Special thanks to fellow archivers of other media, who have been a continual inspiration to me: Jon Halper, Paul Hilcoff, Heather Leah Kennedy, Steven Miller, Stefan Negele, John Relph, Morten Skjefte, Pascal Valentin, Paul Webb
In general, I'm looking for new things to add to the site in terms of information, files, and links.
This is a fan site and has no official connection to The Spent Poets, Monkey Rhythm, Beanpole, No Forcefield, Slider, Madame Blatvatsky Overdrive, Adam Gates, Derek Greenberg, Matthew Winegar, John Berg, Michael Urbano, their current or former management, or their current or former record labels.
This site exists to document and/or archive everything related to the band The Spent Poets and its members.
The original site was a single webpage created in 2002 to spread the word about The Spent Poets' unreleased second album "Steve", and the scope has slowly grown over time.
This is a strictly non-commercial site and contains no advertising and no fundraising.
Hosting is paid out of my own pocket, and I do not solicit for donations to cover hosting costs, domain names, etc.
This site does not use cookies or other tracking mechanisms.
This site does not collect, use, share, or sell visitor data.
This site does collect ordinary HTTP logs - same as all websites - but does not share them with any other parties.
All opinions here are my own unless explicitly attributed to someone else.
All errors are my own as well. Please email me corrections as relevant.
I strive to correctly credit contributions and sources. Please let me know where corrections are needed.
I ask you to return the favor - if you use data from this site, please cite this site as a source.
For the most part, discography-related images were scanned by me.
Madame Blavastky Overdrive cover art is taken from their dead website(s).
Vintage gig poster and flyer images are largely taken from long-ago eBay auctions, except where noted.
This site aims to strike a balance between linking to other sites and rehosting content. The reality is that on a 20+ year timeline, many online sources disappear or end up behind paywalls.
Occasionally, for the purposes of commentary or usability I will rehost content scraped from the Internet Archive such as The Spent Poets Recording Diary.
In addition, we're dealing with at least one musician who periodically deletes his websites...
If you are the copyright owner of a piece of content hosted here and feel that my usage of such material violates fair-use guidelines, please contact me so that we can discuss options for correcting the situation.
I also take steps to make sure that this site is backed up at the Internet Archive.
Audio files rehosted here are generally files posted by the band themselves, Madame Blavatsky Overdrive albums rehosted here per The MBO Music Sharing Philosphy, files from dead webpages, etc. In the case of MBO, I do be sure to adhere to the following from their policy "If you distribute the full album please use the same archived ZIP file that you download from our site.".
This site does not stream audio. for bandwidth reasons it never will.
Overall, I've hosted audio here that I don't think will get a takedown notice. If you see something mentioned here that you'd like to hear, shoot me an email. Especially, if you are someone who received a CD-R of "Steve" from me many years ago.
Simply, my name is Karl and I'm a fan of The Spent Poets. I have no qualifications to create and operate this site beyond the interest and (occasionally) the time to do so. Thankfully, I've been blessed with tons of help from other fans - and some of the bandmembers - over the years. I'm definitely working to improve the citations and credits here such that all primary facts can be tied back to a source.
Feel free to create your own site if you don't like this one.
Absolutely not, but updates can be few and far between when the site content is primarily focused on an album that is over thirty years old.
The changes page has existed since 2018 to help visitors discover additions since their last visit.
In a word: no.
I've been down this road a few times and usually the new owner lets the site die after their initial enthusiam wears off. That leaves me with the awkward situation of needing to reclaim my content and rebuild. I'm in this one for the long haul and won't be handing it over to anyone.
Maybe someday I'll get around to rebuilding the Urban Dance Squad site that Pascal let die.
These sites are all valuable resources, but none of them fit exactly with the full scope of what is contained here. A Wikipedia article would probably come closest, but a quick look at most Wikipedia articles about musicians reveals that they generally violate one or more of Wikipedia's three core content policies (neutral point of view, no original research, verifiability).
So, here we are - with my own site I can do my own research, I can speculate, and I don't have to be neutral. When it comes to crowd-sourced databases like the above, I'd rather do my own verification and not have to argue with any other editors.
It was created in 2002 and looks like it. It's still essentially vanilla HTML handrolled in a text editor. Except for the The Spent Poets Recording Diary, which is PHP scraped from the Internet Archive and then edited for re-hosting.
TBH, rehosting this data in something like WordPress or Weebly would generally result in slower page loads, more dead space on the pages, and much more scrolling.
The site is not optimized for mobile devices, so please let me know where I can make improvements. In general, this is simple static HTML and it should load quite quickly.
I aim for only documenting Adam's and Matt's contributions to the Primus world and no further.
That said, the overall archive situation with Primus can be hard to navigate and I may increase the level of documentation as warranted.
Site created in 2002, <spentpoetsfan at gmail dot com>, Copyright 2002-2025, This page last updated: 08 February 2025
This site is not sponsored or endorsed by the musician(s) or their current or former record label(s).