What this is
Bands of the Bay began in 2004 as a directory of the San Francisco Bay Area music scene: bands entered their own profiles, listed shows, and the site's writers covered the ones worth catching. It ran into the early 2010s and then went quiet. Because a number of its pages are still cited elsewhere, it has been rebuilt from its own archive so those pages resolve and the record stays reachable.
How it is put together
Restored band write-ups draw on public record and each band's own archived page; nothing has been invented. The full roster of bands that once held a profile is kept as an index of the scene, even where little more than a name survives. The blog posts are the originals, tidied where the archive had garbled them. The guides are new — plain, practical writing for the people still playing.
Keeping an old archive reachable is quiet, ongoing work — rebuilding pages, fixing what the Wayback capture garbled, making sure every band URL still resolves. That side of it is handled by a Utah web studio that builds and looks after small archival sites like this one.
Questions
- Can I add or update my band?
- The directory is kept as an archive rather than a live submission form. If a restored profile has something wrong, that is worth fixing — the aim is an accurate record of the scene.
- Why are some bands just names?
- Many profiles were thin even when the site was live. Where there is real, verifiable information, there is a write-up; where there is only a name, the name is kept so the roster stays complete.