In my dealings over the years with the Bomp! mailorder service, I have gotten to know Suzy Shaw. I was flattered that, in the advertising copy for some of the albums Bomp! was advertising, she was using some of the articles that I had written in Wikipedia on the Pebbles albums and on the Stiv Bators compilation album, L.A. L.A.; and I told her so once when I was making one of my many orders She wrote back that she had wondered who had done those great write-ups, and she even sent me an autographed copy of the Bomp 2 - Born in the Garage book in appreciation. We have swapped emails many times over the years.
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Now, of all of the songs that Greg Shaw could have used to name and then subtitle his magazine Who Put the Bomp, two of them came out in 1963, and the other in 1964, though that one could just as easily have been made in 1963. Why 1963? Greg Shaw was 14 in 1963; and, according to neuroscientist and author Daniel Levitin in his book, This is Your Brain on Music, this is when the brain is most susceptible to the influence of music. As quoted in Bomp 2, Levitin writes: “Part of the reason we remember songs from our teenage years is because those years were times of self discovery, and as a consequence, they were emotionally charged.”
Many years later, Greg Shaw wrote in 2001: “One of my favorite phases of 60’s garage was 1963, when nobody had ever heard of England, and songs like ‘Louie Louie’ [by the Kingsmen] and ‘Surfin’ Bird’ [by the Trashmen] were drawing on 50’s R&B to create something new.”
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Two years after the publication of Bomp!: Saving the World One Record at a Time, Suzy Shaw and the editor of Ugly Things magazine, Mike Stax edited another book, Bomp 2 – subtitled Born in the Garage and sub-subtitled Greg Shaw and the Roots of Rock Fandom 1970-1981!. This book looks a lot like a big issue of Ugly Things and consists of a detailed catalogue of Greg Shaw’s publications over that period, and numerous excerpts from Who Put the Bomp and the other fanzines that were published over this period that were not included in the first book. These books are among my most treasured publications, and they are both autographed by Suzy Shaw.
(May 2013)
