Greg Shaw, 55, founder of Bomp! Records and an underground legend in the music business, died October 19 from cardiac arrest in Los Angeles. Shaw’s 38-year career in music began as a teenager in San Francisco, where he edited a mimeographed rock ‘n’ roll mag called Mojo-Navigator Rock & Roll News. With contributions by the likes of Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus, it was a publication which competed for readership with fledgling issues of Rolling Stone. Shaw wrote for respected magazines Creem and Phonograph Record Magazine in the early ‘70s before publishing his own zine, Who Put The Bomp!, a venture which soon spawned Shaw’s record label. Featuring renegade acts like the Germs, the Stooges and the Flamin’ Groovies, Bomp! has been credited as being the headwaters of a 30-year stream of indie-rock recordings which shows no signs of drying up anytime soon. Veteran MAGNET staffers Fred Mills and Jud Cost have penned tributes to Shaw, a man influential in the careers of both.

Greg Shaw’s lucid, easygoing writing style did for me what all those two-chord punk-rock guitarists did for an entire generation of English kids in the mid-’70s. It made you realize there was no great secret here. Anyone with good taste in music, a keen eye, a reasonable command of the English language and, above all, a sense of humor, could get off his ass and do it, too.

I digested Shaw’s monthly musings more than 30 years ago in Creem and Phonograph Record as though they were utterances from a prophet of a new religion. Fueled by a couple beers, I finally dusted off my battered old Olympic typewriter from my college days and nervously fired off a letter to Shaw in 1973 about some long-forgotten Bay Area combo, enclosing the record for his perusal. As always, Shaw immediately wrote back, a warm and gracious letter that gave hope to someone who’d only daydreamed about writing record reviews. What a shock (and confidence boost) it was when he raved about the album in the next issue of Phonograph Record, with practically everything I’d written about the single appearing verbatim in his review.

With the punk revolution and his Bomp! record label in full flower, Shaw’s monthly ravings and droolings in the mimeographed Bomp Newsletter made sure you never missed anything groundbreaking in the avalanche of punk/new-wave records. Not only could you find about the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy In The U.K., you could immediately snag a copy from Bomp! mail-order within a couple weeks of its U.K. release. Want to subscribe to New York Rocker with its prophetic pieces on up-and-comers like Blondie, Television and the Ramones—or Alan Betrock’s indispensible record-auction mag, The Rock Marketplace? Here were the mailing addresses.

Shaw was not only my info pipeline to the volcanic world of ’70s indie rock, he supplied smoking-gun evidence, too, including plenty of classic waxings on his own label by the Flamin’ Groovies, 20/20, Stiv Bators and Iggy Pop—not to mention his long-running series of compilations of ’60s garage-rock obscurities, dubbed Pebbles in tribute to Lenny Kaye’s original Nuggets LP.

In 1983, I wrote Shaw again after he’d let drop that he might be resurrecting his long-dormant magazine Who Put The Bomp! Even though I’d never written anything of the kind, I volunteered a career retrospective of ’60s San Francisco jangle merchants the Vejtables, through an interview I’d just done (my first) with their lead singer, Jan Errico, after I ran into her at the Santa Clara county fair. Shaw readily agreed to print the story, but the magazine never got airborne again. The Vejtables piece finally saw the light of day as liner notes to their “debut” compact disc in 1996.

I bumped into Shaw again in the early ’90s at a North Beach S.F. nightclub appearance by original San Jose garage kings the Syndicate Of Sound. As well as marveling at the Syndicate’s unbridled power, Shaw was raving about then-current U.K. hotshots Ride, insisting that just listening to their neo-psych records could give him an orgasm. We’ll have to take that one on faith.

Though suffering from major health-related problems in the ’90s, Shaw was usually available for a Korean dinner or a dim-sum lunch with Suzy—his ex-wife who’s run the sprawling Bomp! label mail-order empire for decades—and me whenever I was in town. If it was just Suzy, we always talked about food; if Shaw came along, naturally, it was all music.

The last contact I had with Shaw was to solicit his always candid commentary for MAGNET pieces I was writing about Brian Jonestown Massacre and Beachwood Sparks, as well as a Warlocks story I did for Swedish magazine Sonic. They were Southern California combos he’d help launch thanks to his unflinching eye for naked musical talent.

Writer, scenester, record-company exec, ace A&R man, band manager, quotable rock ‘n’ roll expert and voracious record collector: They were all hats Shaw wore with ease. But the one thing I’ll never forget about the guy was his willingness to offer advice and encouragement to someone who aspired only to reach the bottom rung of the ladder, to become a rock ‘n’ roll writer. He literally helped change my life. And thanks to his lifelong legacy forged through Bomp! Records, he’ll be able to do the same thing for years to come for kids who haven’t even been born yet. If that’s not a life well-lived, I don’t know what is.

Next Page >>