Greg Shaw Dies at 55 - Page 8

Running the club on weekends, publishing the club newsletter Caveman News every week, recording many of the bands he discovered there, and living in a big house with 6 other people from the scene, including his colleague Lee Joseph of Dionysus Records fame, gave Greg an exhausting, exciting lifestyle, filled with music, parties, an orgy of cultic activity in his favorite neck of the woods, and a wild series of romantic ups and downs. When it was all over, he found himself living alone again, coming out of a heart-wrenching divorce, and disenchanted with the new generation of kids, who had not seized the opportunity offered by the Cavern to create a vital new scene of their own, but had been content to criticize each other over the "correctness" of their hair and clothes. Rather than being the start of a new youth rebellion, the Cavern fizzled out in redundancy and ennui. Many of the regulars drifted off into Goth, Industrial and other scenes.

Greg had no interest in anything happening musically in L.A. at the time, but England seemed to offer some interesting bands, such as Spacemen 3. He ended up spending a lot of time, and even considered buying a flat and living there. With the help of his London friend Mike Spenser (of the Cannibals) he started a UK label called Ubik, and released a number of records that he hoped would create a niche for him in the British scene. But as fate would have it, just as Ubik was getting off the ground, Rough Trade was going bankrupt, and its fall took down the whole independent distribution industry. It was more than the fledgling label could survive, and despite well-received albums by the Modern Lovers, Sacred Miracle Cave, the Green Pajamas, and a Swedish band called the Submarine Prophets, Ubik was discontinued and Greg came back to California.

There was still nothing happening musically, but he contented himself to work with Spacemen 3, whom he had meanwhile signed. For the most part, however, this was the time when it became clear that CDs would be the future in music, and Bomp with over 200 albums on vinyl was very late getting into the new medium. It was Greg's job now to reissue the back catalog on CD, starting with the most popular titles, in every case creating new package designs, finding new bonus tracks, and taking every opportunity to improve the products as much as possible. It was a task to which he devoted himself throughout the early '90s, and which is only just complete.

This was also the time that computers entered the world of Bomp, with the purchase of their first Mac Plus in 1989. Greg realized he had to make up for lost time, and devoted most of a couple of years to learning the software and mastering the mechanics of creating album artwork and doing color separations via computer. This technical and often arcane knowledge came only with difficulty, but in the end it left him with a new function. Now his role at Bomp would primarily be as a graphic designer, which provided unforeseen creative satisfactions and an outlet for talents he'd never suspected, and the job of redesigning the label's backlog has kept him busy to the present day, although he has taken on a couple of new bands every year--most notably the Brian Jonestown Massacre, whom he has supported and encourage for some five years and who now seem poised for greater success. If so, it would be a first for Bomp. Also, in 1995 he found time to put together a 4-CD box set, for K-Tel's Era label, of the history of the Brill Building and its songwriting greats. The massive article and individual histories of the songs set a new precedent by approaching the music from the point of view of the songwriters, rather than the artists. Since this was probably his favorite period in music, it was a job he took on with gusto.

Article Author: Eric Olsen

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