Democracy of Sound (16 page)

Rarely did the topic of copyright or piracy arise in the early literature on home recording. When it did, the author offered a cursory warning about some recorded material being subject to copyright, before moving on to other aspects of the technology. (“Look out for copyright and union restrictions,” Canby suggested.)
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Joel Tall addressed legal issues in
Techniques of Magnetic Recording
, but only the potential for wiretapping and similar unethical acts. These books nearly always suggested recording music from the radio or television, but it was only one of many applications, along with speech correction, language learning, slide-show commentaries, leaving messages and so on. The copying and use of broadcast music seemed innocuous enough, useful for a teen’s dance party if nothing else. Many of the compositions classical music buffs recorded had long been in the public domain, and federal law did not yet recognize any separate ownership of a recorded performance itself. However, the 1950
Metropolitan
case maintained that selling records of a symphony’s performance could amount to unfair competition, even if the compositions were not under copyright.

Perhaps the boosters of magnetic recording, a consumer technology still in its infancy, were reluctant to play up its potentially illegal uses. However, the increasing popularity of the medium made this prospect unavoidable. The amount of prerecorded material available on tape had been limited, and not everyone was going to practice a speech or record his own violin recital. Many hobbyists used
the idle capacity of their tape recorders to copy material from radio, television, and concert performances.

A poignant symbol of this yen to document everything was Joe Gould, hobo and Harvard-educated fixture in Greenwich Village from the 1920s to the 1950s. New Yorkers remembered Gould wandering the streets of Manhattan, continually scribbling everything he heard in the city.
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He promised to compile the notes into a massive volume called
The Oral History of the World
, arguing that such a chronicle would offer a far greater truth than the work of any historian. Reflecting on Gould’s work in 1970, James Goodfriend argued that a great social history could be extracted from that manuscript, if anyone would take the time to sort through it. “The same problem will face another committee,” Goodfriend said, “the one finally appointed to decide what to do with the huge archive of unauthorized recorded music—tapings of broadcasts, concerts, operatic performances, salon recitals, and commercial records of which the original masters have been lost.”
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Like Joe Gould, the people who captured this music over the years were recording their times—making “An Aural History of the (Musical) World in the Twentieth Century.”
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Recordings captured evidence of reality, and every additional record provided additional information about the human experience. Thus, it made sense to document a particular performance of the Metropolitan Opera in concert or of Duke Ellington on the radio. Whereas disc recording had always been a delicate and difficult operation, tape recording opened the possibility, if in the imagination only, that everything could be recorded all the time.
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Like Boris Rose, an amateur technologist could tape a vast number of radio broadcasts, providing raw material for a future historian who wants to know what was going on at the time.

Like the Hot Record Society, the hi-fi copiers also worried about important recordings slipping into obscurity. “Does a record company have the ‘right’ to withdraw (and therefore make unavailable) a recorded performance because its sales were not up to whatever standards the company might want to apply?” Goodfriend asked. Major record companies could not afford to provide audiences with every recording they desired, nor could they keep everything in print. A record had to be produced in large enough numbers to justify the effort of the sales staff to promote it to the public. “Hits,” after all, rarely happen on their own; the music industry had long indulged in practices of plugging and payola, paying vaudeville artists to popularize new written compositions or bribing radio stations to give new records airplay.
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Even with the added boost of advertising and organized bribery, men in the music business insisted that only one recording turns a profit for every nine that fail to break even. (This claim appears throughout the literature.)
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If the firm added marginal or “historic” recordings to its already risky business model, the failure rate would be worse than
90 percent—at least for centralized, mass-production enterprises like Decca or Columbia Records in the mid-twentieth century.
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Meanwhile, a “huge archive” of recorded music had accumulated for which only small demand existed, making the music impractical to produce for the companies that originally recorded and sold it.
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Goodfriend suggested that the government step in to help. Pirates might freeload off the efforts of artists and record companies, but they still put out recordings that no one else would make available. This need could be met by the government, which would collect all recordings that had been out of print for ten years or more and appoint a committee to determine what to keep. Citizens could then order the recordings in tape form for their own personal use, and educational institutions could draw from the immense catalog too. The recordings should cost twice the going rate for the typical album in the present day, he said, in order not to inflict unfair competition on the record companies. In other words, the government should not become music pirate number one.
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This proposal for public access to musical history may not have been radical, but it was rooted in exactly the same notion of cultural preservation that motivated the Hot Record Society and the jazz journalists of the
Record Changer
, who could not bring themselves to condemn bootlegging outright. “A musical performance … is something more than an item of commerce,” Goodfriend wrote. “It is that, but it is something more too: it is an artistic document, and the public has an interest in its preservation, and perhaps in its availability as well.”
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He presupposed that a group of wise men could determine what is worth preserving, but this attitude was in keeping with the general cast of mind of both jazz and classical aficionados. “The current theory on such matters is to keep everything,” Goodfriend said, touching on the collectors’ instinct to document and hoard any piece of information, but he believed someone would have to separate the essential from the extraneous.
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The idea of a mail-order government music library went nowhere, of course, but many Americans had been working on a kind of decentralized version for years. The bootlegging of classical music performances was, after all, the stimulus for Goodfriend’s proposal. Beginning in 1901, Lionel Mapleson, called the “Father of Bootlegging,” produced some of the earliest live recordings at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, capturing two or three minutes of music at a time. Mapleson had to place his wax cylinder phonograph on the catwalk after audience members complained that the horn blocked their view of the stage.
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The cylinders were the sole remaining documents of several artists who never recorded commercially. The New York Public Library and the Library of Congress made them available for study in the early 1940s, and librarian Phillip L. Miller offered copies of the records at $1.75 a piece.
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Pirates were often the first to issue recordings of many classical pieces. Recording, for instance, Richard Wagner’s
Ring
cycle was such an epic undertaking that no major label had attempted it. Such a project was nearly impossible before the commercial introduction of the LP in 1948. Before then, each side of a disc contained only a few minutes of music, meaning that operas and symphonies were prohibitively expensive and cumbersome to produce. When they were attempted, these symphonies consisted of a string of abrupt fragments of the greater whole; the recordings were sold as a set of individual discs, which is why the term “album” was coined.
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The greater capacity of the LP format and tape recording made the production of long classical works much cheaper and easier.

Eli Oberstein’s Record Corporation of America (which cleverly bore the same initials as his ex-employer, the giant Radio Corporation of America, or RCA) entered the fray in 1954 with the first full recording of Wagner’s
Ring des Nibelungen
. Issued on the Allegro label, it consisted of eighteen discs and claimed to have been recorded at the Dresden Opera House. The attribution was a clever ruse, since few in America had access to the concert halls of East Germany and other communist nations in the early 1950s. No one knew the names of any of the listed soloists, until soprano Regina Resnik realized it was her own voice on the recording. The concert had actually occurred at the Bayreuth Festival in West Germany, and after the Festival’s lawyers pressed Oberstein’s Record Corporation of America about the matter, the set was removed from the market.
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Similar antics occurred throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In 1951, at almost the same time that the more famous RCA got in trouble for printing bootleg copies of its own jazz records for Dante Bollettino, the public learned that the company had also manufactured unauthorized recordings of Verdi’s
A Masked Ball
for an outfit called Classic Editions. The record jacket of
A Masked Ball
claimed that it had been recorded in Italy. However, Irving Kolodin of the
Saturday Review
revealed that the concert had been taped from a radio performance by the Metropolitan Opera in 1947. To make matters worse, RCA had exclusive contracts with two of the performers on the record.
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(Of course, the company
was
technically manufacturing records by its own artists.) In 1965, the Period label issued sets of Mozart’s
Entführung aus dem Serail
and two Verdi operas. The recordings had supposedly been made at the Patagonia Festival, where Ralph de Cross was said to conduct soloists like Claudia Terrasini and Magda Walbrunn. Again, the intrepid
Saturday Review
, which had defended jazz bootleggers in earlier years, accused Period of copying the concerts from European radio broadcasts and, in the case of Verdi’s
La Traviata
, from a recording on the Deutsche Grammophon label. However, no one was sued. Indeed, Livingstone commented, “The whole thing was so funny that nobody did anything about it.”
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These cases of deception raise serious questions about how and why people bootlegged music. Classical music buffs, who made up a large part of the audience for high-quality sound equipment, were both perfectionists and collectors. They wanted to document everything, including performances that established manufacturers were either unwilling or unable to provide. If this is true, then what is the value of a recording that is misrepresented as a performance by a made-up person in a made-up place? Shadowy firms like Allegro and Period tried to cover their tracks by using the techniques of disguise that had served pirates of sheet music and sound recordings for years, making up plausible names for unauthorized products. What collector wants to add a vintage Claudia Terrasini to his library if Terrasini never existed? One answer is that the first-ever full recording of Wagner’s
Ring
was worth having, regardless of its provenance. Another is that a classical music listener in the know may have been able to spot a fake and make an educated guess about which performance it actually contained. These operas were not performed every day, and the people at
Saturday Review
had little trouble figuring out what was what.

To understand the rise of classical bootlegging in the 1950s requires understanding why people felt the need to record. Some copycats held to the documentary ethos of recording and looked at their work as a kind of craft. Like the high-fidelity hobbyists who used many of the same products, these bootleggers aimed to capture an experience in the clearest way, though they may have emphasized the music itself more than some of the technology-obsessed audiophiles did. One opera pirate said that he and his partner bootlegged “as a labor of love. We work slowly and produce few albums. Quality is what we strive for, and it’s often hard to achieve with some of these old tapes. We do what we can to correct fluctuations of pitch and drops in volume, but we never doctor a sour note if the singer sang it that way. We want to document what really happened.”
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A man who went by the name Roland Ernest released numerous bootlegs of performances at Carnegie Hall, including what Clinton Heylin called “the most famous opera bootleg of them all,” the breakthrough 1965 performance of Spanish soprano Monserrat Cabellé in
Lucrezia Borgia
. RCA claimed that Ernest sold 30,000 copies of the performance, which he denied. Some of his releases were so esoteric they sold fewer than 100 copies apiece, and Ernest had to drive a cab to support his activities.
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Akin to the pirates of contemporary opera were the “private labels,” which specialized in out-of-print and nearly extinct recordings dating back to the earliest years of the music industry. Some items were recorded from cylinders and deteriorated discs that had nearly stopped functioning. Borrowing from collectors, privateers used acetate air checks—temporary discs produced by radio networks—to make new copies of music from the 1930s and 1940s. These labels often sold their goods through mail-order catalogs that were distributed to members of a small circle, and they managed to keep such a low profile that record companies rarely took legal action against them.
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