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,

How to Fight [COVID] Loneliness

Music, humor, and family banter live from home

How have you been coping with COVID? 

If not the illness itself, then the whittled-down existence it has demanded? 

I have a suggestion. It's been my security blanket most nights, after Anderson Cooper and Rachel Maddow rile me up. 

But first, let's be clear - I count myself among the lucky. Compared to my friend who lost a spouse, or others who lost parents, or who have wrestled the virus for weeks, some needing oxygenation. Or the suddenly unemployed, like my haircutter of 20 years. Or kids in their 20s who were just starting out, losing jobs and internships before they begin. Or our neighbors who are not just first responders but also have two elementary schoolers "learning from home." 

I've got a partner (unlike some), and we're together in lockdown (unlike some), and we actually like each other (....). I've been able to still work from home since mid-March - which is also around the last time I saw my older daughter, who lives upriver, in person. I haven't seen her sister, an off-campus college senior in Ohio, since New Year's. Her commencement that was supposed to happen on Memorial Day has been pushed till May 2021; my plan to fetch her and her stuff is a non-starter because of quarantine + immuno-compromise issues. 

So we've made do with Zooms, like this one on my birthday:

But still. 

We haven't fled town, like 5% of the city - or 40% of wealthy neighborhoods,, per the NYTimes.

Thankfully we do have bikes, and masks (left), and Central Park nearby - though on weekends it's too full of feckless mask-less rebels. 

There are other signs of the fraying of the social contract, loss of good will and tremors that NYC could be heading to one of those unpleasant economic craters. A bike has already been stolen from our building; in Baltimore, Wire creator David Simon tweeted that his car was broken into for "small change, phone charger and some Sister Rosetta Tharpe CDs." 

But all my pre-COVID palliatives for this already-fraught era (see previous post) - museums, theater, music, giving volunteer tours of the Park - are shuttered. 

Books have proved impossible, partly because of how much I have to read to stay au courant for my CNN gig. The news is too dark for me to lose myself in "dark and edgy" TV dramas. Podcasts are okay, but often turn into a nap. 

We did take refuge in old movies on the Criterion Channel, and relished "What Do We Need To Talk About," the new one-hour Richard Nelson play about COVID lockdown, using characters he'd already written several plays about, which streamed live via the Public Theater. I began to seek solace in other types of entertainment: compelling music documentaries like "The Devil and Daniel Johnston," "Searching for Sugarman," "Muscle Shoals," "Big Star" "Five Years" "A Great Day in Harlem" "Produced By George Martin" (and I'm looking forward to the new Beastie Boys one). 

Or standup specials - like Mark Maron, Ronnie Chieng, Wanda Sykes, James Acaster, and the Dave Chapelle Mark Twain Prize special. 

Or my cousin Ben's weekly silent comedy watch party with his colleague Steve Massa, with Ben's live improvised music, for which his wife Mana is the camera operator and cheerleader. 

But then I found a COVID-depression vaccine that combined elements of all of the above in one package, plus the much-needed sense of belonging to a family. I am one of 1200-1500 or so "clients," as we've been dubbed, who tune in live to the hour-long, five-nights-a-week "The Tweedy Show," broadcast on Instagram from the Chicago home of Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy. 

You don't have to be a Deadhead-level Wilco fanatic like myself - or, indeed, even familiar with the band's repertoire at all - to find comfort, entertainment, humor, and more in the impromptu mix of song, tummeling and family banter.

The show is literally homemade, from their living room, 10-11pm ET, on his wife Susie's Instagram page, "Stuff in Our House" whose pre-COVID function had been to chronicle the eBay-volume of kitsch lining their shelves, leading you to wonder where Jeff has room for his extensive collection of Martin guitars.

I've always been enamored of Tweedy's deadpan I-care-but-I-don't-but-maybe-I-do stage banter; I actually long ago wrote a part for him in a spec pilot, as a semi-motivational graduation speaker. 

Tweedy's emphasis on family, music and fun is clear in the band's whole vibe, especially its bi-annual Solid Sound Festival at Mass MOCA, a fusion of bands who inspired them, bands they want fans to know about, solo projects, comedians and art. 

But putting on 50 of these Instagram shows in a few months - more than most network shows produce in a season - and keeping them charming, distinct, and compelling, turns out to be a different kind of impressive production.

Especially considering it seems to have begun on something of a bored whim in mid-March, when an unkempt Jeff decided to stage a lockdown show literally from his nightly bath, and 107 of Susie's followers tripped across it and kept watching. The family couldn't believe that many were interested. 

They eventually developed a nightly pattern. At first the show began with a closeup of the family jukebox playing a 45, but - after what seems to have been some music rights issues with Instagram - now it kicks off with a TV-style variety show theme song - and logo honoring the bathtub origins. 
(note: I updated the video using show 53's intro to include the animation and Spencer-dance).

Susie is the (iPhone) camerawoman, never seen - a la Charlie in Charlie's Angels or Carlton the Doorman on The Mary Tyler Moore Show - but very continuously heard; she curses like a sailor, and her most common utterance is "Oy Vey." If she ever coughs, she has to immediately insist to her father that she's not sick. The one time she accidentally hit the reverse button on the phone and wound up on camera she got so freaked out she threw the phone to the couch like a hot potato.

The cast is rounded out by their two laidback sons. 

Spencer, 24, an extraordinarily versatile drummer, has been playing since he was a kid -- see this Errol Morris-directed Quaker Oats ad - and made a double album with Jeff in 2014 when Susie was undergoing cancer treatment, named after her: Sukirae (right).

And Sammy, just 20, who at some point will amble out from the unseen part of the house, maybe heating up a pizza, wearing either one of Dad's old shirts or one of an endless t-shirt collection, only to quietly steal the show with his plaintive vocals as he reads lyrics off his iPhone. 

Here he is singing Daniel Johnston's "True Love Will Find You in the End." 

Reviving the Blog: Heroes of 2011

2011 was a tumultuous year -- internationally, nationally, in Facebook redesigns, and, in some smaller ways, personally.  That means I should have been blogging more, not less.

Yet as I got swamped by year-end round-up articles, I realized -- not only am I still catching up on early episodes of Homeland -- I haven't written a post since the Charlie Sheen Roast, which was so long ago that one of the roasters has since passed away.

Along the way I posted on Facebook -- frequently -- about things like the NY Times' egregious overkill on the tragic Stamford fire. A blogger can get lazy when there are more readers and respondents there than here.

But the self-taskmaster in me says it's time to catch up. My nominees for heroes of 2011 -- in a moment. First, some thoughts on the vexations of Blogging, which most people warned me had to be "branded" (i.e., single-topic) and needed a consistent publishing date and frequency for it to ever amount to anything. I got the most page views when I wrote about my past experiences with cult figures -- Terrence Malick and Albert Brooks -- but I didn't want to get stuck writing rehashes of pieces I had sworn off writing in the first place.

Spitzer & Parker (sans dog)

As much as I intended "Hands On" to be Unmediated Me, a few months in I got hired at CNN and was warned to be "careful" about what I wrote.  Rumor had it that someone had recently been fired for simply writing on Facebook about company layoffs -- which had already been public.

And when I was enlisted to write the show blog for ParkerSpitzer, my very first entry got me in trouble -- all I did was describe Eliot tripping over the  gate on Kathleen's office door protecting her blind rescue dog. My boss thought it was fine. Eliot and Kathleen thought it was fine. But I got called on the carpet. Turns out there was some sort of corporate policy against any pets at the office that Kathleen had skirted; I had unwittingly provided an exposé. I was relieved of my show blog duties.

Journalists often step in it without even realizing they've done so. Back when Beverly Hills Cop 2 was coming out, Rolling Stone assigned me the Eddie Murphy cover story.

But before I could meet Eddie, I was told his manager, Bob Wachs, wanted to "vet" me. He told me he had rejected another writer because he didn't think Eddie would get along with her, mainly because she was a woman and "Eddie always runs around in his underwear" and his posse asks questions like "Did you fuck her." I somehow passed THAT test but then was told I also had to interview the film's producers first.

Simpson & Bruckheimer

I dutifully showed up to meet Jerry Bruckheimer and his partner, the late infamous Don Simpson, and asked as many polite questions as I could to satisfy their egos.

At one point I mentioned the fact that Eddie had a team of two managers, Wachs and his Comic Strip co-founder Richie Tienkin, and asked them about their own partnership and how things were divided.

After this meeting, I found out that, unbeknownst to me or anyone else, Eddie's two managers were in midst of a fractious split-up, and that Jerry and Don had decided I was doing an exposé. The interview with Eddie was cancelled.

I ended up writing a snarky piece about Eddie being surrounded by Yes Men and handlers called "FREE EDDIE MURPHY" [left] that covered things like a paternity suit, his obsession with Elvis, and his poor choices in movies, and the magazine went with a Paul Simon Graceland cover. Murphy's career has only recently recovered from the slight. (Joke.) 

After ten years away from such maneuverings, I hoped to be able to write a blog that -- even when looking back at such pieces that I had been happy to leave behind -- would shed some insight into showbiz, TV writing, journalism, parenting, divorce, and anything else that moved me.

But even after leaving CNN in August, I found myself again having to be a cautious blogger, because my new job -- writing for Aaron Sorkin's HBO series set in the world of cable news -- is also closely guarded.

It won't air till next summer, and all HBO has shown is a brief nondescript shot [right] in its trailer for 2012. I couldn't even brag about Jane Fonda being cast as the Ted Turner-like mogul until it was old news.

Meanwhile, rabid fans are already circulating old versions of the pilot script, which has led to a lot of frustrating misinformation in the blogosphere -- including even the name of the series, the name of the fictional network, and the last name of the anchorman played by Jeff Daniels.

What I can tell you is that the challenge of the show ideally will be what will make it pay off. Unlike The West Wing, The Newsroom is set in the real world -- i.e., instead of fake Senators and Presidents and Supreme Court Justices, we're dealing with the real ones, and the news that's being covered is from recent history. The pilot takes place on the day of the BP Oil Spill; by the time the series airs, that will be more than two years in the past: long ago enough for the details to now be murky -- and to add some perspective -- yet recent enough for it to still have relevance. Some days in the writers room our brains explode but when it clicks, it's beyond rewarding.

There's my roundabout transition to bring me to my own take on recent history: the people who for me gave 2011 oomph and hope amidst a dismal economy and troubling political grandstanding.

1) JESSE LAGRECA (pictured up top)
It started out with an iPhone video. An unassuming guy at Occupy Wall Street being interviewed by a Fox News reporter, trying to get the OWSer to criticize Obama and the alleged "lack of message" provide the kind of soundbyte Fox would air. Instead he schooled the Fox guy so thoroughly that the interview didn't air. But a bystander's recording of the interaction wound up on YouTube and turned Jesse LaGreca into an articulate leader for a leaderless movement. He ended up on NPR (at one point appearing on a panel with Spitzer), speaking at the Capitol and elsewhere and gave me hope that something might actually come of the sit-ins. If nothing else I hope he runs for Congress.