As the Xmas madness dies down for another year and those people who think we hold stock of 748,000 size/colour/style/designs that we can just pull off a shelf (thanks to Amazon’s model), step back for another year to be replaced by all our regular classic rock acolytes, I have news. I’m selling the remainder of my CDs because it's at least six years since I played one. To me, CDs attract no emotion or really make me feel anything. How we got persuaded to buy our collection again was a helluva scam. So I’m not attached to them the way I am with vinyl.
Since I sold 2000 five years ago, all that is left is the rare or obscure stuff. For example I have three box sets of ELP and Tangerine Dream bootleg box sets of 7 discs which are valued north of £100. And plenty of other officially released bootlegs.
It all goes to show the value of the long decried, but long desired bootleg. Where would we be without them? We’d have little or no record of a band’s brilliance. That doesn’t seem to have been considered. In fact I don’t recall anyone talking about how the music we so loved would be thought of in the 2020’s. As if they believed our parents claims that it was all ephemeral and worthless.
I distinctly remember telling my dad that no, I wouldn’t stop liking Deep Purple when I was 50, let alone 60. He didn’t believe me. He thought I’d grow out of ‘that bloody racket’. You couldn’t convince him it was art and had a future as part of the fabric of life and wasn’t convinced anyone would want to hear Ritchie Blackmore crafting a solo out of feedback 50 years later, yet here we are.
Over the years, fellow travellers on rock’s endless highway have been good enough to send me CDr’s of bootlegs and various radio recorded live shows, there is an almost infinite amount, including Zeppelin at Kezar Stadium, a brilliant show, I think a bit of which is in How The West Was Won and the whole gig is on Youtube and commonly available now, where once it was talked about in hushed, reverential tones.
Ideally if I was younger, you know what I’d love to do? Create an extensive library of bootlegs, old vinyl ones and CDs if necessary. Imagine how great it would be to have a show from every year the band was in existence or from every tour. But it’s too ambitious to start now, sadly, because I love love love old vinyl bootlegs and those ELP and Tangerine Dream box sets all reproduce old Flying Pig style covers. Really great, painstaking artwork.
It’s a much under-appreciated artform is the bootleg, often an early place to get coloured vinyl. Their heyday was, like so many things, in the 1970s, and if you can find one now, it’ll likely cost quite a bit. In a very real way, they document our rock lives and there deserves to be a museum for them, as they are as much cultural documents of our times as anything more rarefied and deserve to be treasured.
The much under-appreciated artform - The Bootleg
