Democracy of Sound (21 page)

Despite their unpredictable content and quality, bootlegs became a premium item.
Great White Wonder
sold for between $6.50 and $12.50, while stores in New York asked $9.98 on average. Street vendors near Columbia University and other campuses got $20 for the product.
²⁰
Protean Radish
, an activist rag published in the college town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, noted that bootleggers had “liberated” the unreleased Dylan music at prices that were often higher than a regular Columbia records disc. (Price is what distinguishes bootleg collectibles from pirated or counterfeited versions of existing recordings, which were often sold for less to undercut an official release.) According to the
Radish
, small record shops in Durham and Chapel Hill sold
Great White Wonder
for $10 and
Troubled Troubadour
for $5; meanwhile, peddlers were selling
Wonder
in Washington Square Park for $15 in October 1969. “If Columbia goes through with its intention to sue all store[s] carrying the album,” the paper noted, “they would be suing themselves, as one of the record chains selling the album is owned by Columbia.”
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It soon became essential to distinguish one product from another. Since bootlegging was an activity of dubious legality, an “anything goes” attitude prevailed. In other words, since bootleggers were already copying the work of recording artists, their competitors felt free to copy each other’s products. “Uncle Wiggly,” a twenty-six-year-old Los Angeleno who pursued an MBA on his profits from piracy, said his team was hard at work on a new Janis Joplin LP but that they would have to move the product quickly once it was perfected. “We’re taking orders, and then we’re going to deliver them all in the same 24-hour period,” Wiggly told
Time
in 1971. “You see, if we don’t do it that way,
somebody will get hold of an early copy, duplicate it and start competing with us.”
²²
Wiggly’s struggle recalls the competition among American publishers to pirate foreign works in the 1820s and 1830s. “The first step in ‘The Game,’ as it was called, was to secure a copy of a desirable work,” according to historian Aubert Clark. When one publisher saw his offer of £100 for an advance copy of
Nicholas Nickleby
turned down, “he gave up further negotiations simply because he could not afford to pay more for a few hours’ advantage.”
²³
However, time was not the only factor for the bootleggers of the early 1970s. As some labels sought to offer higher-quality recordings, they wanted customers to be able to tell their products apart from those of inferior copycats, who would often make a copy of a copy.

The best way to assert an identity in the market was to cultivate a trademark, a recognizable image. Bootleggers did this by inventing logos, such as Trade Mark of Quality’s (TMQ’s) cigar-smoking pig or the Amazing Kornyfone Record Label’s Dr. Terrence “Telly” Fone, and using a characteristic style of art for their album covers. William Stout’s artwork, similar in style to Robert Crumb’s underground comics, was an extension of the music; his covers depicted scenes from the album’s lyrics. The images were both a representation of the music and a comment on it, sometimes satirical. The cover of a Dutch Dylan bootleg,
Little White Wonder
, featured a cartoon for each of the album’s thirteen songs. Several of the images allude to the chameleonic singer’s roots: at the top, a masked Dylan is back on the farm in Minnesota, the caption “Bob Zimmerman,” referring to his original name. Nearby, a winged Star of David flies by with a musical note inside. In others he is a lascivious character. He stands on the sidelines of a parade shouting “Don’t forget to flash!” in the picture for “Million Dollar Bash.” The last picture shows Dylan seated in a cluttered apartment, with a leering expression on his face as he mouths the song title, “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” like an overly friendly host insisting that his guests stick around. The downside, of course, was that such calling cards made it easier for the authorities to track down particular companies (and the quality packaging cost more, especially if the illustrations were in color). TMQ’s Deep Purple disc,
Purple for a Day
, may not have been an official band release, but a sticker on the plain white jacket guaranteed that it was a “Genuine Trade Mark of Quality Disc,” pig and all.
²⁴

Trade Mark of Quality used its brand to distinguish itself among numerous peddlers of unreliable quality, but the name also caricatured the ways corporations present themselves. It resembled the bland monikers used by fly-by-night tape pirates, like Custom Recording or Super Sounds, and the label’s mascot was a cigar-smoking pig—not unlike the iconic image of a cigar-smoking capitalist. Ze Anonym Plattenspieler (ZAP) was another paradoxical trademark, meaning, “The Anonymous Record Players.” Another venture of Dr. Telly Fone, ZAP tried to have it both ways, cultivating an identity for itself in the market
and
mocking the business of musical commodities. Each ZAP record promised “A High Standard of Standardness!” As a one-liner, it was a cheap shot at mass production and marketing, but as a bootleg slogan, it highlights the awkward position of an entrepreneur in a marginal line of business: ZAP sought to assure consumers that a certain level of quality could be associated with its name and logo, as with any company. However, identities were just as likely to be stolen as music in the bootleg market; smoking pigs showed up on records by people unaffiliated with TMQ, and nine inferior albums were released with the Kornyfone label in 1975.
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Perhaps the most notorious brand to emerge in the heady days of the early 1970s was Rubber Dubber. A sort of capitalist commune, this outfit recorded live performances by the likes of Jimi Hendrix and James Taylor, quickly evolving from white covers to albums adorned with striking monochromatic art and photography—and, of course, the Rubber Dubber logo. Dubber offered not just a trademark or recognizable design, but also a media persona. The group sent review copies to
Rolling Stone
and other critics, with the note, “Yours Truly, Rubber Dubber,” and Columbia Records threatened to withdraw advertising revenue when music magazines began reviewing the records as though they were regular albums.
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Soon the agents of up-and-coming artists were trying to get in touch with Dubber, hoping the firm would bootleg their clients and show that they were good or at least popular enough to be copied.
²⁷
Dubber’s mysterious leader told reporters that they connected artists directly with fans, without the intermediary of a record company. His description of their egalitarian operation recalled Karl Marx’s description of the well-rounded socialist individual in
The German Ideology
: “Everybody in Rubber Dubber has to work, but nobody has to work all the time, and nobody works the same job every day. Each person knows how to do every facet of the operation, so if somebody gets sick or wants to take a vacation, somebody else can take over.”
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Bootlegging and Counterculture

Rubber Dubber was one of numerous bootleggers who espoused a radical creed. Not everyone put forward a blueprint for a different economy, but many aligned themselves with a general insurgency against the establishment. “Many of our salesmen would otherwise be pushing drugs,” Uncle Wiggly argued. “We give a lot of money to the free clinic and to the peace coalition. I don’t think there’s anything illegal about this.”
²⁹
Rolling Stone
claimed that the original purveyors of
Great White Wonder
had fled to Canada to avoid the draft.
³⁰
“It was the mentality of the time, the Vietnam war,” one bootlegger recalled. “There was such an antiestablishment feeling in the air.”
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Michael O concurred: “It was the psychedelic
era and people did a lot of goofy things to break the rules.”
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Producer Dennis Wilen argued that the youth were enamored with the ideal of “bringing music directly to the people without having to go through the bureaucracy of the music industry.”
³³

The romantic aspect is the most compelling attraction. People can’t go fight in the Spanish civil war any more, and the day of the desperado, of Robin Hood, is over. So they strike out at the fat cats of the music companies this way. It’s an existential romantic trip.
³⁴

If anything, most bootleggers were taking from the rich—a record label or a famous rock star—to give to the middle class. The pirates who copied major label products to sell at lower prices might lay a better claim to the mantle of Robin Hood, but almost no one ever praised them.
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For the true believers, bootlegging offered an avenue for creating an alternative music industry, one uninfected with marketing glitz and commercial caution. This
truly
free market would provide more of the rough-hewn, political, folky protest music that Bob Dylan had made early in his career—not the Bob Dylan that Columbia wanted to foist on the public, nor even the version that the singer himself chose to present. The first round of rock bootlegs focused on unreleased songs by Dylan, but copiers soon turned to raiding the studio material of other artists.
³⁶
The Beatles made for a prime target for several reasons. Besides their immense popularity, the Fab Four had also logged countless hours in the studio experimenting with the sounds that became
Sgt. Pepper
and
Revolver
, and it was widely known in 1969 that the band’s follow-up to the
White Album
had languished in limbo for much of the year.

Though the Beatles publicly expressed support for the Left and the peace movement, the unreleased songs from these sessions reveal a political side the band’s surviving members have so far chosen to hide. More than anything, they demonstrate an acute sense of the racial conflict that rocked American and British society in the late 1960s. Sung partly in a stuttering Elvis croon, “Back to the Commonwealth” skewers “dirty Enoch Powell,” a Conservative politician who warned in an infamous speech that “rivers of blood” would flow if the United Kingdom did not cut off immigration. “Enoch Powell said to the immigrants,” Paul McCartney sings, “you’d better get back to your Commonwealth homes.… If you don’t want trouble, you better go back to home.” Such a topical song might not have translated well for the band’s audience outside the United Kingdom, and it might have offended some British listeners who knew Powell and supported him. The song “White Power” on
Sweet Apple Trax
further illustrates the band’s political caution. The extended jam lists the names of black notables, such as James Brown, Cassius Clay, and Malcolm X, and juxtaposes
them with the likes of Richard Nixon and white soul singer Dusty Springfield. The tune resembles “Dig It,” which later appeared on the official
Let It Be
LP and also consisted of a list of names; however, that short track packed less political punch, as John Lennon free-associated, “CIA, KGB, BBC, BB King …”
³⁷

The new album, tentatively titled
Get Back
, was intended to be a return to the simpler rock and roll of the Beatles’ early days. The band released many of the recordings from these sessions as part of
Let It Be
in December 1969, but bootleg versions hit the streets of San Francisco in the form of
Kum Back
months earlier.
³⁸
Fans who obtained a copy of the bootleg realized that the original version of the song “Get Back” was very different from what listeners were hearing on the radio. The official version speaks of cross-dressing Loretta Martin and Jo-Jo, who “left his home in Tucson, Arizona for some California grass”; the lyrics imply that bad things will happen to both characters if they do not “get back to where [they] once belonged.”
³⁹
Bootleg editions reveal that the original lyrics dealt with immigration, speaking of Pakistanis in the United Kingdom and Puerto Ricans in the United States. On an alternate version that bootleggers called “No Pakistanis,” McCartney sings, “Don’t dig no Pakistanis taking all the people’s jobs.” If released on a major label, the tune might indeed have damaged the band’s carefully cultivated image; instead, it appeared on illicit records like the 1969
Kum Back
and Kornyfone’s 1976 compilation
Tanks for the Mammaries
.
⁴⁰
“No Pakistanis” still circulates on file-sharing networks in the twenty-first century, but the Beatles never opted to publish it officially, even when their
Anthology
series released several new—and unremarkable—songs from the vault in the mid-1990s.

Unauthorized releases provided an avenue for risqué material to reach the public, even if only a tiny portion of the mass audience heard it. For example, the best-known Patti Smith bootleg,
Teenage Perversity and Ships in the Night
, featured a strikingly different version of the song “Birdland,” which appeared on her landmark 1975 debut
Horses
. On
Teenage Perversity
, a concert recording, Smith prefaces the song with a comic monologue about aerosol cans and the ozone layer, which slips into a tale of a young boy being molested by his father. Her telling becomes poetic and rhythmic, and then turns to singing; gradually, the audience learns that the father in the story is Wilhelm Reich, the controversial German psychologist whose theories about sexuality and “orgones” landed him in prison, where he died in the 1950s. The lyrics are graphic enough to make the executives at any major label blush, whereas the album version of “Birdland” is much less explicit.
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