We recently made the case for Poly Styrene, founder and lead singer of the early punk band X-Ray Spex, being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (RRHOF) in the Musical Influence category. Today, we’re going to turn to another rarely-discussed candidate – candidates, actually, as they were a couple – who deserve recognition in the Non-Performer category.
For someone who does what I do and who likes the kind of music I like, I owe more to Greg and Suzy Shaw than to anyone already inducted into the RRHOF.
The Non-Performer category of the RRHOF was one of two original designations created to honor vital figures in the emergence of rock whose careers as performers might not have been significant enough for inclusion. The Early Influences – subsequently renamed Musical Influences – was initially for the pre-rock-era artists whose work served as a foundation for rock & roll.
This influential couple deserves to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Non-Performers was designed to be a catch-all for record execs, producers, engineers, DJs (in the original sense of the term), and journalists who played a major role in building the genre.
The award is named for Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records. The first recipients were all legends – pioneering DJ Alan Freed, archivist/historian/producer John Hammond, and Sam Phillips, whose Sun Studio launched Elvis Presley. More than fifty other luminaries have been inducted since that inaugural class. Last year, filmmaker Suzanne de Passe, who was instrumental in transitioning Motown from a record label into a multimedia empire, became the latest inductee.
Greg Shaw grew up with rock & roll. He was a teenager in the mid-1960s when he began turning his passion for music into a potential career. It began with Mojo Navigator Rock & Roll News, a short-lived magazine in which he and his friends discussed current music. The 14th and final issue of Mojo Navigator came out in 1967. Shortly thereafter, Jann Wenner, like Shaw, a Bay area music lover, started Rolling Stone. Many historians cite Mojo Navigator as a major inspiration for Wenner.
While he was working on Mojo Navigator, Shaw met a teenage girl who had run away from her home in Palo Alto to become a part of the Haight Ashbury scene. Suzy (soon to be Shaw) worked with Greg on Mojo Navigator and then co-founded Bomp! (Originally called Who Put The Bomp). It was not the first music fanzine on the market.
That title might go to Mojo Navigator or to Paul Williams’ Crawdaddy!, which covered rock music from the east while Greg Shaw was tracking the Pacific coast. But Bomp!'s impact was enormous.
Between 1974 and 1979, Bomp! covered the music industry the way a smart, driven, passionate fan would. The Shaws identified new bands and new trends long before the mainstream media ever had an inkling. Though most were associated with the emerging punk rock movement, they covered whatever they found interesting.
Still in his early 20s, Greg had been writing and publishing magazines for more than a decade. That blend of youthful passion and veteran smarts made Bomp! the best of the early fanzines.
A quick inventory of Bomp!’s contributors reads like a who’s who of modern rock journalists. Lester Bangs wrote for Bomp! So did Griel Marcus. And Dave Marsh. And Richard Meltzer. They may have been regulars with mainstream giants like Rolling Stone and Creem, but they still contributed columns to Bomp!.
Greg handled the creative side, and Suzy managed the business. They maintained that structure when they closed the magazine in 1979 in order to focus on Bomp! Records, one of the original Indie labels of the punk era. Their reach extended far beyond punk into power pop and new wave, among other genres.
Greg’s extraordinary ear helped bring Devo, Iggy Pop, the Flaming Groovies, the Plimsouls, and the Romantics to the attention of the public – as well as to the bigger labels who snapped them up. With the Shaws at the helm, Bomp! remained a vital part of the indie music scene as countless other small labels came and went.
Greg passed away in 2004, He was 55. Suzy, who had divorced Greg but continued working with him, kept the label running, putting out reissues and compilations, along with new music. They even published a couple of books detailing the history of Bomp!, which also serves as an excellent history of independent rock & roll music in the USA.
Any fan of modern punk, pop-punk, power pop, new wave, or old-school garage rock owes a debt of gratitude to Greg and Suzy Shaw. As much as anyone, they helped make those genres of music legitimate topics of conversation. And anyone who writes a music blog on the internet today – I think at last count the number hovered around 12 billion – owes an even bigger debt.
Greg and Suzy Shaw were not alone in making what I do possible, but I don’t know of anyone who did more. And I can’t think of any non-performers more worthy of recognition in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.