Frankenstein Sound System

“…You ain’t fat, you ain’t nothin’.” – Weird Al -

All right. Lemme explain this quote and it’s relevance to this article. Nowadays to be a nerd is not only acceptable, it’s something to aspire to. It means now to be an extreme enthusiast about something. Movie nerds, comic nerds, tech nerds and lots, lots of music nerds. Cats who know, or think they know a lot about a subject. In this age of rampant half-assery, devotion to something, anything is laudable. Fine. Only most of these cats are straight fronting. Fronting about being nerds. They ain’t fat they ain’t nothing. I just like saying that.

What I mean by this is that I recently got finished attempting to finish Bomp!’s biblical “Born In The Garage”. Edited by Suzy Shaw, present head of Bomp! and Mike Stax, some cat who I don’t know. This book is the realest of real deals where music nerdship is concerned.

It is 300 and 11 pages long. Dense, dense text of Rock and Roll research. Would you like to know more about Swedish bands attempting to sound like they were from Liverpool in the mid to late ‘60’s? Want to track down some Mexican garage band? Wanna read some guy from Garfield, New Jersey’s 35 year gone impassioned plea for old Decca singles? You can read all that and more here.

Anybody who ever wrote for Greg Shaw’s Bomp! zine between the years of 1970-1981 is reprinted here, in the creepy original mimeographed text. This is so thorough it is damn near unreadable. It spans the rockabilly revival through to garage rock experimentation to the birth of punk and everything in between. All of it written by fans, people like like Mr. Shaw himself, Lester Bangs, Ken Barnes and a nameless horde of vinyl buyers. Now, let me get back to the point I made earlier. Bomp! The Fanzine was conceived way before the intertubes, all of this business, every painfully researched, borderline autistic bit of fandom was dug up in record shops from here to Tijuana, banged out on typewriters and then rolled out on those machines in blue ink that we used to take quizzes in back in grammar school days. Think you’re clever cuz you know when Kajagoogoo put out their first single? Think you’re devoted cause you ordered The Arcades Fire’s Japanese singles? Think your deep cause you wrote your thesis on The Donna’s debut album? Fuck you. In them old days people drank harder, loved harder and nerded harder, without a router in sight suckas. You ain’t fat, You ain’t nothin’. - Frankenstein Sound System