Each week, the pop culture website Pop-A-Looza shares some posts from my vast 'n' captivating Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) archives. The latest shared post is "My Illegal Records," a look back at bootleg recordings I've owned.
As the post notes, my first bootleg album was a Beatles boot called The Deccagone Sessions. I wrote this about The Deccagone Sessions in a different post:
My first bootleg record, purchased in 1978. As a teenaged Beatles fan in the '70s, I was fascinated by the idea of unreleased Beatles tracks. Even though there were a handful of legit Beatles LPs I hadn't quite gotten 'round to scarfin' up yet--The Beatles Again, Magical Mystery Tour, A Hard Day's Night, and Yellow Submarine-- I wanted more, more than standard-variety Fab Four fare, more, MORE! I saw ads for this enticing, illicit more in The Buyer's Guide For Comics Fandom, and swooned at the prospect of all this secret bonus Beatles material. I passed up a chance to buy my first Beatleg at a Cleveland shopping mall record store over the '77/'78 Christmas break, then finally grabbed my copy of The Deccagone Sessions at Syracuse's Desert Shore Records a few months later. The Deccagone Sessions offered a hodgepodge collection of BBC performances and 1962 Decca Records demos, plus the horribly distorted live-at-The Cavern Club "Some Other Guy," the promo video version of "Revolution," and an uncredited snippet from the Get Back sessions. The radio cover of Buddy Holly's "Crying, Waiting, Hoping" was my immediate favorite (a skip in the track notwithstanding), with that definitive shooby-doo-wop rendition of "Revolution" a close second. All these decades later, that version of "Revolution" is still without official release.
References to the bootleg ads in The Buyer's Guide To Comics Fandom remind me that those ads played a role in the specific circumstances of my introduction to The Damned. The story involves a girl. Don't all stories involve a girl?
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| A girl. Not THE girl. |
The biggest Christmas treat for me here was THE MONKEES!! Well, almost The Monkees. "Christmas Is My Time Of Year" was a 1976 three-fourths Monkees reunion single by Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz & Peter Tork, a cover of a '60s track by the studio group The Christmas Spirit (with members of The Turtles, The Byrds, plus some chick named Linda Ronstadt). I had the Davy/Micky/Petey track on a boot...er, RARE IMPORT Monkees LP called Monkeeshines, absolutely worshiped it, and was so grateful to secure a cleaner copy of the track on CD. The group's then-unreleased 1967 TV performance of "Riu Chiu" would ultimately become the definitive Monkees Christmas classic, but there'll always be a place in my holiday heart for "Christmas Is My Time Of Year."
There was also Monkeemania, a 1979 3-LP collection from Arista Records in Australia. It was presumably authorized, but it had, I dunno, a bootleg aura about it. I loved it anyway. The Kinks disputed Reprise Records' authority to release the 1973 archive-dive LP The Great Lost Kinks Album, but I don't think anyone really considers that a bootleg.
(Oh, and speaking of Christmas bootlegs, here's what I wrote about my presumably-unauthorized copy of The Beatles' Christmas Album:
One early '70s December evening, I was in the car with my family, riding through the village of North Syracuse, when this crazy, manic comedy record came on the radio. When I asked what it was, my sister said it was one of The Beatles' Christmas records. I was fascinated. But the damned things were elusive; they were originally produced from 1963 to 1969 solely for paid subscribers to The Beatles' fan club, and not available to the general public. To this day, their only official commercial release has been as a pricey limited edition collection of 45s in 2017. The Beatles' Christmas Album, the fan club LP that collected all of the original messages on one platter in 1970, has never been officially released, though bootlegs are quite common. I got my copy at a used record shop in Berkeley in 1989, and I added a decent CD boot...er, RARE IMPORT copy a few years ago. I used to wait for radio stations to play all of these at Christmas time, but few of 'em ever did. When we started This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl, we determined that we would play each and every one of them on our annual Christmas shows, without fail. I can't believe no one else does that.)
My most significant bootleg was a cassette of a 1978 live show by The Flashcubes. That tape was a cherished memento for years and years, and it was my only long-form document of the 'Cubes until the early '90s. The Flashcubes are in my all-time pop Trinity--The Beatles, The Ramones, The Flashcubes--but they only released two 45s during their original late-'70s run. I needed more than that. My live Flashcubes cassette sustained me until 'Cubes bassist Gary Frenay gave me copies of their demos, which in turn kept me going until the release of The Flashcubes' Bright Lights CD in 1997. I wrote the liner notes for Bright Lights, and it's one of my favorite pieces among the miles-high stack o' stuff I've done. It occurs to me that my well-worn, distorted live Flashcubes cassette is long overdue for a lengthy blog post of its own.
After writing "My Illegal Records," I realized that I had forgotten to mention my Dave Clark Five bootleg CDs. The ethics of bootlegs are shaky at best; unauthorized releases bring no revenue to artists or labels, though some fans justify purchasing bootlegs of favored acts because they've already bought everything else, and the boots contain material not otherwise available. That argument doesn't apply to pirates, which are illegal copies of legitimate releases. DC5 boots fall into an area in between; my three illicit documents of the Tottenham Sound--American Tour/Coast To Coast, Weekend In London/Having A Wild Weekend, and The Dave Clark 5 Play Good Old Rock & Roll/Dave Clark & Friends--are pirates of legit DC5 LPs from the '60s. But those are all long out of print, and Dave Clark has been unwilling to reissue them. I already own the four LPs contained on those first two CDs, and I don't think I've ever even seen copies of those last two albums. I'll buy 'em all again from ol' Dave if he ever sees fit to license them for officially-sanctioned shiny discs. Much of the material has been available for authorized digital-air download from iTunes, and I did buy a bunch of those (and frankly, I think those files sound better than some of the bootleg CD tracks).
Anyway, those are the supplements to my bootleg story. "My Illegal Records" is the latest Boppin' Pop-A-Looza.
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This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.
The many fine This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio compilation albums are still available, each full of that rockin' pop sound you crave. A portion of all sales benefit our perpetually cash-strapped community radio project:
Volume 1: download
Volume 2: CD or download
Volume 3: download
Volume 4: CD or download
Waterloo Sunset--Benefit For This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio: CD or download
Carl's writin' a book! The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1)will contain 165 essays about 165 tracks, each one of 'em THE greatest record ever made. An infinite number of records can each be the greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Updated initial information can be seen here: THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE! (Volume 1).
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