Dec 14

BFD Records

BFD RECORDS
 
 
But Nuggets turned out to be just the beginning.  Though many other Nuggets compilation albums would follow that concentrated on the better-known American bands of the garage rock era, it remained for music historian and legendary record collector Greg Shaw to begin to unearth an astonishing wealth of 45’s released by local American bands on tiny labels that almost no one had heard of before.  Beginning in 1978, and under the Pebbles name, Shaw’s AIP label and his alias BFD label put out close to 100 compilation albums.  While the Nuggets bands had the backing of major record labels, a lot of the Pebbles songs sounded like they had actually been recorded in a garage. 
 
(January 2013)
 
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As best I can recall, the above albums were the first two that I acquired in the Pebbles series that has filled my life with great, unknown 1960’s garage rock and psychedelic rock for more than 30 years.  These LP’s, Pebbles, Volume 9 and Pebbles, Volume 10 were the last two albums in the first group of 10 that was released in 1979-1980, purportedly by BFD Records of Kookaburra, Australia.  Actually, the series was masterminded by Greg Shaw, founder of Bomp! Records in North Hollywood. 

 

Why he came up with the Australian connection is unknown to me, but I remember reading a review decades ago in the Village Voice of an album by the Lime Spiders, an Australian rock band that started out at least as a psychedelic-revival band.  The article mentioned that interest in 1960’s American garage rock started in Australia; and looking back, I wonder whether that was for real, or whether the writer was just fooled by the supposed origin of the first Pebbles albums. 

 

“BFD” was well known to me in North Carolina as an abbreviation for “big f--king deal”, and it might be a nationwide or worldwide bit of shorthand.  Anyway, it turns out that there is no such place as Kookaburra, Australia; a kookaburra is a bird that lives in Australia.  I should have known that Greg Shaw was pulling some kind of stunt:  He also talked about Dacron, Ohio, and that isn’t a real city either (though Akron is) – Dacron is a type of artificial fibre. 

 

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For the BFD Records releases – even the most recent Pebbles CD’s on AIP normally have a copyright notice for BFD Productions – someone else was brought in to write the liner notes, since the ones that Greg Shaw did were said to be mostly geared to serious collectors.  This gentleman’s name is Nigel Strange, and he is supposedly the editor of a magazine called Web of Sound.  I haven’t been able to find out anything about this person on the Internet, and I suspect that he is yet another fiction, as is “A. Seltzer” (clearly a reference to Alka-Seltzer) who wrote the crazed liner notes for the Pebbles, Volume 2 LP.  I loved reading the liner notes as I played the Pebbles albums (still do in fact). 

 

(July 2013)
 
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Anyway, once Kill City broke the ice, Bomp! Records and their affiliated labels like BFD Records, Voxx Records, AIP Records, Mohawk Records, and others began pressing LP’s by the truckload almost immediately.  The label’s first compilation album, The Best of Bomp, Volume One was originally released in 1978.  The Pebbles Series of 1960’s garage rock and psychedelic rock songs that number nearly 100 albums in all began shipping in 1978; besides Pebbles, the various series (both LP’s and CD’s) include the Highs in the Mid-Sixties Series, The Continent Lashes Back, Best of Pebbles, Great Pebbles, etc.  Their other reissues of 1960’s music include the English Freakbeat Series, the Rough Diamonds Series, and the Electric Sugar Cube Flashbacks Series. 
 
(December 2017)
 
Last edited: March 22, 2021