About

February 2004 – I had the idea to put together a compilation CD that would be made up of bands that posted on two message boards – Donewaiting and ColumbusMusicOnline. There was some crossover between the two boards but there were also a lot of bands that posted on one or the other. I wanted the CD to serve as a soundtrack to the message boards, something people could toss in while reading and posting.

Since I was more familiar with the bands on the Donewaiting board, I enlisted the help of Don from The Unpossibles to rally up the ColumbusMusicOnline troops. Together we collected songs and within a month or so we had enough tracks to fill an 80-minute CD. (Here is the message board thread on Donewaiting that got the ball rolling … FYI, I’m Atomic Ned).

The name OH CRAP first came up about halfway down this page and wasn’t initially associated with the compilation CD. But it was too good to just let go, so we ran with it.

Here’s another thread about the first volume of OH CRAP. For this CD, we held a CD release party and everything, charged a small cover and allowed people to take as many copies of the CD as they wanted. I think we went through close to 100 CDs that night and the release party was quite a success.

With one volume under our belt, and a whole load of bands still out there that didn’t make it onto the first volume, we decided to do a second volume the following summer, this time using Comfest ’05 as a target date for completion. I was out of town during Comfest so I don’t remember how many copies of OH CRAP VOL.2 we sold, but Ryan Smith really came through for us by burning CDs, making copies of the cover art, and getting the CDs to the merch booth.

It seems only natural to put together a third volume in 2006, but this time I put it together myself as Don had moved to Cincinnati. This may have been the strongest tracklisting to date – I discovered a lot of great bands as I compiled songs and started burning CDs. All told, I think we sold something in the neighborhood of 60 OH CRAP VOL.3 CDs last year.

That brings us to today, just 2 days before Comfest begins and 2 days before I plan on delivering 100 copies of OH CRAP VOL.4 to the merch booth at Comfest. If you’re reading this, it’s probably during or after Comfest and you might even hold a copy of OH CRAP VOL.4 in your hands. I just thought it would be worth giving some history about the project.