What is going on with this board????

[BachtoBacharach]

Have enjoyed this board for years but may soon not bother as the spam has gotten too difficult to navagate...way too time consuming to pick out the gems from the crap and life's too short! Mark has done a great job with this board through the years but the spammers have just about defeated him and us posters and readers! Guess there is really not much he can do. On to other things...will check back in a month or so to see if things have gotten better.

[Dionnefan]

BacktoBacharach-- please don't leave us! You are such a wealth of knowledge it would be a shame to lose. Isn't there something we can do to stop this? It seems like all the messages are coming from a single poster -- "casparfu". Is there a way to ban him or her from posting?

[BachtoBacharach]

There is a way but I know Mark has a lot of other things to do and he prefers to tend this garden totally himself so I guess this is something that will keep happening. Thanks for your kind words re: my contributions...I am hopeful that Dionne's new book, "My Life As I See It" to be published in November by Simon and Schuster, will be very revealing; Dionne's very private and unless she's willing to dispense with the sugar-coating and tell the unvarnished truth, I don't know how the book will do. Interesting thing about Dionne is that she has often been very frank about herself in interviews but skirts the question when interviewers have asked about her friends and acquaintences (with the notable exception of her less-than-charitable comments about Marilyn McCoo and Tanya Tucker). My hope is she will delve deeply and tell the truth about how she feels; for example how she REALLY felt when the extremely narcissistic Patti LaBelle ripped her in her book. Dionne turned the other cheek. Also hope she speaks frankly about the split from Bacharach/David and the pain it caused her. She literally reeled from the split and the results...she literally went from being the top female vocalist in the USA one year to no-hit status the next. We all know about the multi-million $$$ contract with Warner Brothers and how she "was lauging all the way to the bank" even when her hit records abruptly stopped, but the money ain't the story...how did she feel? Her relationship with Florence Greenberg was very close AND very volatile AND very fascinating. Dionne's mother was, from all accounts, an extremely strong-willed woman who took crap from no one...Dionne has always talked about how close she was to her father...not as much talk about much her mother. Dionne's brother Mancel was killed in an automobile accident in May 1968. Dionne and Bill Elliott practically raised her brother's son, Barry...if you have ever seen the photo of Dionne and Bill Elliott at the circus, most folks believe that the child in the picture is David Elliott, Dionne's son...it's not. It's Barry. She has a story to tell but she's always said that she would never "tell all". Maybe a biography is in order because I think most folks would also like to hear from those folks who worked around DIonne and with Dionne...not as likely with Dionne's self-penned tome as with a well-researched biography.

[Steve Schenck]

I, too, feel fed up with the garbage ads running on the board, but I, too, hope you don't move off, BacktoBacharach. The community here is uplifting, intelligent, and shares a deep appreciation for one of the great musical geniuses of the last half-century and more. There have been other times when we get inundated and Mark clears the board; he may be looking for a better spam filter right now. I hope so! Thanks to everyone who contributes to this site, and who doesn't dump here.

[Jan R.]

If you click on "Moderator: Mark", you get to the profile page. There you can see that Mark's last visit was "Sat Aug 14, 2010 10:06 am". He probably didn't notice this crappy spam attack yet.

Jan

[BachtoBacharach]

That's three weeks ago...let's hope he gets this cleaned up soon.