Alaska Employment Law

Bootleg recordings of popular music first appeared around 1969, when a vinyl collection of unknown Bob Dylan songs, in a plain white album jacket labeled The Great White Wonder, began to circulate.  This was soon followed by a leaked copy of an early mix of the Beatles’ Let It Be album, which was played on WBCN radio in Boston and WKBW in Buffalo, and widely taped.  Known as Kum Back, it was the very first Beatles bootleg.  There are now literally thousands of bootleg recordings of the Beatles, just as many of Dylan and Led Zeppelin, and staggering numbers of Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead and Springsteen bootlegs.

So, what’s a bootleg recording?  Basically, it’s a recording that has not been officially released, including live recordings that are taped by sneaky and/or worshipful fans.  A pirate recording, in comparison, is a duplicate copy of an officially released recording.  (The Chinese market is awash in pirated recordings.)  Each pirate that is sold means, of course, that the artist sells one fewer official recording.  Bootleg recordings, on the other hand, would not otherwise be in the marketplace.  Still, most jurisdictions recognize the recording artists’ rights in bootleg recordings of their work.  But not all jurisdictions: at one time, Italian law provided that live recordings over 20 years old were in the public domain, and certain other recordings could be sold by third parties upon “notice” and payment of a statutory royalty to the artist.

There have been many famous bootlegs, some of which are vastly preferable to the official recordings released by the artist.  Among these is Brussels Affair, the Rolling Stones’ live performance at the Forest National in Brussels on October 17, 1973, where the band was in stupendously good form.  Mick Taylor’s slide guitar shreds everything, Charlie Watts is immense on drums, no matter the rhythm, and Jagger’s vocals and harmonica on the apocalyptic version of “Midnight Rambler,” all 12 or 13 minutes of it, have never been eclipsed.  There is simply no official live album by the Stones that comes close.

Some bootlegs become so successful that the artist’s record company eventually decides to release the recording officially.  This was the case with two of Bob Dylan’s best bootlegs.  One of them, Guitars Kissing & the Contemporary Fix, sold perhaps 100,000 copies - which probably  makes it the best selling boot of all time - before it was released (in different, but not better sound quality) by Columbia as The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live, 1966: The “Royal Albert Hall Concert.”  This concert was in fact performed in the Manchester Free Trade Hall, but the original bootleggers got the location all mixed up, and the recording is so well known that it became known as the Royal Albert Hall Concert - even though it’s not.  In any case, the recording is famous for an exchange, occurring just before “Like A Rolling Stone,” between Dylan and a fan who was protesting the erstwhile folksinger’s going electric by calling him “Judas!”  Dylan turns to The Band and, in a moment of blistering contempt, says, “Play f*cking loud!”  Another Dylan boot that saw official release is The Basement Tapes, the best bootleg version of which is A Tree with Roots.  These recordings run to four or five CDs in their full bootlegged glory, though Columbia saw fit to release only a couple of discs’ worth.  They left an awful lot of good stuff behind.

Long before the Beatles released their Live at the BBC two-disc collection, an Italian label released The Complete BBC Sessions, originally a nine-disc set (later expanded to ten)  containing every available BBC recording by the Beatles - about 250 cuts - and a 65-page four-color booklet on times and places of each recording, housed in a handsome box with a terrific photo of George Harrison’s Rickenbacker guitar on the cover.  No one had ever seen anything like it.  Supposedly, Capitol Records even used some of the bootlegged tracks on this set in compiling the “official” release some years later.

Despite the shabby legal status of bootlegs, there are many who think they provide a social good.  They argue that the only people who buy bootlegs are rabid fans who have all the official recordings anyway, that bootlegs preserve recordings of historical interest, and that the existence of bootlegs prompts artists and record companies to release the same stuff in better quality, or to release other excellent stuff that has never been heard before.  And that happens.  As Ringo Starr noted, the Beatles Anthology releases were “Us, booting ourselves.”