Democracy of Sound (19 page)

“It’s All Done with Tape Recorders”

Whereas Joe Gould kept his ears open and a pen and paper handy as he documented the sounds of New York, William Burroughs relied on the tape recorder. In his 1967 essay, “The Invisible Generation,” the Beat novelist urged readers to exploit the full range of subversive possibilities presented by magnetic tape. He emphasized the medium’s ability to capture and replay sounds that are normally not studied closely, like the sounds of the street or idle chatter around the office. “Record your boss and co-workers,” Burroughs advised. “Analyze their associational patterns learn to imitate their voices oh you’ll be a popular man around the office but not easy to compete with.”
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On the other hand was the medium’s capacity for distorting sound, slowing it down, speeding it up, and rearranging it, to reveal new meanings not detected on hearing a sound the first time. Burroughs touched on the same theme of deception raised by classical bootleggers who attributed a performance of Wagner’s
Ring
cycle to a made-up festival, or Eli Oberstein’s invention of generic blues singers to sell records in grocery stores. But Burroughs’s renegade was something of a mild-mannered spy:

this is the invisible generation he looks like an advertising executive a college student an american tourist doesn’t matter what your cover story is so long as it covers you and leaves you free to act you need a philips compact cassette recorder handy machine for street recording looks like a transistor radio for playback playback in the street will show the influence of your sound track in operation of course the most undetectable playback is street recordings people don’t notice yesterday voices phantom car holes in time.
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Burroughs did not merely catalogue a variety of unconventional uses for a new media technology. He also touched on a number of distinctive characteristics of magnetic tape as a medium. The cassette recorder was small enough to be portable and easily concealed, allowing for sounds (such as concerts) to be recorded without knowledge of the authorities. It could be erased and rerecorded on, permitting freer play of experimentation. That magnetic tape was divisible and editable meant that Burroughs could reassemble conversations to preserve the best or worst parts, but it also meant that a bootlegger who recorded a live opera performance could revise the weaker elements of a performance before making the recording available to the public.

Burroughs also spoke of “the efficient generation.” The technologies that he believed could subvert received wisdom and break “obsessional association tracks” had been developed for business and military applications. The techniques were effective for processing information as computer development made great strides in the postwar period and the metaphor of “information processing” became commonplace for describing human consciousness, especially in the emerging field of cognitive psychology.
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The conversion of sound into magnetic traces prefigured the general inclusion of all “information”—whether moving images, genes, music, poetry, or anything else—under the rubrics of “intellectual property” and “content.”
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(The latter term, ever more popular in the early twenty-first century, suggests that knowledge is a fluid, homogeneous substance that could fill a container of any size.) The pamphlet that inspired Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita to develop Sony’s first tape recorder suggested the use of magnetic recording, not just for music or even dictation, but for capturing traces of any measurable phenomenon—any kind of data.
999 Uses of the Tape Recorder
informed Ibuka and Morita that “Magnetape recording can be applied to any phenomenon that can be converted into a varing [
sic
] voltage, current, resistance, pressure, opacity, humidity, viscosity, temperature, transparency, impedance, torque or speed.”
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In the 1950s and 1960s people spoke more and more of sound as a matter of information—of how many tracks, or how much information, could be crammed onto a magnetic strip of a certain size.
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The manipulability of tape—its capacity for slowing down, speeding up, fast forwarding, rewinding, editing, and rearranging—meant that recorded sound was a more fluid and malleable medium than ever before. The Supreme Court in 1908 could not accept the
notion that a pattern of holes in a piano roll qualified for copyright, since the mechanical inscription was not a human expression that could be understood with the naked eye, unlike all previous drama, fiction, music, photography and poetry had been. Even when Congress addressed the thorny issues raised by the court’s decision, it recognized only the underlying written composition as deserving copyright protection. The unintelligible representation of music in the grooves of a disk record or wax cylinder, the perforation of a piano roll, or the pattern of magnetic particles on a tape or wire would not qualify under federal law as a protectable expression until 1972. By then, pressure to recognize all information, including sound and music, as copyrightable (and economically valuable) expression had risen to a fever pitch.

PART TWO
THE LEGAL BACKLASH, 1945–1998

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Counterculture, Popular Music, and the Bootleg Boom

As a boy in Germany the filmmaker Wim Wenders loved American rock and roll, even though he could not understand the lyrics. “For the longest time,” he recalled, “I thought the words ‘Be-Bop-A-Lu-La’ actually meant something.”
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Geza Ekecs had much the same problem when he worked as a DJ for Radio Free Europe in the 1960s. Beaming Western music into the Communist bloc, he struggled to find a way to explain what the song “Too Pooped to Pop” would mean in Hungarian. Translation problems aside, young listeners continued to tune in. Those who could get their hands on a tape recorder would copy their favorites from the radio. However, Communist authorities considered Western music, especially jazz and rock and roll, to be decadent, preferring to provide the masses with classical music.
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Tape recorders being scarce in the Communist world, diligent listeners had to find another way to copy music that was unavailable or forbidden: they collected discarded x-ray plates from hospitals, rounded the edges, and recorded music from the radio onto the images of human skeletons. “X-ray plates were the cheapest and most readily available source of necessary plastic,” Artemy Troitsky recalled. “People bought them by the hundreds from hospitals and clinics for kopeks, after which grooves were cut with the help of special machines (made, they say, from old phonographs by skilled conspiratorial hands).” The records became known variously as “ribs” and “bones,” and were circulated under the table and played at secret dance parties.
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Unauthorized reproduction takes many forms. For instance, these Hungarians could be seen as pirates of a sort. Like jazz and classical buffs in America, they copied music from the radio and traded it outside the bounds of the law, in samizdat fashion. As Troitsky notes, the sound of the bones was often quite bad, but people eagerly settled for it. Both the capitalist and communist pirates sought to acquire or make available music that was hard to get, only in America the
recording company would not manufacture it (nor let anyone else do so) and in Hungary the Communist Party disallowed it. Ekecs reported the copying of rock hits in Hungary in 1965, and a few years later Americans were also reproducing popular music without permission—albeit not with x-ray plates or, necessarily, tapes.

The bones story shows that technological capacity does not determine whether people will disregard the rules and copy music. There must be a will, and there must be some conceivable sort of means, but the former may be more important than the latter. Many observers have credited the advent of the cassette tape recorder as the cause of a surge in bootlegging during the 1960s and 1970s, but this explanation ignores the fact that most bootleggers actually made and sold vinyl LPs, at least at first. For most listeners, the Bob Dylan “basement tapes” that touched off the bootleg boom in 1969 were not tapes at all. When a curious customer inquired about them at the local record shop, the clerk would pull one or two vinyl discs, usually in a plain white sleeve, from under the counter. Recorded in a hotel room or basement, or copied from the radio, these recordings may have come into the world on magnetic tape, but the vast majority of early bootlegs—of Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who—reached consumers as conventional LPs.

Popular music now joined the underground market, which had been dominated by bootlegs of classical, folk, and jazz recordings prior to the late 1960s. A practice that had once been confined to a small niche, catering to minority tastes, abruptly moved onto the turf of platinum-selling rock stars and the image-makers who sold them. Several cultural, economic, and technological trends converged in the 1960s to make this bootleg boom possible. Advances in recording technology made it easier to get copies of music out of the studio and to sneak tape recorders into concerts, while the availability of independent plants and custom pressing services allowed entrepreneurs to convert their recordings into vinyl records. Meanwhile, a generation of young listeners seized on the new technology to circulate every utterance they could find of iconic artists such as Bob Dylan or the Beatles, animated by the zeitgeist of the counterculture and social rebellion.

Predecessors like Dante Bollettino or Boris Rose had aimed to serve fans of less popular genres by reproducing the vanishing traces of America’s musical heritage, but the new bootleggers wanted to liberate the music of the moment. Some flaunted their products and personal images in the media, insisting that they were blazing a trail for a new way of producing music. Record companies soon discovered that they could not curb the unauthorized reproduction of their products with the old remedies of injunctions and civil suits. In response, Congress would pass a reform of copyright law that the recording industry had desired since 1909.

Piracy in the Heyday of Rock and Roll

The growth of piracy was only one of many changes that shook up the American music industry in the years after World War II. The period saw the rise of new technologies, new genres, and new firms that challenged the power of the dominant record labels, especially with the breakout success of rock and roll in the mid-1950s. The 1950s were a time of growing diversity in the music industry, when independent record labels popularized rock and roll, and radio stations shifted from costly network and syndicated programs to playing mostly prerecorded music. The popularity of cheap transistor radios also expanded the potential listening public. Radio stations responded to renewed competition by catering to musical niches, rather than treating listeners as a single mass audience. Labels released fewer cover versions of hit songs, which companies had traditionally viewed as less risky than recording new material, while the number of new artists doubled over the course of the decade. Independent labels benefited most from the rock and roll sensation, but the majors also capitalized on the popularity of new artists, songs, and styles.
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The growth of consumer electronics opened up new possibilities for producing and enjoying music. Independent studios and pressing plants served people who had made recordings on magnetic tape and wanted to share the music in a more commonly used medium. As Edward Tatnall Canby pointed out in 1951, a church group could afford to record and press its Christmas cantata if it could count on selling a few hundred copies. In the 1950s, tape remained an adjunct to disc recording, but the music and broadcasting industries rapidly adopted it as a basic means of capturing sounds. “The introduction of magnetic tape in recording studios, to replace the cumbersome wax masters, put recording technology in everybody’s hands. Records could now be made almost anywhere—local radio stations, basement studios, homes—just as long as a pressing company was available to produce the discs for sale,” Pekka Gronow observed. “The introduction of cassettes and cartridges in the late 1960s removed even this obstacle.”
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Its flexibility and affordability, compared to wax and vinyl, meant that more music could be recorded, and the greater volume of production made it likelier that copies or alternative takes of recordings would leak out of the studio. “Imperfect rehearsal recordings—ones that an artist ordinarily does not want released for sale—may be stolen, duplicated, and made quietly available,”
Business Week
observed. The author went on to chide
New York
magazine’s music critic for praising the pirates who had made an obscure Off-Broadway musical available on tape.
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Often, the complicity of workers in the entertainment industry allowed officially unreleased recordings to reach the public. Some live bootlegs were so good that critics believed they must have been recorded on the soundboards by the
concert staff, rather than a bootlegger with a briefcase. “Are these bootleg tapes from someone onstage involved with their sound equipment?” Greil Marcus asked of
LIVEr Than You’ll Ever Be
, the first rock live bootleg to make a splash and, in his opinion, the best Rolling Stones album ever released.
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Bob Johnston, a longtime producer of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, said he had enough unreleased material in his possession to make twenty great albums for either artist. “I’ve been offered a check for $200,000 for some Cohen tapes I have, and a blank check for Bob’s,” the producer said. “It’s all locked away in Nashville, and I’ve got the key!”
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