Who Put The Bomp #9

Because I was four years old when Who Put The Bomp #9 came out in Spring 1972, I have exceedingly little firsthand knowledge of the rocknroll fanzine scene of the time that this was a part of. Clearly, and as I’d imagined, it’s a leading light in a much larger sea of underground, home-produced fanzines being produced by rock maniacs across the US and UK. Editor Greg Shaw gets into it by reviewing many action-packed fanzines of the era like Alan Betrock’s Jamz, which “has a good section on punk rock (Terry Knight & Pack, Shadows of Knight, Vagrants)”, as well as Andy Shernoff’s Teenage Wasteland Gazette. I’ve sadly never seen either, but one day I shall. There’s another one called Bedloe’s Island that you can read about here while also observing my own 90s fanzine being slagged in the process. It’s only now that I’m coming to realize how fertile fanzine-dom was in the early 70s, and that maybe punk didn’t actually need to happen after all.

This one’s far more lo-tech than the Who Put The Bomp issues I previously bantered with you about here and here. Shaw is living in Fairfax, CA, which is still my favorite place in Marin County and located about 35 minutes north of my San Francisco home. He says at the outset “And don’t bother ripping up this magazine – I’ll send you a complete set of photos plus cover for 25¢”. I wonder if the offer still stands? He then has an editorial apologizing for this not being the promised “English invasion issue”. That would come out over a year later. He’s also warning folks that Who Put The Bomp isn’t usually so oldies-oriented as this issue is. They were actually calling late 50s rock “oldies”, even in 1972 – how about that. What do you call the music of 2009, Times New Viking, Grass Widow, Fabulous Diamonds and whatnot?

Gene Vincent has just died, and thereby gets his own piece. Shaw has also just found out about Wanda Jackson, someone whom he believes “may be a name familiar to you only as a country & western singer”. (I just so happen to greatly prefer the Wanda Jackson country years to her often silly rockabilly stuff, although this video is pretty great). The Vincent thing reminds me of this fanzine’s major contribution to furthering record scholarship, which is assembling a painstakingly complete discography with catalog numbers and the works. Rip Lay does the Wanda Jackson piece, and he talks about how smitten he became of her from her record covers and how she thereby supplanted Darlene from the Mickey Mouse Club in his heart. 

Mike Saunders does a phony interview with a rockabilly artist he invented from whole cloth called The Famous Alaska King Crab. Couldn’t this guy take a breath and be serious, even for a minute? There are other features on Harmonica Frank and “Elvis in Print” (books about Elvis), Greg Shaw goes deep on reissues, which have started to flood out in 1971/72 – even one with Conway Twitty’s early rocknroll material. He reviews the much-maligned Hot Poop record, who were a bunch of students from my alma mater of UC-Santa Barbara who recorded one record and received an absolute stonewalling as a result.

The excellent and lengthy letters section calls attention to previous pieces in Who Put The Bomp by Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus, and contains letters to the editor penned by Eddie Flowers, Kim Fowley and a dude named Doug Hinman, whom I’ve come to find published a Kinks book thirty years ago. There’s much parsing in these many pages about what real rock & roll is, and little if any complaining about the year 1972 and whether or not it’s dead. There are far too many records to collect and reissues to celebrate for that kind of talk.