Bootlegs

“I bought a Deep Purple bootleg in Germany and it cost me a fiver, so they’re making money out of me.”  Roger Glover.

 I saw the Grateful Dead at the Verizon Center in DC on April 14, 2009.  Their website indicates that the band will be recording the show to be made available as a download thereafter, making taping a Dead show, formerly ubiquitous, now obsolete.  Of course with the Dead, “bootleg” is almost redundant.  The amount of live material out there in various forms far exceeds the official studio recordings.  Since so much of the music they play live is improvised and not to be found on any studio album – including many covers – really the studio albums are just the tip of the iceberg.

 Let’s face it: for the die hard fans (the “1%-ers” as the Blue Cheer crowd calls themselves), the unattainable ideal is that literally every single concert the band has ever done, from university campuses, outdoor festivals, arenas, clubs, Woodstock, Altamont, etc. should be recorded, no matter how poorly the band was playing, or how bad the acoustics, or how Jerry was feeling that night, etc.  The mark of a die hard fan is to be able to identify “off nights” vs. “great shows” – but I always got the impression that Garcia was much harder on himself and his bandmates (e.g. his story of throwing Phil Lesh down the stairs for a performance which ended up on Anthem of the Sun) than the fans.  I came into the Dead far too late to consider myself any sort of expert on this, or even a Deadhead.  Ok, drifting here.  In theory you’d want to get all the shows, particularly for this band which plays so much which is not on albums.

 The quality of bootlegs varies considerably.  In fact, for a long time I resisted them for that reason.  I had several Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin bootlegs I ignored because the sound quality was so atrocious.  I eventually listened to them, and found that after a few minutes my brain filters out the noise and leaves me listening to the music, but it takes some time to get used to.

 King Crimson decided to co-opt the bootleg industry by releasing as many live recordings as they could lay their hands on, through their “King Crimson Collector Club” series, which is now up to 40 releases.  The sound quality varies, as it always does on bootlegs, but you hear many songs as works-in-progress, played before the albums they were released on as studio tracks – or a track may be listed under another name. 

 No matter how many live albums a band puts out, they will never put out enough to satisfy the fans.  So what draws us to bootlegs?

 1.  Songs which aren’t on any studio album.  The Grateful Dead and King Crimson are notorious for this.

 2.  Covers which don’t show up on studio albums.  I’m always intrigued to hear a famous band – with more than enough material of their own - play covers and put their own mark on the song.  Again, early on, King Crimson would play Holst’s “Mars”, but it’s never shown up on any studio album they’ve done.  Likewise “Sucking My Love”, my favorite Diamond Head song, only appears in Metallica format in a bootleg of the same name. 

 3.  Rare songs that the band almost never plays live.  “Trapped Under Ice” (Metallica) and “Into the Fire” (Deep Purple) only show up on bootlegs; and “Wheels of Confusion” (Black Sabbath) only shows up on the Hollywood Bowl bootleg. In some cases the bootleg may be of the ONLY show at which a song was ever played live.  For the Grateful Dead, the so-called “DeadBase” is the manual to determine which song was played when and where, if ever.

 4.  Guest stars.  At the Verizon Center, Tipper Gore was playing drums with the Dead.  I have a bootleg of the Beach Boys playing with the Dead, which includes “I Get Around” and “Good Vibrations” (Fillmore East 4/27/71). 

 5.  Weird stuff.  On a King Crimson bootleg, the band goes off on a brief tribute to Monty Python (mimicking the inarticulate grunting lowlives who periodically show up in “Flying Circus” episodes).  In another one, Robert Fripp apologizes to “those of you whose conversations we’re interrupting.” 

 Maybe deliberate attempts at humor don’t qualify as “weird stuff”, but certainly they add some charm and value to the bootlegs, and further explain the attraction fans have for this part of music. 

 Sources.  In the old days, it was trading tapes.  Sometimes we went into Greenwich Village in New York City, where we could find bootlegs on tape and CD – including “Rockin’ in the Parlour”/”Can I Sit Next To You Girl”, the AC/DC single with Dave Evans – the singer before Bon Scott - on vocals.  Eventually the Internet came along, which dramatically improved the ability to trade MP3s, through LimeWire, Bearshare, and of course, Napster.  [Nowadays, 2021, it’s eBay where I find them.]  Eventually bands themselves (e.g. King Crimson and Pearl Jam) jumped on the bandwagon, so to speak, and began selling music directly to the fans.