home

back to the Cool Stuff index

THIS WEBSITE IS PRETTY SMALL STILL AND EASY TO GET AROUND. I'll tell you where you can go for some real detail, if you want it: wckrspgt.com, the website for Wckr Spgt and many related projects. HOWEVER. I understand from talking to people that sometimes exploring wckrspgt.com seems daunting. Due to Mark Givens' dedication, yes, wckrspgt.com is a massive sprawling resource of information and audio files. Have no fear: my years of spelunking and searching and referencing have made me a capable tour guide for the great things wckrspgt.com has to offer. 

As a note, because the wckrspgt.com website was my first exposure to all things Wckr Spgt, you may notice that I prefer to use that format for the name, as it's how things are presented across the site. I think there's been a recent push to resume using the all-caps WCKR SPGT among some of the old heads and I encourage you to use whichever you prefer. 

WELCOME TO WCKRSPGT.COM, PART 1: GETTING AROUND 

FIRST. Here is what you'll see when you first access the site, wckrspgt.com. 

You can get back to this page anytime using the "home" button in the navigation bar, which is persistent across all pages on the site: 

On the homepage, you can scroll around news items, use the navigation bar in the upper right, or scroll all the way down to poke through the IE Webring. 

Now, back to that navigation bar. 

The first item of interest here is that "history" text there. When you click that, you get taken to the history section: 

You can return to this area of the history section any time via "who is wckr spgt?" or "when did wckr spgt start?" in that box on the right. 

This page will tell you about the members of Wckr Spgt, the founding of Wckr Spgt, and Wckr Spgt songs from 1982 and earlier. For more information about the name of the band, you will have to click a different page.

On the right hand box, below "when did wckr spgt start?", you'll see "who else has played with wckr spgt?" Clicking that will take you here:

This page will give you information about Inland Empire Musicians, plus some projects those people were involved in, and some IE/Shrimper- adjacent musicians living elsewhere. You'll have to go to a different page to read more in depth about the musical projects, if you don't find the information you want here.

Below "who else has played with wckr spgt?", there is "who is wckr spgt now?" 

This is the page in its entirety. This page gives the current lineup of Wckr Spgt.

Below "who is wckr spgt now?" you can see "what does the name mean?" 

This page will tell you where the name Wckr Spgt came from and how to pronounce "Wckr Spgt".

Next you'll see "projects and bands" which is where things get slightly more complicated. 

To read about a specific Wckr Spgt side project, related project, or adjacent project, you'll have to find its correct subpage. Here is a chart of which projects are on which subpage of projects and bands:  

On the listing for the above projects, you can read about members of Wckr Spgt associated projects, active years of Wckr Spgt associated projects, and find some links to available music on the Wckr Spgt site. However, this area will not open the album/discography browsing sidebar, which you'll see in the next section after "history". 

First, we'll proceed to "shows" which also has 3 subpages: early shows, other memorable shows, and rock operas. This section not only has information about notable shows by Wckr Spgt & associated projects, but also venues of the 80's & 90's Inland Empire and Wckr Spgt's history with touring. It's time for another chart! What can you read about on these pages? 

Our final stop in the "history" section is "the business":

On this page you can read about labels and zines associated with Wckr Spgt. 

Now that you've caught up on the history, we can get into the discography section. 

As soon as you click discography, hello, welcome! Welcome to the wall of thumbnails! 

What you're seeing here is the earliest releases by Wckr Spgt and associated acts, in chronological order. If you click that brown thumbnail in the top left for CMPLT SPGT, you'll bring up the album page. 

As you can see, this page gives you the year of release (1982), the label (Anthropology Records), and then below that you can see the songs on the given release, in blue text. If you click the name of a song, say "(I'm On) No-Doz Again", you'll see the page change slightly: 

Now there's a different bar on the right, which shows you the lyrics for the song (available for almost all Wckr Spgt songs on the site, less reliably for side projects), plus a little in-browser audio playback element so you can listen to the (entire!) song. Note the "download" button for each song. Generally if you left-click it (or single-tap etc) you'll open the audio element in a new tab and it will begin playing. You have to right click (long-press, etc) and use your "Save link as..." (or similar) function to download the file. 

Now, if we scroll down or return to the album landing page, you'll see the other sidebar over on the right, with years ranging from 1982 onward and some mixed color text. 

This sidebar will give you a text-based navigation for the albums in the Wckr Spgt section, chronologically. The plain black text is the name of the project, and below it you can see the year and name of the albums in question. For example: 

In this image, you can see that from 1985 - 1986, many side projects produced albums that are covered on wckrspgt.com, and then from 1986 to 1993 all of the material was released as Wckr Spgt, with side projects taking a backseat as the Spgt vision took hold for a while. 

Now, if we return to the main discography page, and scroll down, we eventually hit the Compilations area. 

If you click one of these, like Pawnshop Reverb, most are just an overview and don't have any available files for you to download or listen to. Note the red text! 

However, some compilations do have available files: 

• 1985, A Sample of Anthropology Recording Artists
• 1993, Pure Heaven (by Wckr Spgt And Friends, distinct from the Pure Heaven under the Wckr Spgt section) 
• 1993, Silvergate and Dovetail 
• 2012, Gatherings 

For the rest of the releases under Compilations, I am able to offer some detailed coverage here for the Shrimper compilations but the rest are an ongoing project. 

Returning to the main discography page, we have the Cash Nexus area:

You can browse files for the Cash Nexus and T.H.U.D. albums here. There are also pages for albums by The Congress, but they just have track names. This website will not provide you additional information about the Congress. 

You can also view some track names and some album art for Furniture Huschle releases further down the page, but files are not available. 

Past the discography section, which is a nice structured experience, there is the great expanse of the songs area. Every time you load the songs page, you'll get a different batch of random songs from random albums recommended to you, and an index of letters of the alphabet.

Clicking a letter of the alphabet will quickly restore some order and categorization to things: 

By clicking the letter R, we've brought up two sets of information:

• On the left: all song titles starting with R under all albums, regardless of whether you can listen to them or not. May induce a great longing in you for the unattainable. 
• On the right: all song titles starting with R that are listenable/downloadable on wckrspgt.com! (As you can see, below that are more suggested random songs as well.) 

You can also click the text that says "mp3s" up there at the end of the alphabet to bring up, yes, a complete page of all the downloadable songs, if you want to scroll randomly and pick something. Why not!

Next up after songs is the lyrics section, which has a similar structure to the songs section. You can click a letter of the alphabet, or just jump right in via "list all" to load a page with all available lyrics by song. 

Clicking the "search" button will cause a searchbar to appear below the navigation area:

And entering a term in the search bar will show you results for that term under song titles, lyrics, release notes, and history pages. 

Finally, there is the contact page. You can send a note to Wckr Spgt! And/or drop a thank you for all their hard work.

A final note: the red text reading "buy-in" was for the Great Wckr Spgt Buy-In, which was to lead up to the Great Wckr Spgt Sell-Out of 2020, which due to the global pandemic tragically never took place. You can read about some of that, but you'll have to tread alone, because it's been 3 years as I write this, and when I go look at what might have been... as Cash Nexus once said: sad, sad, sad.

any images, lyrics, song titles, etc are property of the original artists, where at all possible images are pulled from my own scanned copies and any found/submitted images are noted and credited. this is a fan site without ads, trackers, or even so much as one of those site counters from the late 90's. if you see your intellectual property here and want it removed, email away. thanks