Dec 14

Bomp! Mailorder

BOMP! (Mailorder Service)
 

A specially priced package of recordings by the Breakaways, together with the Nerves retrospective album and a brand new Alive CD of the Plimsouls at the top of their game – check it out at the Bomp! mailorder site:  www.bompstore.com/breakaways-nerves-related-powerpop-walking-out-on-love-the-lost-sessions-cd/.
 
(April 2010)
 
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I was introduced to Hacienda when Suzy Shaw, who manages Bomp! Records’ online Bomp! mailorder business (among other duties) included three recent releases in one of my usual orders of decades-old music.  Besides the second Hacienda album, she also included a deilghtful psychedelic stew of an album by Mondo Drag called New Rituals; and Brian Olive’s debut solo album, Brian Olive.  Olive (ex-Soledad Brothers) is one of those amazing men – like Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Nikki Sudden – to whom songwriting is as natural as breathing; he is working on a second album already.  Although I very much enjoyed the albums that I had ordered, I found myself playing these new artists again and again.  Anyway, it surely worked, for I have a nice stack of new CD’s and LP’s released by the Bomp! labels that I have since ordered.
  
(January 2011)
 
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Fast-forward a couple of decades, and I am looking over some mailorder sheet or other (usually it is Bomp!, but I have ordered from plenty more over the years).  I spot a compilation album called Disorder by a first-wave Canadian punk rock band called the Ugly that was remastered by Chris Spedding in 1995, and I had to order it just on the strength of Spedding’s having a hand in it. 
 
(November 2011)
 
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As I remember, I already had an article partially written on somebody else when an order from Bomp! mailorder came in that included a specially priced package of new CD’s by three related power-pop bands:  the Nerves, the Plimsouls and the Breakaways.  I already knew the Plimsouls’ hit “A Million Miles Away”, but just about everything else was a revelation, including the Nerves’ original version of “Hanging on the Telephone” that became Blondie’s follow-up hit after their monster “Heart of Glass”.  I quickly checked Wikipedia and determined that the Breakaways did not have an article, so I dashed off a UARB post on them, hoping to interest others in this amazing music. 
 
(April 2012)
 
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The only time I sent an email to Greg Shaw was about what else Thomas Anderson had released, since there was only the one album on his Bomp! website; the reply that I got from Shaw was a cherished electronic treasure until of course it got wiped away by Katrina.  (That’s the thing about backing up computer info:  If the backup is in the same place, you can lose both).  
 
(November 2012)
 
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Basically dropping everything and pushing a band to the top of the heap on the UARA/UARB stack, as I did with the Invisible Eyes, has happened only one other time among these posts, and it was quite awhile ago:  the UARB for April 2010, the Breakaways.  I had ordered a power-pop package from Bomp!:  a retrospective album of, a brand-new CD of a killer live show by the Plimsouls, and then a CD by the Breakaways.  
   
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Like any record company, Bomp! Records doesn’t always sell a lot of copies of every album they release.  On their Bomp! mailorder website and on the emails that I get periodically from them (three or four a week at least), they often have sales.  Sometimes it is 10% or 15% off your whole order, or a special price if you get all of the LP’s or CD’s by one of their artists, or package prices on groups of related CD’s, or book/magazine combinations – you get the idea.  They also have “punk” or “power pop” or “garage” albums in groups of 5 or 10 that you can buy for a low price – sometimes it is their choice of the albums for a really cheap price, and sometimes you can pick out any 5 that you want from, say, the Alive label for an attractive but not all that cheap price.  Over the years, I have ordered a lot of music from them that way – basically I am a sucker for a sale anyway, in a supermarket or a department store or a shoe store, you name it. 
 
Not all that long ago, Bomp! started a promotion called “Come Fail with Us”, where they had special prices on CD’s and LP’s that "stiffed", as they say in the record biz.  It was apparently real popular – because the sets are still available.  Later on, they started pricing CD’s you could choose from a really long list that were priced at $2 or $3 each.  (The Invisible Eyes is still listed for sale on the $3 list).  I ordered a whole lot of them, but because I had been in an LP-playing mode pretty much all year and most of the previous year, there they sat on my shelf, still sealed up in plastic. 
 
(December 2012)
 
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The three Dutch albums in The Continent Lashes Back sub-series within the Pebbles albums put me onto several more, and I found some other real rarities via the Bomp! mailorder store.  I just cleaned up a second 10-inch album among several that I mail-ordered years ago out of an extended series, Beat Express Series. 
 
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So now we have come full circle:  The garage rock movement that had been churning along below the radar for close to 40 years broke out into the larger world as the Garage Rock Revival for a few years in the early 2000’s.  One of the CD’s that I unwrapped recently was one of those sale-priced Bomp! CD’s that I’d been ordering over the past year or so, because it was on their Alive label.  It was entitled, boringly enough, The Sound of San Francisco; it was a collection from 2003 of songs from brand new bands in the San Francisco Bay Area.  However, the music on The Sound of San Francisco is anything but boring:  one great band after another that started with that raw garage-rock sound, but each working hard in their own style. 
 
I would view this 2003 album as documenting one of the first wave of bands that were directly influenced by the Garage Rock Revival. 
 
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I must say that the description given in the email from my buddies at Bomp! was pretty irresistible; it includes:  “The Skywalkers from Utrecht, a duo still in their teens, were discovered by Grey Past Records on MySpace and directly got the opportunity to release [Year One]; and it’s easily by far one of the best retro records ever made in the Netherlands.” 
 
(January 2013)
 
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One name that has come up repeatedly in these 40-odd posts is Greg Shaw, a widely respected music historian and the founder of Bomp! Records – which also includes the labels AIP Records, Voxx Records, Total Energy Records, and Alive Naturalsound Records (usually just called Alive Records) – and their associated Bomp! mailorder music service.  It would not surprise me at all if I haven’t mentioned Greg Shaw in a third of these UARB articles.  In addition, more than a few of the Under-Appreciated Rock Bands have released albums or EP’s on one of the Bomp!-affiliated labels.  If I also included the albums on non-Bomp labels that I ordered through the Bomp! mailorder service, close to half of the UARB’s and UARA’s would likely have a Bomp! connection. 

 

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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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The genesis of the Bomp! mailorder service came about from the way that Greg Shaw and many of the early collectors found records in those days:  Old albums and 45’s were so available and so cheap that many times, Shaw would simply buy several boxfuls and then come home and see what was there.  Before long, they were offering the duplicates to friends, then acquaintances, then through ads in his various ’zines.  The prices were often about what he paid, 10¢ or so; but times change, just as they have on the recent MetLife ads featuring the Peanuts gang:  “Everything can’t be 5¢ (or 10¢)!” 

 

Greg Shaw was a visionary and a legend, and he also had a genius I.Q. of 240 (as I recall).  However, he wasn’t good at everything, particularly the business side of Bomp! Records. . . .  Well, I certainly can’t tell this part of the story any better than Suzy Shaw did in the Bomp 2 book:  

 

“Being more of a historian than a collector, [Greg Shaw] often said that he hated collectors.  All that really mattered to him was getting the general information about the record – it was meant to be played once for the purposes of knowing what type of music it was.  If a record was so shattered that it had to be scotch-taped together (this was not unheard of in his collection), it was at least useful for knowing the label, title and catalogue number, and he would file it away with the others without hesitation.  So legendary was the generally horrendous condition of his vinyl that certain record dealers still use a grading system to this day that starts with ‘Mint’ and ends with ‘Greg Shaw Minus’.  [I have been to record stores myself that posted this grading system.] 

 

“Thus it was no surprise that Greg had not the slightest qualm about merely tossing a customer’s order into a paper grocery bag, stapled at the top to keep the records from spilling out (that’s if you were lucky).  The odds of a buyer getting what they wanted or having the vinyl arriving unbroken were quite slim.  This was bad enough when you were dealing with friends, but the mailing list had begun to branch out to include the general public.  These newcomers had the annoying habit of not only insisting that they receive the exact records that they had paid for, but getting them in one piece, and soon enough the angry letters and threats began pouring in.  Never one to be bothered by such minor details, or the law (federal, state and local!), Greg simply ignored the whole mess, continuing as he had before, until the registered letters from the Post Office began arriving, and the government was actually threatening to file charges.  I was nothing short of terrified, and in a move that was to be oft repeated in our lives together, my choice seemed to be between going to prison or to take over that part of the business.  And so mail order slid over to my side of the game board for once and for all.” 

 

Well I remember poring over those Bomp! mailorder sheets that would arrive in the mail periodically years ago, listing hundreds of albums and 45’s in tiny print with a few tantalizing words of description.  I would circle album after album, and then when it came time to actually write the check, I would have to cull the order back to something that I could actually afford. 

 

When the operation was moved to the Internet – www.bompstore.com/ – I was a little behind the curve and just thought I had dropped off their mailing list for some reason.  It is not as tactile an experience anymore, and I kind of miss that.  I also might be the very last Bomp! customer that still sends a paper check! 

 

(May 2013)

 

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I don’t normally get caught up in the hype about someone or other; but then again, when I am ordering something from Bomp! through one of their thrice-weekly or so emailings, there are normally no pictures.  So when the Klubs were mentioned as the number one choice by Record Collector magazine, I decided to see what the fuss was all about. 

 

(July 2013)

 

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There are actually a lot of websites out there that talk about Blair 1523:  It might be surprising to some that a search of the band name in quotes brings up 18,100 hits on Google.  The first page of Google hits has a YouTube video of “Fantasy of Folk”, the Bomp! Mailorder site where the “last copies” of the CD can still be purchased plus another listing on Amazon.com, the mention of the band in my Wikipedia article on the Outcasts, the Allmusic review and the Julian Cope blog mentioned above, a listing on last.fm that actually has some information and even a photo of Blair 1523, and more barren listings on mtv.com, Discogs, and Rate Your Music .  Further Google pages bring up other barebones listings – the one on Ticketmaster that offers concert tickets and tour schedules for a band that broke up 20 years ago is particularly hilarious – and other places to buy the CD and rate the music and see the lyrics and download “free” MP3’s (Napster lives!). 

 

(September 2013)

 

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I saw the above album by Angie Pepper, It's Just that I Miss You (2001) that was advertised in the Bomp! mailorder service as recommended for Blondie and Patti Smith fans, so I immediately ordered it. 

 

(December 2013)

 

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About this time, Suzy Shaw had discovered the Wikipedia articles that I had been writing, and I was delighted to see that she had started using some of the copy from them in advertising albums for sale on the Bomp! mailorder website.  When I pointed that out, she told me that she was wondering who had written all of that.  Suzy even mentioned that Mick Farren had commented to her how good it was – and what could my response be to that except, “I’m not worthy . . . I’m not worthy!”  The autograph by Suzy Shaw on my copy of the Bomp! book reads:  “Thanks for the brilliant work!  Suzy Shaw ’08.”  

 

(March 2014/1)

 

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Big Midnight is advertised on the Bomp! mailorder site as “former Richmond Sluts”, but I don’t remember it that way when I first ordered the album some years back.  Now that the Richmond Sluts have reformed, that might be the best way to relate to this band.  

 

It took me a while to notice, but the album photography is pretty special:  It has the same stagey poses that 1960’s and 1970’s bands employed.  This is one way that they highlight their retro-rock sound – the Bomp! mailorder advert puts the band “in the retro-as-if-retro-never-happened category”. 

 

(June 2014)

 

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Thomas Anderson is one of those guys where I only have one album and wish I had more; I guess I am going to have to break down and order one.  Moon Going Down is the only one of their albums that I have ever seen on the Bomp! Mailorder website, where I do most of my mailordering.  

 

(November 2014)

 

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I knew of Phil Gammage from a sort of CD EP that I got many years ago called The Electric Radio Sampler Music Test, I believe in a grab-bag package from Bomp! Records.  Two of the songs from Cry of the City, “The Stranger” and “High Roller” were on that record that I immediately took to – slice-of-life stories that were well written and backed by a strong rock band.  His vocals are a little idiosyncratic – he doesn’t have a trained voice and has some trouble with high notes, but he packs a lot of emotion into his music.  It never occurred to me that Phil Gammage might be someone who had fallen so completely through the cracks. 

 

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When writing about the Giles Brothers – which was never actually a band, though Peter Giles and Michael Giles were in numerous rock bands, often at the same time – I was mostly exploring the origins of King Crimson.  I worked extra hard to get an associated album, contacting Bomp! Records specifically about making sure that the Giles, Giles and Fripp album, The Brondesbury Tapes (1968) was included in the order.  (The other man in the group is Robert Fripp, the only continuous member of King Crimson over the decades). 

 

(March 2015)

 

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The promotional material by Bomp! Mailorder notes:  “The musical diversity [by the Human Zoo], once the cause of some people’s griping, is the record’s greatest asset in this age of one song downloadable wonderment.  The band had chops, could put together a really good song, and did so repeatedly on this sole album.  This replica LP edition is limited to 500 copies, which will last about as long is it is taking you to read this description . . . so please order quickly to avoid disappointment.” 

 

(July 2015)

 

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While I sometimes stumble onto them in record stores, mostly I order albums by new bands through the Bomp! mailorder service; and more often than not, they were released by Bomp! Records, Alive Records, or one of their other affiliates. When I discovered the Pebbles Series of 1960’s garage rock and psychedelic rock in the late 1970’s, I began buying other compilation albums of this kind of music; but I quickly found that I enjoy Pebbles albums more than almost all of the others. In short, I figured out that Bomp! mastermind Greg Shaw has basically the same taste in music that I have. 
(June 2017)
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Open Up and Bleed! is still available from Bomp! Mailorder for a bargain price of $5.00:  www.bompstore.com/iggy-pop-the-stooges-open-up-and-bleed-1973-w-liners-cd/.  Truly, I cannot recommend this album highly enough.  With the release of Ready to Die in 2013, the Stooges are well and truly finished, even though Iggy Pop is still around.  To my mind, there is no better document of this band’s legacy than Open Up and Bleed!. 
 
(December  2017)
 
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It’s been a good day, but I am gloomy about one thing:  As of today, as far as I know, now that the Sound Shop stores have closed at our two malls, there is no record store in the Mississippi Gulf Coast region.  I had already gotten downright excited about the prospects for the music industry when the Sound Shop started having new LP’s and used LP’s to go with all of those CD’s.  When I moved here 12 years ago, there were two great used record stores – one overpriced one that didn’t survive Katrina (but had already just about closed up anyway), and the other one that I haunted all the time until it closed up in October 2008 – plus another CD store in the strip mall opposite the big mall in Biloxi (that one didn’t survive Katrina either), and maybe one over in Pascagoula as well.  It is a problem nationwide I guess – Tower Records in New York City closed up a decade ago I guess, and the Virgin Records store in New Orleans was yet another Katrina casualty.  I order a lot of my music from Bomp! Records’ online Bomp! mailorder business and other online sources, but I gotta say that it isn’t the same as flipping through a nice rack.  
 
(No More Record Stores)
 
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I decided this year that it was way past time that I made a big-time purchase at Maynard’s Music, “the” record store on the Mississippi Gulf Coast; and I made off with a half shelf of great finds. I have made 11 (!) orders from my buddies at Bomp! mailorder in Burbank, California in 2019, though I already told them that they could put off delivering the last 2 until after the first of the year.
 
While at my 50th High School Reunion, I kept a promise to look over my good friend Cynthia Jennings’s record collection. I took the records with me to my brother Tom’s house in Winston-Salem where I was staying, and I started going through them the day after – two big boxes full. I figured, maybe I would take home 20 or 30 albums like usual when I do a little record-shopping on a trip; but I kept finding albums that I did not have yet. She had a bunch of Chicago albums, but not the first two that I already had. Same with Joni Mitchell – no overlaps that I could remember. It kept going on and on like that. When I finally got to the end, I had found precisely one album that I wanted but already had – Beck, Bogert & Appice. Coincidentally, that happened to be the album that was on top of the haul from Maynard’s Music on my record racks back home. Naturally I took that one also. The albums are still at my brother’s house, though hopefully, I have arranged a caravan that will eventually bring them down here by the end of next year.
 
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I think that I have now purchased all four of the albums by past UARB the Loons, one of three UARB’s that number Mike Stax among the bandmembers. While I still do not have the EP 5 x 4 by past UARB the Crawdaddys (which also included Mike Stax), I did pick up the 45 that features “There She Goes Again”. Even more surprisingly, I came across the other two albums by past UARB Crystal Mansion in some record store or other: their 1969 album Crystal Mansion and also their 1979 album Crystal Mansion that is also known as Tickets. (More recently, I did come across a copy of the Crawdaddys EP 5 x 4 on Bomp! mailorder, along with the original 7-inch Jesus Loves the Stooges – but I still don’t have a copy of the green-vinyl Kill City by Iggy Pop and James Williamson that also came out in 1977).
 
(Year 10 Review)

Last edited: March 22, 2021