How a Web Site and Its Creator Hit Home With a Singer

Most music "fan sites" on the World Wide Web aren't worth the time it takes to load them onto your screen. Typically they're the work of giddy teenagers, who set up shrines to flavor-of-the-month celebrities, only to abandon them when the next heartthrob takes hold.

But some fan sites are works of artistry in their own right, tended by devoted longtime followers who have become experts on their passion. The best such sites offer troves of information, including discographies, tour dates, biographical material, lyrics, news clips and concert reviews. Sometimes they even lead to interaction between artist and fans.

One such site that I've been visiting for more than two years is devoted to veteran singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell (www.JoniMitchell.com). It's been getting a lot of attention lately because of the crucial role the site played a year ago in reuniting Mitchell with the daughter she gave up for adoption in 1965. But the story of the man who runs JoniMitchell.com, a 46-year-old San Francisco phone company technician named Wally Breese, is equally compelling.

Today Breese plans to make an announcement on his Web site that explains what drove him to spend years of his spare time, without pay, creating one of the best-tended fan pages on the Internet. The site, he will tell his following, has been a crucial part of his battle against colon cancer, one that will only get more difficult because the disease has again begun to progress.

After he was first diagnosed in 1995, Breese said he set out to "commit myself to some project, some creative endeavor that was unselfish." As a Joni Mitchell fan for 30 years and a collector of her memorabilia, Breese decided his project would be a Web site dedicated to the artist.

Since August 1995 he has been packing the site, in an orderly and entertaining way, with nearly every aspect of Mitchell's career, from her roots as a folk singer in Toronto and Detroit in the mid-1960s to her upcoming CD "Taming the Tiger." Not only did such attention to detail play a pivotal role in reuniting Mitchell with her daughter, it also won respect and gratitude from Mitchell, who invited Breese to join her last month as she toured the West Coast with Bob Dylan and Van Morrison.

"We can't say enough good things about Wally," said Mitchell's manager Stephen Macklam in Vancouver, B.C. "Joni has very specific views about dispensing information in any form, so yes, we were cautious at first. [But] the fact that Joni enjoyed Wally's work and later endorsed it is a tribute to the quality he put into it."

Breese first heard Mitchell sing on a Philadelphia radio station when he was growing up in nearby Chester, Pa. If he recalls correctly, he first saw her play at a downtown club called the Second Fret in 1969. He was hooked. "I was always known, even from 1970, as the guy who was into Joni Mitchell," he said. "Whenever a new single came out, I'd make people shut up and listen to it."

In the early 1970s he began collecting Joni memorabilia: rare recordings, photos, poems. After two years in college he spent much of the '70s living in a Boston commune before moving to San Francisco in 1979 and getting his current job with local phone company Pacific Bell in 1981.

All the while, he continued to add to his Mitchell holdings. "Everyone would like to be an expert in some field," he said. His field was Joni Mitchell.

Part of his work, he said, was done out of frustration that she wasn't properly appreciated. "I always felt Joni didn't get the respect and attention she deserved," he said. "The music industry was promoting all these Joni juniors who weren't nearly as talented. I always resented that popular music would just drop people and move on. . . . I felt that eventually history would catch up and recognize how wonderful her talent is. I wanted to be around for that time, to show I knew better than they did."

In February 1995 Breese learned he had a cancerous tumor in his colon. While recovering from surgery the following month, he bought a faster modem for his computer and discovered the potential of the Web. "I saw what was possible to do with the Web. I saw it as a museum and an archive and a library."

After searching around the Web and finding very little about Mitchell, he got his inspiration: "I thought, maybe it's up to me to do it. . . . When I got ill I was thinking about my life and what I'd accomplished, and what I hadn't. I realized there was a lot I could have been doing."

He taught himself how to make Web pages and began typing. In August 1995 he launched his site, and was surprised to find 900 visitors in the first month.

Even after returning to work that September, he spent eight hours a day working on his site. By the end of 1995 he had 5,000 monthly visitors. Months later he began winning awards for the site's design.

In a 1996 New York Times article, Mitchell confirmed what had long been rumored -- that she had given up a baby girl for adoption in 1965. Now she was looking for her.

Breese quickly got two dozen bogus e-mails from women claiming to be her daughter. Then along came a Toronto computer student and former model named Kilauren Gibb. She had been told by friends to check Breese's site after birth records she obtained included information that her mother was born in Saskatoon, had polio as a child and had been a popular Canadian folk singer. On the site, she found 15 other ways in which Mitchell's past matched Kilauren's information.

Mitchell and her daughter were reunited in March 1997 and today are continuing to build a new relationship. Kilauren wrote Breese and credited him with helping her make the connection, he said. And in January, Mitchell called to thank him. They spoke for an hour and a half, Breese said.

In March, Mitchell invited Breese along on the Pacific tour. The invitation came at a time when Breese realized his struggle with cancer was not yet over. But he kept the news from the Mitchell entourage and persuaded his doctors to delay another round of surgery so he could go. "They gave me pain killers to take with me to help me get through," he said.

Breese had the time of his life, judging by his daily postings and concert reviews on the Web site. On May 16, before a show in George, Wash., he finally met Mitchell face to face. During their conversation she learned her record company was not paying him to produce the site, other than a one-time payment of $1,000 awhile back. She helped him set up a deal, which he still is negotiating, to market tour T-shirts and other concessions for a fee on the site.

Breese met with Mitchell on several other occasions as the tour continued and formed friendships with members of her band.

He said he now hopes to work on further projects with Mitchell and perhaps start a new career as a music industry Web-page designer. As for the site, Breese said he now feels its purpose has largely been fulfilled and that it's time to let his own audience know more about what drove him to create his monument to Mitchell.

"I think it's important now that people understand the energy that created the site," he said. "It shows what people can accomplish when they face their own mortality."