Rock Stars Should Play to Collectors’ Market

Back in 1969, just as I was beginning to collect records in earnest, I frequented a hole-in-the-wall record store in Orange with a thoroughly ‘60s name: Heavily Heard. It was there that I had my first encounter with the world of bootleg recordings.

A consummate Beatles fan, then as now, I was intrigued by an album with a strange arching sculpture on its light blue cover and the title “Get Back to Toronto.”

No artist name, no photos, no song titles.

Inside the jacket, however, were the precious grooves containing several unreleased Beatles songs. Some were just fragments, others were full songs; most would appear the following year, in drastically different form, on the Fab Four’s swan-song “Let It Be” album. Indeed, the simple elegance of the embryonic version of “Let It Be” on “Get Back to Toronto” remains my favorite of a variety of performances subsequently released.

Almost as intriguing as the music was the story behind the album. This was, the store owner assured me, a highly confidential product, the result of industrious Beatlephiles who somehow had gotten hold of tapes with studio outtakes, then pressed them up in a garage record printing facility. One of the principals, he whispered, was now in the hospital nursing a couple of broken arms after private investigators had discovered his part in the scheme.

I figured the story was more the product of the record store owner’s fertile imagination than an accurate report on the furtive doings of some music business Al Capone. But it always stuck with me, romanticized or not.

It popped back to mind recently when I read about the mammoth raid of a record swap meet in Buena Park, where more than 10,000 bootleg recordings were seized by police. (See accompanying story.) Local authorities had been tipped to this monthly meet by the Recording Industry Assn. of America, the record industry’s lobbying arm. To the powers that be in the record biz, bootleg LPs, CDs and tapes are as invidious as the Medfly to a fruit farmer.

I’ve never had any sympathy for those who manufacture counterfeit recordings--those that, like counterfeit currency, are passed off as the real thing. But I must confess to having kind of a soft spot for bootleggers, even though they do profit illegally from the creativity of others.

Maybe it’s because most bootlegs sell in such small quantities--typically 1,000 or 2,000, if that--that it’s hard to view them as anything more than flies on the back of the elephantine record business.

Plus, there’s often an archival value to bootlegged music that wouldn’t necessarily be of interest to the public at large, and therefore might not otherwise be made available. “The Great White Wonder” bootleg--perhaps the first and still the most famous--is a sprawling, ungainly collection of Bob Dylan odds and ends. But it is far more insightful into the strange and beautiful wonderland that is Dylan’s mind than such official Columbia releases as “Self-Portrait” and “Dylan.”

Its legendary status may have helped spur the record company to legitimately release much of the same material in 1975 as “The Basement Tapes,” which became a Top 10 album (even though it had been circulating in bootleg form for years. So much for arguments that bootlegs eat very deeply into an artist’s pockets).

A Springsteen bootleg from the mid-’70s called “E Ticket” offers fascinating glimpses into the evolution of such songs as “Jungleland” and “Thunder Road,” with its snippets of early versions and alternate takes. Another Springsteen bootleg contains the demo tapes he made for producer John Hammond that resulted in his original contract with Columbia Records. These and other Boss bootlegs didn’t seem to prevent him from becoming the biggest-selling artist on the planet for a couple of years.

John Entwistle, bassist for the Who, reportedly credited some bootleg Who albums for reminding the band members of songs and performances they’d long forgotten when they were gathering material for authorized compilations of rare or unreleased Who recordings.

In any case, bootlegs generally appeal to people who are such fans of a given artist that they’ll buy anything and everything that the record company puts out, too--an argument that bootleggers like to use, even though it still sidesteps the subject of unpaid artist royalties.

But while RIAA does its best to squash these pests through raids on swap meets, such as the one in Buena Park, or at illegal manufacturing bases, there might be another remedy.

If artists truly are disturbed that any of their music is circulating without their approval, I’d suggest that they acknowledge and try to provide a legitimate alternative to their fans.

While the major record companies rarely release albums in quantities of less than 50,000, the artists themselves could consider establishing low-overhead, fan-club type operations that make available “bonus” recordings to die-hard fans via direct mail.

By culling from live tapes (which virtually all artists make) and/or selecting studio tidbits that for whatever reasons they’ve chosen not to release to the public at large, they could assemble their own “bootleg” albums.

Using generic album covers and basic labels, and selling these products directly, minus the vast promotional expenses that record companies put into major releases, the artists could keep costs to a minimum and still help fill the void that the bootleggers are exploiting.

And, should a title create a demand for more than a few thousand copies, it would provide a signal to the artist and the record company that there is a wider market ready to respond to a full-fledged, official release.

Surely, this wouldn’t put all bootleggers out of business, any more than the RIAA will ever shut down all bootlegging operations. (A cynic might note that the music industry doesn’t seem nearly as zealous about protecting the interests of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of musicians who are losing work to synthesizers that can ape an entire orchestra with the touch of a button. But then, that’s a sin that enhances profit, rather than a sin that reduces it.)

Nevertheless, maybe by making more material available to fans through legitimate channels, a few bucks worth of royalties would go back into the artists’ pockets--dollars that wouldn’t be diluted with cuts to independent record promoters, advertising staffs, distributors and retailers. And that thought might make both the recording artist and the fan sleep a little easier.