In Memory Of Greg Shaw

It’s hard to convey, to your average music fan benumbed from the inevitabilities of the live fast/die young rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic, just how bone-achingly sad I felt when I got word of Greg Shaw’s death, at age 55, of heart failure. After all, he was “just” a rock writer and “just” a guy who’d helmed an indie label—hardly a Hendrix or a Lennon or a Ramone.

By virtue of his good-heartedness and his willingness to share the musical wealth, Shaw was responsible in no small part for encouraging me to embark upon the career path that now, ironically enough, finds me penning his obituary.

In 1978, some friends and I started up a rock fanzine we optimistically called, in our visions of mounting a toxic-yet-erudite project, Biohazard Informae. We were energized by punk and new wave but had absolutely no clue whatsoever as to how to proceed once we’d written up our record reviews, tossed together a suitably “punk”-looking layout and gotten a few hundred copies of the damn thing photocopied. So I wrote Shaw, having been a subscriber to his own homegrown rock rag, Who Put The Bomp!.

I wasn’t sure if he’d write back, but he did. Maybe he discerned, amid my inexperience and general naiveté regarding the music biz, a fellow true believer. He succinctly parceled out some handy nuggets of advice (“Send your mag out to other fanzines and ask if they’ll be willing to swap copies, as well as mutually plugging each other’s zine”; “Send it to all the indie labels that advertise in Bomp! and politely ask for review copies of their records”) while cautioning me in no uncertain terms to never, ever entertain fantasies of getting rich from writing about rock music.

Whattaya know—he was right. Biohazard wound up joining a growing community of underground fanzines, and started getting those all-important freebies from record labels (I think the first promos I got in the mail were from Pere Ubu’s Hearthan label, one that Shaw had specifically mentioned). His other prediction came true as well. I definitely have not gotten rich. But I’ve continued to write about music because of something else he told me:

Do it because you love the music.

By that point, of course, Shaw was already a highly regarded and visible person in the rock world. He’d been a professional writer (for Creem, Phonograph Record Magazine and others) and went on to publish his own mags. He’d worked for the United Artists record label before founding his own label, Bomp!, in 1974, which was directly responsible for kickstarting a second career for the Flamin’ Groovies while championing all manner of non-mainstream sounds. (In 2002, MAGNET paid tribute to Shaw when, for our power-pop special in issue #56, we recreated the cover art of Bomp! magazine’s own ’78 power-pop special, issue #18.) Shaw was reportedly also the first American to witness firsthand the Sex Pistols when he traveled with the Groovies to London. After putting Bomp! on hiatus in 1979 and starting a new indie, Voxx, Shaw became one of the undisputed spearheads of the American neo-psychedelic/garage movement of the ’80s. Later, upon reviving Bomp! and embracing an extended family of indie labels that included Alive, Disaster and Total Energy, Shaw literally found himself standing astride an underground scene he’d always hoped would rear its head high enough to thumb its snotty nose at the American mainstream. Which, as evidenced by the latter-day ascendancy of groups such as the White Stripes, is exactly what happened. Shaw was at the top of everyone’s thank-you list.

Miriam Linna, writing in a recent Norton Records press release, told of being inspired by Shaw, first as a writer and then as an indie-label person. “The fanzine-to-label formula was repeated by loads of us Bomp! readers, fueled by Greg’s can-do/gotta-do gusto. We miss his advice, sincerity, and generosity. With his passing, we lost a guy who truly knew the meaning of friendship, fanship, enthusiasm, loyalty, all that good stuff.” Added Steve Van Zandt in an interview with the L.A. Times, “He was literally responsible for the contemporary garage-rock movement ... a real hero to me personally.”

I’ve often wondered whether individuals like Shaw entertain any thoughts—lofty, humble or otherwise—of their relative positions in the so-called rock ‘n’ roll hierarchy of cool. A day after learning he’d died, I talked to a friend of mine who’d been close to Shaw, and amid much commiseration and anecdote-sharing, she told me about calling him up shortly after her return from Little Steven’s International Garage Festival in August. The festival’s concert program had included, among all the band blurbs, a tribute to Shaw and his long-standing efforts over the years to promote the garage scene. She read the tribute over the phone to Shaw (who’d been unable to travel to the bash), and he responded with surprise. “Gee, that’s so nice,” he told her, obviously pleased, and without any trace in his voice of appearing to feel like it was his due.

It was, and still is, his due, of course. I just hope he knew how much he meant to so many of us. Over the years, I came to think of him as a peer and a co-conspirator, a fellow spy in the house of rock. Whenever I was seeking info on a band that might fall under Shaw’s purview, I knew I could call him and pick his brain, and if I needed a quote for an article in order to give it that extra voice of authority, he’d readily supply it.

My abiding memory is of a time back in 1984 when I revived a dormant Biohazard for a one-off entitled Son Of Biohazard Informae. The theme for the issue was to be contemporary rock writers talking about their craft, as it were: why they do it, and what keeps them motivated. Of all the people I contacted who wound up contributing—folks like Op magazine’s John Foster, Barney Hoskyns of the New Musical Express, Tim Anstaett from the legendary Offense Newsletter and numerous others—Shaw was the first one to write back with his own take on how things had evolved for him.

Drawing a distinct parallel between the work he’d done as a music journalist and what he was doing at the time as a label owner, Shaw observed, “My idea of a magazine was always as a tool to influence opinion, and I view a record pretty much the same way. Us independent-label guys rarely sell many records, so our records are more like fanzines—labors of love, hobbies, statements of our crackpot views which are so wildly against the prevailing cultural trend that we are laughed into the lunatic fringe, where we admire one another’s products and huddle together for warmth and the hope of forming a community of misfits.”

I was part of that community of misfits, too, and I’m proud to have known Greg Shaw in whatever small way I did. Shaw, who’d received a pancreas and kidney transplant in 1999, had not been in great health for some time, and after being admitted to the hospital for extremely high blood sugar, he developed complications that led to cardiac arrest. He passed away on October 19, and as word slowly trickled out over the next few days, I began receiving e-mails and phone calls from my fellow misfits, all deeply distressed at the knowledge that the community had lost another true believer—one of the truest of them all.

Have you heard the news? There’s good rockin’ tonight up at Saint Peter’s sock hop. The original mojo navigator himself is spinning the heavenly wax—Flamin’ Groovies, Fuzztones, Plimsouls, Romantics, Pandoras, Warlocks, Brian Jonestown Massacre, et al—and there’s nary a white-robed attendee who’s not shaking some serious action.

Who put the bomp, indeed.