—-Jeffgarden.com History Lesson—-
1999
Site goes up with no media, just hand-typed (not even scanned yo !) news from the official Soundgarden Fan Club mailings. Obviously, the band had already split up but the fan club was still alive (although on its last leg). The fan club merged with the Alice in Chains club and later died off all together
2000-2002
Started to offer live mp3’s and video clips of some performances and post appearances by Chris Cornell on TV shows. Some shortly after they aired and some from old VHS tapes I had recorded clips on to. This was before YouTube was anything so the videos were streaming via Apple’s .Mac service and downloadable in various formats.
2002-2005
Site was branded as “ChrisCornell.cc” pretty early on, after just being a kinda long URL at first. Finally got to actually see Chris Cornell live since first putting up the site so had 1st-hand media of Audioslave to host.
2005/2006
Site is renamed Jeffgarden.com from ChrisCornell.cc
2006-2010
Chris Cornell tours relentlessly and we do our best to see as much of it as possible. Chris connects with Meghan at multiple shows (we’ll add links here to photos/concert notes from when he called her a bitch, dedicated Pretty Noose to her during an Audioslave show, took and read several song-request signs, dedicated Black Hole Sun to her at Projekt Revolution, and handed her 2…yes 2…mic stands in Chicago). Meghan also starts working on the site.
2010-2011
Soundgarden is back together ! We’ve now seen them twice since the reunion and have 4 shows planned for this year so far. We are both equal contributors to the site and are both up for a Photograph Soundgarden contest for 2 separate shows (Jones Beach + Red Rocks)
2011-2012 The Webcasts We’d Like To Forget Ever Happened
I thought, since we were going to a few Soundgarden shows all over the country, that it would be cool to have a little webcast. The problem was that while we were in the new cities and at the shows, we weren’t thinking about the webcasts at all so each episode would end up being us talking about the show a few days later, making a not-Soundgarden related intro, and putting together clips of videos of the shows. Also we were pretty out of it in all the videos. We stopped making them, because we should have never started. But we still have them up here [http://jeffgarden.tumblr.com/webcast]
2016
Reworking the site to be optimized for mobile first, and still look ultra mega OK on desktop. Hamburger menus. Hamburger menus everywhere...
—-Permission/Copyright Issues—-
This site exists for fans of Soundgarden and the band’s other projects. We appeal to the more dedicated fans that have exhausted all sources of well-made websites that offer anything of actual value. We are an aggregate of a small percentage of Soundgarden material already shared to mainstream sites and services by other fans, with one page of original content from our own shows we've been lucky enough to attend (30+ shows and counting...)
If we post video clips, it’s for fans who don’t get to see them when they first air. We've received the blessing to post by Chris Cornell and his social media team in the past, with one example being his saying "It's Fine !" to post a Tonight Show clip which was then featured on ChrisCornell.com (until Universal TV took it down from YouTube, despite being the same company as Universal Music who asked if they could post the video on the site in the first place lol)
We are not a pirating website. We don't - and have never - offered links to, or host, commercially available material. We promote the band and its members' works with other musicians. The band members themselves often retweet our links to files (and sometimes even just tweet links to our pages on their own), Chris (and/or "Team CC") has shared photos we have taken of him at his Songbook Tour 2011 on his Facebook and Ben has linked to us when we broke the news that “Black Rain” was nominated for a Grammy.
(We mention this to say the band is aware of us, and we are very easily reachable, but they have always been okay with us not going away)
At the same time, it’s often discouraged to take photos or video at some shows and it’s sometimes the band/management themselves who discourage it. Even if they do post links to it the next day.
In short, we put up everything on this site for fans as obsessed with Soundgarden and their music as we are. We feel we promote the band, their music, their live shows, and TV/Web appearances and provide a decent channel for getting up-to-date news. We feel we are ambassadors to the band and help spread their music to existing fans and hopefully new fans every day.
If we’re ever told we’ve crossed any line in respect to copyright/personal/commercial boundaries, we wouldn’t blink before removing the offending page/file/etc.
—-"Run-Ins" In The Past—-
2004
Audioslave’s official site ran a contest to allow fans to download a pre-release song. The contest featured technology that didn’t work on Macs. In response, I posted the song on this site (not something we normally ever do) with the headline “Rage Against The Mac…intosh” explaining how it was unfair that Mac users could not participate in the free song download contest. This lasted about a day or so before I received a call about maybe not doing that… The whole thing was really just meant as a joke to poke fun at the official site so I had no problem complying and removing the song.
2005
Sony reported the site to our hosting company for hosting copy-written files and the site was taken offline. After sulking for a few days, I did the mature thing…and posted anti-Sony flash videos (including a game show called “Piracy or Not Piracy” where the Sony Exec. playing couldn’t tell the two apart). After about a week, I was contacted and told I can put the site back up.
2005-2011
Anything we put up on YouTube gets flagged as potentially going to be taken down. Even when we have permission to put it up. Whatever…
2011
In our first run-in with this sorta stuff, we were asked offline after a Chris Cornell show to not post the videos we had shot. This was at the 05.01.2011 Seattle show at the Moore. The Cornell team was nice enough to leave our photos and videos intact on the memory card they confiscated and we have honored their request by only posting photos from the show.
RT @ijeffgarden: #ChrisCornell "Be Yourself" Seattle @ The Moore Theater May 1st 2011 #Audioslave https://t.co/0ORDg6AFMn
