Do you buy bootlegs?

As to unavailable stuff... sometimes. I find it actually much easier (not to mention cheaper) to trade with other fans than to "buy a bootleg". The latter just smacks of someone trying to make a quick buck off a fan, which I find even more revolting than record company practises.

Trading is the way to go. Though really, MP3s have made the idea of "rare or unreleased tracks" somewhat of a non-entity these days.

As if you hadn't guessed this is a desperate appeal (But I'm not prepared to spend massive amounts of money, OK!)

This is where mp3's come in handy. You can sample the live songs and rarities without having to pay $30+ -- and if it's crap, no harm done to the wallet. And there's not even any ethical questions, because artists never receive any money from bootlegs to begin with.

Big Black - Death Wish (notable for the part where Steve says "the guy who just called me a fag bastard and spit in my mouth... can come back to the room with me"); and

The Stooges - Rubber Face (if only for "Cock In My Pocket")

someone tell me a classic unreleased song.

Pink Floyd: Oenone. Labyrinth. Violent Sequence. Low: "I Can't Lose You". There are others.

I have about 200 bootlegs or so -- mostly by Pink Floyd and Low. I stopped buying them a long time ago; it's much easier -- not to mention considered ethically preferable -- to trade for them, though I haven't traded in ages either. I sometimes tape the shows I attend, and have often regretted it when I haven't.

It's terribly easy to make smug comments about obsessives and the like. But at the end of the day, I generally find that the people who are passionate enough about a band to collect bootlegs (if only a handful of them) are more rewarding people to know, at least musically. Of course it can get ridiculous, but there's a certain joyfulness in the music there -- one that I often find lacking in those people who have seemingly encyclopedic CD collections or comprehensive knowledge of contemporary pop, but who don't really seem loving or reverent about any of it. I know too many of the latter, and find their outlook to be crushingly depressing.

It's a bit strange for me to be in the role of apologist for musical obsessives -- my own tastes are relatively eclectic; certainly, as an intermittently professional musician, I've certainly had to wear a variety of hats. I think I unfairly allowed other issues to spill into your thread; reading ILM lately has, to be honest, depressed me, partly because I've been seeing very little love of music in the posts I've read, but a whole lot of pseudo-hip oneupsmanship and people taking the piss out of each other. There are too many people who seem to treat music as some sort of confectionery for their amusement; having dedicated my life's work (or at least a huge portion of my time and studies) to music, it's an attitude that's absolutely inimical to me. Perhaps, being a sometime academic, I'm a bit biased, but I can't help but believe that there is an association between a person's understanding of the craft of music and the depth of criticism they're able to offer...and I think that the time and love required to gain that understanding precludes making the kind of snap judgments that all too often seem endemic. So when I speak of being "reverent" about music, that's a measure of what I mean -- appreciating the miraculousness of it, both by appreciating the craft and by being responsive to its aesthetic power and "affect" (meaning, among other things, the state of ecstasy and awe that truly great music can inspire in us). I mean passion, and I also mean humility.

Anyway, that's all an aside. I completely agree that you can "admire say, your 20 favourite albums by 20 different bands, with as much genuine love as you lavish on your whole Pink Floyd collection." When I posted my own list of albums that had a profound effect on me to my website, there were about 30-35 albums by 20-25 different bands/musicians. I myself don't own all of the official releases by any band -- I was nearly there with Low for a while, but then they took a new direction which didn't interest me and I stopped being as assiduous about picking up their various releases. And I'm certainly not going to spend a dime on Momentary Lapse of Reason or any other "new" Pink Floyd when I could spend that money checking out something else that might actually be good!

Far be it from me to imply that breadth of knowledge and taste is a bad thing (I think it's crucial, and musical tunnel vision is deadly -- and deadly dull). I just grow frustrated when it seems to substitute for depth, and understanding. I've made plenty of asinine, ignorant statements about music in my life -- "Miles Davis sucks", "only shitty rap has scratching on it", etc. -- and of course, we always despise most in others those faults of which we have evidence in ourselves...;-)

Anyway, I was playing it and Bollocks, to work out what I really really felt abt the latter, and I realised that Spunk isn't actually that good at all. Not only does it NOT have the fabby million-fold guitar, but Lydon's singing is just really sloppy and terrible. It only functions as a fuck-the- industry gesture, and a pretty tossy one at that.

I don't think it would do any good to start pointing fingers at specific people, but I don't like the attitude of "it is SO obvious why so-and-so sucks and why anyone who cares about them is an idiot that I see no reasons why I should bother explaining myself". I know I've done it myself on occasion, and I'm trying to watch the smug dismissals now. They just say more about the person making the statement than about the thing being criticized.

i have a few pink floyd/syd barrett bootlegs, all from ca. 66-71 or so. having songs like "scream thy last scream" and "vegetable man" is really, really nice, but some of the barrett stuff (particularly the _madcap cries_ LP) is almost too disturbing to listen to. sort of mental illness pornography or something; the version of 'octopus' he did with soft machine was pretty cool though, as they were probably the only band that could operate in a sympathetic mode to his manic/completely inconsistent compositional ideas around then.

someone mentioned les rallizes denudes - and they are bloody amazing, i'd consider bootlegging them myself, if i had the money. i only have the complete disc 1 of _live 77_ (thank you, napster!) and some scatterings of unrelated tracks, and it's just amazing. definitely a spiritual ancestor of fushitsusha and the whole jap-psych scene...

Would it be really facetious to point out that the Velvet Underground were 1) art students 2) trust fund kids 3) well, none of them were French Canadian, but one of them WAS Welsh, which is surely much worse...? ;-)

That said, it is a rubbish album...nearly as bad as Regeneration

The only bootleg I still own is "The Re-releases by MBV" 7", only because the original 12" of "The new record" costs so damn much on eBay. The bootleg versions are not really a very adequate substitute.

Bootleg I would like to see: the unreleased/"scrapped"(?) post- Loveless MBV recordings.

I seem to be picking up the odd bootleg these days. two volumes of dark side of disco, some of those artist rare 12" mixes compilations, re-edit things. funny that all the talk on this thread was on rock boots when it seems really ingrained in dance culture - or at least certain strands of dance culture. sorta seems like more of a blind eye is turned there, too. maybe I'm wrong on that.

your null fame OTM about buying velvets boots if they were out officially. whatever happened to that mooted series of those? they did the quine tapes box and then nothing more. other things I'd buy in a heartbeat: les rallizes denudes, roxy music BBC/peel sessions

Just a handful of notables off the top of my head:

PJ Harvey's 1993 Peel Session: Recorded post-Rid Of Me but before she sacked her original band, with badass horns by Gallon Drunk. "Primed and Ticking", "Claudine The Inflatable One", and "Naked Cousin" are cool, sexy, and fucking scary. She also did a short but sweet acoustic set at a radio station in '92, you can grab "Dress" here: http://popdrivel.blogspot.com/2006/05/pj-harvey-early-fm-performances.html

Black Sabbath Paris 1970 & Asbury Park 1975: Both pro-recorded, a handful of tracks were released on a live comp, but if you want to hear them in their entirety you've got to get w/ the bootlegs. After grabbing the Paris show I went on a tear and tracked down every 70s Sabbath bootleg I could get my hands on. These two pwn all others like a dwarf's feet crushing a miniature Stonehenge.

Misfits @ Max's Kansas City '78: Most Misfits live recordings are dire, but this Static Age-era rarity features the band before they devolved into a spastic hardcore blur; Glenn actually sings, the band actually rocks.

Kate Bush's 1976 Cathy Demos aka Phoenix Recordings: An hour of Kate alone in a room with a piano, recorded prior to her record deal. Jaw-dropping stuff, loads unreleased, and I prefer the stripped-down simplicity over her ornate studio albums. An enterprising fan cleaned up these recordings, which you can download here: http://www.dongrays.com/kate-bush/mp3/

Neil Young @ the Bottom Line 1974: Young hops on the stage unannounced after a Ry Cooder set and performs an impromptu set of downbeat Ditch Trilogy material.

Godspeed You Black Emperor 9/9/99 @ Middle East MA: Flattening! I've made several people GYBE fans by slipping them this show; their albums can be spotty affairs.

Black Flag 1982 Demos: 5 piece w/ Rollins, Ginn, Dez, Dukowski, and Chuck Biscuits, silenced by legal hassles but still stomping through career-best versions of My War and Slip It In material. If only this lineup could've recorded the follow-up to Damaged.

And I must confess the hubub over Arcade Fire struck me as entirely unreasonable until I heard a couple of their live shows.... gah, that's enough for now...

i used to do the same thing w/ nirvana - the outcestide series compiled most of the rare stuff/demos that later came out in the nirvana boxed set

Spunk's been available as a bonus disc with Bollocks for about ten years!

Or ilxors. Cuz i wouldnt mind hearing that myself.

I just bought some God Machine bootlegs actually. 1st bootlegs i've bought in several years.

as is obvious from my blog, i love this kind of stuff, but have no real sorrows about seeing the bootleg "business" go down the drain. a very shady line of work, though there were clearly some labors of love. My friend has the Genuine Live 1966 Dylan thing, and it's as well put together as any official release -- maybe more so.

i agree with J0hn -- bootlegs kind of made record shopping exciting back in the day -- you never knew what sort of stuff you might find. and there was sort of the added thing of "if i don't buy this now, i may never see it again." of course, as a kid, i rarely had the $$$ to actually buy these things. but they were fun to see -- and now you can pretty much get any of them via a quick google search.

I only bought one of these, ever, or rather two: a couple of volumes of Dylan's Basement Tapes, and despite buying them in Toronto when the US dollar was strong against the local currency, it still broke the bank. Yet it felt great to be in on the cult. Still, it's better now. For instance, I was just feeling nostalgic for Patti Smith's I Never Talked to Bob Dylan, an awesome 1976 live set. Now I'm downloading it. I'll take that over nostalgia (well, assuming the show holds up).

that's the Swedish show? it is killer. def. one of the best Patti bootlegs.
anyway, one of the arguments i read for the bootleg industry was that w/o an influx of cash (people buying bootlegs), there wouldn't be new stuff coming out (like they couldn't buy Dylan outtakes from collectors). I don't know, still shady. And there's still plenty of stuff coming out! You just don't have to pay $60 for it.

yes! It's a show from Stockholm.

There was also the fact that many bootlegs were real labours of love, put together with greater regard for design and packaging than official releases. My favourite boot of all time is Peter Hammill's Skeletons of Songs, a recording of a superb 1978 solo show in Kansas City. Never managed to snap up one of the 100 copies of the original vinyl box set, but wasted no time in picking up the CD reissue, with a gorgeously drawn poster thrown in.

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bootleg-Secret-History-Recording-Industry/dp/0312142897";>this book</a> is pretty great - has some amazing albeit hard-to-believe stories about how some people got ahold of their source tapes. breaks down who all the major players were, all more detailed than you'd think possible and yet the mystery & allure still survives.

it's nice that you don't have to be rich to hear stuff, no doubt. but the whole secret-society aspect, I miss it - a recording without some cool framework is missing something for me. and some of those frameworks had their own vibe, coded messages & all. anagram otm - the Who's Zoo bootleg is like all-time:

http://www.thewho.org/us/zoof.jpg

a bootleg with that cover! so awesome!

yeah, no doubt -- so many of those things were made by serious fans of the (often somewhat obscure) artists, and I'm sure that no one got rich off of a lot of that stuff. Like that Double Exposure Television bootleg, for example ...

when I was a teenager I'd come into NYC and go to Venus Records and It's Only Rock-n-Roll and Second Coming and all the others and there was NOTHING cooler then some mysterious weird bootleg. It's Only Rock-n-Roll had a whole wall of tapes with these photocopied sleeves that really fascinated me. I got a few pink floyd ones. I now know they were the same as various vinyl bootleg releases.

Not totally sure I get the appeal of lossless files of bootlegs! So you can hear every little detail of a 4th generation transfer of a tape of a record of a tape?

My favorite, but now long lost bootleg, was Syd Barret's Vegetable Man, which used Robyn Hitchcock's cartoon for a cover and included most of the stuff that would end up on Opel a few years later.

The other fave is/was Dark Side of The Moo. Floyd boot w/ a faux Atom Heart sleeve containing the early singles, the Zabriskie Point stuff, Point Me At The Sky, etc. It was pretty essential to me and I still have it and still play it and bring it out when DJing non-dance parties. Not going to find an Apples and Oranges 7" any time soon...

That is the thing, though. Like, those Barrett-era Floyd boots of acetates & out-of-print stuff, if you didn't live in New York, you could forget finding 'em. The one or two L.A. places that had 'em 1) wouldn't even show 'em to you unless you were somehow connected and 2) wanted hundreds of dollars for 'em. 2001, yahoo groups, overnight I have 3 CDs of Barrett acetates for the cost of blanks & postage. Would I like the original boots, would they be cooler? No doubt, but I was never going to hear this stuff that had once been legitimately released? not a chance.

"was I ever," I meant to write

There were a few places in the LA/SoCal area you could get bootlegs at least up til the mid-90s -- Go-Boy in Redondo Beach, Mayhem in Santa Monica, I think a place in Westwood ... but yeah, it was always mind boggling to go into those places and see these tantalizing bootlegs ... and then walk out empty handed, wondering if you'd ever get to hear the music on them. One of the crazier things when I moved to the east coast was finding the dude in the village who just had a table set up with tons of tapes of bootlegs for like $6 a pop. Wonder if he's still there.

and while we're on the subject of great bootleg cover art
http://dkpresents.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/chromedreamsfront.jpg

and (mentioned above)
http://static.rateyourmusic.com/album_images/789c37d012f711ef6d68dd5357ab41f4/100878.jpg

http://cdn1.ioffer.com/img/item/434/767/96/o_FEb_13_005.JPG

of course, for every cool bootleg cover there were about a bazillion horrible ones ...

I used to have this one:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Eb8o3VHuieY/SlBiLrlNtxI/AAAAAAAACMU/F_wbu4kXiNg/s1600-h/The+Sisters+Of+Mercy+-+cryptic+Flowers+%281984%29-Front.jpg

dammit

here anyway: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_Eb8o3VHuieY/SlBiLrlNtxI/AAAAAAAACMU/F_wbu4kXiNg/s1600-h/The+Sisters+Of+Mercy+-+cryptic+Flowers+%281984%29-Front.jpg

Also essential bootleg material for me, a year or 3 after the Floyd stuff, was Joy Division's RCA recordings and stuff like "The Drawback" and "As You Said".

But back in the classic rock days...also the Jim Morrison/Jimi Hendrix recording.

I think vinyl bootlegs are alive and well, if you know where to look. I was vinyl shopping at a my local second hand emporium today (Scored a pristine Bauhaus "Sky's Gone Out" double with " "Press The eject . .") and they must have had a couple dozen nicely packaged "limited live LPs" by name punk and post-punk acts. I'd previously picked up a live Birthday Party set "The Front row is not for the Fainthearted . ." there, with a rare image of Nick snuggling up to Lydia on the cover. Sounds just fine, too.

and this may be a different thread all together, and in fact it already is, but bootlegging of hip-hop/disco/soul etc is pretty huge on vinyl. Where you find people still buying vinyl, you find people buying vinyl bootlegs!

yeah, that sort of seems like the way for bootleggers to stay in business -- make a cool looking vinyl product, rather than CDs. like if you did a vinyl version of the aforementioned Double Exposure bootleg, you'd probably sell a bunch ... That's how you'd get collector scum, anyway.
I remember seeing this when I was a kid (for like $200) and wanting it so bad
http://www.popsike.com/pix/20060130/4828908059.jpg

that thing is legendary

There were a few places in the LA/SoCal area you could get bootlegs at least up til the mid-90s

Rhino in Claremont used to have a small selection. Toxic Shock in Pomona was a good source of punk bootlegs... I was very happy to find a copy of Dead Kennedy's A Skateboard Party there.

PDQ Records in Tucson was the best bootleg source, but with the most fascist staff anywhere.

yeahhhh, Rhino might've been where I saw that Ten of Swords thing ...

bootlegging of hip-hop/disco/soul etc is pretty huge on vinyl.

yeh, and sometimes its the original record company thats doing the bootlegging! have heard stories about well known dance labels claiming to have only pressed say 2000 copies to the artist, but on the quiet pressing up thousands more & taking 100% of the profit.

The most interesting/intriguing thing about that bootleg article mentioned above is that it seems to allude that Scorpio is the one with those Velvets soundboard-tapes from the Matrix that had edited highlights leaked a couple of years back... doesn't look like we'll be hearing those in their entirety any time soon...

Springsteen is an example of an artist who has been extremely well served by bootleggers. Just one or two official live albums in the 35-year career of someone whose live shows are legendary, one of those being a 5LP set? It's not hard to see why the bootleggers moved in. And a lot of them made great recordings. There are some labels that pretty much guarantee good sound quality, e.g. Crystal Cat.

yeah that was a very tantalizing aside thrown in there. I loved how the implication was that its lack of release was the consumers' fault for not buying $50 bootlegs anymore.

xp

and yeah the Springsteen 1975 Main Line show is unadulterated classic.

Not to mention the Winterland Night New Years Eve show from 1978 or thereabouts.

The most interesting/intriguing thing about that bootleg article mentioned above is that it seems to allude that Scorpio is the one with those Velvets soundboard-tapes from the Matrix that had edited highlights leaked a couple of years back... doesn't look like we'll be hearing those in their entirety any time soon...

I really got into Beatles bootlegs in high school since they were all unreleased and alternate studio tracks. I always wondered why my favorite song, the psychedelicate gem 'Peace of Mind', wasn't included on the Anthologies and it turns out it might not even be The Beatles. I imagined it was recorded during the trip to India, but its origin is as mysterious as its sound. You decide:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1piwyY8XnQ

yeah there were a whole bunch of Beatles "outfakes" -- one was so convincing that Yoko Ono tried to have it published under Lennon's name, I think.

Until Let it Be Naked came out, the only way to hear those essential pre-Spector Let It Be tracks was on boots. Plus, if you want to see Let It Be the film, it's still a question of tracking down the bootleg (except that you can download it, of course).

those beatles ultra trax and unsurpassed masters series (they essentially have the same things on them from what I remember) are completely necessary and vital. their existence directly lead to the anthology packages and they still better those releases in a lot of respects (fewer outfakes, etc); the history of how all those tapes got out in the 80's is pretty crazy. I"m pretty sure the popularity of the purple chick releases (interesting in that there wasn't actually any kind of shill label behind them) spurred the final release of the remasters.

In the tiny world that is post-punk obscurities, I was responsible for some accidently misdirection. When music by the Homosexuals was about the rarest thing you could find, a writer named Richard Mason sent me a CD-r of Homosexuals-related music that Johan Kugelberg had burnt for him. It included a cool version of Faust's Rainy Day Sunshine Girl. I then took that CD and stuff I had gotten from a few other sources, some releases but also internet-based traded CD-rs and tapes and made a 2 CD compilation that I then traded and shared with friends and other "fans". I was unaware of soulseek and the like and eventually this stuff spread around enough that people were talking about how cool it was that the Homosexuals did that Faust cover. A few years later as Chuck Warner was putting together the Astral Glamour collection he asked Bruno from the band about it and he said he had no idea, then he asked me about the sources, which finally ended with Chuck asking Johan and Johan saying "oh that was some band of mine that I threw on the CD for Richard to here" or something.

dan, to address your question of why I want lossless boots, it's simple. I don't like the sound of MP3s and they are often poorly encoded (tylerw excepted!). this makes a difference even if the source quality is less than ideal.

Springsteen totally turned a blind eye to it, for sure (the Winterland show famously starts with the "roll your tapes!" proclamation). Prince, on the other hand, has done a shockingly good job policing stores, the net, the shows - for a dude as bootlegged as him, it's sort of hard to track down live or studio bootlegs of his stuff, let alone in good quality.

Ironically, a lot of acts, come reissue time, have been turning to fans for rare recordings.

haha, that's a great story, Dan ...

i've never seen the point of being a flac nazi when it comes to bootleg files, but it's true, i have occasionally heard some mp3s of this stuff that are unlistenable ... not sure what it is -- some kind of horrible mix of tape hiss and mp3 flutter.

and as for acts turning to fans, as i noted in the Feelies thread (or maybe on my blog thread) the Feelies' drummer's wife supplied me with one of the missing songs for my covers comp. She said that he's downloaded a bunch of bootlegs to re-learn old songs that they never recorded in the studio ....

Yeah but you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The crucial thing is not how the files are encoded but how the thing was recorded in the first place w.r.t. equipment, placing in the hall etc

yeah, I'm not saying lossless necessarily IMPROVES anything, just that it doesn't degrade it any further, which I prefer.

Carrie Brownstein once told me S-K used to listen to bootlegs all the time to relearn songs and/or arrangements.

there is like a whole weird cottage industry of people doing "remasters" of bootleg tapes to try and make them sound better, but the results are so unpredictable that DIME banned them a couple of years back (see also "polluting the trading pool" arguments).

I also love that Lenny Kaye quote about how bootlegs sometimes redefine an artist's perception of themselves (obv he is speaking from experience).

the dylan community seems to be nutso about the remaster thing, so much so that there'll be like six different versions of a single recording of a show. I've heard some that are improvements, but I'm not gonna get that deep into the whole affair. I'm obsessive but not that obsessive!

Springsteen fans are into the remaster thing, too. Mostly matters of getting the bass and treble right.

Prince, on the other hand, has done a shockingly good job policing stores, the net, the shows - for a dude as bootlegged as him, it's sort of hard to track down live or studio bootlegs of his stuff, let alone in good quality.

not THAT good, I bought an Italian (Warner Bros on the label tho who knows...shockingly good fake if so tho) pressing of the Black Album in I think '87 at a to-remain-nameless shop in H'wood circa '87

had to ask for it by name to see it tho

yeah, you can find prince bootlegs all over the place on the net -- I think there's a big one called "The Work" or some such. But he might be more vigilant towards stores selling them than, say, Springsteen.

I really got into Beatles bootlegs in high school since they were all unreleased and alternate studio tracks. I always wondered why my favorite song, the psychedelicate gem 'Peace of Mind', wasn't included on the Anthologies and it turns out it might not even be The Beatles. I imagined it was recorded during the trip to India, but its origin is as mysterious as its sound. You decide:

Fake, fake, fake.

most of the ones I've bought have been sanctioned or just youtube vids online, but I really enjoy watching Youtubes or listening to recordings of shows I was at. really helps bring the feelings back from that show.

to think when I was in college I dreamed of the ability to clearly get video and audio of a show I was at (though I usually just wanted it for a clip or two, not the ENTIRE SHOW like some punters do)

This is a fantastic read, by one of the originators - http://www.kendouglas.org/bootleg-stories/

Thanks. It is indeed.