BOOTLEGS KICK ‘EM WHERE IT HURTS

“Outrageous,” Bob Dylan says in the liner notes to his recent “Biograph” anthology. “If you’re just sitting and strumming in a motel . . . you don’t think anybody’s there . . . and then it appears . . . a cover that’s got a picture of you that was taken from underneath your bed and a strip-tease-type title and it costs $30. Then you wonder why most artists feel so paranoid.”

Bruce Springsteen despises them: “Out-and-out theft,” says his manager, Jon Landau.

What Dylan and the Boss don’t like are bootleg records and tapes--and with good reason. Dylan (whose recent five-record “Biograph” has had to compete with a 10-record boxed bootleg, “Ten of Swords”) and Springsteen (whose fabled live concerts, not available on any legitimate releases, are represented on more than 100 bootleg collections) are among the most heavily “booted” artists.

Dylan has been fighting boots for the better part of his career. Indeed, when Rolling Stone magazine reported on “Ten of Swords” last March and CBS Records temporarily withdrew its advertising in protest (claiming that the article was endorsing an illegal product), the confrontation had many familiar echoes. The same parties had faced off in 1969 when the first important public bootleg, Dylan’s “Great White Wonder,” appeared in Los Angeles and was written about extensively in Rolling Stone.

“GWW” launched a pirate cottage industry that has continued to bedevil record companies and artists even as it has satiated hard-core fans and collectors.

Now as then, bootlegging is illegal, and it raises serious ethical and artistic questions. “We consider the release of this record an abuse of the integrity of a great artist,” CBS stated in 1969. “The sellers of this record are crassly depriving (Bob Dylan) of the opportunity to perfect his performances to the point where he believes in their integrity and validity. They are at one time defaming the artist and defrauding his admirers.”

That’s pretty much been the battle line ever since. Dylan has since been booted some 500 times (there’s even a widely available book titled “Bob Dylan: His Unreleased Recordings,” discussing them in critical detail).

Yet there has never been any real dialogue between record companies and artists seeking to maintain control over their creative works and those enterprising collectors who think their fanaticism exempts them from legal niceties. In fact, those fans will buy and produce bootlegs despite the pleas and criticism of the very artists they so admire.

Just look at Springsteen, also a CBS artist. He, too, has inspired a 10-record set (“All Those Years,” covering his work from 1971 to 1982), as well as many four- and five-record concert sets--in part, no doubt, because he has yet to release an album of his long live performances, which many of his fans consider his most powerful medium.

There are at least a dozen “Born in the U.S.A.” tour sets out right now. Before the end of Springsteen’s run at England’s Wembley Stadium last July 4, high-quality audiocassettes of the opening concert were available on the streets of London.

Other heavily bootlegged artists include the Beatles (800 titles), the Rolling Stones (600), the Who, Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead. Most boots are of rock acts with commercial or cult followings, ranging from the aforementioned dinosaurs to youngsters such as R.E.M. and U2.

There is no market for Kenny Loggins or Melissa Manchester, and there are virtually no bootlegs of popular black artists, even those with large crossover audiences, such as Prince and Michael Jackson. The average collector is a young white male rock fan.

Most boots originate with concerts, radio and television broadcasts, demos, rehearsal tapes and studio outtakes. Thousands of bootleg albums exist (and there’s an emerging wave of bootleg videos), but you’re not likely to find them in your local record store. Given the small sums of money to be made (most boots have runs of only a few thousand), it’s usually not worth risking prosecution or disruption of service by annoyed wholesalers.

Record companies, of course, see bootleggers and their customers quite simply as thieves hurting the artist (who gets no royalties), the public (which is exposed to material the artist wishes to keep private) and the record company (which says it loses sales even though buyers of bootlegs tend to already own all available commercial releases).

For their part, fans seem willing to put up with high prices (up to $30 per disc) and inconsistencies in quality (while some bootlegs have excellent audio, they are more often atrociously recorded and pressed) for the sake of historical completeness, which may explain why collectors’ stores are more likely to carry boots than regular retailers are.

Hard-core fans are willing to overlook the ethical questions as well. They claim the right to appropriate anything that validates their commitment--including concerts and broadcasts, which are presented in the open air, as well as private tapes never intended for public exposure.

“Great White Wonder” was put together by a couple of Dylan freaks in Los Angeles who had access to private tapes, including recordings made in Minnesota in 1961, before Dylan had signed with Columbia, and ones from 1967, when he’d recorded what eventually came to be known as “The Basement Tapes” with the Band in Woodstock, N.Y.

The Woodstock tapes, though of mediocre quality, contained some outstanding songs and performances. Rolling Stone editorialized in 1968 that “the Basement Tapes should be released.” Dylan and CBS did not agree, and soon “Great White Wonder” was out: a double record inside a plain white cover with no identification, notes or song titles. The two entrepreneurs who pressed it had to borrow a car to deliver it to record stores on a cash-and-carry basis. They insisted they’d done the project because of the music.

Not only was “GWW” reviewed in Rolling Stone, it was given extensive airplay by Los Angeles radio stations (something that would never happen now except at the college radio level). Legitimized by this exposure, the album ended up selling something between 50,000 and 100,000 copies--exact figures are hard to come by, of course.

CBS, Dylan and his publishing company brought pressure on stores that carried “GWW” and instituted suits aimed at manufacturers and distributors, calling the album “a simple case of piracy of Dylan’s private musical performances for defendant’s profits and a brazen disregard of the Copyright Act provisions respecting record licensing, copyright royalties and elementary fair play.” That language remains at the core of legal actions today.

So, with the law closing in on them, the “GWW” entrepreneurs moved on to another area of capitalist endeavor: They fled to Canada and opened a gas station with their profits. When one of them returned briefly to Los Angeles, he found that “GWW” had itself been bootlegged.

Bootlegging is in many ways analogous to dealing dope. It’s built on a network of nameless underground operators and purchasers dealing with middlemen. It’s cash up front, no guarantees, no returns, no standards of quality. There is also little honor among thieves: Bootleggers often steal from existing bootlegs, putting on new covers, hinting at different material, taking the sound quality down another notch by copying copies.

“GWW” opened the floodgates, and if people thought bootlegs were being done strictly for artistic reasons, they were proved wrong when producer Bob Johnston told Rolling Stone in 1971 that he’d been offered $200,000 for unreleased Dylan tapes.

Among the big sellers of the ‘70s: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Wooden Nickel” (which quickly forced an official live release, “Four Way Street”), the Beatles’ “Kumback” (the unmixed, pre-Phil Spector version of “Let It Be”) and the Rolling Stones’ “LIVE’r Than You’ll Ever Be,” recorded at the Forum and Oakland Coliseum and released a year before “Get Yer Ya-Yas Out.”

But in the late ‘70s, as prosecutions increased and record companies cracked down, bootleg albums became less visible--though a new twist arrived in the form of a huge network of tape collectors and traders, who didn’t actually enter into production or sales.