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Anyone Have or Collect Bootleg Albums?

J

jmiles1960

Super Member
Back in my high school days (70's) a friend had access to live recordings of various rock and country artists / bands from a NY source. The recordings came on LP's in white cardboard jackets. He called them "bootleg" recordings. No label on the LP of course. Some were better recordings than others, but cool non the less.

Anyone collect these or know if they are still circulating? I suspect the Internet and digital age has erased the need for such medium.

I don't have any, but would be interested in obtaining a copy or borrowing.
 
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Oh man..... I have 100's of Zeppelin and Elvis Presley bootlegs on both vinyl and CD. Once I started rubbing elbows with the original tapers and/or guys that had the lowest gen tapes, I gave up on the "boots" for pure tape collecting either on DAT or Cassette. As a result, I have about 20 Case Log cases filled with tapes and multiple tupperware boxes filled with DAT's.

You are correct though, the Internet (read: download sites) have almost rendered bootlegs null and void. But the new releases are still fairly robust though - for example, the Led Zeppelin II multi tracks where just released exclusively on Boot CD...previously uncirculated.

JQ
 
Have only found ONE bootleg...
In the 3 years I've been collecting albums at the thrifts....
And It's Phenomenal


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The Beatles - Nowhere Man 2:40 (live)
Cat Stevens - If You Wanna Be Me, Be Me 2:42
Fleetwood Mac - Purple Dancer 5:46 (live)
Steely Dan - Dallas 3:07
Procol Harum & the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra with The Roger Wagner Chorale - Toujours L'Amour 3:41 (live)
Mott The Hoople - Rest In Peace 5:40 (live)
David Bowie - Rebel Rebel 2:54
The Band - Baby Don't Do It 3:52
Simon and Garfunkel - You Don't Know Where Your Interest Lies 2:19
Jethro Tull - Summer Day Sand 3:42
Spirit - Red Light Roll On 5:35
Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band - Grow Fins 5:47 (live)
Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band - Diddy Wah Diddy 2:25
The Move - So You Want Be A Rock'n'Roll Star 2:44 (live)
Bruce Springsteen - The Fever 7:35
Crosby Stills Nash and Young - Long May You Run 3:52
Jimi Hendrix & The Band Of Gypsies - Little Drummer Boy/Silent Night/Auld Lang Syne 4:10
Frank Zappa and The Mothers Of Invention - Deadly Jaws 2:59 (live)
The Rutles - Get Up And Go 2:23
The Beatles - No Pakistanis 3:43
Brian Eno - The Lion Sleeps Tonight 2:43
Gentle Giant - The Runaway 5:31 (live)
The Strawbs - Lay Down 4:40
The Mushroom Tabernacle Choir - The Twelve Drugs Of Christmas 3:22
Jackson Browne - You Just Want Meat (You Don't Want Me) 1:44 (live)
Little Feat - All That You Dream 3:29
Groucho Marx - Hooray For Captain Spaulding 3:08 (live)
 
i have 2 XTC live bootlegs...

XTC – Black Sea Tour '81 Recorded live at London's Hammersmith Odeon, February 1981

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XTC – The Rhythm January 1980 at Hurrah's in New York City

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Too many to count, file, and find when I need them. :pity: My Stones boot collection is completely out of control. Some sound just horrendous, some ok and listenable, and a select few are just jewels.
 
I grab them when I find them if the price is right. Current permanent parts of my collection;

The Runaways - The Originals: Early Wizardo[?] 2LP press on coloured vinyl.
The Runaways - Forever Lost: Bauta Records [Sweden]. Red vinyl 375 copies.
Genesis - Swelled and Spent: Original TAKRL w/insert which sounds WAY better than that crappy reissue w/the fancy cover.

Enjoying at the moment but may go eventually;

Led Zeppelin - Live In Seattle TAKRL 2 LP
Led Zeppelin - Copenhagen Warmups 3 LP
Genesis - L'Ange Gabriel on yellow/white vinyl

Not yet listened to;

Genesis - Pamela is Watching You
 
On Vinyl? Yeah. Pink Floyd, about 20 of them, Grateful Dead, maybe 15 or so, Zeppelin, Hendrix and the Stones about ten apiece. A few YES shows as well. Tried to get a copy of every show I've been to, or at least another date on the tour. Only a few of the extremely rare recordings are for die-hards only.

Quite a few are White Jacket/ White label but a lot of the Dead LP's have a coloured mimeograph insert, some have really top-notch artwork.

Year ago, there used to be a few record stores in NY, NJ and Philly that kept them behind the counter. You had to know what to ask for and HOW to ask for it usually. I remember finding a crate of them on the Main Line in the 1980's in the back of a particular store. If the owner didn't like you (or didn't like your taste in music), he wouldn't sell you anything significant. Reminds me of the movie "High Fidelity". Got some of my more interesting Dead and Floyd boots there.

On cassette, Reel and DAT (and even a few Beta HiFi)....thousands of hours. I've been digitizing it all.
 
I don't have any on vinyl. I had some nice AC/DC ones on tape that I always planned on transferring to CD. Back in the day I bought a few CD boots. One was a Zep that was pretty good. I think some(or all?) of that material came out on a legit release eventually. I also have a Metallica one that sounds pretty bad. I didn't buy any after that. $40+ for a crappy sounding boot seemed like a waste, to me.

Now, if you are talking downloads, I have a ton. Some people would say I have a problem, actually.:D
The internet has opened up the bootleg world to whole new level. And they aren't a $40 gamble anymore. If you want boots, you are a high speed connection away from musical enjoyment:music:
 
I have a huge number of Cure bootleg recordings in digital file format, from '77 to 2010. At one point I was actually pretty obsessive about "collecting" them.

But The Cure is one of the most-bootlegged bands in history, supposedly, so there are plenty of things on vinyl and CD too. Back in '95 I actually got a really cool bootleg called "Razor Rare Demos Vol.3" on CD at an Alwilk in a shopping mall, if you can believe it. Everything on it is available elsewhere now (well, most of it), but back then I was a very young teenager and a budding Cure fan, and this CD was a blast:

http://www.discogs.com/Cure-Razor-Rare-Demos-Volume-3/release/1516204

This record is pure gold, one of the best of the shows from the 1984 Top Tour, which happens to be my favorite of all their tours. It was recorded live in 's Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands. The performances here are a bit sloppy - missed and wrong notes, poor timing, forgetting to turn the volume down or up on certain instruments for various songs - but emotionally intense and very effective. It sounds like a soundboard recording, although the sound quality is still only decent.

And here's another issue concerning bootlegs in general: Misspelled or completely incorrect song lists. The funniest one here is supposed to be the song title "Charlotte Sometimes," but instead some joker decided to make is "Shower Sometimes" (see second picture below). :D A few of the other songs are out of order (compared to what's actually on the record), a couple aren't listed at all, and some are listed but are not really on the disc. :scratch2: So it seems the band members of The Cure were not the only ones doing lots and lots of drugs in '84.

Oh, they titled it Dressing Up. after the Cure song of the same name, which is actually part of this performance and recording:

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I used to have quite a few - Stones, Tull, etc. - but I've sold them all except for this rather famous one:
 

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Don't have any vinyl but because of the internet I have a pile of bootleg CD's but I've gotten more picky, if they don't sound really good I don't bother with them.
 
Live Zep Boot find

Wow what a day at the thrifts!!!!!!!!! I saw this fellow in the clearance section looking at a stack in the bins and I always think, "Dang he'll get all the good stuff" but I worked my way around and when he finished, and he was a brute just tossing the records like they were trash, I saw a couple of Zep albums Santana, Stones and so forth.. Great titles but really poor poor condition. So I did a quick run thru the stacks of about 300 albums and pulled about 50 that looked interesting. Narrowed those down to about 12 or 13 that were worth looking at. There was one Zep title I wasn't familiar with "Led Zeppelin On Tour" But it was a little rougher than I like and I was about to put it back when I thought, I should get it and even if I can only get a couple of songs it might be nice. I then found a second copy of the same 2 lp set. Heck I grabbed them both. Come to find out it is a pretty tough Boot to come by. Berkely Records is the label. Most boots I got back in the day were just blank or some even hand written. These were labeled and while not great art or anything. Decent job. Listening to them right now.
The other Boot story is a sad one. My very last album purchase back in the hay days of vinyl, was at a local shop. The guy grabbed me by the arm and whisked me into the back room of his shop and said "Pssst hey check this out" It was the usual white cardboard blank album cover but opened up to a trifold cover all three albums were labeled "The Beatles Revolver Album" in German but when listened too, it was a live boot of Pink Floyd The Wall Live in LA. And hands down the best live boot I had ever heard. Heck it was one of the better live recordings bar none that I had ever heard at the time. In the move to my present home it was lost along with the only tape I had of it. After 17 years, I still have hopes it will reappear someday. Sorry the post was so long, but I get excited at finds like this.
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The Beatles were the only group I cared enough about to search out bootlegs of any sort. And that only started because I was abolutely sick and tired of listening to the first 4 albums in cd mono thanks to GM, and all the whiners at EMI, lol.

I've got bootlegs of virtually everything of distinction that the Beatles recorded, by way of the infamous Dr. Ebbetts, at least anything that approached being stereo. Never have been a big mono fan, sorry. The core collection would be all Capitol albums, all MFSL lps, and all Blue Box lps. I also have the entire MFSL set, and early Capitol versions, that were done by Millennium Remasters. The MFSL set differing sonically a bit from the Dr. E. versions in that they are a bit softer on top, though both claimed to having used nothing but noise removal software on them, and probably used somewhat similar rather top end playback gear.

I have also collected the majority of the really decent sounding studio outakes, and alternate versions released by various well known Beatles bootleggers. I have to say that I was absolutely astounded when I found out just how much of this stuff was out there, and just how good a lot of it sounded, which led/allowed me to get a bit picky regarding sound quality, lol. I still find it a bit odd that more people do not seem to realize that all of this stuff is out there.

Anyway, my hat is off to all of those that made such bootleg recordings possible, especially of the long ago discontinued main releases, as I never would have been able to afford collecting the original lps, nor would I have been able to afford the proper playback system to truly enjoy them on. And of course many thanks to those that managed to duplicate the various outtakes/alternate versions, as listening to them never fails to draw me just a little bit closer to having actually been there during the recording sessions.
 
When I drove from Mass to The Grand Canyon & back all I took were 60 Led Zep boots, a Johnny Winter Boot & a Ten Years After 2fer.
I was pretty sick of LZ boots by the time I got back :yes:

The Led Zeppelin studio outakes from Antrabata; 11 Disc Set is worth seeking out on FLAC if you're an LZ freak

I have Rolling Stones LIVE'r Than You'll Ever Be on vinyl. It's excellent :tresbon:

bt.etree.org has free downloads of a gazillion bands that allow/allowed audience/soundboard recording.
I have about 600 discs of The Grateful Dead live from mostly soundboard recordings.
Tapers don't like the bootlegger moniker.
They put a lot of care into their recordings and trade or give their work.
Bootleggers are rip-off artists.
There's a big difference.
 
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I picked up an REM vinyl boot last weekend. I was doing a job at a "seniors village" kind of place and it was garage sale weekend. It was mixed in with a bunch of the usual garage sale fare.
 
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