As "The Aging Punk," I feel it is my right, and perhaps even my duty, to go on an occasional "When I was a kid…" rant. You know, "When I was a kid we had to walk five miles in the snow to get good music. Uphill. Both ways."
Now, some of you may not think this is fair. That I've had it pretty good as a music fan. And I will admit I've seen some great concerts you never will, experienced some bands you will only ever read about, and have actually lived through at least a couple "golden ages of rock'n'roll." Still, at the very least, being a music fan is much more convenient today.
Take concert tickets. When I went to my first rock concert (The Grateful Dead, in 1970, if anyone's keeping track), you could not order tickets online, because there was NO "online" (ARPAnet, the precursor of the internet, linked its first four (4!) computers in 1969, just the year before). Nor could you go to Ticketmaster, for nothing like it existed yet either. If you wanted tickets to a concert, you went to the Box Office (you know, that grated window at the theater) where the concert was to be held and bought your tickets there. Or there was mail order, which meant you put your money in the mail, and crossed your fingers. Although it wasn't too much later (only a couple of years) before record stores started selling tickets to the most popular concerts. In any event, the process involved a bit more effort—and a lot more uncertainty—than today.
But what I'm mainly interested in today is after the concert. You got the tickets. The concert was awesome. You just wish you could hear it again. What do you do?
Nowadays, if it was not one of the growing number of concerts which offer you the instant gratification of a CD as you walk out (or the slightly slower gratification of an official CD release next week, a la Pearl Jam), you just go on the internet when you get home (that internet thing again!). If you can't find the exact concert you saw, you can almost certainly find one from the same tour.
When I was a kid, none of this was available. The best you could hope for was an official live album from the band, probably recorded two or three years earlier, and nothing like the show you saw. Live albums were a much rarer thing back then. Most bands released one, maybe two, over an entire career. There were exceptions, of course; The Grateful Dead released live albums every year or two. But even a powerhouse live band like The Rolling Stones only released two live albums in the first 10 years of their career, and only one of those (Get Yer Ya-Yas Out, from the 1969 tour) was any good.
In the fall of 1975 I saw Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue, one of the great tours of all rock. The official live album, Hard Rain, was recorded the following spring, and it completely failed to capture the magic of the show I saw. So what did I do? I bought a bootleg. The sound quality was not great, but at least it resembled my memories of the concert.
Bootlegs were one of the magical aspects of being a rock fan in my late teens and early 20's. Magical because a good one gave you something you could not get anywhere else. Magical because they were rare, often acquired only through some grand quest. Magical because they were unpredictable—even when you found one, you never knew what you really had until you unwrapped it and dropped a needle in the groove. Would the sound quality suck? Most often, yes. Would the performance be worth the effort? Less than half the time. It was the search for the holy grail—a crisp, clean recording of an exceptional concert. All of it added an air of adventure to record buying.
To be clear, bootlegs were LPs of otherwise unavailable recordings. This is distinct from pirated records, which are cheap copies of officially released recordings. The first rock bootlegs were studio recordings. The very first recognized rock bootleg was Great White Wonder (1969), a set of Dylan recordings with The Band (which would later be officially released as The Basement Tapes). This was quickly followed by recordings of The Beatles' "Get Back" session, which eventually produced the Let It Be album and movie. But quality worthy studio recordings were hard to come by (somebody had to effectively steal tapes from the studio), so most subsequent bootlegs were live recordings. Most of the early live bootlegs were from someone sneaking recording equipment into a concert, although some were from radio broadcasts, or even stolen sound board recordings.
As I said, official live recordings were, for most bands, a rare thing. Bootlegs filled the gap. In fact, in the early 70's, many live albums were only released because someone had already bootlegged the tour. The aforementioned Get Yer Ya-Yas Out was released to counter a bootleg of the 1969 tour, LIVEr Than You'll Ever Be. CSNY's Four Way Street was likewise rushed into release to counter bootlegs.
Bootlegs did have a limited and particular fan base. True fanatics of a particular band, especially one like the Beatles, would want every recording they could get their hands on. But, especially with other, lesser bands, "true fanatics" was a pretty limited market. But there were also people like myself, who just loved live recordings. There were enough of us to make bootlegging a lucrative business.
I realize many people consider live recordings an inherently inferior product—a sample of how the musicians happened to play on one night, not a carefully crafted record of how they wanted their music played. For me, that's part of the appeal. I like the spontaneity of a live recording, even the occasional sloppiness. I would even propose that, in this way, live albums are true to the real spirit of rock & roll. For isn't rock about losing control? Studio albums, on the other hand, are all about control.
At a more basic level, live albums usually have more energy than studio albums, and energy has always been one of my top criteria for great rock music (the other being originality). It wasn't until the punk rock explosion of the late 70's that I consistently heard studio recordings with the energy of live albums.
My first live album was Woodstock, one of the great rock albums of all time, live or not. Second was The Concert for Bangladesh. These two albums had some significant similarities. They were both documents of a specific event (my reason for getting them). They also both had movies of the event, movies which helped me gain an appreciation of the power of live performance. I remember being particularly blown away by Sly Stone's performance in Woodstock; seeing it in the movie gave me a new appreciation of his cuts on the album. In The Concert for Bangladesh, it was Leon Russell's "Jumpin' Jack Flash/Youngblood" medley which impressed me. So those two albums helped me gain a true appreciation of the format.
My next couple of live albums actually added little to that appreciation. They were the Stones Got LIVE if You Want It, and CSNY's Four Way Street. Got Live… was my first Stones album, and I bought it for the song selection, not because it was a live album. It was recorded in 1966, a time when a Stones concert was more a battlefield than a great musical experience. The performances are only remarkable for their speed-freak tempo; it is certainly in no way a classic. As for Four Way Street, again I was after certain songs, not performances; the long jams on "Southern Man" and "Carry On" only bored me at the time (I have since gotten over that).
But I soon heard some classic, powerful live albums, including Get Yer Ya-Yas Out, The Who's Live at Leeds, and The J. Geils Band's Full House (my appreciation again aided by a filmed version, this time a performance on TV's In Concert). From these albums I began to discover just how powerful and exciting live albums could be.
But still, my interest in live albums was motivated as much by curiosity as appreciation. A prime example of this was my curiosity about live Beatles recordings. I knew they sucked in concert, but I wanted to hear it for myself anyway. They didn't release an official live album until 1977, seven years after they broke up. But by then, I had a bootleg.
And I had a great curiosity about bootlegs. I have no idea where I first heard about them, but by my last couple of years of high school, I was well aware of their existence and wanted to hear them. Like much of importance in my adolescence, they were something I had heard about, but had yet to experience for myself.
And once I did encounter bootlegs, the two interests—bootlegs and live performances—fed into each other. I'd buy bootlegs out of simple curiosity, and discover great performances. And the more great performances I heard, the more curious I became about what I hadn't heard.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
In the summer of 1974, between my junior and senior years of high school, I was an exchange student in Mexico City. Living with a Mexican family, I was certainly immersed in Mexican culture. But I also spent a fair amount of time—probably more than I should have—searching for certain aspects of U.S. culture, specifically pinball machines and record stores.
One day I wandered into a new record store, and there on the counter were two crates full of bootleg records. It was like discovering a vein of gold. I must have spent at least an hour in there, first just studying the records in wonder. Most just had a bare cover, identifying the artist and the recording, with maybe a song list, but some had elaborate cartoon illustrations. And then deciding what to purchase. I quickly narrowed it down to The Beatles or David Bowie (there were some interesting looking Stones albums in there too, but I already had live Stones in my collection). Despite my curiosity about the Beatles, I ended up with the Bowie, primarily because I had just seen him the month before, and it had been an awesome concert.
The album I selected was the first half of the 1972 Santa Monica Civic Center concert, from his first U.S. tour with the Spiders from Mars. It is currently available in semi-official release as Santa Monica '72. It turns out to be the best live Bowie ever released, and certainly the rawest. Bowie has never been known for raw music, even on his live albums (most of his live albums sound so clean and controlled, they might as well be studio recordings), but here the rock'n'roll is fresh and ferocious—on the second half, which I eventually acquired, it gets downright sloppy at times. That album had a lot to do with my eventually becoming a huge Bowie fan (I was only a moderate fan at the time). Due to its quality, both the sound quality (it was taken from a radio broadcast) and the quality of the performance, it also made me a genuine fan of bootlegs.
I went back to that shop a couple more times, and though I was tempted, I didn't buy any more. I was on a pretty limited budget, and knew I should be spending it on souvenirs of actual Mexican heritage. Also, honestly, I wasn't at all sure about my prospects of getting the record back into the U.S. In fact, take a moment to picture me, 17 years old, standing in the line at customs, all worried because I have a bootleg album in my luggage. Foolish, 17-year-old me.
Maybe a year later I discovered the little ads in the back of Rolling Stone for catalogs of "Underground Records" (as if calling them this somehow skirted all the legal issues). These catalogs were a real crapshoot. On their dense, mimeographed pages they usually provided a track listing and where the album was recorded, but little else. No hint of the sound quality, or even the physical quality of the record. Most of them, it turned out, came in plain white cardboard sleeve, with a single sheet of paper providing info on the recording, and some sort of artwork, often a cartoon caricature of the band.
Nonetheless, I quickly started collecting in earnest. First, I finally went for the live Beatles, which was not very good. I got a two-disc set, Hollywood Bowl '65 and Tokyo '66. The 1965 concert was decent, though—not unlike Got LIVE…—played at amphetamine tempo, but the Tokyo concert, from near the end of the touring days, was really bad. They were playing more complex songs then, but they literally could not hear each other. The crowd was screaming too loud, and they had no stage monitors. You can imagine how that sounded. But I didn't really care; my interest was more historical than musical. I could at least hear how the Beatles sounded live, even if they sounded terrible.
Others quickly followed. The Who live at the Fillmore 1968—far inferior to Live at Leeds. A three disc set of of the Stones 1975 tour, on red, white and blue vinyl. Again, not nearly as good as Ya-Yas, but I had seen that tour, so I could relive the show. And it did have a few standout cuts, such as a gorgeous "Wild Horses." And that beautiful colored vinyl! In the summer of 1977 I was able to score a couple of recordings of Iggy Pop's spring tour (with David Bowie on keyboards!); both were, frankly, lousy sound quality (obviously mic'ed out in the crowd somewhere), only hinting at the power of his live shows at that time.
The following spring, when I was back in college, the local store, already used to catering to the college students by carrying obscure 45's and imported LPs, started carrying underground records on their shelves. Now I could really shop to my heart's content. No more waiting a month for the records to show up in the mail. And I could at least get a hint of the quality, as there was usually a correspondence between the quality of the cover and the quality of the record within. Also, with such easy access, I was more willing to take a chance.
So I got more live Bowie, Iggy, Stones and much more. I finally managed to get that recording of The Rolling Thunder Revue. Perhaps the best bootleg I picked up that spring was a live Roxy Music album from 1976 called Silk Circles, a double album a complete concert, far superior to their official live album, Viva Roxy Music. Also, all my friends were buying bootlegs too, so I could also hear live Sex Pistols, Doors, Neil Young and much more.
Just as my move to Idaho in 1980 ended my punk rock days, it also ended my bootleg collecting. I no longer had any source from which to purchase them. But by then it didn't matter so much. Much of my curiosity had been satisfied, and I had discovered that 90% of bootlegs only satisfied curiosity; they were not great listening experiences. Sound quality was all over the map—occasionally you would get a genuine sound board recording, but most of the higher quality ones were taken from radio shows, which had their own problems (including DJs talking over portions of the show). And audience recordings (at least 50% of what was out there) were generally pretty ugly. When you did get a good recording, it was no guarantee of a great performance. With all the unpredictable factors, truly great bootlegs were rare.
Which is not to say they didn't exist. In my own collection, that Roxy Music, Bowie's Santa Monica '72, and Out on Bail, a Rolling Stones set from the 1978 tour, all qualify. And there were others, including two classic Dylan bootlegs, the aforementioned Great White Wonder, and Royal Albert Hall 1966. Interestingly, both of those were eventually given official release, as was an album of The Rolling Thunder Revue. The Beatles did eventually release the Hollywood Bowl concert, and Bowie put out the Santa Monica concert.
In fact, most of the classic bootlegs have, by now, been given some sort of official release. For nowadays it is a completely different ballgame. Changes in technology and distribution enable bands to release far more live material than they used to, and not just in downloads, but in CD form. CDs with such a narrow market can now be released profitably. Pearl Jam, Phish, the Grateful Dead and even the Doors have released huge quantities of live material in the past decade. (It should be noted that all of these bands are well-known for performing a unique show every night, making multiple live discs worthwhile.)
But I can't help feeling a little nostalgic for the old days, even if only for the thrill of the hunt. Plugging your favorite band into Google has nowhere near the excitement of stumbling upon a cartoon of bootlegs on the counter of a store in Mexico City. And the challenges of finding bootlegs made us willing to listen through their poor sound quality.
Yeah, who am I trying to kid? Am I really arguing that listening to crappy recordings was a superior experience because it was so hard to find them? No way. It's back to my original assertion. You kids have it easy. Why, back in my day…
G. Murray Thomas writes and performs poetry because he can't sing. He can be found at myspace.com/gmurraythomas
