KGLW.net, one of several fan sites for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, went live with a major upgrade to its website last week.
I’m honored to have penned a guest column on the site about the experience of my March travels in Europe following the band through five countries. Here’s a link to that column.
But the upgraded site, which now uses Songfish software, is going to be an incredibly comprehensive resource chronicling the Australian psychedelic rock band’s setlists, the band’s history, interviews, recordings of the band’s wildly improvisational live performances, and much more. It’s also a place to head to for live setlist updates as the band is performing, though each show will still go through the more rigorous review process outlined below.
I’m going to tell you all about the site here, starting with the aforementioned software upgrade.
First, it’s true that other sites already had posted the band’s setlists.
This image is the fan site’s main logo.
KGLW.net’s founder, Justin Mando of Pennsylvania aka AlteredBeef, has made it clear that his intention with the site is not to compete with other Gizz fan sites.
But KGLW.net is attempting to be THE site for documenting the band’s record, including song performance histories.
Until the site launched the upgrade last week, fans had to rely largely on the accuracy of Setlist.fm, which is owned by LiveNation.
Aside from those setlists generally not catching audibles the band makes, they really don’t capture a lot of the detail that fans of the jamband community have long sought with the likes of Phish, Umphrey’s McGee and others. You don’t have to have a love for jam bands to appreciate the effort the band is making to make each show different from the next.
There’s so many things that can make each show special, including extended versions, guest appearances, song teases, quotes, segues, and bust-outs, to name a few.
As Songfish founder and developer Adam Scheinberg put it in an interview last week, “I think Setlist.fm is an amazing site. Love it, and I think it is fantastic that it exists. But … for bands like this, it’s not enough. (Setlist.fm) has to be what it is for most people. But Phish phans, Umphrey’s McGee fans and King Gizzard fans, Goose fans, you know, all of them want details that would completely overwhelm normal people. They want jam charts, or show me songs that are tagged a particular way or albums that are tagged in a particular way. I think there’s room in the world for both of those things to exist. Maybe Songfish only serves a niche audience.”
Scheinberg has some experience developing setlist software, first building software that powers the extensive setlist database for the fan site phish.net. He’s long been involved there and with the Mockingbird Foundation, a non-profit organization founded by Phish phans (more on KGLW.net’s non-profit goals below). Scheinberg is a recent president of Mockingbird Foundation. His volunteer work there led to working for Umphrey’s McGee and ultimately founding Songfish, which is available to any band or fan site that wishes to utilize it for a nominal fee. Songfish is more of a hobby for Scheinberg, who is an executive in the information technology sector. He loves live music and has been seeing Phish live since 1996. He’s also become a Gizz fan.
In the case of KGLW.net, he said he approached them first.
“I found their site,” he said. “It was all done by hand, but it was pretty elegant how they solved the problem. But it did not allow for some of the things that I thought would have been ideal like statistics and list making and stuff. And so I reached out to them and I said, I see you guys have this site. Have you ever looked at something more powerful? That led to a lot of conversation. And I’ll tell you, those guys were a huge pain in my butt for a while because they have really high standards. But Songfish is better for it.”
It doesn’t matter what type of listening background you might approach King Gizzard from, be it more of the metal side of things, their psychedelic side or were just plain mind-fucked by the band, like I was, because of their improvisational creativity.
Fans of several jam bands, which generally live by a standard of not repeating songs in consecutive shows, have been able to appreciate the work of Scheinberg, whose work has allowed fans to run their own statistics for the shows they have attended.
Setlist Wizards
There is a committee of KGLW.netters that are responsible for arbitrating the setlists. That process starts with watching a show via stream or listening to a recording or show being streamed in real time.
Andrew Parker, aka ListeningWind of Stockton, Calif., usually has first crack, he said, putting “together the initial setlist, all the songs played, any segues, any teases or quotes, guest appearances and timestamps to make it easy for people to see those things,” he said. “Once that is done, it will be posted for the setlist team to review.”
The rest of the committee of “setlist wizards” go through the recording and they come to an agreement on what the final setlist is going to look like.
There are currently 13 members of the site that participate in the process, Parker said.
Parker noted that one of the members also runs a setlist thread on KGLW.net’s Reddit account. As mentioned above, this is in addition to the setlist review process done for each show for which there is a recording. Mando said the group’s Reddit threads will continue, while those setlists will be updated on KGLW.net as well, as shows are being played.
“Sometimes they will mention things that the team doesn’t pick up on, we can go back and review that,” he said. “On that topic, if anyone out there is listening to (a particular Gizz show) and thinks they hear something that we don’t have listed, they should hit us up through email to let us know to see if it is something we didn’t catch the first time around.”
This screenshot is from Gizz’s March 7 show in Stockholm. Note the green Gizzy creature in the top right corner. This icon denotes the setlist has gone through KGLW.net’s review process.
Such a scenario happened for the March 7 Stockholm show. The band teased “Hypertension,” which was caught by the team. But they initially missed the tease of “Superposition,” a song KGLW.net’s database has no record of the band every playing live before (yet).
Parker said he wanted a place like Phish.net, wanting to track his stats for Gizz. He and a few other fellows that are on Phish.net have been working together to bring KGLW.net to reality.
“It is going to be a great resource for any Gizzard fan,” Parker said. “It is a way to give back to the community. Hopefully it is going to be a really great resource that lasts for years to come.”
Mando said the site came to be on a Discord Phish site, where a bunch of Phish fans pondered why there wasn’t already something like Phish.net for King Gizz.
“We could not find anything beyond Setlist.fm that was doing what we wanted,” said Mando, who bought the KGLW.net domain name on a whim. “I could see I could get it for $17 a year.”
It seems, he said, that all of the Gizzard fan sites, including LaminatedDenim.net and WeirdoSwarm.org were launched within a couple of weeks of each other late last year.
“We are just doing this to give to the Gizz community,” he said. “We are not trying to claim ownership. We are simply trying to provide a place for people to enjoy the music in the way we do. … We want to create an archive of all of this documentation to help us figure out what happened at all of these shows. There are different sources of stuff we find. We have a bunch of people who are interested in that history. Even with Phish.net, people argue, is that the final word? That’s OK. We want the conversation.”
Setlist review still in progress
KGLW.net’s setlist effort requires a live recording for any particular show, and there are shows without known live recordings. On the other hand, the band has taken on a more improvisational bent in recent years.
So the site’s database requires for the setlist team to go through each and every show for which there is a recording. It’s a process that is not yet complete, though the site has confirmed many years of the band’s live performance history, including this year, 2022 (sans the spring tour), all of 2021, as well as 2010 and 2012.
The efforts of Brent Housteau of California, aka GizzHenge on the site, has helped that process. He updates a spreadsheet of all known and available recordings of the band’s performances.
“Most of the best stuff is on Youtube or it is on Archive.org,” he said, noting that some recordings are excluded for Archive.org’s Live Music Archive for not meeting certain standards.
Housteau found Gizz through Trey Anastasio, the frontman of Phish, who called Gizz the greatest band in the world last year.
“I mainly put the spreadsheet for myself,” he said, a long-time Phish fan whose first time seeing the band was 1996’s Clifford Ball.
He really appreciates the effort that is being undertaken.
“The setlist team is going through year by year and creating setlists, notations, notes and verifying what has been played, removing stuff that hasn’t been verified,” he said. “Without the spreadsheet, it would be 10 times more difficult to do. I have already found the best audio and video that is out there.”
His spreadsheet actually lists all known recordings for a show.
The site is also embedding the best known video of a show in its setlists.
Housteau does assist the setlist team. But he said he puts most of his efforts towards updating the spreadsheet and a “Today in King Gizz live show history” thread on Reddit.
“The reason to do this, to me, is selfish,” he said. “I want the shows to be as good as possible. Each show is unique. If the fans don’t notice it, and there aren’t sites educating the fans on how each show is, it is a lot of work. They may go back to playing the same sets again. We have to do our part to encourage them to take this effort to make each show special. They did 5 nights in Barcelona and nobody talked about how that was the longest they had gone without a repeat.”
Mando has said there is room for debate on things like what is included on a given setlist. It’s why, unlike a sports game box scores which are generally put to bed by officials at the end of each contest, the KGLW.net process allows for changes to be made really indefinitely, if new information comes to light, man.
There are, for instance, a number of early shows without known setlists.
“What we want to do is dig through into Facebook groups that might have discussed Gizz back then,” Mando said. “We want to look back in ways that people haven’t really done yet. There are a couple of people on Setlist.fm that have done really good work in unearthing that history. We want to make it a community process that we all kind of own as a community.”
Interview archive and more
Dan Rzicznek, aka RattleRattleRattle, is a college English professor from Ohio involved with KGLW.net.
He saw the band for the first time last year in Detroit and dove deeply down into the Gizzverse, spending a great deal of time trying to learn more about them.
He has been curating the site’s interview archive. He didn’t want all the credit, however, noting that Mando and the sites’s volunteer editor, Wyatt Slinger, aka W.B.T.G. Slinger/Boiler Rhapsody, got it started. He and another member (Spida) have worked to keep it up to date, he said.
“I have been keeping that list healthy, looking for new sources,” he said. “Before that, there was a guy who is no longer part of the team who reached out to the Gizzard organization to get rights to publish all of the lyrics. I helped him get all of the lyrics right and published.”
Rzicznek said he appreciates the way Gizz engages its fans, and, as a long-time fan of Phish, the Grateful Dead and psychedelic rock, has noticed Gizz embracing some of the same interactions with their fans.
“You are all in on the same wonderful joke,” he said. “It is amazing that is happening. … There is something there that is beyond the social that brushes against the spiritual.”
That is what moves a busy guy – all of the folks interviewed for this piece lead extremely busy lives for that matter – such as RattleRattleRattle to devote his time and energy to the site.
“It takes dedication,” Mando said. “And everybody is a volunteer. It is an amazing range of people. People have been generous, smart and dedicated. This is something that will live beyond us, really.”
Fans of King Gizz should take a good look at the site. The database it has developed thus far has a “venues” chart, where you can learn, for instance, the band played the basement of First Ave in Minneapolis, 7th Street Entry, on Nov. 5, 2015. It’s one of only two known performances the band has played in my adopted state (if somebody knows otherwise, they should contact the site).
Mando noted that the site will eventually have “notable versions,” similar to Phish.net’s jam charts.
The site is hosting fan-written reviews and includes a blog (there have been several excellent posts already, check out this cool piece and this one) with an editor, Slinger, from rural Australia.
Mando, acknowledging the site is largely run by folks based in the U.S., hopes Gizz fans from around the globe will get involved.
“We want to make this an international effort,” he said, mentioning a recent blog piece reviewing a graphic novel adapted from Polygondwanaland, by Joe Courtney and Jorge Peña, from Colombia. Peña sat in on and spoke a recent weekly meeting of KGLW.net volunteers.
“We have a couple of other people involved who love this band from Australia,” he said. “We would like to grow in that way.”
Nonprofit efforts
One thing that jumps out about many of King Gizzard’s lyrics is their take on environmentalism.
From “Astroturf,” to “Red Smoke,” or “If Not Now Then When?” to name a few, the band is sending a message to us Earthlings about the way we treat this place.
You don’t have to abstain from fishing, as “Fishing for Fishies” might suggest, to care about the planet. And that is not to dismiss the song’s message.
Mando, whose own professional career as an English professor and writer has involved environmental or conservation writing, is excited to slowly but surely build a non-profit organization that helps fund conservation work in cities and places where King Gizzard has toured.
That got definitely got Rzicnzek excited.
“I grew up hunting and fishing,” he said. “I hunted until a few years ago.”
Housteau is involved in working up the paperwork for the non-profit.
“We still have this goal,” said Mando, who said more recent efforts have been poured into getting Songfish up and running.
That is a work in progress.
“The big goal is to develop the non-profit,” Mando said.
If group’s efforts to get the site running are any indication, its charitable arm, just like Phish.net’s Waterwheel Foundation, will likely be a success.