These Boot(legs) Are Made for Walking Down Memory Lane, Part II

Last week, loyal readers will recall, we were discussing the glories and travails of the bootleg recording. A brief recap: upside is you get to hear music, often live recordings, that you normally wouldn’t because the artist chose not to record/release it; downside is, the quality is usually not great, particularly recordings of older shows, before the advent of tiny digital pocket recorders.

To reiterate my stand on bootlegs – I’ve stayed away from them mostly out of laziness. In the vinyl and CD years, boots were not easy to find, tended toward expensive, and since they didn’t sound all that good, it seemed like a lot of energy spent for not a great return. But with the advent of the Internet and the transmission of music electronically, and the tendency these days to share music for free, the whole bootleg landscape has changed. Now it’s possible to download great shows from days gone by for the price of a monthly Internet connection that you’d have anyway.

An example: while I was browsing around on a site, looking at various shows available, I noticed a show available by one Mr. Van Morrison. It was from Fillmore West in 1970. He was touring his new album, Moondance. The band featured some amazing players, including guitarist Ronnie Montrose. And Van never sounded better. You could hear the passion in these amazing new songs, and the album was already generating the kind of buzz that would make it a classic, even today. It’s probably the best-known of all his albums, and the guy is prolific.

So this is a great recording to have in one’s collection. But for me, it’s far more than that. This, ladies and gentlemen, was the very first concert I ever attended alone. This was the show I went to see at 15 years old because I could. I was living alone for the first time, and realized one night that I could go to Fillmore if I wanted to. So I did. The bill that night? The Small Faces, starring Rod Stewart, and Van Morrison. This recording I found is of that show. I listen to it from several points of view at once; musically, it’s fantastic. But I can also remember standing there in that crowd, sizing up people at the show as potential audience members of my own one day, and also just basking in the feel of those days.

Fillmore West was a great place to see live music then. People gathered as much to see other people as the bands. In those times, the music was important, but the musicians not so much. There wasn’t the absolute adoration that came to pass just a couple of years later. People appreciated the music, but didn’t yet worship the players.

Ok, so you still don’t want to support bootleggers, and that’s fine and good. The Internet is giving us an ethical option. There are now streaming sites where you can listen to live recordings of shows from days gone by, without the ability to download the material. So while you have access to it, you don’t own it. The artist still doesn’t profit from the work, but you don’t get to turn around and sell it, either. A gray area, I know, but hey, this is life.

So go to Google and type in Wolfgang’s Vault. What you’ll get is a site that contains hundreds of live shows, mostly recorded at the Fillmore and at Winterland. This music is available for streaming, which means that while you’re at the site, you can listen. Most of it cannot be downloaded, so you need to either be at your computer, or own an iPhone and get the app (which, by the way, I did, and it’s great).

Right now I’m listening to Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention live at Winterland in 1970, basking in the glow of a Zappa guitar solo as only he could do it. The other day I listened to the very famous Bruce Springsteen show from December 1978, which is supposed to be the best live show he ever did, and if you know anything about Bruce, you know what a statement that is. There are shows from performers for every taste in music from the 1960s to now. This is a site for music lovers. And it’s free.

Could this something like the spirit of Woodstock coming through the Internet age? Or am I just having a rare moment of not feeling like a cranky old man?

Some Boot(legs) are Made for Walking Down Memory Lane

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Ah, the Internet; home of a billion Web sites, a veritable hive of human psychic fingerprints. With numerous free blog sites out there, almost everyone, it seems, has a story to tell, and they are more than willing to tell it.

This includes, turns out, a host of folks who have managed to acquire, through means unclear, various recordings of artists that the artists themselves did not intend to be recorded, or at least released. These have been and still are referred to as ‘bootleg’ recordings, and for the past forty years or so, these bootleg recordings have been the purview of enthusiasts, fans, and just people who enjoyed finding and owning stuff that is, at best, unauthorized, and, at worst, illegal.

There are, from the artist point of view, several problems with the bootleg thing. One, they are, as mentioned, recordings not intended for public release. Artists feel that they are, or should be, the final arbiters of the work they release. To release work that doesn’t stand up to the standards of that artist can be to dilute the legacy of that artist. One can understand, certainly, how that could be a concern. The other problem is, of course, financial. When someone purchases a bootleg recording, the transaction is entirely underground. There is no royalty to the artist. Or the artist’s record label. Artists are by and large annoyed by this. Labels, on the other hand, go so ballistic over this that they sue the customers. It’s all quite dramatic.

So I have, over the years, more or less avoided the whole bootleg thing, out of sympathy for my artist brothers and sisters, sure. But really more for the fact that seeking out these things takes more time and effort than I care to put in to it. The quality of many of these recordings are sketchy, to say the least. And do I really need to spend a day or two seeking out a live recording of, say, Amy Winehouse that someone recorded with a cell phone, spend $20 on it and listen once, only to just have it sit on my iPod taking up valuable bandwidth?

But here’s the thing. Lately, bootlegs have been finding me. And giving me back some of my lost youth. Really. Here’s what I mean.

A friend of mine, a regular attendee at the Armando’s Blues Jam, showed up a couple of months ago with a very rare recording. He knows I’m a huge Eric Clapton devotee, so he brought me a CD of Derek and the Dominoes playing at the Berkeley Community Theater. Now, this particular band only did one tour, and I happened to be there the night they played Berkeley. I remember it so well, because Eric introduced a young turk guitarist named Neil Schoen to play on Key to the Highway that night. To my way of thinking, Eric was gracious and let Neil take a couple of choruses, and the young man played his heart out. But then Eric took hold and pretty much polished the floor with the kid.

This is significant in my life because a couple of years later, when my band was playing at The Great American Music Hall, Neil was leaving Santana and forming a little outfit called Journey. He was backstage before our show, and I asked him why he didn’t join the Dominoes when Eric invited him to. He told me that Eric was doing lines of heroin, and he didn’t want to get involved in that. He also said that he had pretty much mastered the Clapton thing, and was now working on the Hendrix thing. I thought that was pretty arrogant, so to show him a thing or two, I invited him to play with us that night. He came out and I struck up Key to the Highway. I played a couple of choruses and nodded to him. He pretty much polished the floor with me.

To have this recording now is like a direct window into my past, a very important part of my life. The recording is terrible. When I play it in the car, my wife begs me to find something more sonically suitable. But I don’t care about the sound quality – I’m hearing some very special moments being relived.

I have more to tell about this bootleg thing. And I will in columns to come.