Confessions of a 20th & 21st Century Bootlegger

 

"All you bootleggers out there in radioland, roll your tapes!"

-- Bruce Springsteen, the Roxy, Los Angeles July 7, 1978

Thanks to Covid quarantine and ease of technology, I recently backslid into a vice from my youth - bootlegging a favorite musician. 

Back when I was in high school and college in the 70s and 80s, obtaining live music by your favorite bands was exciting - and somewhat fraught, because it was, of course, illegal. Concerts would be duped endlessly and traded among fanatics, through a kind of underground network - I can't even remember how. 

The origins were often radio broadcasts (including ones I made myself, if I happened to hear about a show in advance), as well as audience members sneaking in with a tape recorder. 

I taped a couple myself, too, just as souvenirs for myself and friends - until a friend and I got nailed at an Elvis Costello show in L.A., ushered into a back room by security and handing over our precious tapes, a la Richard Nixon, so we could get back to the performance.

Occasionally, a great show would even be turned into a bootleg LP set, which you could find in the right record stores if you knew where to look, but that was even more contraband-y, because people were now selling it (both manufacturer and store) i.e., making money off an artist without paying any royalties. 

So the record labels would be untraceable one-off names pretending to be in places like Germany and the Netherlands to avoid copyright laws. Sometimes they'd bother to make actual album art and look like a real release, but they could also be in a white cardboard liner with a color xerox insert. 

The Grateful Dead legendarily encouraged such bootlegging, but some artists - notably Springsteen - did try to pursue and shut down the practice with lawyers. I, of course, found this annoying: Look, we are buying all your legit releases and concert tickets - why not let us celebrate you and promote you? Especially considering on one of the cassette dupes I had obtained of a broadcast from LA's Roxy in 1978, he had literally teased, "All you bootleggers out there in radioland, roll your tapes!" before launching into a never-released instrumental led by Clarence Clemons on sax, "Paradise by the 'C'."

Then in the mid-80's Springsteen finally released an authorized boxed set of live work covering the decade from 1975-85, structured to mirror a single concert. It may have been a great intro for the uninitiated or casual fan, but for the crazy diehard, it was a little lackluster and hodgepodge. Absent was the amazing Darkness tour version of "Prove It All Night," yet throwaway songs were included, and only a handful of cover songs. 

Side note: The one and only time I met Springsteen, 1993 backstage at the final NBC Late Night with David Letterman, I decided to use my moment with him not to get an autograph or a photo, but to try to convince him to release "Murder, Incorporated" a hard-edged early-80s outtake I had gotten ahold of in college on a 100th-generation muffled cassette bootleg - so muffled that I couldn't really decipher the lyrics.

Bruce demurred, saying "yeah, yeah, there's a lot of good stuff" in the vaults, but I persisted, saying it sounded so different than everything else. 

Lo and behold, when he released a Greatest Hits album in 1995, among the previously-unreleased tracks was... "Murder, Incorporated"! 

I felt like the most powerful fan ever - until I read the liner notes, in which he credited its release to the nudging of a fan who had apparently followed Bruce from show to show holding a handmade banner bearing the song's title. Ok, whatever. 

With the CD revolution it became way easier to make copies of the music without losing quality (or needing a pressing plant). Concerts that had been hard to find suddenly became much easier, and I started piling up so many that I could no longer really listen to all of them, and it lost its luster.

Some fans go nuts for the archival or developmental aspect of bootlegs of songs-in-the-making, or discarded demos - Bob Dylan has officially released so many of these I can't even count. For me, I found, unless it's the Beatles, I don't have the patience; usually there's good reason they didn't see light of day. (And interestingly, "Murder, Inc." seems to have faded back to obscurity and is not typically part of Bruce's set lists. Maybe I was wrong?) 

There's a different bootleg grail that I found myself gravitating towards - covers. Once you've started to stockpile live bootleg shows, there's only so many versions of "Radio Free Europe" or "Jungleland" or "Pump it Up" you're gonna sit through. 

(REM Mission of Burma cover)

But a cover of an oldie, while sometimes becoming an every-night thing for one tour, or even appearing on an album, was a cool, rarer souvenir, whether in person or on bootleg - hearing Costello do the Beatles' "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," or Springsteen do Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Who'll Stop the Rain" or Aimee Mann doing Steely Dan's "Dirty Work" (which I still can't find a copy of anywhere, but I swear I heard her play it once).

When CDs first happened, somebody went to the trouble of assembling every Springsteen cover of an oldie they could find - despite varying quality of recording  - and assembled a whopping 3 boxed sets of them. It was almost too much - like eating an entire half-gallon of ice cream. 

From 1994 boxed set, "Covers Story" allegedly made in Italy

Free bootlegs! 

Then, like most, I gradually stopped listening to CDs, and opted for YouTube, where you could find videos of entire vintage concerts, and then Spotify, where, I discovered, Springsteen has been releasing huge amounts of archival live material, including all-cover collections (right), rendering even my bootleg boxed sets obsolete. (In the best way - he includes covers as far-ranging as "Rebel Rebel" and Lorde's "Royals," for chrissake.) 

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Cut to the pandemic. 

As I've previously mentioned here - and to any friend who would listen - during the long lockdown, the thing that most sustained me - as well as a few thousand other "clients," as we've been sarcastically/affectionately dubbed - are the live shows Wilco leader Jeff Tweedy started streaming in March 2020 from his Chicago house on his wife's Instagram page, co-starring his 20-something sons Spencer and Sammy, with occasional guest star family members, band members, and friends, all filmed by off-camera wife and mother hen, the tireless, tummeling, cancer-survivor-warrior Susie Miller Tweedy, who used to run the legendary local music bar Lounge Ax.

(The comment stream)

For the first 100 shows or so, I mostly ignored, or couldn't keep up with, the live running commentary of viewers who were providing not just a Greek-chorus to what was happening onscreen, but also side discussions ("what was your first live show?"), song requests, one-on-one chats, in-jokes, compliments, occasional attacks (on a Jeff footwear choice, e.g.), that Susie would often quote, in an amazing display of multitasking. 

But I was mostly there for the campfire songs by an insanely talented bunch of people, and the generous-of-spirit, warts-and-all family gathering that I was missing from my actual life. They cried about sad news events. They were there to comfort people in distress with a song in Hebrew. 

My only interactivity, such as it was, was to occasionally clip a song after the fact and post it on the Facebook Wilco fan page, or on my own, for people without the patience, time, or fandom to sift through it all. 

As time went on, I was especially embracing of - surprise, surprise - the covers. When I saw Wilco do an amazing all-covers show at the opening night of its bi-annual Solid Sound Festival in 2013,