Democracy of Sound (22 page)

This alternative channel for music distribution proved useful for Smith and other early punk-rock artists, whose work was too provocative for a chary music industry. Television, for instance, was a seminal New York band whose work circulated on bootlegs in the 1970s; concert tapes remain the only surviving documents of some short-lived and ever-changing groups of the period.
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Smith
seemed to support the bootleggers who disseminated her live performances, Clinton Heylin says, as she “sometimes [introduced] ‘Redondo Beach’ as a song from
Teenage Perversity
.”
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The labels that circulated (potentially) controversial records did not neatly fit the model of the “collectors’ pirate” who dominated the jazz and classical underground in earlier years. In the early 1970s, sociologists R. Serge Denisoff and Charles McCaghy distinguished this zealous new breed of bootleggers from earlier copiers like Dante Bollettino, who had justified their sales of unreleased or out-of-print material as a service to listeners. The commercial scale of pop music and the tug of youth rebellion put the bootleg boom of the late 1960s in a different context, both economically and culturally. “First, the demand for their products was much greater, hence potentially more profitable,” Denisoff and McCaghy noted.
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Opera piracy might have been a minor irritation to record companies, but bootlegs of the Beatles or Bob Dylan were harder to ignore.
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Second, “counterculture pirates” went far beyond the archiving and service functions espoused by jazz or classical bootleggers. Their ideology was, according to Denisoff and McCaghy, “a complex amalgam drawing upon both Marxist and utopian socialist writers and translated into the rhetoric of the New Left.”
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Historian Doug Rossinow’s attempt to define both “counterculture” and the “New Left” can help us understand where bootlegging fit in the broader environment. In his book
The Politics of Authenticity
, Rossinow argued that the young rebels of the 1960s sought to expand “the scope of ‘politics’ after several decades in which political activity was understood … merely as the attempt to influence governmental institutions and the social allocation of resources.”
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They refused to restrict social change to setting the tax rate one percent higher or lower, insisting that revolution must encompass every level of daily life. Slogans such as “the personal is political” and “the revolution is about our lives” exemplified this attitude toward political struggle.
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If the revolution was about one’s life, then it could be as much about music as about civil rights or war.

How could popular music—the product of capitalist media—fit into the schema of radicalism, though? The musicologist Nadya Zimmerman has written about tensions that shaped the San Francisco counterculture of the late 1960s, in which young people, inspired by novelist Aldous Huxley and Buddhist writer Alan Watts, among others, desired to reject consumerism and embrace a more “natural” way of life. But as Zimmerman cautions, we ought not assume that opposition to materialism or conformity necessarily meant that radicals eschewed all interest in consumption or pop culture.
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Bootlegging was a form of rebellion that scrambled the anti-corporate, anti-consumerism, and anti-technology tendencies of the counterculture, existing alongside the back-to-nature aspirations of those who “dropped out” of mainstream life to form rural communes, as well as the more conventionally political goals of activists.
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As Rossinow suggests, it is fruitless to try to pin down one definition or even one counterculture, since Americans of many stripes fought against one perceived establishment or another. After all, the most successful rebellion of the time may have been that of conservative Americans who rallied to support Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972.
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This “silent majority” also saw itself as oppositional, defying the establishment elite, albeit in the spirit of patriotism and the work ethic. Defining a counterculture requires not just identifying a group or movement that opposes the status quo, but also determining what it is about the prevailing society that people oppose. Rossinow argues that the New Left and the hippie counterculture shared a search for “authenticity,” yet opposition to capitalism was also an important unifying thread. Not every participant in these movements hated consumption, markets, or property rights, as the flourishing market for hippie paraphernalia attested, but an inchoate desire to resist the domination of American society by business and bourgeois values was central to much of the counterculture.
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Indeed, the commercial success of rock and roll bootlegs and the attention given to them in left-leaning media indicate that many critics of the establishment did not blush at consumption (of a kind). This style of opposition was displayed in the 1968 debate between activist-showman Jerry Rubin and Fred Halstead, presidential candidate of the Socialist Workers Party. While dour spectators looked on in despair, Rubin rebutted Halstead first by playing “I Am the Walrus,” and then by burning two dollar bills. A socialist hooted, “If you have no goddam [
sic
] use for those dollars then give them to us!” “I wouldn’t burn $100,” Rubin drily replied. “It’s just a symbol. I believe in the end of personal property and all the capitalist dollar thing.”
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Property—whether in the form of money or music—was outdated and irrelevant in Rubin’s eyes, but the music possessed a political value in its own right.

The counterculture to which bootleggers ascribed themselves did seek to build alternative ways of life, and did oppose capitalism, at least as it was understood at the time—bureaucratic, corporate, industrial. However, just as Rubin later grew rich in the yuppie era of the 1980s, the bootleggers’ new world ran the risk of looking a lot like the old one. Writing in
Harper’s
, Ed Ward recognized that “your run-of-the-mill headshop/waterbed/record-store” often amounted to “the same old thing with longer hair,” but he believed that the Rubber Dubber organization constituted a genuine alternative model of capitalism.
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One bootlegger told
Rolling Stone
that “profits from bootleg albums are more equally distributed to employees than are major company profits which are often funneled up to parent conglomerates.”
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Here, the pirate drew a distinction between the bootleg labels, which clearly sold goods for consumption on the market, and big business. However, dissension within some enterprises casts doubt on such claims of egalitarianism. In 1971, two employees reported Los Angeles tape copier Donald Koven to the authorities when he refused to give them a raise, and Rubber Dubber’s warehouse of albums, cover art, and equipment was given away by an informant, most likely from within the secretive group.
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Figure 4.3
The title of this recording of punk artist Patti Smith performing live on New York radio station WBAI captures the paradox of the countercultural ethos—freeing music from capitalist control while still selling it as a market commodity.
Source:
Courtesy of Music Library and Sound Recordings Archive, Bowling Green State University.

Piracy, counterculture, and capitalism made strange bedfellows, yet the centrality of desire (including, but not limited to, the desire to consume) unified them. The title of a Patti Smith bootleg,
Free Music Store
, neatly combines the rhetoric of anti-capitalist liberation and liberatory capitalism.
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Here was consumerism, freed from almost all constraints—consumerism with the gloves off, so to speak.

Ironically, pirates could give consumers what they wanted in part because they did not operate within the complex web of relationships that labels traditionally used to bring records to market. They did not have artist and repertoire (A&R) representatives to identify promising talent; they had no promotional staff to cajole DJs and program directors to give recordings precious airtime, nor did they have to work out arrangements with distributors, record clubs, or rack jobbers
(merchandisers who selected only the most popular and profitable recordings to place on racks in variety shops and grocery stores, with the option of returning unsold copies to the labels).
⁵⁸
In fact, retailers complained about the deals the labels offered consumers through record clubs, arguing that the low prices undercut sales in stores; certain small dealers did not feel much remorse when they purchased cheaper bootleg tapes to sell instead of label-sanctioned merchandise.
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With no allegiances within the industry, most bootleggers were like Uncle Wiggly—they simply raced to bring the most desired music to listeners as quickly as possible, with the ability to produce in smaller batches with much lower overhead than Columbia or Warner Brothers could manage. They knew that fans would snap up their albums without the marketing push of tshirts, buttons, advertisements, and payola that left most major label releases still failing to break even. A bootleg of a concert performed one day could appear in a record store or the back of a van a week later. In this way, the bootleggers offered a desired product faster than the established industry’s structure would allow—a prototype of fast, flexible capitalism, however radical the pirates’ rhetoric or their convictions might have been.

Craftsmen or Criminals?

Indeed, some on the Left challenged the radical credentials of music copiers. North Carolina’s
Protean Radish
saw piracy as evidence that music could be distributed without the involvement of the record labels, even though pirates were not using this alternative system for revolutionary purposes. They used other people’s music to antagonize the Man
and
to turn a profit. “You have to sort of admire them for taking one [
sic
] the Columbia and fucking them,” Edd Taub opined. “But at the same time these outlaw capitalists are responsible for placing the people’s music in the hands of the people with money, a lot of it.”
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Note that Taub said “the people’s music” and not “the artist’s.” He felt that bootleggers were only secondary copycats, following the original mimics—white rock stars like Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley, who were quite literally “great white wonders.” “Now the class that gave birth to the music can’t afford to buy it back in the form of Dylan,” Taub argued, “who has created higher levels of this culture by using musical forms from the Black and white working class experience.”
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The reality of many bootlegs as sought-after rarities capable of commanding high prices contrasts with the role of outright counterfeits, which were (and still are) usually sold at bargain prices. Often, bootlegging for collectors and fans was seen as more admissible than a parasitic, entrepreneurial piracy. From Taub’s perspective, however, the latter sort of copying could be understood as making music more affordable for the masses.

Most journalists felt sorrier for the artist than for the lumpenproletariat that had inspired what was now a high-dollar collectible. A reporter from the
Los Angeles Press
clandestinely met with a bootlegger who wore a Columbia University sweatshirt and a paper bag over his head. “I interrupted him to ask about Dylan’s share,” the journalist wrote. “Wasn’t he entitled to royalties on his own material?” The man in the bag at first evaded the question, declaring that
Great White Wonder
was better than the “shit” Columbia Records chose to release. He then turned into a populist: “In a sense, we’re liberating the records and bringing them to the people, not just the chosen few.” Finally, the man admitted that paying Dylan was “a dream we here have long held and will continue to cherish.” Less disingenuously than some other pirates, this one did not feign a sincere concern for the artist’s royalties. He would send Dylan a little of the profit some day, but in the meantime dreams of outselling
Nashville Skyline
consumed his thoughts.
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Ralph Gleason, a music critic and executive at Fantasy Records, ridiculed the professed mission of bootlegging and foretold its demise, as record companies stopped tolerating unauthorized reproduction and pushed Congress to change the copyright law.
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The prosperity of the 1960s, he said, “allowed quack Robin Hoods like the Rubber Dubber to pose as public benefactors, in a sense, giving the public a chance to get some more of what they wanted when the artists themselves (and the companies) were unable or unwilling to supply the demand.” These Robin Hoods liked to say they circumvented the big, bad corporations by giving the people what they wanted and sending royalty checks to the artists. Even if they did—and Gleason doubted it—they gave nothing to the session musicians who made the music. He noted that the record companies were going after stores that sold unauthorized merchandise, especially pirate tapes: “These are usually made by straight criminal types who are into some kind of hustle as opposed to bootleg LPs, where the implication—though even this isn’t sure—is that a counter culture dude does them.” Overall, Gleason rejected the notion that bootlegging meant cultural liberation, suggesting it was only free in the sense of a free market. “It is the same kind of self-justification that a pimp employs or the manager of a stag show or a porny movie house,” he concluded. “After all, we are performing a public service. So is a bull.”
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