Hot Acts, Hidden Microphones

As soon as he was inside the hall, clear of the guards at the doors, Tapewyrm tended to his preparations with a burglar’s stealth. This obsession of his was both an act of love and a crime, and to do it right, he had to take care.

The 40-year-old communications technician headed to a bathroom. Inside a stall, he unpacked a tiny sound studio he had smuggled in beneath his flannel shirt. He fit dime-sized microphones under his hair, then readied a miniature digital tape recorder.

These were the well-rehearsed details of a practiced man. He was at the height of his surreptitious craft--making illegal bootleg recordings of his idol, Bruce Springsteen. Midway through the singer’s 15-show stand here, Tapewyrm intended to get mementos of every night for himself and hundreds of friends.

But as the lights dimmed inside the 20,000-capacity Continental Airlines Arena, Tapewyrm’s torture started. For three hours, a trio of loudmouths behind him brayed on during Springsteen’s anthems, gossiped during his ballads and chanted “Beer run!” during his harmonica solos, a cacophonous yammering that pulsed directly into Tapewyrm’s $300 mikes.

“I was gold,” he moaned afterward to fellow bootleggers in the parking lot. “And now I’ve got three hours of yahoos in love with their voices.” Tapewyrm’s only consolation was that he had made one more recording, flawed as it was, without being caught.

“In practicality, they can’t stop me,” he said the next morning, while he transferred a concert tape onto recordable compact discs known as CD-Rs. “There are 40 more people there every night doing the same thing. You can’t stop a movement.”

Music bootlegging--the unsanctioned taping and distribution of rare, unreleased recordings and concert material--is a hobby gone haywire, part black market, part crusade. It is an outlaw trade of hustlers who cater to the voracious appetites of music buffs who can never get enough, fans who scheme and pay whatever it takes to obtain souvenirs of the performances of their idols.

For three decades, bootleggers have skirmished with the recording industry in a cold war of smuggling, raids and lawsuits. The two sides have always talked past each other: the rock zealots who depict themselves as on a quest for hidden art, the record companies and musicians who fret that bootlegging chips away at their revenue and copyrights.

Hobby Leapfrogs Into Computer Age

All bootlegs are illegal under federal law, whether sold, traded or given away. After years of lobbying for stricter copyright protections, the music industry was rewarded in 1994 with an anti-bootlegging statute passed as part of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Even the act of recording a concert without permission, Tapewyrm’s shadow hobby, now carries a federal penalty.

But in the last year, just as the tougher legal stance began to show results, bootlegging leapfrogged into the Computer Age.

Fanatics who once prowled through seedy CD stores and weekend record conventions are turning online for their illegal treasures. They can search hundreds of “CD-R tree” sites on the Internet, where fans trade and pass on recordable discs of unauthorized concerts to each other free. Others link up with underground retailers and auction houses, where bootleg discs that appear out of nowhere in limited amounts can fetch from as little as $20 to as much as $300, sold off in furious bidding wars. The more computer-literate download hours of music onto their hard drives from Web audio sites.

And the growing availability of high-performance equipment--from inexpensive “CD-R burner” machines and computer hook-ups that transfer music onto compact discs, to easily hidden digital tape machines and microphones--has made it possible for enthusiasts like Tapewyrm to become one-person bootlegging operations.

Technology’s whirlwind pace has brought so many changes so quickly that even the record trade’s aggressive lobbying arm in Washington, the Recording Industry Assn. of America, has quickly had to fine-tune its stance. While insisting current laws “give us a good base,” Frank Creighton, the recording association’s director of anti-piracy operations, concedes that “some areas will have to be strengthened.”

In the past, black marketers produced their contraband--records, cassettes and compact discs--in foreign or fly-by-night pressing plants. But in the first six months of this year, law enforcement raids confiscated 10,485 CD-Rs, a clear sign of how quickly bootleggers are embracing the desktop revolution. Raids have waned in recent years as bootleggers have been shut down, but the new spate of computer-related activity sparked 71 operations against pirates this year, 20 more than in the same period a year ago.

And recordable CD machines that cost $25,000 a few years ago have been replaced by stand-alone and computer units that can be had for as little as $200.

“There’s no reason why anyone who wants this music shouldn’t be able to get it,” said Tapewyrm, who uses his punning online alias in unsecured chat rooms. “And there’s no reason why they should have to pay for it.”

Seeking Tipsters, Going After Students

The RIAA announced in August that it would reward tipsters who expose underground CD-R mills. And the group plans to increase pressure on students who offer copyrighted music on their Web sites and the colleges that give them Internet access.

“We’ve sent out thousands of cease-and-desist letters,” Creighton said. “If we find they keep doing it again, we’ll take appropriate action.”

Some Internet bootleg addicts have learned how to trade their computerized files without exposing themselves to industry watchdogs. They use high-capability cable modems and anonymous sites that allow them to feed shows to each other without leaving an obvious trail on the Web.

Even the hole-in-the-wall record shops that once specialized in bootlegs smuggled from Italy and Japan have turned to computers to churn out their own product. In New York’s Greenwich Village, a bootleg mecca where two dozen stores offer illegal discs, nearly every unauthorized CD found on shelves these days is a CD-R, recorded either by anonymous entrepreneurs or store owners themselves.

“The bootleggers are getting bootlegged,” said Mike Carlucci, owner of Subterranean, a cramped Village disc shop where patrons collide as they hunch over the bins. Carlucci carries so many CD-Rs among the legitimate discs in his dimly lit shop that he pastes up reviews so buyers “know which ones are good and which ones suck.”

At Revolution, another bootleg shop several blocks away, the store manager explained the CD-R flood this way: “No more middlemen, no more worrying whether your package from Luxembourg is being traced by [U.S.] Customs.”

The survivor of two decades of raids and a lawsuit by the Grateful Dead for selling bootlegs of the group’s marathon shows, Revolution now stocks hundreds of black market CD-Rs of performances by artists as varied as the Allman Brothers Band, the Artist Formerly Known as Prince and Rage Against the Machine. Buried in the Springsteen section, which held at least 50 bootlegs on a recent weekday, were several CDs of the musician’s recent 15-show stand in New Jersey.

The discs’ provenance was as blank as their pale blue coating. The manager, a ponytailed, moon-faced man who declined to give his name, laughed when asked where they originated. “Who ever knows?” he shrugged.

Tapewyrm has his own suspicions. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said, “if they’re mine.”

Drawing a Line at Selling for Profit

The lines between fans and profiteers long have been blurred, ever since “Great White Wonder,” an underground collection of unreleased Bob Dylan songs that is the first acknowledged rock bootleg, surfaced in Los Angeles record shops in 1969.

Lou Cohan, a Southern California teacher who was among the first to sell illegal Springsteen recordings, according to his own admission and other accounts of the bootleg trade, started out in the mid-1970s as a rabid fan, building a tidy side business until a raid scared him into quitting.

“I’ve got a lot of great memories from those days, but I’m glad they’re behind me,” Cohan says.

Tapewyrm draws a line at selling his own discs for profit. But he knows that his tapes, highly regarded by profiteers, are regularly duped and sold by bootleg dealers. He exchanges e-mails with several Europeans who sell illicit Springsteen material and has even sent them tapes on the understanding that they would not be sold. “If they burn me, they’ll never get another one,” he said.

Most audience tapes of concerts still pale compared to official releases. But the revolution in digital equipment has deepened the quality of recent “live” bootlegs. And Tapewyrm and his confederates spend hours dreaming up schemes to find the perfect sound source.

Some of Tapewyrm’s trader friends have resorted to bootleg sales for quick cash. Tapewyrm admits he too considered selling his bootlegs a few years back. “I stopped out of fear,” he admits, and a missionary’s zeal to get his tapes “out there for free.”

Hundreds of concert discs and cassettes spool out in rows on the floor of his Maryland apartment. Some date back to 1984, when he began taping Springsteen shows using a cheap office cassette recorder that “sounded like you were listening through a Dixie cup.”

He tapes because he wants something tangible of his obsession, a vestige of what would otherwise be gone the moment the music stops. “It’s not enough to hear the show and go home,” he says. “All the enjoyment’s in getting the tape. If I don’t have the tape, it’s like something’s missing.”

As he has honed his craft, building a tower of recording equipment in his living room, Tapewyrm’s discs have become legendary among Springsteen fanatics. He is anonymous when he stands in line at the ticket gates, just another middle-age fan under a Springsteen tour cap. But even when his tapes were spoiled by loud talkers or bad seats, Tapewyrm was besieged by requests for copies.

Tapewyrm’s life went into overdrive last spring when he heard the first rumors of the Springsteen tour. He bought a new digital tape recorder. He began growing his hair long, the better to hide his microphones. “Bruce touring again?” his mother asked when she noticed the locks curling over his ears.

Single and able to set his own hours at work, Tapewyrm can travel at a moment’s notice. From late July through September, he disappeared from work for days at a time, chasing the Springsteen tour, taping, crashing at home for a few hours, then working midnight shifts to catch up. One night, exhausted by the pace, he nodded off in his sport-utility vehicle at a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop.

After each concert, Tapewyrm met in parking lots with a traveling contingent of Springsteen fanatics and bootleggers. They huddled together, plugging headphones into his digital recorder to critique each other’s tapes.

“Were you dancing?” Tapewyrm recoiled one August night when he heard a shaky-sounding tape recorded by Sam, another bootlegger. “You can’t dance and record at the same time, man!”

Sam was crestfallen. The 28-year-old computer specialist runs a Springsteen Web site and has flown to Europe to tape the singer’s shows. But on this night, he had failed the master. “It’s my cheap mikes,” he insisted feebly. “I need a better model.”

The music industry is well aware of the hundreds of bootleg CD-R sites that have sprouted up online. The RIAA has a staff of Internet sleuths who scan online rock sites every day. Still, “serious instances of commercial bootlegging get our top attention,” Creighton said.

The RIAA’s campaign against bootleg dealers climaxed this year with the federal conviction of New York bootlegger Charles LaRocco. A Long Island record dealer, La-Rocco was arrested in 1996, 1997 and again in January for running a distribution network that supplied millions of bootleg CDs to record stores and Web sites.

LaRocco was contemptuous of the music that made him rich, sneering to customers that he “doesn’t like anything recorded after 1955,” Carlucci said. But when U.S. Customs agents raided LaRocco’s apartment and warehouse in 1996, they found more than half a million bootleg CDs, from Springsteen to Nirvana, packed away. The haul’s street value was estimated at $10 million. LaRocco has pleaded guilty and is due for sentencing in November.

The music industry is on muddier terrain when it deals with CD-R traders like Tapewyrm. “If artists tell us they don’t care,” Creighton said, “we’re not going to drag them into it.”

Some rock groups have gone out of their way to sanction CD-R trading. It is an outgrowth of an informal policy started in the 1970s by the Grateful Dead, who allowed fans to openly tape and trade cassettes of their shows. Alternative rock groups like Pearl Jam, the Black Crowes and Phish have expanded that notion to CD-Rs, permitting trading but taking a hard line against bootleg sales.

“We figure if someone’s interested enough to go out and tape the band, they probably already have all the band’s material,” said John Palushka, manager of Phish. The group has sold more than 4 million discs despite rampant CD-R trading, Palushka said.

‘Kind of a Hip Honor’ for Some Rock Artists

But many other artists have no public stance on bootleg trading, forcing hard-core fans to test legal waters themselves. Springsteen and Dylan are two of the more well-known musicians who have waged public battles against bootleg profiteers but kept mum on CD-R trading.

Neither artist’s management would publicly comment, but an official with their record label, Columbia, said artists’ silence often stems from the desire “not to get locked in a legal position they might regret later on.”

Artists “might be privately sympathetic” or unconcerned about taping and free trading of discs, the official said, but are unwilling to alienate corporate law departments and the recording association, strong resources in the war against bootleg profiteers.

“Some artists think it’s kind of a hip honor to be bootlegged,” explained David Braun, a veteran Los Angeles entertainment lawyer whose clients have included Dylan, Neil Diamond, Michael Jackson and other top-tier rock artists. “The idea that people are spending hours taping and trading on the Internet . . . it’s kind of like kids sneaking into a ballpark. That’s not high on artists’ radar screens.”

Even without clear signals from musicians, Justice Department prosecutors who specialize in computer and intellectual property crimes are now on the alert for test cases that might slow the growth of online bootlegging.

“Fans who engage in that kind of distribution, even if it’s not for money, are not going to have a sympathetic ear in the federal government,” said David E. Green, deputy chief of the agency’s computer crime and intellectual property section. “We’re encouraging them to take up other hobbies.”

Justice’s intentions became clear last January, when FBI agents in Eugene, Ore., raided the apartment of a college student, hauling off his computer and CD-R equipment.

The student, University of Oregon senior Jeffrey Levy, was charged with Internet piracy for amassing hundreds of music, software and video game files on his college-supplied Web site, allowing anyone to download the material free.

Levy pleaded guilty to violating the 1997 federal No Electronic Theft Act to avoid a lengthy trial and three-year prison sentence. The charges have left Internet traders and civil libertarians perplexed and outraged.

“This is about picking out college kids and making test cases out of them,” fumed rock critic Dave Marsh. “They’re putting the screws on their best customers.”

Veteran Bay Area taper Jeff Soldau perceived the case as “the [music] industry’s way of keeping power by letting the government solve its problems.”

And despite her client’s guilty plea, Levy’s attorney, Sean S. McCrea, likened his offense to “trading albums in a dormitory.”

The Levy case seemed like distant fire to Tapewyrm as he churned out his CD-Rs each morning and messaged fellow tapers at night in their online Springsteen chat groups. “I’m paranoid enough as it is,” he said. “I go on the assumption that someone might be watching, so I try to lay as low as I can.”

But even the cautious slip up. Tapewyrm stewed for days after the New Jersey loudmouths marred his tape, then finally decided on a desperate gambit: At the next Springsteen show, he would quietly tell fans sitting near him that he was taping and offer them CD-Rs in return for their silence.

The ploy worked “better than I could have dreamed,” he reported a few days later. As the Springsteen tour moved on into Boston, Philadelphia and Washington, Tapewyrm made his pitch before every show. He still heard chatter when he played back his tapes, but the noise was dimmer, less obtrusive. “What’s killing me is why I didn’t do this before,” he said.

Tapes Confiscated, but Still Work to Do

His comeuppance was delivered one night in September. As he sat near the stage, his tape recorder rolling, Tapewyrm saw two security men approach in the dark. They grabbed him by the arms and hustled him from the hall. In minutes, he was out on the street, his tape confiscated.

His mind pulsed with panicked scenarios. Who ratted him out? Would the guards remember his face? Would Springsteen’s people search him out? Could he ever tape again?

The course seemed clearer in the morning. He still had his digital recorder. None of the security men had demanded identification or asked his name. They had bounced him so speedily, he figured, “no one will remember me six weeks from now.”

Taping Springsteen shows was out for the time being, but there were still dozens of CD-R requests to fill, friends to satisfy.

He sat down with his blank discs and his equipment. And then he turned the power on.

*

Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this story.