Greg Shaw was born in San Francisco in 1949. He grew up with rock & roll,
hearing it on the radio from early childhood. As soon as he could afford to, he
began buying and collecting 45s by
Elvis,
Fats Domino,
Little Richard, et al.
By the time he was in high school he had hundreds of them, but that wasn't the
end of his penchant for collecting stuff. He had a room full of science fiction
pulp magazines going back to the '20s. As an active member of SF fandom he went
to conventions, was friends with a lot of authors including Philip K. Dick and
Robert Silverberg, and found a social life among fans many years his senior
that he didn't have with kids his own age. The mindset of "fandom" took hold,
giving him a lifelong preference for dedicated amateurism (not to mention an
ironic sense of humor combined with a chronic shyness that's commonly
misunderstood, or mistaken for aloofness). And as a fan, of course he bought
himself a mimeograph machine (for younger readers, that's a hand-cranked drum
full of ink that you cover with a stencil, basically a sheet of wax that must
be cut on a typewriter, to print up your own writings. In the days before xerox,
this is how fanzines were made, right up to sometime in the early '70s) and
started cranking out zines.
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When he got out of high school, he'd already published some 200 zines, and been
written up in The Saturday Evening Post for his zine Entmoot, one of the first
devoted to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. But in 1966, these interests took a
back seat to the music scene that was starting to erupt in San Francisco's
Haight-Ashbury.
With a couple of school chums, he started hanging out and getting to know the
bands on this scene. Living on his own now and supposedly attending college, he
started a new fanzine devoted to what was then still a very small scene, in
which everyone knew each other. Mojo-Navigator Rock & Roll News started as a
2-page gossip sheet and by summer's end was up to 32 pages and multi-color
printing. It was more than a year before Rolling Stone was to begin (borrowing
its early format completely from Mojo, it might be noted) so it filled a void
and became the bible of the local music community. Soon his friends included
people like Janis Joplin, Chet Helms, the
Charlatans, the
Grateful Dead, and
Country Joe
& the Fish. He was able to meet many of his musical heroes, from
Jimi Hendrix
to Syd Barrett.
He also took an interest in the cultural aspects of what was going on: the drug
culture, the writings of people like Ginsberg, Burroughs and Watts, and certain
radical thinkers in the new generation. He didn't much care for the Oracle, but
he was active in the same circles and gave them advice when they started. When
the Underground Press Syndicate was launched, he was a founding member. He
corresponded with John Sinclair in Detroit and Oz Magazine in England, and
other alternative media moguls around the world, comparing notes and networking
ideas. He was a member of the Communication Company, who did some very radical
guerilla publishing in the Haight (with a mimeograph, of course). Jann Wenner
became a fan of his, coming around to ask questions about how to start a
magazine. He tripped with Tim Leary. He partied way too much. The magazine grew
too big to manage, and folded. College was long-forgotten.
He moved out of San Francisco in 1968, first to Marin County, where he had
further adventures not particularly relevant to this chronicle (though
excellent grift for the autobiography he'll probably never get around to), and
then to Los Angeles in 1972, when he received a job offer to work at United
Artists. To backtrack a bit, after a couple years apart from the music scene,
the itch came back and he started writing reviews and articles for the rock
press. There was an explosion of rock magazines at the time, and he was a major
contributor to them all, from Fusion to New York Rock Press to Vibrations to
Creem, of which he became West Coast Editor, and wrote a monthly column devoted
to singles, from about 1971 to about 1974. In the meantime he had launched
another fanzine, called Who Put The Bomp. Starting in 1970 from the old Mojo
subscription list, it picked up new readers after Ed Ward wrote a glowing
article about it in Rolling Stone, and became a favorite of rock writers and
people at record companies. This led to the job offer.
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The job at UA was to be Assistant Head of Creative Services, under "house
freak" Marty Cerf. This meant, among other things, writing all the artist bios
and press materials (for everyone from
Bobby Vee to the
Hawkwind), running the
press office, organizing reviews and interviews for UA's artists, even writing
radio spots. On top of these normal chores, Marty had the idea of starting an
in-house magazine that would cover the whole spectrum of music, not just the UA
roster, and hire the best writers to give it credibility. Greg was to be the
editor. Phonograph Record Magazine grew to have a circulation around 200,000
(rivaling Rolling Stone for a couple years) distributed around the country via
a network of leading FM rock stations, and because it was given away free as
promotion for the stations, there were no commercial considerations and Greg
was able to turn it into a kind of fanzine, covering all kinds of obscure
music, cult favorites, critics' bands and new trends. The glam trend was very
popular in its pages, and it was one of the first to put the
New York Dolls on
the cover. Writers like Lester Bangs, Nick Kent, and other "stars" loved it
because they could write about whatever they liked, and all this glory
redounded to the good name of UA, who were footing quite a large bill for it
each month.
In addition to editing and art-directing PRM, Greg was also typesetting it and
doing all the paste-ups. You might think he would be busy enough, but somehow
he managed to continue publishing Bomp at the same time (though he never
managed more than 2 or 3 issues per year of his "quarterly" schedule). There
had been some substantial pieces in the zine already, like Lester Bangs'
classic 70-page rant on the
Troggs, (written on a 3-day binge of amphetamine
and booze and cheap sex with the alcoholic next door, at Greg's house in Marin
in 1971), but after the move to L.A., Bomp expanded considerably, and began to
feature lengthy discographies and rock history pieces, exhaustive reviews of
obscure 60s records and new things of interest, and beginning The Encyclopedia
of British Rock, an A-Z history of everything recorded in England from 1960 to
1970, with band bios, photos, and complete discographies. (It only got up to
"F" before the magazine folded, but it's still more complete in some respects
than anything else published to date). In addition, songwriters like Mann &
Weil, Pam Sawyer and Jackie DeShannon were profiled (with complete song-ographies),
a lengthy surf discography was published, histories of the recording scenes of
Sweden and Holland, and on and on. In 1975, Kim Fowley sponsored a contest in
Bomp's pages to assemble a band he hoped to make "the female Beatles", the
result being the Runaways.
During the early 1970s, rock was in one of its serious lulls, so many were
looking to the past for inspiration, discovering stuff like rockabilly and doo
wop; and in the pages of Bomp, the '60s began to take on its lustre as a source
for lots of great music nobody had heard yet. There were other collectors'
zines, such as Rock Marketplace, doing similar things, but Bomp held a special
place at the hub of a network of thousands of serious rock fans who had nowhere
else to turn for a sense that they were part of some kind of community that
cared about the real stuff. Bomp's always-popular letter column kept expanding,
and became a meeting ground for all sorts of people: names from John Peel to
Gene Simmons can be found in those back pages, and when punk rock started up,
the people who started it emerged from that same community. It was a special
time, in which a magazine like this could make a difference. Such a time will
never come again.
