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.
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