Entertainment For Lively Minds
... are you planning a bootleg LP?
Just finished listening to David Hepworth's excellent Radio4 show on the history of bootlegs. It reminded me of a fantastic story I read in Sounds back in the late 1970s.
It concerned an unnamed band who were staggeringly successful in the US, but lacked one thing: they hand never been bootlegged (as in turned into proper vinyl bootleg LP, which was more of a big deal back then). So concerned by the damage to their cred this represented, that they recorded and mixed a whole live show and handed it over to one of the big bootleg manufacturers of the day, virtually begging them to press some copies.
No sooner had the bootleggers complied than they were raided and the entire pressing run was confiscated by the feds.
Has anyone else heard this story? I would so love to know who the band was(I'm thinking Toto/Cars FM rock without the cult cache of a Springsteen or Zep but might be being terribly unfair.) Any ideas anyone?
- More from Emcee_Fotherington-Thomas.
- Login or register to post comments
-
I'll have a guess
Foghat were huge in the States but meant almost nothing back here in the UK, their home country.
Didn't Littlefeet record
Didn't Littlefeet record their own bootlegs?
In the version of the story I heard...
...it was Journey.
A band once reported as saying, we'd love to play Europe but we wouldn't make enough money to cover our toilet paper costs
Sounds about right to me....
Huge FM appeal, but nobody sufficiently interested in their ouevre to want off-cuts.
Thanks Stimpy, I didn't dream this one!
Little Feats..
"Electrif Lycanthrope" was mixed by Lowell george and is the best bootleg ever.
'Bundled Sunspray Demise'
Isn't that a great title for a 70s vinyl bootleg (of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, of course)?
Don't suppose anyone has a copy?
I read recently....
...that Tom Waits bought a bootleg copy of his Alice demos to remind himself of the original material in order to make the CD which he released 10 years after the stage show.
ish
He was getting back the master tapes - in what was apparently something of a hostage negotiation. Incidentally, I know quite a few Waits fans who prefer the demos to the studio album (though I'm not among them).