Harp Magazine

After Greg Shaw died in 2004, his former wife Suzy Shaw decided it was time to resume work on a project that had been back-burnered for two decades: to assemble a book chronicling her ex-husband’s journalistic legacy and resurrecting crucial early writings of some of rock writing’s greatest voices—among them, Lester Bangs, whose notorious Troggs screed “James Taylor Marked For Death” originally consumed a whopping 24 pages of Shaw’s seminal publication Who Put the Bomp.

WPTB was one of the premier rock fanzines of the ’70s, aesthetic sibling to the likes of Crawdaddy!, Fusion and CREEM, and an oasis for kick-out-the-jams-minded fanboys and collectors who had little truck with corporate-hyped swill. Early issues featured the Bangs classic, stories on the Seeds, Flamin’ Groovies and the rockabilly revival, and all manner of left-field minutiae (take the 26-point test to learn if you are a “rock and roll trufan”[sic]; point #13 inquires if “you squeezed Robert Plant’s lemon”). When punk and new wave dawned, Shaw eagerly dived right in, doing cover stories on the UK punk explosion (“England’s Screaming” blared the headline, over an image of a leering Johnny Rotten), power pop, the Ramones, etc., and foreshortening the mag’s name to just Bomp!. Regardless of the coverage—Shaw’s late-’60s pre-WPTB zine Mojo-Navigator Rock & Roll News included—there was never any whiff of complacency. This was rock criticism as activism.

For the Bomp! book, Suzy Shaw and author/Deviants frontman Mick Farren have deftly anthologized the Greg Shaw oeuvre, culling the best features as direct reproductions so one can see exactly what the magazine’s pages looked like, right down to the typos, the quirky layouts and the close-ups of Joey Ramone’s ripped jeans. The editors have also penned fresh essays and added unpublished photos to contextualize Shaw and his magazine as both evolved with the times.

In 1974 Shaw also launched Bomp! Records, and along the way he had a hand in the careers of Stiv Bators, Flamin’ Groovies, Plimsouls, Warlocks, Black Keys and others. But whether he was writing about music or releasing it, his overriding manifesto was saving the world one record at a time. As he told me in 1984 when I interviewed him for my own zine, “I don’t find much essential difference in producing a magazine or producing an album. It’s our shared opinions, expressed through records or writing, that it boils down to.”

By Fred Mills