Who Put The Bomp! #13

Except for the couple of times I’ve written about fanzines that a friend personally xeroxed and assembled for me, my rule here at Fanzine Hemorrhage is to only blather on about zines I personally own. So, while I’m absolutely long in the proverbial tooth, that’d negate stuff like Who Put The Bomp! #13 that came out when I was seven years old; unless, of course, I went and paid some large multiple of its Spring 1975 $1 cover price in order to own it – which is exactly what I did. As discussed last time we looked at Greg Shaw’s fanzine, my goal is to try and hunt down as many of the pre-punk issues of this as I can find and/or afford. Recently, this one came into my hands, and I’d like to tell you about it.

I don’t know about you, but I have a weird fascination with what rock & roll nostalgia looked like for folks when rock music was not even two decades old. Elvis, Charlie Feathers and Carl Perkins were still alive. Even Keith Richards was still alive. So Shaw’s big thing here on the rockabilly revival is kind of a hoot; many of the late 50s/early 60s 45s are being dug up for the first time and thrown out into the world on cheap-looking compilations, and “record collecting” is really starting to become a thing as a result. Shaw talks about it in detail. You’ve seen some of these comps before; they’d look like this and used today they sell for about what they did new back then.

Of course, Happy Days was something of an instigator of all the 50s nostalgic hullabaloo, but what I’m more interested in is what record collecting looked like in 1975. Set sale lists, painstaking discographies with catalog numbers, and man oh man – the sorts of mind-melting finds in record stores that guys like me only dream about in 2024. Can you imagine having a 60s punk 45 want list and stumbling across all the original singles for a buck or less, the monsters that’d come out on the Back From The Grave comps ten years later? Anyway, if you were that guy – and you were almost certainly a guy – Who Put The Bomp’d certainly be required reading. 

Greg Shaw, an eternal optimist, surveys the world of rock music in early 1975 in an opening editorial, and sees that “70s rock is reverting to a 60s pop aesthetic”. His entire essay pushes against a narrative that 1975 is just as godawful musically as 1971 was, and hey, depending on one’s perspective, I suppose he was probably correct that “good times” were on the way. I’m just not sure it was a Beatles-esque 60s pop aesthetic that would lead the way in 1976-77. And honestly, looking at the record reviews in Who Put The Bomp! #13, it all just seems super grim to me, warmed-over glitter and boogie and pub rock. There’s a great review of the first AC/DC single, a total laff I’d never heard, and which you can watch an early video of here (do it!). He says “Their similarity to the early Easybeats is startling”. 

He also reviews the debut King Uszniewicz & His Uszniewicz-Tones 45, and of course totally gets it and loves it to death. There’s a big piece on Michigan sixties rock, including a discography of A-Square records who put out MC5 and Rationals singles, and a related bit on Bob Seger, where I learned to my surprise that he did the original of the Lazy Cowgirls’ “Sock it to Me Santa”, released by Shaw’s Bomp Records nine years after this fanzine. Seger’s B-side was called “Florida Time”, “the only known song to glorify Florida’s surfing scene”. You might need to listen to that too. 

Here’s another fun peek at the 1975 vantage point: Shaw writes that “The MC5’s best song, ‘Black to Comm’ was never recorded”. By the time I got into said band around 1985, that particular song had such the underground cache, total holy grail music that everyone wanted to hear. I’d wildly imagined this crazed, long, howling guitar blowout that’d be “Rocket Reducer” x100 and the total personification of “dope, guns and fucking in the streets”. Big disappointment when I finally did hear it, a fun rave-up but a huge sonic drop off from “Sister Ray” and “Fun House/LA Blues”. The MC5 never really had one of those, did they?

The single best thing in Who Put The Bomp! #13 is “The Rise & Fall of The Hollywood Stars”, written by Kim Fowley, and who happened to be the guy who sired them into existence and, for all I know, helped to screw them up and ensure their demise in one year. It’s really a fun read. I get this band confused with another flame-out band called The Hollywood Brats who had an entire book written about them that I see remaindered every now & again. After Fowley’s piece, a supposed 15-year-old Lisa Fancher follows up with her own piece about how special the Stars were over the course of their five gigs at The Whiskey. Here’s a good interview with her about those days. Next time I’ll try and give the 15th issue of Who Put The Bomp! a whirl, OK?