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.) 

*     *     *     *     *     * 

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,

My 40 Years of Bruce: A scrapbook

Both the first and most recent times I saw Bruce Springsteen - almost 40 years apart - I sat left of center.

Most everything else had changed.  When we started this dance, I was a high school senior; now he's a senior citizen (and I'm still only 12 years younger). We both had kids (though mine seem more interested in his music than his). He moved his act uptown from the scrungy Palladium (RIP) to a posh Broadway theater, along the way putting a wrecking ball to the original Giants Stadium.

And the face value of my ticket went up from $8.50 (though my scrawl in my scrapbook indicates I actually paid a scalper price, $32) -- to $400. The Times, They Are Ka-Chinging.

The Ties That Bind (and cost big bucks)

I've seen Bruce live maybe 3 dozen times - fewer, to be sure, than the hardcore diehards, but still, more than any other musician, in venues large and small, from acoustic to full strings and horn section - even when he sacrilegiously disbanded the E street band for a tour ("Shayne Fontayne on guitar!" Really?).

I had his poster in my college dorm room, own more Bruce bootlegs than all other artists combined, and sprang for most of his recent overpriced boxed-set-remixed-reissues (even though I will probably never slog my way through all the peripherals, right).

Poster I had in college

But as his core E Street band members have started to die off (Clarence Clemons, Danny Federici) and the others - unlike Bruce - have started to show their age from the wear and tear of his marathon shows, I started to feel my Springsteen concertgoing experience becoming something of a replica of the real thing. Not Vegas, not a tribute band, but just less freewheeling. He was still putting out the energy and spirit on stage (a mutual high that he admitted in interviews he was addicted to - as were we all), but I was missing the unpolished spontaneity and quirky personal discursiveness that had helped attract this sheltered suburban kid to his wild-eyed yearning romanticism.

Well, Bruce has been also thinking about (and working on) himself - including publicly, first for my friend Peter Ames Carlin's bio Bruce, in which Springsteen not only was unusually open about his private demons, but allowed those in his life to speak without NDA restraints; then for his autobiography, Born to Run (recommended in audio form).

I had long joked that as Bruce hit his 60s, instead of exhaustingly touring worldwife, he should just take up residency and just play a month a year at an arena in Jersey and his fan base would make pilgrimages to see him. (In recent years, Billy Joel and Jerry Seinfeld have both done versions of this.) Now Bruce has hit on a plan that satisfies his musical and introspective urges, and one that leaves the E Street Band off the hook: this solo Broadway run, five shows a week, sold by lottery trying to thwart scalpers (as if), opened October 3, 2017 for "8 weeks only" but has been extended three times (as of this writing) to December 15, 2018.

15 months only! (so far)

It's not a rock and roll show, though he does play some of his biggest hits on piano and guitar. Instead, hearing Bruce's elegiac travelogue through his life and career, I found myself newly moved, as he described looking back wistfully at the time when his life was ahead of him like a blank page.  He spent as much time talking as he did singing, and he candidly admitted the man who wrote "Racing in the Streets" was very late to even learning to drive, and that the rebel who wrote "Born to Run" and swore to escape his "death trap" hometown, now resides a stone's throw away. He brought out his wife, Patti Scialfa, for a couple of songs. He revisited the meaning of his friendship with Clemons.

As I sat there, I also realized that, when you spend 40 years in the company of a sentient artist, you accumulate a lifetime of memories - even if the relationship is one-sided (I have only met and spoken to him once - more on that below).

Just as if you live in New York long enough, nearly every block and corner of Central Park you walk in holds a special memory - if you see enough Bruce, it becomes its own narrative of your life, with the inevitable tragedy, comedy, and every now and then, a glimpse of salvation.

I know everybody's got their Bruce stories, but these are mine.
Since most of them predate cell phone cameras, this is my scrapbook.

GROWIN' UP
1977, sophomore year. I'm at Steve Hertz's house. He's a senior and, LP's spread everywhere, has been playing deejay to help upgrade my musical taste from the mainstream I'd embraced so far (Beatles, Stones, Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Eagles, Yes, Fleetwood Mac, Queen. ELO, ELP).

Steve puts on a song: "You know this?"
Of course.
"This is the original. Isn't it so much better?"

The song is "Blinded By The Light."
I only knew the version I'd heard on the radio, by Manfred Mann's Earth Band (in which the confused Brits sing "revved up like a douche" instead of "deuce").


I dunno -- a little tinny sounding? I am still not sure. (!)

Eventually Steve wears me down. And when he graduates, a senior in the next class, Eric Alterman, imparts an even bigger Bruce fandom knowledge (as well as inculcating me into the Clash and Elvis Costello). He would later write a fan's appreciation book.

Soon I am tuning in to Springsteen's live radio broadcasts and taping them on my cassette deck,

A Death in the Musical Family

R.I.P. Clarence Clemons. It is truly the end of an era.

The E Street Band was the closet approximation to a family I ever saw on a rock and roll stage. After keyboardist Danny Federici died of melanoma, the family soldiered on, but it's hard to imagine anyone replacing or subbing for Clarence's signatrute throaty tones or onstage bravado.

When I saw the band on the last tour there was something in the air that felt like it might be the last time we were all in the same room together -- maybe Bruce sensed it too, that's why he did some cncerts where they performed entire albums start to finish, to make sure he touched all the bases.

I first saw Bruce and Clarence play at New York's long-gone Palladium in 1978 -- that's 33 friggin years ago. I once drove all the way to a little bar called Lock, Stock and Barrel in Fair Haven, NJ on the rumor that he was going to be playing - -and he was, with Southside Johnny, Garry Talent and a guy named Stormin Norman on piano. (Thanks to Google, I found this nice tribute Norman wrote when Clarence was ailing.)

I posted some videos on Facebook but this is a more permanent place to put them.

Drumming Thomases

As I bulleted up to the Beacon Theater to see Elvis Costello for the umpteenth time, delayed by tornadoes (not local ones, but covering Joplin at CNN), I paused to consider, honestly, somewhat jaded, what part of this evening would be able to provide a transcendent moment for me.

It's not that I'm hard to please (well, I am, but not on this count), it's just that my Elvisgoing is second only to my Brucegoing in terms of sheer hours logged agog on my feet, and I occasionally suffer from having heard certain songs live so many times -- for example, "Pump it Up" -- that it's hard for them to still have meaning. I start craving the obscure, or the complete reinvention of a song, or a guest appearance (as when Elvis himself showed up to sing "Higher and Higher" with Bruce at Madison Square Garden) to kick this concert into the category of Not Just Another Elvis Show.

Having read up about Elvis's tour, which features a spinning wheel of song titles [right] spun by audience volunteers and a go-go dancing cage -- neither of which promised transcendence -- I was hoping he would perform one or both of the Beatles covers on the wheel -- "And Your Bird Can Sing" and "Girl." But I would  be equally happy to hear the chestnuts he'd been excavating from the mid-80's King of America/Blood and Chocolate albums -- the last time he played New York with this spinning songbook  -- back  when I worked for Rolling Stone and Elvis played five nights at a legitimate Broadway theater, having traveled light years from his punk origins.

Turned out, the moments that truly moved me -- mesmerized me, seared onto my brain, left me breathless -- had nothing to do with Elvis at all. Nor was it the guest cameo (on "Lipstick Vogue" by Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys, whose name holds as minimal impact for me as Elvis Costello's name did for my dad when he was my age).

PETE THOMAS

No, the surprise was that it was all about drumming. Intergenerational drumming.

Hymns for Agnostics

"Say hi to 1972 for me." That's what a friend texted me when I told him I was at Tanglewood seeing a James Taylor/Carole King concert. And while I think none of the songs played was newer than say, 1980, the show was not a nostalgia fest. When Taylor preambled a pair of songs by describing them as "Hymns for Agnostics" -- King's "Way Over Yonder" and his "Shower the People" -- I realized why 18,000 fans had flocked there.

For many in my generation, rock music has usurped the role of religion. There is a lot more messianic fervor at a Bruce Springsteen show than at most services I have been to. The generation's singer-songwriters like King and Taylor -- Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young -- were bards and prophets. I am not sure who today's are, or if they will ever have the same cultural impact. The distribution of mainstream music has gotten diffused, but also, the sentiments that Taylor and King espouse -- whether the joys or sorrows -- are so raw and personal, they don't seem as possible in today's jaded world.

The subtext of the whole tour was