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,

 Jeff had bemoaned the fact that they had learned the arrangements to some 30 songs only to play them once (so he played "And Your Bird Can Sing" twice to get it right). 

But the fact is they and he are quite adept. Right after Bowie died, I saw them work up a cover of "Space Oddity" at the Kings Theater in Brooklyn, a tale Tweedy tells in the opening scene of his memoir. 

And yes the Tweedys covered the Beatles and Neil Young and the Replacements. But also Simon and Garfunkel and John Denver and T.Rex. And also - even though I had worked at Rolling Stone and remain something of a music head, Jeff & sons turned me on to many acts I did not know about. Yes, I knew Elizabeth Cotten and Eminem and Funkadelic and the Meters and Emmit Rhodes and Billie Eilish - but I didn't know Arthur Russell or Guided by Voices or Molly Sarle or Purple Mountains or Bobby Charles or or or - dozens of worthy names, all new to me. 

Maybe my favorite obscurity was when Jeff did a song by The Walter Williams Band, a defunct local act Susie had managed. You can see Spencer barely hide a grin when he pulls out the lyric sheet for his father. She freaked out so much Jeff had to restart it.   

The archive quickly became overwhelming. Susie herself didn't start posting the past shows on her YouTube page for a while, and is about 40 shows behind; episodes 4-15 can only be seen on the page of fan Kate Vassos, who continued to subclip new original songs that Tweedy debuted on the show. For the first 50 shows or so, a fan with the page Julien Etc., who seems to have been watching from France, cut song clips live as they happened; I think he gave up trying to keep up, or moved on.

As the show hit its second year this spring, I started paying more attention to, and participating in, the "client" comments. Watching live on my laptop, I was better able to keep up and started getting to recognize various recurring screennames. Half of them were at best only tangentially related to the person's real name; some were specifically created to participate in the comments ( like "SusieBallsack," a tribute to one of Susie's countless catchphrases, as with any long-running family sitcom. Be advised: don't try to Google it). 

There was Paul, the superfan who attends many, many live Wilco shows, who people quickly came to rely on to identify songs as soon as Jeff played a few notes, and who could somehow turn an utterance into a hashtag as it was still being uttered. Another, Arrow, kept churning out emoji explosions and asking for Neil Young songs - and occasionally was rewarded! I later found out chatting with him privately that he hadn't even been a Wilco fan when the pandemic started, and stumbled across the show by accident and now was a devotee. 

There were shoutouts to various family and friends including "Flanny," the proprietor of L.A's deservedly famed club Largo - as well as Chicago potter Oona, who would eventually materialize live at the Tweedy house as a special guest star. Susie's younger brother Danny would constantly bicker with her, but in April also hosted one of the best episodes on the blustery porch of his L.A. house. 

Katz's on the tour bus

I tentatively entered the fray, finding myself feeling weird when someone would respond, or when Paul would acknowledge me - but also weird when they didn't. I guess this is what Twitter does for some people,  or Youtube comments during a livestream, but that never happened for me. Among this intimate, recurring group, it somehow seemed more substantive and understood. 

Eventually I began occasionally communicating privately with Susie & Spencer via social media, and after hearing the all-vegan family extolling New York meateries Katz's Deli and the late, great Sammy's Roumanian, I spontaneously shipped the boys t-shirts of those places to the Wilco offices as a thank-you. (Spencer has worn his several times; Sammy still hasn't worn his. Not that I'm keeping score.) 

To be clear, this is not typical behavior for me. At least not since I was in college. But I felt they were putting all this heart, emotion, humor and song into the world and deserved some recognition. Along the same lines, the clients recently assembled a massive "Box Full of Letters" (to quote a Wilco title from the debut album) and mailed them to the family through an intermediary. 

I got a better sense of who the fans are when someone asked the Facebook fan page members (not necessarily all Tweedy Show viewers) to weigh in on what they did for a living. It remains one of the more inspiring reads I had during the pandemic. 

The 250 answers ranged from educators, mental health and health care workers, people in the art world and non-profits, a pastor, a scientist, vet techs, minor league baseball GM, preservationist architect, stay-at-home mom, photographer, vintage store owner, artisanal baker, Alaskan tour guide, commercial fisherman, ice cream maker, house painter, butcher, software maker, elevator repairman, and a children's book illustrator (who created some recent artwork of the show on his Instagram page).

Susie's portrait by Matthew Cordell, with the trademark Ikea curtains

In April, as my 60th birthday neared, I decided to hazard making a request. The 1000+ songs played by the Tweedys on the show had been artfully tallied by fan Kristofor Georgeou on the Wilco reddit page "Via Chicago" and the Facebook fan page "A Shot in the Arm," and in a searchable Google spreadsheet by another, Monty Smith.

I searched to think of an apt song that Jeff had NOT yet played on the show, but would already know how to play, and found an answer: Brian Wilson's "Love and Mercy," which appeared on a Golden Smog album, one of Tweedy's countless side projects - and is one of those timeless songs that pertains for situations like a pandemic. 

My request was honored, which helped make up for the fact that I wasn't able to have an actual 60th birthday party, even though Jeff as usual undersold the celebration. The video glitched briefly due to their spotty home wifi, the bane of Susie's existence. But I was so touched that instead of just posting the subclip to Facebook, I actually made it publicly available on my previously dormant YouTube page:     

Then, as I realized that after a whopping 200 episodes - more than most TV shows - "The Tweedy Show" would be going on hiatus, as Wilco heads out on a much-delayed tour - so I was inspired to reboot my dormant bootlegger's muscles. 

Tweedy Show cast assemble for a 200th episode rendered by Junior Jumble artists Jeff Knurek (also a client)
*bassist John Stirratt mislabelled as "Jim"; also note ghostly image of Motorhead's 

There is no easy way to Cliff's-Notes a series than ran the gamut from an all-Dylan show for the singer's 80th birthday to an episode making Conan's TBS sign-off in which Jeff played every song he had performed on Conan's various late night shows. 

But I decided to spend the time I sat watching the Mets perilously cling to games and Biden perilously cling to the reins of government to go back through the archive and make a sort of YouTube boxed set to display the wide range of covers played since Tweedy first sat in the family hot tub in March 2020 and broadcast to a handful of Susie's followers who happened to catch the live story. 

My goal was to get to 100 clips before episode 200 (which airs tonight, July 29) and I actually surpassed it; I also created a "Tweedy Show Favorites" playlist and linked to a couple of Julien's earlier clips rather than duplicate his efforts. 

A majority of the clips are covers - including Dylan's "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carrol" from the week that George Floyd was killed.  But there are a handful of Wilco songs in the mix - including from the two episodes when two other band members participated - as well as Tweedy songs, including newly-written ones like "Lou Reed Was My Babysitter," which sounds like a Velvet Underground or Jonathan Richman cover. 

I reached a satisfying end last night, when I dug up episode 15, the only time Jeff assayed a Radiohead cover (below) - to honor a request - prefaced by a disclaimer about how the song is out of his comfort zone, followed by a droll offer of how he could raise it an octave if necessary. 

It was also fascinating to look back at this early episode and see them still trying to figure out how this whole interactive thing was going to work. So, as with various other clips, I left in the prelude for historical context. 

After Jeff performed three actual live shows in mid-July between home episodes 194 and 198, he seemed notably worn out, yet he, too, is clearly having pangs of sadness about this unique experiment coming to an end. So he is trying to keep his newfound relationship with fans going via a just-announced Substack page. In the intro, he writes, 

"I really want this (Starship Casual or Goofball Gazette or Shoddy Kerning Quarterly) to be an extension of that experience, and to put into practice some of the insight I’ve gained about my past attempts to make social media feel worthwhile and honest to me. It’s the community I’ve always missed. For me, blue checks or not, I'm not sure anyone is really themselves — or who they say they are. So I’m gonna settle in here and share all kinds of things with an added emphasis on a feeling of direct interaction."

I'm not sure a blog can ever have the same spontaneity of interplay among family members, instruments, and strangers that turning a steadicam iPhone on their living room did, but considering that Tweedy also cranked out a book and two albums during the pandemic while broadcasting, I wouldn't put anything past him.

 

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POSTSCRIPT: 

Episode 200 opened with Jeff back in the tub, and then it widened to reveal that superfan Paul, who lives in Chicago, had not only been invited over to the Tweedy house, but....

Paul then served his usual Tweedy Show function of live-naming the songs played, but in-person, and danced with Spencer to the jukebox playing "I'll Take You There," as well as arbitrating family disputes. Hard to imagine a more fitting season-ender about intimacy with the fans.