This might become a regular feature, each time with a trio of eclectic of bootlegs.
Babs' Bootleg Bonanza #1 is a very nice mix of bootlegs from Thelonious Monk, Led Zeppelin and Joni Mitchell. All three are soundboard recordings that all things considered have very good audio.
Thelonious Monk Quartet
November 12th, 1962
The Village Gate, New York City
1. Rhythm-a-ning (cut at start)
2. Body and Soul
3. Evidence
4. I'm getting sentimental over you
5. Body and Soul
6. Jackie-ing
Thelonious Monk - Piano
Charlie Rouse - Tenor saxophone
John Ore - Bass
Frankie Dunlop - Drums
Led Zeppelin
September 28, 1971
Festival Hall
Osaka, Japan
01 Heartbreaker (cuts in)
02 Since I've Been Loving You
03 Black Dog
04 Dazed And Confused
05 Stairway To Heaven (end cut)
06 Please Please Me
07 From Me To You
08 Celebration Day
09 Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp
10 That's The Way
11 Going to California
12 We Shall Overcome
13 Tangerine
14 Down By The Riverside
15 The Grand Ole Opry
16 What Is And What Should Never Be
17 Moby Dick
"Percy" - vocals
"Pagey" - guitar
"Jonsey" - bass
"Bonzo" - drums
Checkout the covers of the Moptop's "Please Please Me" and "From Me To You"
Joni Mitchell
November 6, 1995
The Fez
New York, New York
CD1
02 Refuge of the Roads
03 Hejira
04 Sunny Sunday
05 Happy Birthday, Joni
06 Just Like This Train
07 Moon at the Window
08 Magdelene Laundries
09 Lead Balloon (instrumental--in progress)
10 Crazy Cries of Loves
11 The Three Great Stimulants
12 Cherokee Louise
13 Happiness is the Best Facelift
CD2
01 Song For Sharon
02 Turbulent Indigo
03 Love Puts on a New Face
04 Night Ride Home
05 Amelia
Joni Mitchell with Brian Blade on drums.
This was Joni's first gig in almost a decade, and the first to feature Joni's modified Fender Stratocaster hooked up to a digital Roland VG8 unit. As Joni points out, her absence from performing live was that she typically uses 30-50 guitar tunings for her complex repertoire, necessitating as she puts it: "endless re-tunings plus an army of extra guitars I had to bring on the road in what had become a truly exhausting process."
For the freeload, what was the first bootleg you had?
It was a 1978 bootleg of Cheap Trick called "California Man" which was released in Germany. Somehow a copy found its way to a used record store in New Hampshire. I think I sold it to another used record store, probably in Milwaukee. Maybe it eventually made it to California.
ReplyDeleteI did not buy bootlegs for a very long time, I taped them. So it must be a secondhand one, I know the last bootleg I bought. An illegal reprint of the first Melvins album for a fiver.
ReplyDeleteBlueberry Hill by Led Zeppelin from the very newly opened Virgin store in London which had a great bootleg section, probably served by Richard Branson who was behind the counter at the time...Jay
ReplyDeleteZep's 'Blueberry Hill' is a classic.
DeleteBonzo's Birthday Party, 1973 from a record shop in Lawrence, KS. I don't recall the price or the name of the establishment. I do recall that I was expecting better sound than what I'd bought, oh well.
ReplyDeleteI believe the 2nd was Phish doing Quadrophenia, stem to stern, musta been 1988, in St. Petersburg, FLA, at a head shop/cd store on 5th street.
I believe the 3rd was Grateful Dead, 2/14/1968, got it as a starter trade (blanks & postage) when I joined the Sugarmegs mailing list so long ago. Since then it's been off to the races! Thanks Babs
'Bonzo's Birthday Party' is also a classic.
DeleteI got a live CSN&Y double album shortly before 4 Way
ReplyDeleteStreet came out. It only had 1 LP inside & of course had poor sound quality. Never bought another...
I recorded Queen's first show in Buenos Aires. It was 1981 and I was 12 years old.
ReplyDeleteIn 1967, at Canterbury Records in Pasadena, CA I bought a 2 LP set of a January 1966 "Acid Test" with The Dead, Keesey et al. Still have it after all these years.
ReplyDeleteBabs? Share a pic of the artwork!! Oh, my first was, "Great White Wonder".
ReplyDeleteThe album will be part of a future Babs' Bootleg Bonanza.
DeleteAccording to, "Recordmecca.com" the "Acid Test" lp is worth $2,500!
ReplyDeleteI have a copy of the one on "Recordmecca.com", but it's not the one I was referring to. The cover of the one I had, was made with a magic marker but looked really cool, and it appeared to have been mimeographed (remember that amazing smell?). It was also on two LPs, with plain white labels that were rubber-stamped: Side A, side B etc.
DeleteAs a long time music collector, seller and trader, I will say the one on "Recordmecca.com" (even if it was a sealed copy) at $2,500 is ridiculously overpriced/valued. Of course, asking price and selling price are two entirely different things.
Mimeograph aroma! Why hasn't someone replicated & bottles that!? Guessing it would be a hit. Used to volunteer to make copies in school for no other reason than the smell. Good times. Thanks Babs
DeleteThe scent of spirit duplicators was burned into my olfactory memory forever. Sometimes you'd get lucky and get a sheet that was still wet from the machine wafting great waves of that enticing ink smell all over the classroom.
DeleteIt was our first drug.
Delete"Albert Hall" 1966. Bought for £4 in Portobello Road in 1974
ReplyDeletePink Floyd on TMOQ from 1971, purchased via mail order, probably in 72. Don't remember the title but it included "Embryo" and "Fat Old Sun" -- the latter of which was mis-labelled as "Summer Song" or something similar.
ReplyDeleteThe Glyn Johns mix of projected LP Get Back.
ReplyDeleteIt was around 1970 I picked up the double-LP bootleg Great White Wonder consisting of some of the Dylan/Band basement tapes and other Bobby Z ephemera. I think I got it at Licorice Pizza—a local LA chain whose stores burned so much pachouli the record you bought there were permeatged with the scent.
ReplyDeleteAmong today's freeloads I'm most interested in hearing Led Zep's renditions of early Beatles.
A Stones double L.P. called "Lips"! Side one was from Hyde Park and side two from '76 European tour - both sounded atrocious. But the other was mainly from the '78 US tour and sounded really good (plus Midnight Rambler from Brussels '73)
ReplyDeleteGood lawd, your boots look amazing. My first was a live Stones lp from their 73 tour.
ReplyDeleteIn 1979, on the final day of a six week tour of the US and Canada by Geyhound bus, I called in to a Greenwich Vilage record shop and bought a bunch of lps, because they were much cheaper than in England. There were three bootlegs included : Albert Hall, a live Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello - 5,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong. Could this have been your record shop, Babs?
ReplyDeleteIf it was on Bleecker Street, it well might have been.
DeleteGreat idea for a regular feature. Of course the thing about bootlegs is the quality: from soundboard to audience member's self-recording & everything in between; plus just how "bootleg" is it, authorized, enhanced, raw, remastered.
ReplyDeleteI believe my first boot was Cash/Dylan - Nashville Sessions (1969), then Pink Floyd's Floyd's of London (1971). By far I have more Clash bootlegs than any other band. Some are horrendous & some are incredible.
Thanks Babs.
It was one of these:
ReplyDeleteButthole Surfers – Double Live
PJ Harvey – Europe 1993
The Beatles - Live in Atlanta Whisky Flat on TMOQ, blue vinyl with a large number 1 or 2 on the labels. Led Zep's Blueberry Hill was a favorite too.
ReplyDeleteAnybody else notice the name of the 9th track on the Joni boot? Coincidence, or kismet?
ReplyDeleteI have tons of Dylan boots, some of which have been officially released since then as Bootleg Series.
C in California
A Double LP by the Jam called 'A Young Man From Woking' which covers a BBC braodcast concert and an earlier concert. Given the BBC Concert was broadcast over FM, the quality is much better than the average bootleg from the time and far superior to the other concert recording including in the vinyl set.
ReplyDeleteIIRC The first album of the BBC concert has reappeared at least once as a bootleg CD since if not on an official one.
Live R Than You'll Ever Be - Rolling Stones. I bought it before I had a driver's license...probably 1972. Bought in Berkeley, CA...at Rasputin's on Telegraph.
ReplyDeleteI had a ton of bootlegs to start my record collection, mainly because they were cheap (around five bucks as opposed to around fifteen for a new or catalogue one), which was important when saving up pocket money, and then, money from delivering newspapers.
ReplyDeleteBack then of course I didn't know what a bootleg was, or that they were illegal. They were sold at the same stores as every other disc, so mainly the dodgy artwork giving you pause...
My very first bootleg was also the very first album I ever bought with my own money, a Beach Boys album very optimistically and not very realistically called Greatest Hits.
It was a mere ten tracks, ran for about 23 minutes and coupled some of the licensed-to-everyone HIte Morgan tracks with a couple of surf tracks that weren't even from the Beach Boys.
It also had the ugliest ass cover you'll ever see, with ridiculous cut outs of the band members heads on some ridiculously cheap computer graphics.
Seriously, check out this beauty
https://www.discogs.com/fr/release/3606632-Beach-Boys-Greatest-Hits
Yeah, that's awful. It's noteworthy that it was cheap, though... when I ran into boots in the 1970s, they were expensive, often higher priced than an import LP....let's see....uh...a regular catalog LP would be $4.00, an import from the UK $8.00, and a bootleg $12.00...that sort of increase. And a lot of the time, they sounded like crap. :)
DeleteLink
ReplyDeletehttps://workupload.com/file/nEHzmeHDJ4Y
Jimi Hendrix "Lord Of the Strings" which was the complete Woodstock performance. Coloured vinyl! Tape warble where somebody bumped into the takeup reel! Larry Lee singing Gypsy Woman!
ReplyDeleteI had a blank cover/label bootleg of what became Let It Be before the Spector version came out. It was probably Glyn Johns rough mixes. Feedback at the beginning of Teddy Boy. Not a great pressing.
ReplyDeleteGrateful Dead at the Felt Forum 12/5/71 on Berkley Records. A single LP with hand written song titles on the inner circle of the disc. Playing it for the first time, Pigpen was growling his way through "Mr. Charlie" when my older sister (whose tastes were mostly James Taylor and Simon and Garfunkle with a little Beach Boys thrown in) screamed "Turn that shit down!" Since I depended on her for rides everywhere I complied.
ReplyDeleteThe Who "Decidedly Belated Response" from Philadelphia, December 1973. It was probably a King Biscuit Flower Hour aircheck on vinyl, but I loved the versions of "I'm One," "Sea and Sand," and "Drowned." The latter were utter power trio electric bliss, and the first has a Pete Townshend vocal that's always grabbed me. The old cover had an air raid shelter symbol photocopied onto dayglow paper, with enough lettering to sell it to me.
ReplyDeleteD in California
I think it was CSN&Y. In the early seventies I was after all the Little Feat boots with their Neon Park print out covers.
ReplyDelete