Greg Shaw Lives! (Do the Bomp...)

Saving the world one record at a time: rock complacency marked for death.

By Fred Mills, Blurt Managing Editor

After Greg Shaw died in 2004, his former wife Suzy Shaw decided it was time to resume work on a project that had been back-burnered for two decades: to assemble a book chronicling her ex-husband's journalistic legacy and resurrecting crucial early writings of some of rock writing's greatest voices-among them, Lester Bangs, whose notorious Troggs screed "James Taylor Marked For Death" originally consumed a whopping 24 pages of Shaw's seminal publication Who Put the Bomp.

WPTB was one of the premiere rock fanzines of the ‘70s, aesthetic sibling to the likes of Crawdaddy!, Fusion and CREEM, and an oasis for kick-out-the-jams-minded fanboys and collectors who had little truck with corporate-hyped swill. Early issues featured the Bangs classic, stories on the Seeds, Flamin' Groovies and the rockabilly revival, and all manner of left-field minutiae (take the 26-point test to learn if you are a "rock and roll trufan"[sic]; point 13 inquires if "you squeezed Robert Plant's lemon"). When punk and new wave dawned, Shaw eagerly dived right in, doing cover stories on the UK punk explosion ("England's Screaming" blared the headline, over an image of a leering Johnny Rotten), power pop, the Ramones, etc., and foreshortening the mag's name to just Bomp!. Regardless of the coverage-Shaw's late-‘60s pre-WPTB zine Mojo-Navigator Rock & Roll News included-there was never any whiff of complacency. This was rock criticism as activism.

In the fall of 2007, Suzy Shaw, along with author/Deviants frontman Mick Farren finally completed the first phase of anthologizing the Greg Shaw oeuvre with the book Bomp!: Saving the World One Record at a Time. For the handsome, hardcover coffee table volume they culled the best features as direct reproductions so one could see exactly what the magazine's pages looked like, right down to the typos, the quirky layouts and the close-ups of Joey Ramone's ripped jeans. The editors also penned fresh essays and added unpublished photos to contextualize Shaw and his magazine as both evolved with the times.

Now Shaw has returned to the Bomp! well with a second volume, Bomp! 2 - Born in the Garage, this time assisted by Mike Stax of Ugly Things zine fame. Elsewhere on the BLURT site today our right Rev. Keith A. Gordon flips through the Bomp! pages and offers his reflections on what the magazine and Greg Shaw represented - "unbridled passion," for starters, something we could use a helluva lot more these days as the print milieu continues its decline and snarky celebrity-centric navel gazing tries to pass for music journalism.

By way of my own tribute, let me add this anecdote. In 1974 Shaw also launched Bomp! Records and along the way he had a hand in the careers of Stiv Bators, Flamin' Groovies, Plimsouls, Warlocks, Black Keys and others. I eagerly snapped up anything that bore the Bomp! imprint. But whether he was writing about music or releasing it, his overriding manifesto was saving the world one record at a time, and that was the type of approach that a lot of us who started our own zines or our own labels back in the ‘70s and ‘80s took too.

I'll never forget the time I wrote Bomp! for back issues and included a note to Shaw telling him that I had started working on a punk fanzine and asking if he had any advice. Boy, did he ever - most significantly, he said that you have to do it because you love the music and not because you want to get rich or famous. (Getting free stuff in the mail, however, he added, was a nice perk.) That's been a guiding principle for me ever since.

Later, around 1984 I devoted an issue of my zine to the world of underground music magazines and the people who published them, and Shaw was one of the first people I contacted. At the end of the interview he reaffirmed all the forgoing, observing, "I don't find much essential difference in producing a magazine or producing an album. It's our shared opinions, expressed through records or writing, that it boils down to."