Dec 14

Greg Shaw

GREG SHAW
 
 
Greg Shaw  (January 1949 – October 19, 2004) was a Los Angeles-based fanzine publisher, magazine editor, music historian and record label owner.  In addition, he was known as a record collector, archivist, and historian, and started the Pebbles series in the late 1970’s, a project inspired by Lenny Kaye’s 1972 Nuggets reissue.  (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
The album . . . Or the Beginning by the Not Quite, the band’s last was released in 1990 as an LP only on Voxx Records, a label operated by the late Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records to showcase 1960’s revival bands.  (Bomp was slow to get into CD production, and they have kept much of their vinyl catalogue in print for decades). 
 
(May 2010)
 
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Greg Shaw, rock music historian and founder of Bomp! Records, has said of Cleveland’s the Dead Boys:  “They are the best punk rock band that I ever saw, and I saw them all.”  Stiv Bators had been their front man from the beginning and was famous for his stage antics, but he was often restless and desired to move beyond the punk-rock conventions.
 
The Dead Boys broke up in 1979 when the whole punk rock scene seemed about to disintegrate; Sex Pistols had famously imploded in January 1978 during their first American tour.  Stiv Bators and Greg Shaw began working together almost immediately and continued off and on well into the 1980’s when Bators was trying to reinvent himself as a pop singer.  The results were a fine album called Disconnected (which was released in 1980 and was recently reissued on both CD and LP) and several singles that were collected in a CD called L.A. L.A. 
 
Greg Shaw regards the Wanderers album as being among Stiv Bators’ finest work, and I concur. 
 
(February 2011)
 
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The songs on Ear-Piercing Punk include one of Bomp! Records founder Greg Shaw’s personal favorites, “Bottle up and Go” by the Mile Ends (that factoid was included in the liner notes for a compilation album of the Pebbles compilation albums, Essential Pebbles, Volume One). 
 
(April 2011)
 
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Mick Farren is still recording albums regularly and has become a respected rock critic, journalist, and science fiction novelist.  I used to read an occasional piece that he wrote for the Village Voice both before and after I lived there; one mused on why the English had such bad dental hygiene and featured a photo quiz asking the reader to match photos of rotten teeth with celebrities’ names (including one member of the royal family).  The acclaimed retrospective of the world of Greg Shaw called Bomp! / Saving the World One Record at a Time lists him as the co-author with Suzy Shaw, Greg’s business partner and ex-wife.
 
(August 2011)
 
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The Outcasts song “I’m in Pittsburgh (and it’s Raining)” is the opening track on Pebbles, Volume 1, the second compilation album of 1960’s garage rock and psychedelic rock music (after Nuggets).  In the original liner notes, Greg Shaw calls the song “a blistering punk-rocker, which has been compared to the Pretty Things at their best”. 
 
(September 2011)
 
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Other dreams that went by the wayside were to collect all of the garage rock and psychedelic rock compilation albums.  There were too many of them also; I remember going into a record store once and seeing a rack with several dozen different comp albums – just overwhelming for my little budget.  As an alternate dream, I determined to purchase all of the Pebbles Series albums (LP’s and CD’s) including the Highs in the Mid-Sixties Series records that had been released by Greg Shaw and Bomp! Records – that’s more than 60 albums right there.   
 
 (April 2012)
 
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Not even Bomp! Records founder Greg Shaw – who released several of his songs on the albums in the Pebbles Series – was able to find out much of anything about Milan.  I took it upon myself to dig up what I could for an article on him for Wikipedia, and once I made contact with his sister Dara Rodell Gould, I was able to get the full scoop.  In fact, she is the one who got me to sign up for Facebook.  As you might imagine, I am pretty excited about the Ugly Things article – heck, I was plenty stoked when a 2009 retrospective album of Milan’s music, Hell Bent for Leather mentioned my Wikipedia article.  But enough about me!  
 
(July 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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At one point, I was planning to insert a biographical sketch of music historian and Bomp! Records founder Greg Shaw; but I decided against that, since the connection to Shaw really isn’t all that strong.  Bomp! Records is now billed as the oldest independent record label in the U. S. and has been around since 1974.  But here is a picture at least; I have probably mentioned him in at least a fourth of these UARB and UARA posts, so you ought to know what he looks like anyway. 
 
The reason I was considering that is that the Invisible Eyes is the last band that Greg Shaw signed to Bomp! Records before his untimely death in 2004 from complications of diabetes.  But to quote Shaw himself after he once noted that the Mockingbirds included two future bandmembers of 10cc:  “But they deserve to be known for more than just that.” 
 
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Bomp!’s Greg Shaw named one of his record labels, Voxx after the Vox Organ; that was the label for 1960’s reissues and the true 1960’s revivalists. 
 
(December 2012)
 
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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. 
 
But the Pebbles series wasn’t just garage rock and psychedelic rock either:  The Pebbles, Volume 4 LP and the Pebbles, Volume 4 CD showcased rare surf music, illustrating that there was a lot more to the surf scene than the mellow sounds that were hitting the radio in those days by the likes of the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean; while the Pebbles, Volume 6 LP – subtitled “The Roots of Mod” – included several rare British beat bands.  Greg Shaw later followed up with that album with the now-deleted English Freakbeat Series. 
 
Greg Shaw’s Pebbles output also included a vinyl-only series called Highs in the Mid-Sixties – which was nearly as long as the original Pebbles series and focused on particular states and regions – plus a subset of Pebbles called The Continent Lashes Back that put the spotlight on music from continental Europe.  The Netherlands in particular has a rich musical scene that rivals the UK. 
 
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Mick Farren writes a lot of stuff; he has several science fiction novels to his credit, including a trilogy called The DNA Cowboys.  Along with Greg Shaw’s ex-wife and business partner Suzy Shaw, Mick Farren co-wrote the 2007 book that cements Shaw’s legacy in the rock and roll universe, Bomp! / Saving the World One Record at a Time.  I have seen numerous articles by Farren in the Village Voice and elsewhere.  But I can only recall one other time when Mick Farren wrote liner notes; that was for the comeback album for his old band the Pink Fairies, specifically their 1987 release Kill ’Em and Eat ’Em. 
 
(January 2013)
 
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Another great Canadian band (from Montreal), the Haunted had a fairly big hit that has the title “1-2-5”.  Their recorded output was prolific enough that Greg Shaw released two Haunted albums in the Rough Diamonds Series on Voxx Records; a CD called The Haunted has been released on Voxx more recently. 

 

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One of my recent acquisitions is a Voxx Records compilation CD put together by Greg Shaw of crazed psychedelic material called Beyond the Calico Wall.  That album included another Bohemian Vendetta song, a brain-twister called “Paradox City”; it is also available on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNiJ6HnMptI .   

 

(April 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. 

 

(July 2013)
 
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I wrote the above tribute to Dr. Crow on July 30, 2013, not learning until later that morning that Deviants frontman Mick Farren had passed away three days earlier.  Besides his amazing music that is not like anyone else’s – that goes double for his singing voice – Mick Farren regularly wrote articles that I would see in the Village Voice and other places, published numerous science fiction novels, and was a respected rock critic and music historian. 

When Suzy Shaw of Bomp! Records determined to write an appreciation of the ground-breaking career and life of her former husband and long-time business partner Greg Shaw (shortly after his untimely death in 2004), Mick Farren was brought in as the co-author of the resulting hardbound book Bomp! / Saving the World One Record at a Time. 

 

(August 2013)

 

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GONN is another legendary garage rock band; their amazing song “Blackout of Gretely” was slated to be included on the original Nuggets album but was omitted due to its length (4:29 – most garage rock tracks clock in at 3:00 or less).  But Greg Shaw had included this song as a bonus track on the CD reissue on AIP Records of Pebbles, Volume 1 and also put their follow-up single “Doin’ Me In” on the Pebbles, Volume 10 CD.  I had also acquired a retrospective album by GONN that was identified as Rough Diamonds, Volume 9; Rough Diamonds is a series of albums that Greg Shaw put out on Voxx Records by garage rock bands who had recorded more than just a few singles.  

 
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I have been collecting Pebbles albums for around 30 years and have also purchased many, many other albums that have come out on Greg Shaw’s record labels:  Bomp, Voxx, AIP, Total Energy, and Alive.  There have also been several compilation albums that have collected highlights from Bomp! Records releases over the previous several years, and I have most of those as well.  One of the most comprehensive is Destination: Bomp!, a two-CD set that is subtitled “The Best of Bomp! Records’ First 20 Years”.  Bomp celebrates its 40th anniversary next year. 

 

The first CD in particular walks the listener through the chronological history of Bomp! Records, beginning with the “A” side of their very first release:  “You Tore Me Down” by the Flamin’ Groovies.  Greg Shaw’s liner notes about this song describe how Bomp! Records got started:  “When Cyril Jordan first played me this, and the other stuff that they’d done in England (including ‘Shake Some Action’) that nobody would release, I was stunned.  Then he said, ‘Why don’t you put it out?’  I couldn’t think of a good reason, except of course that there was no way to distribute, promote or sell it . . . all I knew was that music this good had to come out.  So we did.  And that’s as good a foot to start on as any, I reckon.” 

 

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The music on Destination: Bomp! is amazingly good from end to end, but the next to last song really caught my attention:  “Fantasy of Folk” by Blair 1523.  I immediately caught the reference to “1523 Blair” by the Outcasts.  Sonic Boom, a member of the 1980’s British psychedelic rock band Spacemen 3, told Greg Shaw about this band:  “[They’d] sent him a tape from a place with the unlikely name of Praze-an-Beeble, somewhere in Cornwall.  By the time I got in touch to offer them a deal they’d already broken up, but I went ahead and compiled a CD from their various demos, and it became a favorite of mine and many others.  This [“Fantasy of Folk”] is one of their charming, poppier tunes, but the album also includes some stretched-out, deep space jams that are not to be missed.”  

 

Blair 1523 was founded in 1989 and broke up in 1992.  They released an EP called On the Rise on a small English label, Wilde Club Records, so Blair 1523 might have dropped from sight altogether had they not caught the attention of Greg Shaw.  Their Voxx Records release Beautiful Debris came out on LP and CD in 1993.  

 

(September 2013)

 

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In 2003, Angie Pepper released her first full-fledged album, Res Ipsa Loquitor (the name is taken from a Latin legal term meaning “the thing speaks for itself”).  The songs include a cover of the notorious “Hindu Gods (of Love)”, a linchpin Australian punk rock song; “Hindu Gods (of Love)” was originally released by Lipstick Killers on Greg Shaw’s Voxx Records in 1980. 

 

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One of the early L.A. punk rock bands was the Pandoras, an all-female band that was formed in 1983 by bandleader Paula Pierce (lead vocals, guitar, harmonica) and Gwynne Kahn (organ and vocals).  Greg Shaw gave them a record deal and some studio time; the result was an excellent debut album on Bomp! Records called It’s About Time (1985). 

 

Writing in the liner notes for the Bomp! Records compilation album Destination: Bomp! (1994), Greg Shaw writes of the Pandoras:  “Someday, when all the ‘Riot Grrrl’ hype has died down, I hope Paula Pierce gets the credit she deserves for being the first to break the taboo against blatant sexual aggressiveness in female performers.” 

 

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Punk stalwart Jeff Dahl was instrumental in getting Les Hell on Heels signed by Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records – the CD was released shortly before Shaw’s death in 2004.  Greg Shaw was quoted as saying of Les Hell on Heels:  “I feel the same way that Phil Spector must have felt when he first saw the Ronettes.” 

 
(December 2013)
 
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Following the death of her former husband and longtime business partner Greg Shaw in 2004, Suzy Shaw sought to establish in book form his legacy in the annals of rock and roll.  She asked Mick Farren to be her co-writer, and they published an excellent overview Bomp! / Saving the World One Record at a Time.  Naturally, the book was mostly composed of Greg Shaw’s writings, actions and antics, focusing on his early fanzines and the formation of Bomp! Records.  But the opening essay by Mick Farren, the modestly entitled “Introduction” not only provides a canny observation of the history of rock and roll, but also Greg Shaw’s place in it – concentrating as much on Shaw’s ideas as anything else.  The Bomp! book establishes that Greg Shaw didn’t just assemble compilation albums and press records and publish fanzines, and he didn’t just write music history – he actually changed the direction of rock and roll more than once. 

 

(March 2014/1)

 

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While “I, I, I Want Your Lovin’” and “She Only Wants a Friend” feature the harmony vocals and intricate guitar that are hallmarks of the Hollies’ sound, the band’s R&B roots are still evident on both songs.  The liner notes on the English Freakbeat, Volume 3 CD (probably by Greg Shaw) says that “their three releases are consistently intense, brilliant R&B ravers”.  The Sons of Fred broke up after Mick Hutchinson and Pete Sears left the band. 

 

(March 2014/2)

 

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As with past UARB the Sons of Fred, I learned about this month’s Under-Appreciated Rock Band, the Soul Agents through the albums in the English Freakbeat Series.  The English Freakbeat, Volume 2 CD includes a song made famous by Muddy Waters, “I Just Wanna Make Love to You” plus the flip side of a later single, the organ-driven instrumental “Gospel Train”.  The English Freakbeat, Volume 4 CD has three more songs, “Don’t Break it Up”, “Mean Woman Blues” and “I Just Wanna Make Love to You” again.  Apparently the intention was to include “Let’s Make it Pretty Baby” on the earlier CD (it was included on the English Freakbeat, Volume 2 LP); Greg Shaw says that it was his favorite among their songs in the liner notes for the English Freakbeat, Volume 2 CD. 

 

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The Soul Agents released their second single on October 15, 1964, also on Pye Records; the band picked two other traditional songs for this 45, “The Seventh Son” b/w “Let’s Make it Pretty Baby”.  Of the “B” side, Greg Shaw said in his liner notes for English Freakbeat, Volume 2:  “‘Let's Make it Pretty Baby’ is my favourite, a John Lee Hooker number but with an urgency that was wholly their own.” 

 

(May 2014)

 

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Suzy Shaw has advised me that the Invisible Eyes is actually not the last band signed to Bomp! Records by Greg Shaw before his death, as Allmusic says of this band.  As she remembers it, the band with that distinction is the Coffin Lids, another future UARB.  

 

(December 2014)

 

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There is no question that Kim Fowley was there for the peculiar flip side of the Bo and Peep single, “The Rise of the Brighton Surf”, which is included as a CD bonus track on English Freakbeat, Volume 6.  Andrew Loog Oldham and Kim Fowley are listed as the, uh, songwriters; and that is Fowley doing the vocalizing on a reworking of “The House of the Rising Sun” as a paean to the English coastal resort town of Brighton with lyrics that (as Greg Shaw says in the liner notes) appear to have been made up on the spot.  

 

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As recounted in Greg Shaw’s liner notes for the English Freakbeat, Volume 2 CD, Kim Fowley connected with another American expatriate, P. J. Proby.  After several failed singles in this country, Proby had a series of UK Top 20 hits that included his cover of a Lennon/McCartney song, “That Means a Lot” that the Beatles were never able to record to their own satisfaction. 

 

Greg Shaw included both sides of a December 1964 single by a band called the Lancasters on the English Freakbeat, Volume 2 CD, “Earthshaker” and “Satan’s Holiday”; both songs were co-written by Kim Fowley.  One of the members of the band was a young Ritchie Blackmore shortly after being in the backing band for Screaming Lord Sutch called the Savages and several years before he became one of the original bandmembers in Deep Purple. 

 

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One of the albums that I have, Born to be Wild (also from 1968) sounds like Kim Fowley is playing the basic melody for mostly familiar songs on the organ with one finger, accompanied by an anonymous band.  It is a cut above basic Muzak, but just barely.  I guess this is one of what Greg Shaw calls his “put-on albums”.  

 

(January 2015/1)

 

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Much as past UARB the Poppees was the first band signed by Greg Shaw for his original Bomp! Records label, the Crawdaddys was the first band brought in by Shaw for his new 1960’s revival label Voxx Records.  The name Voxx is an adaptation of the Vox brand of musical instruments, known in the rock world for their electric organs, amplifiers, and (as Wikipedia says) “a series of innovative but commercially unsuccessful electric guitars and bass guitars”.  

 

The Flamin’ Groovies showed the way when their 1976 album, Shake Some Action (on Sire Records and Aim Records) moved a lot of vinyl by looking backwards to the 1960’s, vindicating Greg Shaw’s decision to step up and launch Bomp! Records by releasing their 1974 single, “You Tore Me Down” b/w “Him or Me”. 

 

As quoted in the book by Simon Reynolds called Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past:  “Greg Shaw soon decided that words weren’t enough anymore; it was time for action.  He folded the magazine Bomp! and injected all of his energy into Voxx, a Bomp! [Records] subsidiary label dedicated to the new breed of post-[Flamin’] Groovies garage bands.” 

 

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In the liner notes for Be a Caveman, Greg Shaw recalls those heady days:  “At the end of the 1970’s, there was no scene for ’60s garage music.  No label released it.  Less than a handful of bands played it.  Then came Voxx Records, and over the course of a decade, everything changed.  Voxx was as much a concept as a record label.  The idea was to present young bands doing pure mid-’60’s roots music, garage, psych, surf, beat, folk-rock, and various hybrids thereof. . . .  The catalyst was a young San Diego combo called the Crawdaddys, who actually came to me via a very good new wave band, the Hitmakers.” 

 

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Jeff Scott phoned Ron Silva, and they patched things up over Silva’s leaving the Hitmakers.  Scott was about to go to L.A. to play their band’s demo tape for Greg Shaw at Bomp! Records, and he offered to bring him and Steve Potterf along if they could lay down some tracks first.  The Crawdaddys assembled in the Silva garage and recorded two original songs plus Chuck Berry’s “Oh Baby Doll” and Bo Diddley’s “Tiger in Your Tank”. 

 

Ron Silva says of the meeting of the Crawdaddys with Greg Shaw:  “In my opinion it would be fairly safe to say that [Steve] Potterf and I blew Shaw’s mind that day.  We walked in, and Potterf had this absolutely devout Brian Jones thing going with the hair, and we both had the complete Downliners Sect ’64 look from head to toe.  It was totally ridiculous and great at the same time.  Shaw said, ‘Go back to San Diego and make an album, preferably for next to nothing, if you don’t mind.’  We didn’t.” 

 

(January 2015/2)

 

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I putzed around in my stacks looking for a band who was clearly influenced by the Rolling Stones – the way that my “two-fer” from a few months ago was, the Richmond Sluts and Big Midnight – but I couldn’t find one right away.  So I decided to go back to the mother lode of English beat bands, the English Freakbeat series that Greg Shaw put together, where I have found several other previous UARB’s.  Sadly, these albums (both vinyl and CD) have been out of print for many years, but there are used copies available here and there.   

 

Anyway, I found one right away:  the Primitives.  That’s the Primitives with the crazy hair in the middle of the cover of the English Freakbeat, Volume 4 CD; the caption inside the booklet says:  “The Primitives get their hair done!”).  

 

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Mal Ryder and the Spirits made three singles from 1963 to 1965; a fourth single came out in Mal Ryder’s name individually.  The first two 45’s, “Cry Baby” b/w “Take Over”, and the Bobby Goldsboro song “See the Funny Little Clown” b/w “Slow Down” were both produced by Peter Sullivan, who was also Tom Jones’ producer in that time period.  The song that Greg Shaw thought was the strongest of these songs, “Forget It” (from November 1964) is included on two CD’s that I have, English Freakbeat, Volume 1 and English Freakbeat, Volume 4.  As far as I am concerned, this bouncy R&B song with gruff, throaty vocals stacks up well with all of the Primitives material that I have heard. 

 

(May 2015)

 

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It still has been just that one box that I bought basically sight unseen (the way Greg Shaw used to buy records, for one); but the next time I get an opportunity like that, I am definitely going to jump on it.
 
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In an interview for SugarbuzzMagazine.com, Jeff Drake mentions that Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records signed Amanda Jones after he saw their first show at Coconut Teazser, a Hollywood rock and roll club located at the eastern end of the Sunset Strip, where they became the house band for a while.  
 
(December 2015)
 
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Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records started a long series of albums in 1978 called Pebbles that dug deeper into the mine than Nuggets for obscure garage rock and psychedelic rock songs. The initial album, the Pebbles, Volume 1 LP was subtitled “Original Artyfacts from the First Punk Era”, in a takeoff on the full name of the Nuggets album, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968. The Wikipedia article on this album is largely my work, and there are dozens more articles on the albums in this series that I put together as well, in my first major Wikipedia project: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebbles,_Volume_1 .  
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But Iggy Pop and his compatriots could find no takers among the major labels that had so willingly released the Stooges albums, or anyone else. When James Williamson showed up at the Bomp! Records office one day with the Kill City tapes in hand, Greg Shaw jumped at the chance to get the album pressed and in the stores: “Even though I had to almost sell my soul to raise the needed cash, I wasn’t about to let this deal pass. To this day, Kill City is the single most important item in the Bomp catalogue, but what made it extra nice is that James [Williamson] also threw in a big box of unlabeled tapes that turned out to be mostly demos and rehearsals from the Raw Power days onward – hours and hours of stuff that became the foundation for my long-term Iguana Chronicles project of documenting the unreleased side of this incredible band.” Elsewhere, Shaw describes the Stooges as “the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band of the century”.
 
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Some months back, I included a story on the Prime Movers, yet another Michigan band, which numbered among its members Michael Erlewine, the man who started All Music Guide (now Allmusic), along with All Movie Guide and All Game Guide; and James Osterberg, better known today as Iggy Pop. He started out as a drummer, as he was for this band; and the other bandmembers started calling him “Iggy” because he had previously been the drummer for a band called the Iguanas, this month’s Under Appreciated Rock Band. The band name also gave Greg Shaw the name for his long series of Stooges albums, The Iguana Chronicles.
 
(December 2016)
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Allmusic reports that the Weirdos reformed in 1988 with original members the Denney brothers (John Denney and Dix Denney), Nicky Beat, and Cliff Roman, plus Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers; they released a new album in 1990 called Condor.  I haven’t heard that record, but I couldn’t resist sharing the above cartoon that was on the back cover of Destroy All Music.  Greg Shaw used to put this kind of thing in his Bomp! Records releases and publications like Bomp! Magazine all the time. 
 
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A few years later, Greg Shaw gave the Lazy Cowgirls a proper album (and one of their best), Tapping the Source (1987).  Shaw even relaunched Bomp! Records to release it, since it didn’t really fit on his active Voxx Records label.  He included one of their classic songs, “Can’t You Do Anything Right?” on the two-CD retrospective set called Destination: Bomp!, whose songs and liner notes also provide a concise history of the legendary Bomp! Records label that styles itself “the last of the independent record labels”. 
 
In the liner notes for Destination: Bomp!, Greg Shaw writes:  “The [Lazy] Cowgirls had made one badly misproduced album before Tapping the Source, the Bomp LP that captured for the first time their real strengths, the nonstop buzzsaw guitar attack and Pat Todd’s vein-bursting passion as a vocalist.” 
 
(March 2017)
 
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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. 
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Greg Shaw and the Bomp! Records crew even came up with a cool term for the kind of music that they like: “Bomp-Worthy”. Sadly, in the 12+ years since Shaw’s untimely death in 2004, this term has largely dropped out of sight on the Internet. I remember one “thread” (in the pre-blog era) talking about Linda Ronstadt’s Bomp-Worthy music that was still findable not so long ago, and I wish I could remember more about it. It was one of the references for the Wikipedia article that I wrote on the Stone Poneys. Now, there are only 20 results on Google for “Bomp-Worthy”. 
(June 2017)
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Before I get into The Iguana Chronicles – the series of albums of Stooges music put out by Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records – I’ll take some time to relate my early acquisitions of albums of this kind.  There are records out there which are not authorized that can include recordings that fans cannot get any other way.  They are usually referred to as “bootleg” records and consist of music that was never officially released.  “Pirated” records are illegal copies of major-label releases, and they are a different thing altogether.  That is what got Napster into so much trouble many years ago.  Bootlegs exist in a grey area and are generally (if grudgingly) tolerated by the music industry.  In the same way, the major record labels almost never try to retake possession of the early promo copies of albums that are supplied to DJ’s and rock critics ahead of the official releases, even though they are typically marked with something like:  “Licensed for promotional use only.  Sale is prohibited.” 
 
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The Iguana Chronicles is not really a series of bootleg albums; as related by Greg Shaw, James Williamson brought a box full of tapes of music by the Stooges for him to do whatever he wanted with, in exchange for his agreeing to release his new album with Iggy Pop, Kill City on Bomp! Records, when major-label record companies would not.  The name The Iguana Chronicles is taken from Iggy Pop’s first band, past UARB the Iguanas (I doubt that I will ever get used to the idea of the Iguanas being in the UARB roster). 
 
As Greg Shaw put it in the liner notes for the label’s retrospective double-CD Destination: Bomp! (1994):  “To this day, Kill City is the single most important item in the Bomp catalog; but what made it extra nice is that James [Williamson] also threw in a big box of unlabeled tapes that turned out to be mostly demos and rehearsals from the Raw Power days onward – hours and hours of stuff that became the foundation for my long-term Iguana Chronicles project of documenting the unreleased side of this incredible band.” 
 
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According to Greg Shaw, James Williamson was instrumental in saving the Stooges’ musical history; besides the treasure trove given to Shaw as part of the Kill City release deal, he had saved the tapes that became Metallic K.O. (1976), from live performances by the Stooges at Michigan Palace in Detroit on October 6, 1973 and February 9, 1974 – the album originally purported to be entirely from the 1974 show, which was purportedly the Stooges’ last live performance until reforming in 2003, but later releases of Metallic K.O. cleared up the confusion on the dates.  The same thing said about Metallic K.O. in Wikipedia – “Considering [James] Williamson’s involvement, and the endorsement of Iggy, it was considered a ‘semi-official’ bootleg, when released on the Skydog label in 1976” – would apply to the albums in The Iguana Chronicles as well. 
 
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The Tell-Tale Hearts caught the attention of Greg Shaw, and he arranged studio time for them at Bomp! Records/Voxx Records, resulting in their first album, The Tell-Tale Hearts (1984).  The liner notes continue:  “We battled tooth and nail against technology to try to capture the raw bite of our live show.  Recorded mostly with minimal overdubs, the results were generally satisfactory, until Greg decided to do a remix while we were away on tour.  The result was an album where the music was robbed of all its muscle and vitality – something we’ve never let Greg forget since.” 
 
(September 2017)
 
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Greg Shaw launched Bomp! Records in December 1974 with the release of the Bomp 101 single, “You Tore Me Down” b/w “Him or Me” by the Flamin’ Groovies, with the latter song being the Paul Revere and the Raiders song.  The first band signed by the new label was past UARB the Poppees, whose unabashed Beatlesque stylings were at odds with the established rock scene and the punk/new wave scene alike. 
 
The Bomp! Records EP by the Boston band DMZ called Lift Up Your Hood is what Greg Shaw is holding in the best known photograph of him, as shown above. 
 
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This is taken from the write-up by Greg Shaw in Destination: Bomp! for the SS-20 song “Arnold Layne”:  “Once in a while I get enthusiasms that few others seem to share, and this was one of those.  I was in awe of Bruce Wagner’s ability to squeeze original ideas out of the boneyard of rock guitar cliché, and I particularly love what he did with old songs.  We cut stuff by people including the Seeds, the Stooges, Love, and the Doors, in each case adding something new to songs I thought had already been done to perfection.  Against this, SS-20 had Madeleine Ridley’s morbid, gothic poetry, a blend I found intriguing.” 
 
(December 2017)
 
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But I likely will keep putting out what I call the “Story of the Month” (I have my web pages broken down into short “Items” and longer “Stories” on whomever or whatever I am talking about) that I uncover as I load up the web site. These Stories are on well known (well, better known anyway) songs and albums and rock bands and other topics that are not of the Under Appreciated variety. I started those last year and meant to list the ones in my year-end post last time but forgot, so here is that list from the past two years:
 
December 2013 – The Standells 
 
January 2014 – (skipped)
 
February 2014 – Hasil Adkins 
 
March 2014 – Bobby Darin 
 
April 2014 – Nuggets 
 
May 2014 – The Nerves 
 
June 2014 – The Outsiders (American band)
 
 
 
September 2014 – The Piltdown Man and Brontosaurus 
 
October 2014 – Walter/Wendy Carlos 
 
November 2014 – The Trashmen 
 
December 2014 – John Birch Society Blues 
 
January 2015 – John Mellencamp 
 
February 2015 – Child Is Father to the Man 
 
March 2015 – Dion DiMucci 
 
April 2015 – “Scotch and Soda” 
 
May 2015 – Stiv Bators/Greg Shaw 
 
June 2015 – “Walk on the Wild Side” 
 
July 2015 – “Lola”
 
August 2015 – Bob Dylan the Protest Singer
(Year 6 Review)
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I might yet write some more posts, but not until I secure my website in a safe place. No other bands or topics come immediately to mind though. I have already written 13 “stories” about various aspects of Bob Dylan’s musical life, and I don’t know what else I have left to add. As it turned out, a lot of my posts have revolved around artists on Bomp! Records and their affiliated labels, like Alive Records. When I was preparing the last of my posts, on The Iguana Chronicles (a long series of albums of unreleased material by the Stooges that was put together by Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records) – which was named after the least likely UARB of them all, the Iguanas – I went through all of the Bomp! Records artists that I could locate before I finally found one without a Wikipedia article that wasn’t already a UARB: SS-20, whose first album came out in 1986 – 12 years after Bomp! Records was founded.
 
(Year 10 Review)
Last edited: April 7, 2021