The birth of the fanzine
When Greg Shaw died in 2004, rock fans should have declared a day of mourning, with freak flags flown at half mast. Shaw was the fan's fan, creator of pioneering pre-Rolling Stone rock fanzines like Entmoot, Mojo Navigator and Who Put the Bomp that mixed erudition with enthusiasm and made readers ecstatic to be included inside the sultan of swing's tent.
Shaw's fanzines, and his later record label Bomp! — still in existence — were templates for the 'zine and D.I.Y. revolutions that paralleled the arrival and partly explains the longevity of punk rock. His Bomp fanzine was also undoubtedly the inspiration for reissue labels like Rhino, Sundazed and Norton, and his fanzines were the incubators for great rock critics like Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, Dave Marsh, Ken Barnes, Billy Altman and Phast Phreddie. That rebellious torch was carried forward in magazines like Creem, Punk, Big Takeover, Razorcake, Roctober, Flipside, etc. In short, Shaw is the one who, as the song goes, put the Bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp.
Bomp2: Born in the Garage (Bomp/UT Publishing), edited by Suzy Shaw (his former wife) and Mike Stax, is the second compilation of the best writing from Shaw's various late, lamented fanzines. The first, Bomp!: Saving the World One Record at a Time (AMMO), was a hefty, handsome hardcover filled to the brim with archival photos, artifacts and contemporary essays that looked back on the times and music that shaped the magazines. Bomp!2 is a more Spartan affair, with pages from the fanzines reprinted as they originally appeared (some typed on an Olivetti and hand-cranked from a mimeo machine). This is not to say that Bomp!2 is any less entertaining or vital than Bomp!1; it may in fact be more useful as a reference tool. You are getting the original sources, my friends, some of which were, prior to these two anthologies, going for hundreds of dollars on eBay. You not only get profiles of bands and firsthand accounts of scenes that shaped them, you get "obsessively detailed" discographies and label listings that you can't get anywhere else. At $15.95, this may be the steal deal of the year in publishing.
Every one of the 312 pages of Bomp!2 contains a highlight, but among the most noteworthy are Ken Barnes' definitive piece on Sky Saxon & the Seeds and Barnes' equally detailed profile of the elusive Jack Nitzsche (this may be the only non-hostile interview the stranger-than-Phil-Spector Nitzsche ever gave); the British Invasion issue, reprinted in its entirety; the issue on California Surf Roots (ditto); and the continuing series on regional music scenes of the 1960s that covers Chicago, San Francisco, Michigan, Sweden (!), and Boston. "Bosstown in the Glory Years" will open (or reopen) some ears; it even contains a section on Connecticut bands like the Wildweeds, Van Dykes, Shags, North Atlantic Invasion Force and a Hartford group that went by two names, the Blue Beats and The # 1. All in all, a noble effort to chronicle scenes that shifted constantly like the blobs inside lava lamps.
Mike Stax, former lead singer of the Loons and an expat-Brit now living in San Diego, contracted the rock fandom disease from Shaw. The latter's obsessions are on ample display in every issue of the former's twice-yearly Ugly Things, subtitled "Wild Sounds from Past Dimensions," each issue of which is book-length and filled with similarly fan-charged chronicles of bands past, the more obscure the better. The latest 225-page issue (Winter 2009), for example, includes articles on the Masters Apprentices, Wildflower ("San Francisco's Lost Band"), loving remembrances of Sky Saxon, and tons of reviews of the greatest reissues, books and DVDs out there.
Stax jumped the shark with The Misunderstood. His 2-issue saga of this proto-psychedelic band swept through three continents and more epiphanies and crack ups than a Kesey acid test. Perhaps seeing the band as embodying the strange days of the 1960s, Stax expanded the story in Like, Misunderstood, a memoir co-written with band member Rick Brown. While the band's psychedelic rock sounds great — their "I Can Take You to the Sun" single is included on nearly every "nuggets"-style reissue — they never attracted the following a band called "America's Yardbirds" deserved. They were sidetracked, for starters, by the Vietnam War, from which Brown was a "stateless fugitive."
Open your ears to a new level of rock fandom by visiting bomp.com and/or ugly-things.com.
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