Bootlegs Revisited

 Another return to an older topic, in that case the blog was written in 2009.   Since then I’ve collected most of the King Crimson Collector Series. 

 I also picked up a few TOOL bootlegs:  one from the Fear Inoculum Tour and three from the 10,000 Days Tour (thanks, Diane!).   The band only has two official live recordings: a 1993 Lollapalooza recording, and Salival, combined with either a VHS or DVD, which dates from Undertow, the first album, and includes “You Lied”, a great non-TOOL song.  According to drummer Danny Carey, the band has a huge stash of live recordings, but has yet to release any of it, a la King Crimson Collectors Club, which is odd considering they went 13 years from 10,000 Days to Fear Inoculum AND they are not only fans of King Crimson, but toured with them.  I picture a huge warehouse full of live recordings no one has had the time or patience to wade through to determine how decent the sound quality is or whether the performances embarrass the band.  Who knows.  I dare say we’ll find out. 

 AC/DC.  I picked up a ten pack, for $50 – meaning each CD of a show was $5.  Six of them are Bon Scott shows and four from Brian Johnson.  The latter gave me a recording of Brian Johnson singing “Bad Boy Boogie”, a Bon Scott song, to complete my ersatz playlist of Paris ’84, our first concert.  Keep in mind that Bon Scott era AC/DC has only ONE official live album, If You Want Blood (You Got It), recorded on the Powerage tour.  That set was “Riff Raff”, “Hell Ain’t A Bad Place To Be”, “Bad Boy Boogie”, “The Jack”, “Problem Child”, “Whole Lotta Rosie”, “Rock’n’Roll Damnation”, “High Voltage”, “Let There Be Rock”, and “Rocker”.  The bootleg package has some intriguing song choices, including “Sin City”, “Gone Shootin’” and “Up To My Neck In You”.  One show was from September 1977, yet Powerage wasn’t released until May 1978, meaning those lucky audience members heard those songs before others did the following year.  The Bon Scott bootlegs are two from Dirty Deeds, three from Powerage, and one from Highway to Hell tours. 

 I also picked up a bootleg of their Madison Square Garden show on the Rock Or Bust tour in 2017 with Axl Rose singing.  We saw the following show, Verizon Center in DC, with an identical setlist.  Why the band didn’t see fit to record the show and release it themselves, I don’t know.  As a practical matter, Axl sounds a lot more like Brian Johnson than Bon Scott.  I found his inter-song banter to be unintelligible.  However, the song choice alone was well worth the purchase.

 Black Sabbath.  I also picked up a few Sabbath bootlegs, one (Lausanne, Switzerland in April 1970) includes “Sleeping Village >> Warning”.  Many older Sabbath shows have extended jams, “Sometimes I’m Happy”, and alternate lyrics.  I don’t think of Black Sabbath as a jam band, but some of the improvs put them in that category.  The other commonly known Sabbath bootleg, which I picked up recently and will be officially released with the Sabotage boxed set, is the Asbury Park show, known as Killing Yourself to Live.  It has “Megalomania”, “Sabbra Cadabra”, and “Spiral Architect”.  I awhile ago I picked up the Paranoid boxed set, mainly for the quadraphonic mix from 1974.  But it included the Brussels and Montreux shows from the Paranoid tour, which had been bootlegs for years.   

  Coverdale/Page.  After Deep Purple broke up, singer David Coverdale formed Whitesnake.  From 1978 to 1984 (David Coverdale’s Whitesnake through Slide It In) they were more of bluesy band (WS Mark I), and from 1987 (self-titled) to the present they’ve been more of a commercial metal band (WS Mark II).   Many accused the Mark I version of being a bit too reminiscent of Led Zeppelin.  So it was odd, or possibly appropriate, that Jimmy Page and David Coverdale collaborated on a single album, simply called Coverdale/Page, in 1993.  I bought it when it came out and listened to it a few times since then.  It sounds like Jimmy Page and David Coverdale made an album together.  What I didn’t realize was that the band actually toured – in Japan.  A bootleg of their Japanese tour (Live in Osaka) features “Slide It In”, “Here I Go Again” and “Still of the Night”, by Whitesnake – with Jimmy Page playing – and “Rock And Roll”, “Kashmir”, “In My Time of Dying”, “White Summer/Black Mountain Side”, and “Black Dog”, with David Coverdale singing (except on WS/BMS).  The remainder of the set – 50% - are C/P songs.   Overall an interesting addition.

Grateful Dead.  This band is famous for allowing audience members to tape their shows and trade them, much to their record company’s anger and frustration.  Eventually many of these wound up being officially released: no less than 38 Dick’s Picks, 38 Dave’s Picks, and 17 Road Trips, plus Cornell ’77 (probably THE most famous show), Egypt ’78, and a quadruple set of Closing of Winterland 12/31/78, a four disc set covering a bizarre show which began at midnight and ran to the morning of January 1, 1979.  I’ll repeat again:  Cousin Jimmy was a student at Cornell in ’77 and saw the concert, then my uncle Buddy took the family to Egypt and he saw the following year’s show there. (Count our blessings….!)  I suppose “official bootleg” might be a contradiction in terms, but others on this list are truly non-official.

The Dead even have a database, DeadBase, which will tell you which songs were played, and when. 

Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl.  Note that, from 1963-70, the years the band was in existence and releasing material, no live album was released.  Part of this was because those shows from 1963-66 (last concert at San Francisco) the crowd noise far exceeded the band’s tiny ampage.  Imagine if Pete Townshend had spoken to them and recommended a few Marshall stacks to even the odds.   With the screaming girls drowning out the band’s performance, it’s more novelty and morbid curiosity than an enjoyable experience.

Other General Principles

Sound Quality.  This often varies considerably, but I’ve found that even for shows which are relatively worse, after you listen for awhile your brain seems to screen out the noise and you start hearing the music.

 Song Selection.  Hearing rarely-heard songs live is one major benefit.  Again, AC/DC only have ONE official live album from Bon Scott’s era, so six bootlegs give you many songs you weren’t going to hear on If You Want Blood. 

 I Was There!!  In the unlikely event someone recorded a show I was actually at, I’m happy to get the bootleg.  As it is, the Dead shows at RFK in 1992 and 1995 seem to be the only ones I can think of off the top of my head which qualify.  

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.