Destination: Bomp!

DESTINATION: BOMP!

Writing in the liner notes for the Bomp! Records compilation album Destination: Bomp! (1994), Greg Shaw writes of the Pandoras: “Someday, when all the ‘Riot Grrrl’ hype has died down, I hope Paula Pierce gets the credit she deserves for being the first to break the taboo against blatant sexual aggressiveness in female performers.”

(December 2013)

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A few years later, Greg Shaw gave the Lazy Cowgirls a proper album (and one of their best), Tapping the Source (1987). Shaw even relaunched Bomp! Records to release it, since it didn’t really fit on his active Voxx Records label. He included one of their classic songs, “Can’t You Do Anything Right?” on the two-CD retrospective set called Destination: Bomp!, whose songs and liner notes also provide a concise history of the legendary Bomp! Records label that styles itself “the last of the independent record labels”.

In the liner notes for Destination: Bomp!, Greg Shaw writes: “The [Lazy] Cowgirls had made one badly misproduced album before Tapping the Source, the Bomp LP that captured for the first time their real strengths, the nonstop buzzsaw guitar attack and Pat Todd’s vein-bursting passion as a vocalist.”

(March 2017)

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Before long, I began locating albums by newer Bomp! artists, and I have nearly all of the compilation albums that have been released by Bomp! Records over the years: Destination: Bomp!, Straight Outta Burbank, Best of Bomp, Volume One, etc. Numerous UARB’s over the years have been Bomp! artists, and my post for May 2013 talked in some detail about this.

(June 2017)

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As Greg Shaw put it in the liner notes for the label’s retrospective double-CD Destination: Bomp! (1994): “To this day, Kill City is the single most important item in the Bomp catalog; but what made it extra nice is that James [Williamson] also threw in a big box of unlabeled tapes that turned out to be mostly demos and rehearsals from the Raw Power days onward – hours and hours of stuff that became the foundation for my long-term Iguana Chronicles project of documenting the unreleased side of this incredible band.”

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The Mystery Machine was formed in 1982 by veterans of several other like-minded bands like the Hedgehogs, the Crawdaddys, and Manual Scan. Bandmembers included Ray Brandes (vocals), Carl Rusk (acoustic and electric guitar), Mark Zadarnowski (bass guitar), Bill Calhoun (keyboards, saxophone), and David Klowden (drums). The band stayed together only about one month, but that was long enough to create one of my long-time favorites called “She’s Not Mine” that was included on three different Bomp! Records/Voxx Records compilation albums: Battle of the Garages, Part 2, The Roots of Power Pop, and Destination: Bomp!.

(September 2017)

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As I have written about previously, the first LP released by Bomp! Records was Kill City, representing music that Iggy Pop and James Williamson put together right after the Stooges broke up. As Greg Shaw tells the story in the liner notes for the double-CD compilation album, Destination: Bomp! in the entry for the Stooges song “I Got a Right”: “In 1976-77, Bomp was about the only established label in America that was actively pushing the new music. For a brief time, I could have had virtually any band that I wanted. It couldn’t last of course, but while it did, it was a real rush.

“But I never dreamed I could have the Stooges, until James Williamson showed up one day with a tale of woe: Iggy, fighting to kick drugs, had finished most of a great new album, but his rep was so bad no label would touch him. Even Sire [Records] had passed on Kill City. Was I interested?

“Even though I had to almost sell my soul to raise the needed cash, I wasn’t about to let this deal pass. To this day, Kill City is the single most important item in the Bomp catalog; but what made it extra nice is that James also threw in a big box of unlabeled tapes that turned out to be mostly demos and rehearsals from the Raw Power days onward – hours and hours of stuff that became the foundation for my long-term Iguana Chronicles project of documenting the unreleased side of this incredible band.”

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In the liner notes for Destination: Bomp!, Greg Shaw says: “‘I Got a Right’ . . . remains one of Ig’s best songs ever, and one he still performs regularly.” Both “I Got a Right” and “Gimme Some Skin” are included on The Best of Bomp, Volume One (as is the flip side of the first Bomp single, “Him or Me” by the Flamin’ Groovies); that’s where I first heard them.

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For whatever reason, although Bomp! Records received the box of tapes from James Williamson in 1977, and even though both “I Got a Right” and “Gimme Some Skin” were included on The Best of Bomp, Volume One (1978), the records in The Iguana Chronicles series itself were apparently not started until the early 1990’s. The 45 release on Bomp! Records with these two songs is dated 1991 (although Discogs shows a copy with a white label that has a hand-written date of December 21, 1990). The entry on “I Got a Right” in the liner notes of the 1994 compilation album Destination: Bomp! refers to the single that was released in 1977 on Siamese Records.

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When I read the description of The Iguana Chronicles in the liner notes for Destination: Bomp!, the first album that I ordered was Wild Love, since it really sounds like it was taken from “mostly demos and rehearsals from the Raw Power days onward”. In the best bootleg tradition, the other albums that I have not yet mentioned are all or mostly taken from live performances.

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This is taken from the write-up by Greg Shaw in Destination: Bomp! for the SS-20 song “Arnold Layne”: “Once in a while I get enthusiasms that few others seem to share, and this was one of those. I was in awe of Bruce Wagner’s ability to squeeze original ideas out of the boneyard of rock guitar cliché, and I particularly love what he did with old songs. We cut stuff by people including the Seeds, the Stooges, Love, and the Doors, in each case adding something new to songs I thought had already been done to perfection. Against this, SS-20 had Madeleine Ridley’s morbid, gothic poetry, a blend I found intriguing.”

(December 2017)