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.4
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.”5 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.6
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.7 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!”8
Johnston valued his relationship with Dylan, Cohen, and Cash and was unlikely to endanger it by leaking music they chose not to publish. However, other producers could not have been so conscientious if the flood of unreleased music by major stars is any indication. Sound engineers and other staff could be tempted to take acetates and tapes out of the studio, whether to “liberate” the music, make some extra money, or stick it to their employer. A 1952 essay by Hot Record Society alum Charles Edward Smith suggests that this practice had a long history: “The collector must rely upon the never quite infallible ear of the critic, to tell him whether this is the first master, the second master, or the acetate test that the office boy filched from the wastepaper basket.”9
Even without the assistance of a sound engineer, getting music out of the concert hall was easier than before. As early as 1901, Lionel Mapleson was lugging his wax cylinder recorder all over the Metropolitan Opera House, searching for a place where he could keep the cumbersome machine out of view. Not everything had changed by the 1960s; a cartoon in Stereo Review shows a woman in a fur coat trying to enter an opera house with a microphone sticking out of her extravagant hat. However, those with the money or ingenuity could do a much better job of concealing their equipment. They snuck into concerts, especially as tape recorders became more compact, flexible and effective. The most advanced organizations would send an agent into a concert with a microphone that transmitted to a van, where tape was rolling a quarter of a mile away. Small-scale success allowed ambitious bootleggers to invest in better equipment. One could start with a simple tape recorder costing $40 and work up to a $100,000 stereo system. “Music-trade publications and underground newspapers carry ads for the machines,” Time observed in 1971, “and many an Aquarian-Ager has been able to convert his basement into a tape factory.”10 Michael “Dub” Taylor used his profits from a Bob Dylan bootleg to move up from pilfering studio outtakes to producing high-quality concert recordings; he was spotted in 1971 at a Faces concert with a $3,000 microphone hidden in a suitcase.11
Law enforcement began worrying about the penetration of bootleggers into concerts before there were even laws to enforce. Congress would extend copyright to sound recordings in 1971, and North Carolina did not pass its own antipiracy law until 1975, yet high school students in Charlotte reported police monitoring at a Jimi Hendrix concert in 1969. An officer asked one attendee if his movie camera was a tape recorder—apparently, a concert video was acceptable, but a sound-only recording was not. The policeman then asked his friend about a suspicious case:
Cop: What’s in that case under your chair?
Friend: A poloroid [sic] camera.
Cop: Do you have a tape recorder?
Friend: No.
Cop: Open up the case.
Friend: Do you have a search warrant?
Cop: Open it up.
Friend: I don’t believe I have to without a search warrant.
Cop: (grabbing him by the arm) Step outside.
Friend: (by this time a uniformed pig appeared) Am I not entitled to a search warrant by the Constitution?
Cops: Step outside son.12
That summer, the first major rock bootleg began to circulate in Los Angeles: a passel of tunes by Bob Dylan, recorded in hotel rooms, radio and record studios, and, most famously, the basement of Dylan’s home in Woodstock, New York. The bulk of these basement tapes consisted of covers and new folk songs performed with members of the Band during the period between the singer’s motorcycle accident in 1966 and his return with John Wesley Harding in late 1967.13 Word leaked of an unreleased set of Dylan songs, written and performed in the fashion of his early 1960s work, while many fans had greeted his just-released country album, Nashville Skyline, with dismay. Reviewers in the Berkeley Barb and other left-leaning independent magazines expressed disgust at Dylan’s innocuous musings on “country pie” while the Vietnam War dragged on and student rebellion raged. Even as the Top 40 format imposed uniformity on many radio stations and DJs, the emergence of “free form” radio on the West Coast allowed hosts to air new, unreleased, and soon-to-be released music at will, culled from review tapes sent out by labels to critics or recordings ferreted out of local recording studios.14
The album of Dylan’s “basement tapes,” Rolling Stone reported in 1969, “was collected, pressed and currently is being marketed by two young Los Angeles residents both of whom have long hair, a moderate case of the shakes (prompted by paranoia) and an amusing story to tell.” The young men went by the names of Patrick and Vladimir, until both interviewer and interviewee found the latter too difficult to spell and opted instead for Merlin. By hook or crook, the two had
obtained tapes of unreleased Dylan songs, including recordings made in hotel rooms, a few off-the-cuff “rap sessions,” and a live TV performance with Johnny Cash. Lacking their own vehicle, they had to borrow cars to deliver the records to the Psychedelic Supermarket and other local retailers. Although they struggled to keep their names and addresses secret, many people had already approached them with other “secret tapes” for future release. “He’s got all these songs nobody’s ever heard,” Patrick said of Dylan. “We thought we’d take it on ourselves to make this music available.” Jerry Hopkins ended the interview with this question: “Do you know what will happen if you get away with it? Why, if John Mayall or anybody opens at the Whisky tonight, there’ll be a live recording of it on the stands by the middle of next week.”15
Figure 4.1 An unknown label released this bootleg record, one of many different compilations of Bob Dylan’s “basement tapes” to circulate under the title the Great White Wonder, beginning in 1969. It has the same blank aesthetic as many of the Great White Wonder records, with a paper label listing the album title and the song tracks glued to the front of the sleeve. Source: Courtesy of Music Library and Sound Recordings Archive, Bowling Green State University.
Figure 4.2 The cover of this 1970 bootleg of the San Francisco band It’s a Beautiful Day features only text handwritten with a black marker—prefiguring the way listeners labeled “burnt” CDs later in the twentieth century. Source: Courtesy of Music Library and Sound Recordings Archive, Bowling Green State University.
These earliest rock bootlegs were minimalist by default, with plain white covers that gave little or no indication of what was contained inside. When a woman from Brooklyn saw the Dylan album and expressed interest in hyping it back in New York, she told the boys it needed a name. Based on its presentation, she suggested Great White Wonder. Subsequently, Patrick and Merlin stamped each release with the letters “GWW.” According to Rolling Stone, “Some [stores] objected to the simple packaging—a white double sleeve with ‘Great White Wonder’ rubber stamped in the upper righthand corner—they said, while others indicated they were afraid of how Columbia might react.”16 Many other versions of these recordings followed, as entrepreneurs imitated the style of the original and either tried to improve the sound quality of the material or offered a slightly different assortment of live recordings and demos.
The blank design of the early Wonders recalled what became known as the Beatles’ White Album, released the year before. Designed by pop artist Richard Hamilton, the 1968 record originally featured a plain white cover, the lack of adornment mirroring its simple title: The Beatles. In other words, it was just the band, with no fanfare or addenda. (It was also the first album they released on their own label, Apple Corps.) While a blank album cover might be expected to stand out on the record shelves—Hamilton wanted its militant abstraction to resemble “the most esoteric art publications”—Apple still added the stamp “The Beatles” on the cover to ensure that fans knew what the record was.17
Great White Wonder stood in contrast with standard music industry product much as the White Album did, as a plain container filled with an unalloyed volume of the artist’s work. Packaging design is an aspect of marketing, a central piece of the campaign to tantalize the public into purchasing any musical product, and thus represents a portion of the investment in production and promotion that record companies accused pirates of appropriating. The earliest bootlegs, however, exploited this investment only indirectly; pirates may have benefited from the attention already generated by the promotional machine, but they did not copy the graphic design of the product. In the case of Wonder, they were not even copying an actual major-label release. Alan Bayley of GRT Corp., which manufactured tape versions of albums for major labels, urged the music industry to adopt an industry-wide trademark to distinguish legitimate recordings, but Business Week observed that in most cases the difference was already evident: “Authentic tapes are nicely packaged with full-color illustrations whereas bootleg tapes generally have a plain printed label listing the performers and songs and no maker’s name or address.”18
Aesthetics aside, the plainness served more practical purposes. The two young men who first published Great White Wonder lacked the resources to create a more elaborate production, even with the funds they scared up from a local businessman known only as “the Greek.” Further, Patrick’s desire to get the basement tapes into the hands of frustrated fans required forgoing much attention to detail in terms of presentation. Plain white packaging might have prevented police or other authorities from recognizing a record as the work of an artist on a major label, at least until the design became well known enough for the public to associate it with bootleg music.
If nothing else, leaving the sleeve blank could keep anyone from tracing the record to a particular bootlegger—unless, of course, he had the album manufactured at Columbia Records’ own pressing plant in Los Angeles. A young man named Michael O made this mistake, issuing his own edition of Great White Wonder after being displeased with the original release. His was also packaged in a white sleeve, distinguished only by one low-budget touch—a drawing of a flower by his girlfriend on each of the 200 releases, which led to its being dubbed Flower by retailers. Michael found his mother at home one afternoon, fuming because a Columbia rep had come by and insisted that the boy buy back whatever records he had sold and turn them over to Columbia. Another entrepreneur in the area took a stab at perfecting the basement tapes, releasing a ten-track record in another blank sleeve. Like Flower, it also got its name from retailers, who saw the letters TT inscribed on the disc label and called it Troubled Troubadour.19
As the summer and fall of 1969 wore on, multiple versions of the basement tapes circulated. Retailers expressed astonishment that young people would buy up any bootleg available, with no sure knowledge of what it contained or whether it duplicated another record they owned. Recorded music came unmoored from any kind of fixed identity; fans could no longer assume that a recording was one of a definite sequence of releases by a particular artist in a label’s catalog, recorded and packaged for sale at a definite moment in time, nor could they be sure whether the sounds had appeared elsewhere in slightly different form. Sound became free-floating and promiscuous, like the motley mix of recordings by any artist that one might find on a spindle of “burnt” CDs or a computer hard drive in the twenty-first century. The music’s provenance, its release date, even the identity of the performer was far less certain than those of a glossy, well-designed LP released by a legitimate label. The tireless effort of record companies to build the stardom and image of their performers crumbled in the face of widespread duplication.
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.”21
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 tw
enty-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
Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century Page 14