Left Of The Dial

When I was a scrawny, curious kid trying to wrap my head around punk rock history, I would spend hours milling around a towering dusty house known as Toad Hall, a rambling series of rooms stuffed-to-the-gills with LPs, books, comics, magazines, and related ephemera. Literally a rabbit hole, the place attracted Japanese tourists that maxed out credit cards for rare jazz records found on the under lit second floor. The basement, though, contained a real black vinyl hive: oodles and oodles of loose 45s, most without any more management and organization than a single letter – say S – followed by a confederation of hodgepodge, piled up records. For me, this was Eden, land of the lost and lovelorn, where I first put my grimy hands on Troggs singles. Reading the Bomp collection Part II reminds me of those days, long before the hyper-segmentation of today’s ‘here today gone tomorrow,’ self-conscious alternative music. When garage/psycho teen/frat rock/raw psych music held sway for tiny groups of rock’n’roll insiders, Bomp was the Bible, literally. It was the conduit for news and info on Mexican blasters, British underground electric soulsters like Creation and the much-lauded, stirring Small Faces, a repository for all things Seeds and Standells, and a place where writers like Lester Bangs began to popularize their righteous critiques with zest and vision. Sure, it didn’t quite have the hip downtown writerly sway of Creem, or the interview-rich terrain of Rolling Stone, but it held firm to fanzine roots, kept all matters close to the ground. Where else could one, in 1975, read about the savvy style of Paul Revere and the Raiders, considered has-beens meant for the dustbin? My own sister spun their records alongside Iggy Pop and 999 and never winced. To her, such feisty, interesting music was a continuum, a shifting paradigm from one decade to the next. Nothing lost, just built upon. Bomp has that kind of kindred spirit – Mersey Beat and the Weirdos. Just like Greg Shaw insisted – “in rock’n’roll a good idea is always good.” This compendium is not for the punk subset who think the Sex Pistols were pure original carnage; this issue is for the dudes and gals with bigger ears, who know that punk rock was being spanked and shaken by bands long before, just as early issues of Bomp testify. Punk fills the pages, long before the British adopted day-glo and safety pins. If anything, the sheer pleasure of music is entombed here – not just the original joy of hearing the right tune hit your inner ear, but the sizzling fetish for discourse, the fetish for collecting, the fetish for touching objects: worship-lore and fandom. “Pure now for pop people,” intoned Shaw as well, reminding us that rock’n’roll, in its best form, never tires, always transcends, to meet us in the here and now. - Left Of The Dial