BOOTLEG The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry CLINTON HEYLIN St. Martin's Press New York m To sweet D. Welcome to the machine BOOTLEG. Copyright © 1994 by Clinton Heylin. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. ISBN 0-312-13031-7 First published in Great Britain by the Penguin Group First Edition: June 1995 10 987654321 Contents Prologue i Introduction: A Boot by Any Other Name ... 5 Artifacts 1 Prehistory: From the Bard to the Blues 15 2 The Custodians of Vocal History 27 3 The First Great White Wonders 41 4 All Rights Reserved, All Wrongs Reversed 71 5 The Smokin' Pig 91 6 Going Underground 105 7 Vicki's Vinyl 129 8 White Cover Folks! 143 9 Anarchy in the UK 163 10 East/West 179 11 Real Cuts at Last 209 12 Complete Control 229 Audiophiles 13 Eraserhead Can Rub You Out 251 14 It Was More Than Twenty Years Ago . 265 15 Some Ultra Rare Sweet Apple Trax 277 16 They Said it Couldn't be Done 291 17 It Was Less Than Twenty Years Ago . 309 18 The Third Generation 319 19 The First Rays of the New Rising Sun 333 20 The Status Quo Re-established 343 21 The House That Apple Built 363 22 Bringing it All Back Home 371 Aesthetics 23 One Man's Boxed-Set (Is Another Man's Bootleg) 381 24 Roll Your Tapes, Bootleggers 391 25 Copycats Ripped Off My Songs 403 Glossary 415 The Top 100 Bootlegs 417 Bibliography 420 Notes 424 Index 429 Acknowledgements 442 Prologue In the summer of 1969, in a small cluster of independent LA record stores, there appeared a white-labelled two-disc set housed in a plain cardboard sleeve, with just three letters hand-stamped on the cover - GWW. This was Great White Wonder, a motley collection of unreleased Bob Dylan recordings, culled primarily from home sessions in Minneapolis in 1961 and Woodstock in 1967. It was the first rock bootleg, and it spawned an entire industry. For twenty-five years now the bootleggers have persevered, even occasionally thrived. They continue to be a thorn in the side of an industry grown bloated by its own excess. Throughout these years they have reflected the best and worst of legitimate releases. The bootleggers are the ultimate free-marketeers, giving fans what they want - and to hell with the wishes of the artist or record company. Bootleg collectors the world over will remember their initial 'hit' - that first time they stumbled upon a stall or store selling albums you weren't supposed to be able to buy - and the charge that first blast of illicit vinyl gave them. For me it was as a thirteen-year-old would-be obsessive that I learnt of a seedy little porn shop in the nether regions of central Manchester, free-standing in the centre of an area modelled on Dresden circa 1945. It was a Sunday and the store was closed, but a friend and I bussed into town just to confirm that this really was a purveyor of hot wax. Sure enough, sellotaped in the window were three of their more attractive artifacts, with titles at once cryptically enticing — LiveR Than You'll Ever Be, Seems Like a Freeze Out, Yellow Matter Custard - huh? Returning the following Saturday, oblivious to the well-endowed German ladies thrusting out from the covers of magazine upon magazine, I edged my way to the back of the store and two cardboard boxes. I was searching for one item in particular - Bob 2 Bootleg Dylan at the Royal Albert Hall. Having read a description of the events one night in 1966 when Dylan scrambled the synapses of an entire generation, how could I fail to be intrigued? 'Sorry, we're out of stock on that one. We'll be getting some more, though.' I furtively flicked through whatever quasi-definitive Dylan boot­ leg guide I had along for the ride. It recommended one they did have, Talkin Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues. Great title. And I loved the lyrics I'd read in Writings and Drawings. It had a proper cover, t'boot. 'I'll take it.' 'Two quid, to you, lad.' My most recent legitimate acquisition — Mr Bowie's Aladdin Sane — had required a seemingly hefty £2.19, courtesy of Boots the Chemists. After all the scaremongering that accompanied bootlegs in the early seventies (and even today), I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the sound quality of this new addition to my Dylan collection (which numbered exactly two collections of Greatest Hits) was perfectly good — a bit of hiss that was largely lost on my parents' Grundig gramophone, but pretty damn fine (little did I know it was actually a Berkeley Records edition of an original Trade Mark of Quality bootleg and that TMQ's version was hiss- free) . By the time I established that the acquisition of these items carried considerable kudos among the record-swapping fraternity at school, I was a teenage bootleg junkie. In those days there was no real way of knowing what one was buying. Bootleggers were (and are, though no longer for the same reasons) notoriously vague about the sources of their material. My friendly neighbourhood bootleg dealer was generous enough to let me take 'items' home to decide if I wanted them. Though funds were tight, I bought what I could. Soon enough he had moved to new premises and the German ladies had been shunted to the back shelf - in two cardboard boxes. The albums kept multiplying. The 'above board' record store across the road did not appreciate all the punters who came in asking if they sold bootlegs and decided Prologue 3 to make a phone call. One Saturday I saw a new Dylan bootleg, Joaquin (pronounced 'walkin", as in 'she's a . .') Antique, the first to feature outtakes from his recent return to form, Blood on the Tracks. The official album had been out all of six weeks. I was broke and prices had by now nudged up to £2.6o. I was obliged to return the following weekend, money now in hand, intent on buying this exciting new platter. There was no stock. Indeed there was no window. Orbit Books was no more. Twenty years later, I'm sitting in an upmarket Chinese fry-up joint trying to tape an interview with one of the central figures in the eighties 'Boot Biz' over a cacophony of sizzling fat. 'Eric Bristow' - his chosen pseudonym - despite a healthy American tan, has not lost his broad Lancastrian accent. He is telling me about this great shop in Tibb Street, Manchester, where he first started buying bootlegs . Everyone's stories are different, yet the song remains the same. BOOTLEG is as much an excuse to collect all those tall tales as an attempt to provide a layman's account of the contradictory constructs that have been mounted to stamp out an industry that has proved to be remarkably resilient. Bootlegs are here to stay because the appeal of hearing music that has not been authorized or sanitized by the artist will always be an enduring one. BOOTLEG is, above all, a celebration. Despite many shoddy titles, shameful practices and cowboy practitioners - who have been responsible for much that is bad and ugly - I believe bootlegs have been a positive influence on the music. They have reminded fans that rock & roll is about 'the moment', that you might have to wade through static, pops, crackles, bad nights and worse tapes to find one clear moment, but no record company can capture each and every one worth preserving; that the record companies cannot lock music up in neat little boxes and say, 'This is what you may listen to.' Hopefully the bootleggers have also freed an awful lot of music that the artists themselves might not 4 Bootleg have 'approved' for release. But then, never trust the artist, trust the tale. Clinton Heylin - June 1994 Introduction: A Boot by Any Other Name ... The Privateering Stroke so easily degenerates into the Piratical, and the Privateering Trade is usually carried on with an Unchristian Temper, and proves an Inlet into so much Debauchery and Iniquity.1 Though rock bootleg albums are the bouncing babies of illicit trade, the impetus for bootlegging most forms of popular art has a hoary ol' tradition dating back at least as far as Shakespeare. The line between 'the privateering stroke' and the 'piratical' has re­ mained blurred throughout its 400-year history. The word bootleg, as fans of gangster movies are well aware, originally referred to the sale of illicit booze (generally the moon­ shine variety). The expression, which became current late in the nineteenth century, came from the apparently common practice of carrying a bottle of whiskey or the like in the leg of one's boot, presumably in the interests of avoiding detection. (Appropriately, this is also a popular method of smuggling tape-recorders into rock gigs.) Its transference to the musical world dates from the pro­ hibition era, when the word was in common currency. Around 1929, the showbiz journal Variety referred to a 'huge market' for what it called 'bootleg disk records'. What Variety was referring to were not so much bootleg albums, in the sense now understood by the term, but 'pirate' albums - i.e.