Dec 14

Bomp! Records

BOMP! RECORDS
 
 
Bomp! Records  is a Los Angeles-based record label formed in 1974 by fanzine publisher and music historian Greg Shaw.  The label has featured punk, pop, powerpop, garage rock, new wave, old school rock, and neo-psychedelia among other genres; and its roster has included artists such as The Modern Lovers, Iggy & The Stooges, Stiv Bators & The Dead Boys, 20/20, Shoes, Devo, The Weirdos, The Romantics, Spacemen 3, The Germs, SIN 34, Jeff Dahl, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, and Black Lips.   (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
Stories:
●    Overview 
●    Early History 
●    Kill City 
●    The Iguana Chronicles  
  

 
In late 1974, Greg Shaw’s first release on his Bomp! Records record label were two tracks from 1972 album sessions by the Flamin’ Groovies that the band could not get anyone to release.  The “A” side was “You Tore Me Down”, backed with a fine treatment of the old Paul Revere and the Raiders song “Him or Me”.  As Shaw put it:  “All I knew was that music this good had to come out. . . .  And that’s as good a foot to start on as any, I reckon.”
 
It wasn’t until 2008 that a proper retrospective album for the Nerves came out, called One Way Ticket – on the Bomp-affiliated Alive Records label – that includes their recorded output as well as some additional related tracks, plus seven nice live tracks from a 1977 show. 
 
In early 1982, the Plimsouls released the quintessential power-pop song “A Million Miles Away”, and it was a bonafide FM hit before Geffen Records wrested the band away from Bomp! Records and pulled the song from the market until their album was finished.  
 
 (April 2010)
 
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The album  . . . Or the Beginning, the Not Quite’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).
 
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The Eyes date from the earliest days of punk rock in Los Angeles.  I ran across their first recordings on a 1998 compilation album of releases on What Records? called What? Stuff, on Bomp! Records, that I just picked up.
 
(July 2010)
 
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After a few false starts, the Poppees were signed by Greg Shaw as the first new band for Bomp! Records – Bomp is still going strong, issuing the Poppees anthology album this year among other great records, and has several allied labels, such as AIP, Alive, Total Energy, etc. 
 
(December 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 delightful 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.
 
Hacienda caught the attention of Dan Auerbach of the acclaimed blues-rock band the Black Keys, who produced both of their albums.  One of Bomp’s recent coups was releasing the first album by this band in 2002 called The Big Come-Up; the new Black Keys album, Brothers is one of the standout albums of 2010, landing a Grammy nomination and a #2 ranking on the 2010 Albums of the Year by Rolling Stone, and even making Time Magazine’s list of Best of 2010 in Music.
 
(January 2011)
 
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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. 
 
Bomp! Records also released several additional Dead Boys albums following the break-up of the band, beginning with Night of the Living Dead Boys in 1981.  The vocals had to be overdubbed, since Stiv Bators had deliberately ruined the original recording by singing off-mike, in order to get back at their record label.  Even so, this is the best live punk rock album I have ever heard.
 
(February 2011)
 
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The folks at Bomp! Records had begun having some success in marketing garage rock and psychedelic rock compilation albums in the Pebbles Series and others, so when punk rock came to the fore in the late 1970’s, they decided to have some fun and try to clandestinely introduce young punk rock fans to the glory days of 1960’s punk.  They packaged an album that would have been a great addition to Pebbles, put a picture of a punk rock girl on the cover (complete with piercings and safety pins), and chose a suitable double entendre as the album title, Ear-Piercing Punk.
 
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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The Unknowns was named one of the four best bands in Los Angeles in 1981, and they got a record deal with Bomp! Records (later picked up by Sire Records) when Bruce Joyner was only 18.   Though the resulting 1981 EP, Dream Sequence didn’t really show the band at their best, the Unknowns’ live performances won them numerous fans among established musicians in the LA area. 
 
(June 2011)
 
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Between Captain Trip Records and the Bomp! Records label Total Energy, virtually the entire Deviants/Mick Farren catalogue is now happily back in print.
 
(August 2011)
 
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The 2008 album that I have, called simply Ron Franklin and released (where else) on one of the Bomp! labels (Alive), is actually Ron Franklin’s third album, and Allmusic gives it four stars. The recording quality is very clean (this is one of those albums where I own both an LP and a CD – not on purpose, but that is how it worked out). 
 
 (January 2012)
 
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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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Johnny O’Halloran and Travis Ramin of Tina and the Total Babes were later in a band called Nikki Corvette and the Sting Rays that released an album in 2006; Nikki Corvette’s earlier band Nikki and the Corvettes released an album called Nikki and the Corvettes on Bomp! Records in 1980 and is one of the groups that Tina and the Total Babes are honoring in their album. 
 
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I only have the final album by the Not Quite, . . . Or the Beginning, which came out in vinyl only on the Bomp!-affiliated Voxx Records in 1990, and I do hope that I can find some of their other records. 
 
(May 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.   
 
(July 2012)
 
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Phil and the Frantics is best known for a song called “I Must Run”, which was a local hit single in their native Arizona; the song is said to have been adapted rather openly from the flip side of the Zombies’ fourth single, “She’s Coming Home” b/w “I Must Move”.    In his really snide piece on the band, Mark Prindle runs with that but starts with a confession that while in college, the author bootlegged copies of the albums in Bomp! Records' Pebbles Series (more about that later).  
 
The recordings on the Pebbles Series were taken from one of the world’s greatest record collections, that of music historian and Bomp! Records founder Greg Shaw.  
 
The first album featuring music by Phil and the Frantics came out in 1980 on the Bomp! Records label Voxx Records as Rough Diamonds, Volume 3 in their Rough Diamonds Series that consisted of entire albums by 1960’s garage rock bands that have more than one or two singles to their credit.  The first side is in an earlier style and is what I imagine music at a “sock hop” might sound like (I was a little too young to have ever actually gone to one), while Side 2 collects music from the same period as “I Must Run”.  Another of the songs on this album, “Till You Get What You Want” has been included on several garage rock compilation albums; I have a copy on Acid Dreams Epitaph.  Nothing else is quite as good as “I Must Run”, but several of the other songs on the album are just as enjoyable.  Later albums collecting Phil and the Frantics music have come out on Bacchus Archives Records and Light in the Attic Records (which also recently released the album by past UARA Jim Sullivan). 
 
(August 2012)
 
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Stiv Bators, the front man for one of the best punk rock bands the Dead Boys, had a tempestuous relationship with Bomp! Records' Greg Shaw.  He was trying to reinvent himself as a pop singer and released one excellent album in 1980 called Disconnected and a lot of other singles.   
 
(September 2012)
 
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The album I have by Thomas Anderson, Moon Going Down was released on Marilyn Records; the label predates Patrick Boissel’s better known, Bomp! Records-affiliated Alive Records.  The promotional material for the album (which is still available on the Bomp! Records website) quotes Anderson as saying:  “When I started doing this, I wanted to establish up front that my allegiance was with rock ’n’ roll and not singer/songwriters.  God love ’em, but a lot of them are telling the same stories about dusty roads, country back porches, and missing you.  Here I am singing about Martians.  That’s my thing.  There are other stories to tell, and I want to be the one to tell them.” 
 
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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“Jealousy” is their first single by the Poppees for Bomp! Records and opens their long-overdue 2010 retrospective, Pop Goes the Anthology; this one is at www.youtube.com/watch?v=06WjNpHo1Tc&list=PL4FFEEE560A1D4123&index=7 .   
 
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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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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. 
 
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The king of all of the new garage-y bands is probably the blues-rock duo the Black Keys (sometimes viewed as a sort of twin of the White Stripes) whose debut album, The Big Come-Up came out in 2002 and is the largest selling album that the Bomp! family of record labels has ever had – Alive Records in this case. 
 
(January 2013)
 
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Suzy Shaw wrote me in an email recently that Hollis Brown is her personal favorite among all of the bands that Bomp! Records has worked with over nearly 40 years.  And it is easy to see why:  Their music is remarkably bright and sunny while still being roots music and infused with the blues.  Hollis Brown are true professionals also; the songwriting is first-rate, and the performances simply shine.  (Wow, I just gave a lot of references to “light”, didn’t I!).  I guess you can tell that I am a real fan of these guys as well. 

 

(May 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. 

 
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The first Pebbles album came out in 1978, in a modest release that was apparently distributed mostly among top record collectors.  

 

In 2008, on the 30th anniversary of the original Pebbles release, Bomp! Records put out a special reissue on clear vinyl complete with the pink xeroxed sheet with Greg Shaw’s liner notes that had been included with the 1978 album. 

 

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In 1983, another long series of Pebbles LP’s came out on a brand-new label called AIP Records (standing for "Archive International Productions") that was openly affiliated with Bomp! Records.  Before it was over, I had purchased close to 100 LP’s and CD’s with the Pebbles name, and I still don’t have them all.  In fact, some were mostly circulated in Great Britain under the name Best of Pebbles, and I only ever saw them one time – at the same Schoolkids Records store across from the North Carolina State University campus on Hillsborough Street where I first saw the original Pebbles LP’s.  I sure wish I had bought at least one or two that day; not even Bomp! Records has a full set of those albums. 

 

(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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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. 

 

Among the many admirable traits of Bomp! Records releases is that you get your money’s worth.  The Pebbles LP’s typically have 16 songs on them; to this day, it is common even for “greatest hits” CD’s to have just 9 or 10 songs.  The Bomp CD’s are virtually filled to capacity as well:  Destination: Bomp! has a remarkable 48 songs on its two CD’s.  

 

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.” 

 

(September 2013)

 

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Venus and the Razorblades released “Punk-a-Rama” as their first single on Bomp! Records, a terrific song that provided an overview of the early punk rock scene.  I first encountered the song on Bomp’s initial compilation album, Best of Bomp, Volume One, which I recently cleaned up from Katrina.  

 

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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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Bandmembers in Les Hell on Heels are Paula Monarch (lead vocals and guitar), Katie Rose (guitar and vocals), Chela LaRue (bass guitar and vocals) and Kristin Machynski (drums).  The band released their self-titled album in 2004 on Bomp! Records.  Les Hell on Heels is from Phoenix, Arizona, and the bandmembers had been in two earlier bands.  Paula Monarch and Chela LaRue had been in a garage punk band called the Peeps; they released a well regarded album on Sympathy for the Record Industry Records in 2000.  Katie Rose and Kristin Machynski were previously bandmembers in Tempe Tramps. 

 

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. 

 
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This is the first single by the Poppees, “If She Cries” b/w “Love of the Loved”, just the third to be released on Bomp! Records:  

 

(December 2013)
 
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Boyskout, this month’s Under-Appreciated Rock Band are pretty open about being a lesbian band – they used the term “rad queer band” in one interview.  Though neither their Allmusic write-up nor the Bomp! Records packaging mentions this. the name of the last song on the album, “Girl on Girl Action” gives it away if you hadn’t already figured it out. 

 

Boyskout initially put out a single on clear vinyl in 2003 on Isota Records, “Secrets” b/w “Pictures from the Moon”.  Their music caught the attention of the Bomp! Records label Alive Records, which included two Boyskout songs on their compilation album, The Sound of San Francisco.  The two songs were “Secrets” and “School of Etiquette” – of these three early songs, only “Secrets” is on the Alive CD, even though the name of the CD is School of Etiquette.

  

(January 2014)

 

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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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This is their EP, Dream Sequence on Sire Records that originally came out on Bomp! Records:  

 
(June 2014)
 
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Allmusic lists a total of 29 albums by Davie Allan and the Arrows, many being soundtrack albums.  I have three of them myself, all on the Bomp!-affiliated Total Energy Records label:  Fuzz Fest (1998), The Arrow Dynamic [Aerodynamic] Sounds of Davie Allan & the Arrows (1999), and a live album called Live Run (2000).  The live album includes their hit “Blues’ Theme” as well as “Apache”. 

 

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I first heard one of the songs on the second album by the Silencers, Cyclerific Sounds, “Mr. Fruity Pants” on the 2-CD compilation album (released for the 25th anniversary of Bomp! Records in 1999), Straight Outta Burbank; there is also a track by Davie Allan and the Arrows on the compilation album called “Open Throttle” (from Fuzz Fest).  “Mr. Fruity Pants” is not actually an instrumental song (unlike everything else they have recorded); this track has distorted, mumbled vocals in the background that I cannot really figure out. 

 

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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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In 1972, Kim Fowley recorded some songs by the proto-punk band the Modern Lovers, building on previous recordings that had been produced by John Cale.  As Wikipedia reports:  “These included re-recordings of ‘She Cracked’, ‘Astral Plane’, ‘I’m Straight’, ‘Girlfriend’ and two versions of ‘Roadrunner’, as well as the songs ‘Walk Up The Street’, ‘Dance With Me’ and the a capella ‘Don’t Let Our Youth Go To Waste’.  [Bandleader Jonathan] Richman also credited James Osterberg (Iggy Pop) as co-writer on ‘I Wanna Sleep In Your Arms’ as a way of acknowledging that the song borrows a Stooges guitar riff.” 

 

The recordings were first released on Kim Fowley’s short-lived Mohawk Records (a subsidiary of Bomp! Records) in 1981 under the title The Original Modern Lovers.   

 

(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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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”. 

 

While this line-up never recorded another album, the Crawdaddys secured their place in the rock firmament with their next two releases (both on Voxx Records):  the single “There She Goes Again” b/w “Why Don’t You Smile Now” in early 1980, and an EP called 5 x 4 in August 1980.  For my money, “There She Goes Again” is the one Velvet Underground song (written by Lou Reed) that is tailor-made to be covered by other bands.  There is an obscure cover of “There She Goes Again” by the Electrical Banana in 1967 which is mentioned by Wikipedia; this is not the same band as the Electric Banana that was a pseudonym for the Pretty Things over several years.  However, the only other cover version of “There She Goes Again” that I know of is by R.E.M.; and Peter Buck acknowledges that their recording is inspired by the Crawdaddys version.  “There She Goes Again” is included on the Bomp! Records compilation CD Straight Outta Burbank, and that is where I learned about the song.  The “B” side, “Why Don’t You Smile Now” was co-written by Lou Reed and John Cale but pre-dates their involvement with the Velvet Underground; “Why Don’t You Smile Now” was originally released on a 1965 single under the name the All-Night Workers. 

 

(January 2015/2)

 

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Marilyn Records was a European label that was founded by French musician Patrick Boissel in the mid-1980’s.  After a number of French and Spanish releases, Marilyn began handling the sort of musicians and bands that gravitate to Bomp! Records.  Suzy Shaw of Bomp! Records met Boissel at a record convention, and Marilyn Records became their distributor in Europe.  One result was a great compilation album that I have of previous Bomp! Records releases called From L.A. with Love (1992) that features the Plimsouls, the Flamin’ Groovies, Stiv Bators, Jeff Dahl, the Stooges, and the Zeros. 

 

In the mid-1990’s, Patrick Boissel moved to Los Angeles in order to work for Bomp! Records.  Right away he formed his own label called Alive Naturalsound Records (usually shortened to Alive Records).  He and Suzy Shaw married, and they now run the Bomp! empire together.  

 

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More generous praise can be found in the Wikipedia article.  Reviewing a 1984 Certain General show at New York’s Pyramid club, the UK-based New Musical Express called the band “New York’s answer to [Echo and] the Bunnymen with a few [Jim] Morrison tendencies thrown in” [but with] “plenty of individuality and a lead singer full of passionate presence — agonized lyrics torn from twitching limbs.”  The review concluded by observing that Certain General was “almost psychedelic in their unfettered spirit.”  Bomp! Records – whose affiliated label Alive Records reissued November’s Heat in America in 1999 – has called them “NYC’s 80’s cult favorite”, while Rock & Folk identified Certain General as “the bridge between Television and Radiohead.” 

 

(March 2015)

 

*       *       *

 

The Under Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for December 2015 is AMANDA JONES, a punk/pop quartet from Los Angeles that is best known for their song “The First Time”.  As far as I know, it was not actually released as a single; but the song was included on the two-CD retrospective album, Straight Outta Burbank, that was released on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Bomp! Records. 
 
*       *       *
 
According to the promotional material by Bomp! Records for the band’s EP, Amanda Jones, Amanda Jones was born in March 1995 as a collaboration of Amanda (Mandy) Brix and Jeff Drake, previously in the punk rock band the Joneses.  The combination of her first name and his former band name clearly brought about the band name Amanda Jones, but they were almost certainly mindful of the Rolling Stones connection also:  Their sound has the same kind of playful spirit as early mid-period Stones albums like Between the Buttons (released in January 1967); besides “Miss Amanda Jones” and “Ruby Tuesday”, the album also includes the song “Let’s Spend the Night Together” that got the band into so much trouble with The Ed Sullivan Show – Mick Jagger sung the title lyric as “let’s spend some time together” as Ed Sullivan insisted, though he and bassist Bill Wyman were rolling their eyes at the time.  A few months back, I discussed the controversial lyrics in their first big hit “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”; the Rolling Stones were able to sing that number on The Ed Sullivan Show with no censorship. 
 
*       *       *
 
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)
 
*       *       *
 
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 .  
* * *
The Stooges had actually put together enough songs for a fourth album that had become part of their live set (as collected in the 1995 Bomp! Records release, Open Up and Bleed!), with highlights being “Open up and Bleed”, “Johanna”, “Rich Bitch”, “Wet My Bed”, “I Got Nothing”, and a natural for any garage rock band’s repertoire, “Cock in My Pocket” (plus another winner that was omitted from this particular album, “Pin Point Eyes”).  If you ask me, this could have been the best Stooges album of them all.
 
* * *
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”.
 
As to Kill City itself – included by Bomp! Records in The Iguana Chronicles, though not by Discogs – this album has an entirely different feel from the Stooges’ albums. Despite his trials in the previous few years, Iggy Pop has consciously and deliberately taken his music in a new direction – call it “post–proto-punk”.
 
(December 2016)
* * *
After the Stooges broke up in early 1974, and before his first post-Stooges tracks were finally released by Bomp! Records as Kill City under the name Iggy Pop and James Williamson, Iggy Pop continued the collaboration with David Bowie that he had begun on Raw Power with his first two solo albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life.  Both are ranked 5 stars by Allmusic; the latter album includes what is probably Iggy Pop’s best known song, “Lust for Life” (it is sometimes mistaken for a Stooges song).  He was working fast, with all three of these albums released in 1977; all told, Allmusic lists a remarkable 26 solo albums in the Iggy Pop name, not counting the Stooges albums or Kill City. 
 
*       *       *
 
Mick Farren starts his liner notes for Destroy All Music by noting:  “On August 16th, 1977, at least two events occurred of major rock & roll significance.  Elvis Presley died on his Graceland toilet, and the Weirdos cut three songs for Bomp! Records, ‘Destroy All Music’, ‘A Life of Crime’ and ‘Why Do You Exist?’. The session – in a home studio in Tujunga – was produced by Craig Leon, who had overseen the Ramones’ first album.  It was a hot damp night in Los Angeles, and, by all accounts, the weather was much the same in Memphis. 
 
“Even the Weirdos copped to the fact that the death of Elvis was fractionally more important than their first record.  ‘The King Is Dead’ was scratched into the metal stamper of the Bomp release ‘Destroy All Music’ that became a classic of late 1970’s L.A. punk, and prompted critic Mark Deming to call the band ‘one of the best and brightest American bands of punk’s first wave.’” 
 
“Destroy All Music” and “A Life of Crime” were instant favorites the second I heard them the first time, and the other music by the Weirdos has the same high quality wrapped in barely contained coiled chaos.  Sadly though, the quantity is not there, as these first-wave punk bands tended to burn out and break up quickly, due largely to indifference from the buying public.  The three songs from the 1977 Bomp session mentioned above are on the album, along with four demos that include those songs again plus “Teenage”. 
 
In 1979, backed by a studio rhythm section – Billy Persons on bass and Danny Benair on drums – the Weirdos enlisted top L.A. producer Earle Mankey (formerly a guitarist in Sparks) to engineer six songs for a mini-album called Who? What? When? Where? Why?; these tracks close the Bomp album, though the masters were difficult to locate after so many years.  But as Mick Farren put it:  “Finally, though, the 30th Anniversary collection of the Weirdos was assembled, proving beyond any shadow of doubt that, among seminal punk bands, the Weirdos were one of LA’s finest.” 
 
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. 
 
*       *       *
 
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”. 
 
(March 2017)
 
*       *       *
 
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. 
Before long, I began locating albums by newer Bomp! artists, and I have nearly all of the compilation albums that have been released by Bomp! Records over the years: Destination: Bomp!, Straight Outta Burbank, Best of Bomp, Volume One, etc. Numerous UARB’s over the years have been Bomp! artists, and my post for May 2013 talked in some detail about this. 
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”. 
* * *
Bomp! Records would qualify as a mostly underground record label in their early decades; but with the May 2002 release on Alive Records of The Big Come-Up, the debut album by the Black Keys, their artists have a higher profile these days. Not surprisingly, Alive Records has made several special reissues of their hit album, such as the above copy that was released on gorgeous hand-mixed colored vinyl. 
Among the rock bands that have arisen since the Garage Rock Revival began in the early 2000’s, the Black Keys has attained a prominence in the American consciousness that Queens of the Stone Age, the Hives, the Strokes, and even the White Stripes never quite managed. As an example, I have noticed the band mentioned in our local paper twice in the past two or three months. Suzy Shaw of Bomp! Records told me that she was eating lunch in Los Angeles once and overheard several suit-clad businessmen talking about the Black Keys a few tables over. 
* * *
 
The album that I have, Inside Out Your Mind (2015) I mistakenly thought of as their first album, but the band had been around two decades at this point. It wasn’t even the Loons’ first album on Bomp! Records; that was Red Dissolving Rays Of Light five years earlier (also on order). After writing this post, I came across an interview with Suzy Shaw who said that they revived Bomp! Records specifically for the Loons; Mike Stax had always wanted to have an album on that label. The band’s new drummer on both of these albums was Mike Kamoo, who had been the drummer for the Shambles; while the line-up of the Loons was otherwise the same as on Paraphernalia. Bass guitar and album design are by Anja Dixson on Red Dissolving Rays Of Light, while the name Anja Stax is shown for both on Inside Out Your Mind. The only other change between the two Bomp! albums is that Chris Marsteller is also shown as playing keyboards on Inside Out Your Mind. The Loons’ original drummer, John Chilson had also previously played with the Shambles.  
(June 2017)
* * *
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.” 
 
*       *       *
 
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 given in Discogs, there are 20 records listed in The Iguana Chronicles (all dating from the 1990’s up to 2000), starting with Kill City – though the original LP releases are not shown, with Kill City being the first LP released (in 1977) on Bomp! Records; previously they had pressed only 45’s. 
 
*       *       *
 
The Mystery Machine was formed in 1982 by veterans of several other like-minded bands like the Hedgehogs, the Crawdaddys, and Manual Scan.  Bandmembers included Ray Brandes (vocals), Carl Rusk (acoustic and electric guitar), Mark Zadarnowski (bass guitar), Bill Calhoun (keyboards, saxophone), and David Klowden (drums).  The band stayed together only about one month, but that was long enough to create one of my long-time favorites called “She’s Not Mine” that was included on three different Bomp! Records/Voxx Records compilation albums:  Battle of the Garages, Part 2, The Roots of Power Pop, and Destination: Bomp!. 
 
*       *       *
 
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)
 
*       *       *
 
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. 
 
And then there are the numerous albums of new music that have been released by Bomp! Records and their affiliated labels over the years; besides the bands that have already been mentioned, early examples by comparatively well known bands include those by the Pandoras, Nikki and the Corvettes, the Modern Lovers, Gravedigger V, the Last, the Barracudas, and many more.  The music of many of the past UARB’s can be found on these Bomp! records. 
 
*       *       *
 
The Under Appreciated Rock Band of the Month for December 2017 is SS-20, a psychedelic rock band dating from the mid-1980’s.  The band recorded two albums, one EP with Sky Saxon, the frontman for the Seeds, and numerous other stray tracks.  I don’t have a lot of information on the band other than what the various Bomp! Records sources have.
 
*       *       *
 
My introduction to SS-20 was on From L.A. with Love (1992) – probably the best compilation album of previous releases on Bomp! Records – which came out on Patrick Boissel’s label Marilyn Records.  The song is actually by SS-20 and Sky Saxon and is a remake of the landmark Steppenwolf song “Born to be Wild”.  This number certainly falls into the category of songs whose original version seemingly could hardly be improved upon.  The most obvious change in the SS-20 version of “Born to be Wild” are the vocals (including many new lyrics) that are shared by Sky Saxon and Madeline Ridley, but the arrangement of the song has also been innovatively changed.  If I had to choose, believe it or not, I would probably say that this is now my favorite rendition of “Born to be Wild”.  However, most of the songs that SS-20 covers are not so prominent as this one. 
 
*       *       *
 
Yet another SS-20 song, “Still I’m Sad” (the Yardbirds song) is on a split 45 that was given away by an Italian magazine called Lost Trails, with the other side being a live performance of the Patti Smith Group song “Dancing Barefoot” by the Australian punk rock band Celibate Rifles.  Discogs has several more of these free 45’s listed that feature other bands from the Bomp! Records roster, such as past UARB the Tell-Tale Hearts, Gravedigger V, the Fuzztones, the Steppes, and the Miracle Workers. 
 
(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)
 
*       *       *
 

My proudest achievement is my tribute to legendary underground rock musician Mick Farren, which appeared in March 2014.  I garnered a lot of praise that my friend Suzy Shaw of Bomp! Records forwarded to me – from past UARA and fellow bandmember in the Deviants, Andy Colquhoun (who posted a link on the band’s Facebook page), from Mike Stax of Ugly Things Magazine (who published my article on Milan year before last), and from Suzy Shaw herself. 

 

(Year 5 Review)

 

*       *       *
 
Anyway, here is what and who I talked about last year:
June 2017 – 1990’s-2010’s Sixties revival band THE LOONS; Story of the Month on “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!”; also, Green Day, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Karen O, Bomp! Records, the Black Keys, the Sloths.
 
(Year 8 Review)
*       *       * 
 
These annual posts normally summarize what I have written about in the past year, but in this case, there has only been one of them; and even that one is dated December 2017.  But it is a good one, one of my best I think; Suzy Shaw of Bomp! Records gave me some really nice compliments on it.  I had been writing about the Stooges and Iggy Pop over several previous posts, and I undertook a detailed examination of the long series of CD’s and LP’s of unreleased Stooges material called The Iguana Chronicles.  I also took the opportunity of writing up descriptions of many early releases by Bomp! Records, as well as other peripheral info as I usually do. 
 
(Year 9 Review)
 
* * *
 
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: March 22, 2021