Bootleg Vinyl

volcanic tongue selling this. some people on my facebook pissed about it. fancy limited bootleg that sells for hundreds of dollars? why not just make your own?

LaMonte Young
Drift Study/Poem For Tables, Chairs And Benches, Etc (1960)
The Amazing Horny Bone Recording Company H-12
Hand Cut Acetate LP
£229.99

Major score: original copies of this ultra-mysterious and hideously rare hand-cut acetate LP issued in an edition of only 25 (!!??) copies by The Amazing Horny Bone Recording Company. Two sides of higher-minded bliss w/incredible sound beamed direct from the source on some of the most historically potent minimalist/drone moves of the 20th century. The first sides is an excerpt from “Drift Study”, “31 1 69c. 12:17:33-12:24:33 pm NYC”, while the flip presents a portion of “Poem For Tables, Chairs And Benches, Etc (1960)”, “89 VI 8c. 1:45-1:52 am Paris Encore”. Unlikely to see these ever offered again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e8QKh3LOQY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt7aBjuDyPE

love how "incredible sound" and "acetate" are both part of the description. this is pretty lame, yeah.

A few of the indie record stores I used to buy from had prominent signs near the door that said "No, we don't sell bootlegs", despite the fact that they did sell some bootlegs. Was this just a common ploy to thwart law enforcement, or did they not realize that some of their inventory was indeed boots?

ironic signs, like people who have those "hippies use side door" signs

and the "no drugs on the premises"signs..

fancy limited bootleg that sells for hundreds of dollars? why not just make your own?

i've been asking myself this question a lot lately. is it really bad to bootleg oop expensive records? like, does it make you a bad person? a criminal? is it taboo? is it expensive? i see them every once in a while, i mean they seem harmless

The problem with bootlegs is that it will often make repressing that rare record properly an uneconomical adventure, however occasionally I have bought them because I can't afford the second hand price of an original, and it's very unlikely the original artist will be seeing any of that.

hmmmmm

interesting stuff.
i am so glad i never got into the whole vinyl thing.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/jun/15/vinyl-came-back-from-the-dead-and-so-did-the-bootleggers-inside-the-booming-business-of-knock-off-records

is it really that interesting though? its as old as time. people used to bootleg sheet music. scores. bootleg broadway and opera records are cool. from the 60s and 70s. such a limited audience.

all of this is very avoidable if you are into the whole vinyl thing.

re-sealed records though. that always makes me mad. when actual people now sell a record as sealed online or in a store. its kinda charming when i come across old reseals from the mafia days in the 70s though. at the very least, they made for interesting dollar bin fodder in the 70s and 80s.

but people now sealing them themselves? they should be hung from the highest yardarm.

yeah idk Scorpio records hello?

i imagine a lot of boots sound as good or better than the “official” stuff that gets pressed these days

yeah idk Scorpio records hello?

ding ding ding, so sketchy, what's crazy is that some of the older ones (i.e. mid-to-late 2000s) sell for like $20-30 or more now

some of the Sun Ra ones they do are so bad, like a needledrop of a particularly shitty Saturn pressing with noise reduction added

(specifically Discipline 27-11)

yeah I’ve bought Scorpio stuff that sounded like a nth generation cassette dub with the treble turned all the way down.. maybe the people spending 20-30 don’t realize that the album covers tend to not be reproduced very well on those (ime)

scorpio did deals with labels! i feel like i've brought this up a million times on ilx. they were not doing wholesale bootlegs of major label records for years. nobody can get away with that. i'm sure it was a very complicated arrangement. and some of them were great. i was always very grateful in the 90s for their Kak and Ganfalf reissues. and later all that Mainstream psych that they put out.

the labels were making so much money churning out bad CD reissues of all their catalog albums in the 90s that i don't think they really cared about the forgotten psych and funk records they owned.

So, the mystery is mostly solved. Rhino and Scorpio both had reissue programs, with Scorpio being the distributor for both. Scorpio, however, reissued music from lots of different labels, including -- most importantly -- Blue Note, which led to speculation that Scorpio reissues might be bootlegs or unofficial releases. David Cheppa assured me that is not the case. He told me that Scorpio paid for the rights to all its releases. Which makes sense, because otherwise, they would've been sued into oblivion by now. [I have seen some reports that Scorpio was sued by the estate of Sun Ra for alleged unauthorized releases, but have not been able to find any information about the validity of the charges or the outcome of the suit. However, I would note that a number of Sun Ra albums are still available on the Scorpio order site.]

https://vinyldiscovery.blogspot.com/2017/08/a-primer-on-rhinoscorpio-jazz-reissues.html#:~:text=Scorpio%2C%20however%2C%20reissued%20music%20from,that%20is%20not%20the%20case.

but yeah when they were selling, like, FIFTY sun ra reissues in their catalogue all of that was...who knows.

this explains scorpio's varying quality:

"What about the sound quality of these Rhino and Scorpio reissues? It's worth emphasizing that since Rhino reissues are all on labels owned by its parent company, it's fair to assume that they have access to the best available original source. [Of course, that doesn't mean that they always work from the original master tapes.] Scorpio, on the other hand, is dependent on the rights holder to provide the source material. Cheppa told me that quite often the source he worked with was not the original master but a later generation copy. He said that while he was occasionally tempted to use some EQ or decompression to improve the sound, Scorpio didn't want (or perhaps wasn't authorized by the rights holder) to do any remixing, so he simply made the best cut possible with the source he was given."

Interesting! The bad ones I’ve heard are so bad I can’t imagine it being a case of source tapes, feel like it must be the manufacturing.. hmm

isn't the more correct term pirate or counterfeit? my understanding has been that bootlegs are releases of live performances and previously unreleased material vs. illegitimate copies of commercial releases.

I prefer pirate/counterfeit, yes - bootlegs are unavailable stuff, ROIOs, etc.

and ty scott! very interesting.

yeah i don't know why i just say bootleg for anything dodgy. but yes pirated or counterfeit would be the better term.

plenty of grey area stuff in places like barnes & noble and big chains. russian jazz reissues. italian reissues. labels like DOL. there stuff usually sounds pretty bad. they will put out stuff that is public domain in europe and sell it wholesale to u.s. distributors where the music is totally not public domain but its probably too hard/not worth it for people to fight it. every u.s. distributor sells vinyl/CDs from euro labels that do not give a penny to the artists or their estates. but its not taylor swift or frank ocean so people mostly ignore it.

makes sense to me that music that old should be in the public domain. those pressings are really just like the cheapest shit though. there's no joy in owning no frills ass vinyl.

I kind of remember Scorpio ones retailing for like, $8.99. That made getting into vinyl fun, you can get two psych reissues for the price of a CD at the mall.

plenty of grey area stuff in places like barnes & noble and big chains. russian jazz reissues. italian reissues. labels like DOL. there stuff usually sounds pretty bad. they will put out stuff that is public domain in europe and sell it wholesale to u.s. distributors where the music is totally not public domain but its probably too hard/not worth it for people to fight it. every u.s. distributor sells vinyl/CDs from euro labels that do not give a penny to the artists or their estates. but its not taylor swift or frank ocean so people mostly ignore it.

― scott seward, Thursday, June 20, 2024 12:47 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

Is this the explanation for the crazy amount of different releases I see for Kind of Blue? Among others, but especially that one. I've seen so many copies of it at Amoeba with different, mostly terrible and cheap-looking cover art.

Yeah one of the funniest things you see is classic jazz records being issued by the labels scott mentions but with new covers, sometimes the new covers are even touted as selling points lol. It's funny that maybe the copywrites of the cover photos of these records are better protected than the actual music.