GREG SHAW was often described as a music entrepreneur, although he always preferred to call himself an “enthusiast”. As a journalist and later a record label proprietor, he may have lacked the high public profile of the British disc jockey John Peel. Yet in many ways, he performed a similar function on the American rock scene, a behind-the-scenes champion of new and obscure bands for more than four decades. His writing, it was once said, turned pop music from “ephemera into scripture”, while his label issued recordings by the likes of the Flamin’ Groovies, Devo and Iggy Pop. Both exerted a profound influence on the musical tastes of several generations of American fans.

He was born in San Francisco in 1949 and began collecting singles by Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Little Richard at an early age. It was the start not only of a record collection that would eventually total an estimated one million discs but of a fan mentality that he never lost. He also collected science fiction pulp magazines and his first venture into amateur publishing print was a fanzine called Entmoot, devoted to the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, which he printed on a second-hand mimeograph machine.

In 1966 he started a music fanzine called Mojo-Navigator Rock & Roll News to chronicle the nascent hippie scene then emerging in the Haight- Ashbury district of San Francisco. It started as a two-page mimeographed sheet but within months had expanded to 32 pages and colour printing to become the bible of a vibrant local music community that boasted the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and Country Joe & The Fish. Shaw was a poor businessman and the magazine soon folded. But by then a young entrepreneur called Jann Wenner had paid him a visit to quiz him about how to start a magazine. The result was Rolling Stone, the earliest issues of which bore a notable resemblance to Mojo-Navigator.

In 1970 Shaw launched a new fanzine called Who Put The Bomp? Taking its name from a well-known song by Barry Mann and Gerry Goffin, it swiftly acquired an influence in the music industry out of proportion to its circulation and inspired a boom in fanzines. On the strength of this success, in 1972 he was offered a job in Los Angeles as head of press for United Artists. Despite the demands of running the press office and acting as a spokesman for artists as diverse as Hawkwind and Bobby Vee, Shaw not only continued publishing Bomp! (as it became known) but also persuaded the label to launch a house magazine called Phonograph Record Magazine.

The name may have been uninspired but the content was anything but dull. Distributed free via leading radio station across America, it was not really a United Artists house journal at all, for it was not unusual for Shaw to put on the cover acts such as the New York Dolls, signed to the rival Mercury label. In effect, he ran it like a personal fanzine, with United Artists footing the bill for him to employ the best writers in rock, such as Lester Bangs and Nick Kent, to enthuse at length about all manner of obscure acts, cult favorites and new trends. At its peak, the circulation of 200,000 rivalled Rolling Stone.

In 1974 he met the Flamin’ Groovies and on learning that they could not get a record deal, offered to put out their single You Tore Me Down through the magazine. It secured the group a lucrative contract with Sire Records and Shaw became their manager. When they parted company in 1976, Shaw put his considerable energies back into Bomp!, expanding the magazine into a full-blown label, releasing records by such LA punk bands as The Weirdos, The Germs and The Zeros, as well as Devo and Iggy Pop’s first solo album, Kill City.

In the 1980s with contemporary music entering one of its periodic doldrums, Shaw turned to archiving little-known bands from the 1960s whose rough-hewn sound he dubbed “garage rock”. His hopes that his compilations from the era would prove a positive influence on new bands were fully realised and were in large part responsible for the “garage revival” that followed. Shaw turned producer, working with new bands like the Pandoras and the Miracle Workers and signing the Brian Jonestown Massacre and Spacemen 3. More recently, he saw vindication for the kind of unpolished music he had been championing all his life in the current supremacy of bands such as The Strokes and the White Stripes .

In 1998 he suffered kidney failure and underwent a transplant the following year. He is survived by his fourth wife Pheobe and their son.

Greg Shaw, music promoter, was born on January 31, 1949. He died on October 19, 2004, aged 55.