Democracy of Sound (32 page)

Bootleggers, then, claimed that they made more music available to the public without impinging on the music industry’s bottom line.
Hot Wacks
chose the soundtrack of
The Sound of Music
—a massive hit that sold over ten million official copies—as its example of a counterfeit, highlighting the distinction between a pirated mainstream product and the alternative fare preferred by bootleggers. Such counterfeits directly hurt the established companies by fooling consumers into purchasing a nearly identical knock-off instead of the official release. Most importantly,
Hot Wacks
argued that bootlegging did not contribute substantially to the $200 million a year in losses claimed by the RIAA in the late 1970s: “Bootleg records, with an average run of 2,000 copies, should not even be included in this figure as the record labels do not lose revenue on a record which is not their catalog.”
¹⁴
The economists Alireza Jay Naghavi and Günther G. Schulze lend tentative confirmation to these claims in their study of the economic impact of bootlegging, suggesting that bootlegs are not substitutes for officially released albums. “It is neither clear that they are cheaper,” the economists suggest, “nor that they crowd out official sales.”
¹⁵
According to this view, the typical purchaser of a bootleg is a fan who also buys all the official releases by his favorite artist, thus causing no direct financial damage to the performer or the record company.

Some musicians considered recording by fans to be harmless. The trading of concert tapes helped spread the word about many musicians in the punk movement of the 1970s, lifting the fortunes of Patti Smith and the band Television in particular.
¹⁶
British punks the Buzzcocks reportedly knew of the
Times Up
bootleg and even owned a copy; they did not inform the authorities, but the British Phonographic Industry trade association took action against the pirates. “I’d like to have some kind of royalty from bootleggers,” the manager of singer-songwriter Elvis Costello conceded in the late 1970s. “100 albums wouldn’t be a lot to ask. But it’s the record companies who stand to lose most out of it—which tells you something interesting about the whole record industry.”
¹⁷

Figure 6.1
This mid-1970s recording consists of live performances by the punk artist Patti Smith. Released on the label Ze Anonym Plattenspieler, it illustrates how bootlegging persisted after the passage of federal copyright protection for sound recordings in 1971.
Source:
Courtesy of Music Library and Sound Recordings Archive, Bowling Green State University.

Most notoriously, Bruce Springsteen openly endorsed bootlegging early in his career. For example, when “the Boss” became entangled in a contractual dispute that prevented him from making new recordings, he took to the stage to deliver his music to the public. He arranged to have five concerts aired on the radio in 1978, in hopes that the music would be recorded and circulated among his fans nationwide. On stage, Springsteen celebrated “the magic of bootlegging” for making his music available to fans, and one night he even called out, “Bootleggers, roll your tapes, this is gonna be a hot one!”
¹⁸

Springsteen initially viewed concert recordings as a matter of fans’ devotion. “You find out most of the time that, number one, they’re fans,” he told an interviewer in 1978. “I’ve had bootleggers write me letters saying, ‘listen, we’re just fans,’ that’s their story.” At this stage in his career, he also subscribed to the theory
that bootlegs did not reduce overall sales because they appealed primarily to fans who would buy his official recordings: “The kids who buy the bootlegs buy the real records too, so it doesn’t really bother me. I think the amount of money made on it isn’t very substantial. It’s more like a labor of love.”
¹⁹
Springsteen was a fair-weather friend of the bootleggers, though, eventually coming to resent the appropriation of his work. Just a year later, Springsteen and his label sued Vicky Vinyl, a legendary bootlegger in California, for copyright infringement and a host of other offenses, including illegally using his name and likeness.
²⁰
He later told
Rolling Stone
that “in some way, the song is bein’ stolen,” expressing indignation at bootleggers who made big profits from albums with poor sound quality. His staff continued to work with the RIAA and legal authorities to pursue charges of copyright infringement in the 1980s and 1990s.
²¹

The Grateful Dead provides perhaps the best-known example of a popular group that accepted bootlegging and even incorporated it into its way of doing business, much as Springsteen attempted to harness unauthorized reproduction with his radio shows of 1978. The “Deadheads” who followed this quintessential jamband around the world devoted themselves to capturing every trace of the group’s meandering improvisations, night after night. Their zeal for documentation recalls the classical copiers of the 1950s and 1960s, who yearned to record the subtle nuances of each unique performance of a beloved opera singer, just as jazz fans valued every iteration of a composition by a virtuoso musician as worthy of preservation. “The Dead … is a compilation, every night, of every show that went before,” taper Dan Hupert averred. “Without a tape, what they played in Laguna in ‘68 is nothing more than past history.… If you see two shows a year, or five, or seven, they are individual concert experiences. If you see twenty-five and listen to tapes of most of the others, it is no longer an individual experience or a set of them. It is a continuing process.”
²²
This mode of perceiving the band’s work—hearing it live, listening to and comparing the tapes—would be impossible without the creation of an ongoing record of the music.

The Dead also served as a link between the rebellious cultural milieu in which pop bootlegging first flourished in the 1960s and the stable pattern of underground collecting that developed in the following decade. The band emerged in 1965 in the midst of the countercultural fervor in San Francisco, embracing an antiestablishment ethos that advocated both hedonism and collectivism. Band members described their followers as “a community, tribe, family, and traveling circus,” in which “the audience is as much the band as the band is the audience.”
²³
The recording and trading of concert tapes rapidly became a part of this shared experience, beginning in the late 1960s but becoming truly widespread in the following decade.
²⁴

When the band issued an official policy on taping in 1985, it codified and regulated activities that had long occurred (literally) under the performers’ noses.

Taper David Cooks recalled hauling his reel-to-reel tape machine into concerts by the Quicksilver Messenger Service, one of the Dead’s psychedelic contemporaries, starting in 1968, and no one tried to stop him. “Occasionally they’d question me,” he said, “then they figured I was just recording them [for personal use] and let it go at that.”
²⁵
Cooks did not run into another taper, though, until 1972. Tape trading did not take off until the early 1970s, when fans began to organize clubs to share their recordings.
²⁶
New advances in consumer electronics sped the development of this hobby, exemplified by the shift from Cooks’s reel-to-reel set-up in 1968 to cassettes as the currency of trading in the 1970s. When Harvey Lubar and Jerry Moore made a pivotal early bootleg in 1970, they still used a small Uher open-reel tape deck.
²⁷
By 1974, taping experts were recommending Sony’s 152 SD cassette recorder to beginning bootleggers.
²⁸

Interest in taping grew as seven high-quality tapes recorded by the Grateful Dead’s technical support during a series of shows in 1968 and 1970 made the rounds among fans. Unlike the live bootlegs of Rubber Dubber, which captured the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Elton John on tape but distributed the sounds of vinyl, these recordings remained in tape form and reached listeners in samizdat fashion. The tapes also contributed to the growing lore about the Dead’s prowess in live performance. “Listening to the Dead’s albums is fine, but the studio cuts are to their live sets as hamburger is to steak,” Charlie Rosen wrote in the early 1970s. “They are theoretically composed of the same ingredients, but a sirloin is juicier, more delicious, more nutricious [
sic
] and far more filling than a Big Mac. There are also several bootleg albums to be had, but the quality of sound is so inconsistent that forking over all that bread is almost like playing the ponies.”
²⁹
Rosen proposed that the document of a live performance contained a value that could be found nowhere else, qualities that no one who missed the concert could access unless the sound was recorded and preserved. The paucity of recorded live material in the early 1970s inspired many concertgoers to start making their own recordings and assist in the project of documentation.

The launch of Les Kippel’s fanzine
Dead Relix
in 1974 also spurred interest in recording among fans. The writers in
Relix
sang the praises of the Grateful Dead and tirelessly discussed the minutiae of recording—how to sneak recording equipment into concert venues, what kind of tape to use, the etiquette of copying and distributing tapes to other fans, and so on. Just as the band itself did not oppose audience recording, the management of most venues did not seem especially concerned about taping either. “Hiding it [recording equipment] under your coat or a girl’s skirt is out,” one fan explained, “because it will bulge and bouncers are always suspicious of bulges. What they are looking for, however, is bottles. As long as you can convince a heavy that what you are carrying is not a glass container, your [
sic
] O.K. Because, while heavies are supposed to confiscate recording equipment, they seldom see it and are not looking for
it.”
³⁰
In 1974, the smuggling of alcohol—the original inspiration for the term “bootlegging”—still mattered more than smuggling a tape recorder. The author even suggested that one could get a device past a bouncer by saying that it was only a tape
player
, not a recorder. “They are usually dumb,” he said.
³¹

Relix
offered a forum for nascent tape-trading networks to connect with other potential participants. In a handwritten advertisement, Jerry Moore promised “the finest tapes available,” but added “trade only,
no
sales” and “quality recording a
must
!” The tapers embraced a number of artists who shared the Dead’s propensity for improvisational and experimental music, particularly those who blended folk with psychedelic rock. For example, Harvey Lubar of the Bronx invited readers to join his Hell’s Honkies Tape Club, announcing both the recordings he had to offer and the ones he was seeking. “We got Dead (lots), NRPS, Q.M.S., Airplane, Zappa, Floyd, and much, much more!!!” he wrote. “We want more of the same—and any
OLD
Frisco music.”
³²
Similarly, Mike Tannehill of Fort Worth, Texas, advertised recordings by a similar range of taper’s favorites, including King Crimson, Bob Dylan, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Traffic, Frank Zappa, and, of course, the Grateful Dead. Although these preferences reflect the taste of a generation weaned on sixties rock, they also show how bootleggers and collectors continued to favor music that emphasizes improvisation (like jazz) and the virtuosity of live performance (like opera).

In 1985 the Dead took a new approach to the great number of tapers who showed up at their performances. They explicitly condoned audience recording—as long as the tapes were used for strictly noncommercial purposes—and they set aside a section of each venue near the stage for tapers, who could order special tickets for this area through the mail. The decision brought some order to the bustle of recorders jockeying for the best positions at shows and introduced a degree of quality control by granting tapers an advantageous place to do their work. Bootleggers made copies available to other fans, often through a tape-trading “tree”; the possessor of a sought-after bootleg was a “branch,” who would mail copies of the original recording to other fans, the “leaves,” who supplied a blank tape and paid postage. The system was meant to maintain the sound quality of copies and operated on the basis of good will and reciprocity, rather than profit.
³³

The Dead’s policy attempted to square the circle of music copying by fans—an ethical puzzle that lawmakers, listeners, and labels had never been able to solve. Collectors in the 1960s had urged the New York legislature to provide an exception in new antipiracy laws that excluded the “antiquarians” who copied and traded rare recordings in obscurity. However, no one had ever explained how bootleggers who catered to a small group with esoteric tastes could be distinguished from pirates who copied and sold the hits. Was it not necessary to bar the sale and distribution of unauthorized copies across the board? What
if the small-scale collector’s bootlegger made a profit? The Grateful Dead and its loyal following of Deadheads, however, presented a case of fans individually recording, copying, and trading music, with an avowed commitment to noncommercialism.