Little Feat's "Electrif Lycanthrope" - one bootleg that deserves its reputation
I'm doing a programme for Radio Four about bootlegs. I've never been a completist in this respect. That way madness lies. But in the course of talking to people about the legendary bootlegs I've had my interest reawakened.
The classic for me was always Little Feat's "Electrif Lycanthrope", bought from a man behind a curtain in a little cubbyhole just off Carnaby Street. To get hold of a copy you had to know a series of codewords, catch the man at the right time and then hand over folding money. Contrast that with what I did just now. A little light Googling took me to the Internet Archive and a ZIP file of the original recording made on September 19th 1974. They used to reckon that Lowell George himself had mixed this. Listening to it again I wouldn't be at all surprised. And this time it hasn't been poorly mastered and badly pressed on sub-standard vinyl.
If you want to know what used to excite people about Little Feat, it's here. And if you're bothered about the ethics you might be interested to know that the Internet Archive's policy is to only feature the work of "trade-friendly" bands. In other words, bands who don't mind.
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Where's the fun
in downloading it?
I remember going to record fairs, and coming back with multi-disc Bruce Springsteen bootlegs. It was absolutely thrilling!
Maybe not downloading it...
...but trading for it over the internet...with someone from Singapore maybe??
I remember paying £25 for a Steve Earle/Del McCoury *import* from a legit shop in Stirling round about year 2000. When I got it home I found it was 2 cd-r's and they were stuck together. Prising them apart destroyed them. I decided then never to pay for another bootleg.
Will you be covering really terrible bootlegs?
Like the ones where a "Beatles lost song" is really someone recording The Rutles holding a tape recorder next to their TV set? Or genuine I Am The Walrus outtakes recorded on the shortwave band with a French DJ speaking over half of it? Linda McCartney demos under The Beatles name? For all those, I recommend 'Indian Rope Trick'. I spent twenty pounds on this turkey at a record fair in 1985 and I'm still hurting.
Time to rediscover Little Feat surely ...
Can we have a Word feature ...?
For years I had an increasingly wobbly version of this on cassette, taped from a mate's LP. I had played it so often that a transfer to CD would not have been worth the effort, even if it had not disappeared during a house move. I discovered it online a few months ago and it has rarely been out of the CD player since.
I missed their Dublin gig earlier this year while away on holiday, and just this Thursday, while Paul Barrere and Fred Tacket were playing just up the road, I had to endure a work related dinner with my ticket in my pocket! I suspect Little Feat are a band I am destined never to see live, even in bits.
My own bootleg fetish was/is the Beatles and Dylan. Picture vinyl editions of 'Sweet Apple Trax' was my first expensive purchase around 1977-78 - £75 for the two plus a third LP of one of the 1966 Budokan shows. I sent my dad in to buy them for me!
It really only escalated though when Unsurpassed Masters came out on CD. Late 1980s? A local independent record shop stocked all manner of boots on vinyl and then CD quite openly, marked as 'Imports'. The thrill was having something that no-one else had - it didn't mater that no-one else wanted it! Of course the Beatles' 'Anthology' and Dylan's own 'Bootleg Series' have removed most - but not all- of the fun.
By their very nature a lot of these recording are destined to sit on the shelf rather than on the turntable but, If you're interested, I have found that these stand up to repeated listenings:
1. Bob Dylan - The Genuine Bootleg Series (Vol.1)
2. The Beatles - The White Album Sessions
3. Little Feat - Electrif Lycanthrope
4. The Rolling Stones - Brussels Affair (Live 1973)
5. Bob Dylan - Blood On The Tapes
Clinton Heylin's book 'The Great White Wonders' is also highy recommended.
You do realise
by encouraging the downloading of these tracks you are depriving hard working (and illegal) "record companies" of potential future profits.
that's all right then. Carry on.
Can I just say Cathy Demos. Mmmmmmmmm.
Feat's Imprimatur
Weight is added to the argument that the band were more than happy with the release because of the Neon Park cover that adorned the vinyl record.
I still can't understand why it has never been put out officially.
You beat me to it Carl.
I was going to also point out that the artwork on my copy;
reappears in amended form on the sleeve of Hoy Hoy, the official release that gathered together a bevy of great material after Lowell's sad demise, further legitimising the recordings.
Did Bill Nelson play on it too?
That would make it doubly collectable in my book (I did download it a few years ago). How about a feature on the multi-talented "Yorkshire guitar hero"?
Fred Eaglesmith (Canadian singer/songwriter)...
....used to allow taping from the soundboard of his shows. These shows were passed along through internet fan sites. Strangely enough, he never allowed them to be shared through sites like Dimeadozen.
By the way..I love his bootlegs much better than his studio albums(though I have them all), simply for his banter.
Bootleg Serious
All these bootlegs being available online has changed things a great deal. Just over ten years ago, I was seemingly obsessed with tracking down all five volumes of Bob Dylan's The Genuine Basement Tapes; I would be on a permanent search, wandering into every market and record shop I could find; wondering if today might be the day that I'd find that one I was after. I'd be looking through the endless Dylan bootlegs in Camden Market before picking up my daughter from school, saying to myself: "Ignore the live stuff: you've got all you need". Then the man at the stall would look at me and say, "You know, if you like Dylan, I've just got this in" and reach beneath the counter in a slightly exciting but always eventually anticlimactic manner.
The internet changed all that, obviously; and I don't miss it for a second. If, for example, I'm curious about reappraising last week's Ryan Adams gig that I walked out of, I'll have a look on the Internet Archive. It'll be there eventually. There'll be a choice between several sound formats. No money will change hands. No harm will be done to the artist or their lawyers (in this case). No seedy market stalls. No wasting money on something that may well tun out to be crap. But the best thing that the internet has done in this respect is that it's cured my ravenous desire to have everything by a particular artist. I now realise that I don't need to own every artistic breath that certain people have uttered. There's all the stuff that I feel is nice to have but I never, never listen to: under this bracket I would file the White Album demos; the Nebraska or Exile On Main Street outtakes. Then there's the essential stuff: the alternate takes that are actually better or more representative than the albums that have overshadowed them. Sometimes it'll just be a song, like Wilco's arrangement of When The Roses Bloom Again that was left off Mermaid Avenue once they realised that it wasn't written by Woody Guthrie. Top of this pile has to be the Blood On the Tracks New York sessions, Blood On The Tapes, whatever. A rose by any other name. I listen to these recordings far more than I do the 'original' album.
Anyway, I take my hat off to those, like Adams or (the estate of) Warren Zevon, that have cleared their live recordings to appear on the Internet Archive. People will always download this stuff, and die hard fans will try their utmost. May as well let them. It removes much of the stigma of bootlegs - so many of them aren't worth releasing; but, in the spirit of the internet and Jackson Browne's accusation that "these times are famine for the soul, while for the senses it's a feast", it's nice to have the availability.
"No seedy market stalls." eh?
Seedy market stalls have delivered hundreds of hours of enjoyment during my record buying life, thank you very much; there's no call to denigrate them.
Seedy stalls haven't been the same...
since they became CD stalls. Discuss.
Vinyl's so much thinner,
it's easy to imagine there's a gem snugly fitted in between that dodgy Bon Jovi album and the eighty-second-copy-you've-seen-this-morning of Wings At The Speed Of Sound.
Do you remember that furtive sideways glance one perfected for checking out what the bloke standing next to you was flipping past in M while you were still finishing off L? The guilty feeling that he might clock you clocking him clocking a copy of a hard to find Van The Man bootleg? The suppressed intake of breath when you realised that the chap opposite you, working his way through D, had just pulled out a mint copy of The Gemini Suite, cruelly shelved under D instead of L? The inner sneer at those who simply pulled albums from the racks based on the title and the artist, with no attempt to inspect the state of the vinyl, while the cognoscenti, yourself included, would be eying the vinyl critically, like that chap on Face The Music who could tell what the music was from the reflections of the grooves?
Each to his own
I was just saying that I don't miss that way of hunting down obscure records.
I know, and I agree that looking for boots in stalls is
a quick way to waste enormous quantities of wonga!
These days, however, seedy stalls are one of the best places to find stuff that's currently unavailable (ie official stuff that's not currently licensed on CD).
My CD wish list is topped with five titles by artists who are not really obscure, just second division, and the total of their current second hand asking prices on Amazon is around £300. One of them isn't even offered second hand on Amazon, it's just "Currently Unavailable". It's available from someone in Europe on GEMM, but it adds another £150 to the bill.
I bet that within 12 months I can find at least two of these titles in 'seedy stalls' for a sensible price, because the stall holder won't have had the time or the inclination to check the CDs desirability on the second hand market, they'll just have picked it up in a job lot, and be glad to double their money by selling it to me for £5.
Flicking through a few racks of CDs in tired-looking cases is still a pleasant enough way to waste half an hour on a quiet Sunday afternoon.
Thanks David
It's a peach, even if the net has taken the forbidden thrill out of bootlegs - like the market stall at Camden where the man glanced both ways before taking the 'rarities' box out from under the table.
Magnificent
I knew they were good, but until I heard this I didn't realise just how good.
I love the Feat
The Feat are my overall all time favourite band, and this lovely clear digital version replaces my woozy old cassette copy. I have another Feat boot which this inspires me to dig out where Lowell tells a funny story about meeting Howlin' Wolf backstage in New York City - he asks the Wolf - "the man who invented rock n roll" - to play his new Stratocaster - and Wolf looked at him and said (VERY deep voice) "FUCK OOOFF" - "and it felt good - so I dedicate this song to Howlin' Wolf" - into "Apolitical Blues".
And here it is...
http://www.archive.org/details/lf1973-03-20.shnf