kellan was born on a Tuesday, and I was there the Monday before,” she recalls.

Nelson’s situation isn’t the only one that’s changed. In 1997, very few groups had a presence on the Internet, so the Zone hosted band pages that provided brief musical synopses and contact information. Now, nearly all of the Zone’s featured groups maintain their own Web sites, so Nelson simply links to their home pages, eliminating the middleman element.

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At the time, the Zone was a revolutionary concept: A limitless space on which musicians, used to paying for absolutely everything, could receive free advertising for their concerts and projects. Now, several local sites are dedicated to the same cause. The impressively encyclopedic Rockkansas.com, for instance, includes new-media touches such as an MP3 library and a video vault as well as frequently updated reviews and band profiles.

But there’s one element of the Zone that even its well-stocked peers can’t match: its instantly addictive forum. An absorbing reality show with a cast of Kansas City musicians and observers, this message board pits reactionary cover-band frontman Red-Eye against liberal indie guitarist Keanon Liggatt, cocky glamour boy John Doom against erudite Kill Creek crank Scott Born, and anonymous antagonists such as the bile-spewing “Becki” against the scene as a whole.

Even when she removed the rest of the Zone, Nelson left the forum intact. “I would’ve battled hell and fury if I’d touched that,” she says with a shiver. In addition to providing guilty pleasures with its personality clashes, the forum also served as a makeshift replacement for the rest of the Zone’s functions during its hiatus, with musicians posting shows and classifieds.

During her time away from the Zone, Nelson continued to work on her personal site, bitterberry.com, adding provocative black-and-white photography, poems and journal entries.

“I got a few snotty e-mails about that,” she says. “People wrote, ‘So, I guess you have plenty of time to take slutty pictures of yourself, but you didn’t have any time to update band pages.’ People are a little bitter about it. At least I know they care.”

Nelson needs such reminders that people care, because her default assumption, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, is that they don’t.

“There are some people that care, and that’s sweet, but … I don’t know,” she says. “I really worked hard at it. I’m not good at anything — I have no talents, I’m not good at any hobbies, I don’t play music especially well — and this was my baby.”

Nelson was most proud of her computer-conceived child when concertgoers told her they had learned about a show through the Zone. “Tons of people got into the music scene because they read about the bands or they visited the Zone forum and met people,” she says. “There’s a bunch of scenesters now wanting to join bands, and I don’t care if I contributed to that or not. The main reason I started the Zone was to get more people out to see live bands.”

Nelson doesn’t see many shows these days. “I’m only 25, but I’m like an old lady,” she says. “I’m just tired all the time.”

However, she’s within a year and a half of completing her schooling, at which point she envisions returning to clubs and restoring immediacy to the Zone.

“I have a redesign not only in mind but also in actual files,” she explains. “It will take time to implement, but once I get started on something, I really want to finish it. If I relaunch it, that commitment will be back. I won’t put it up and let it die there.”