Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century

by Alex Sayf Cummings

  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 1975.25

  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.26 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.”28

  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.”31 Michael O concurred: “It was the psychedelic era and people did a lot of goofy things to break the rules.”32 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.35

  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.41

  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.42 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.”43

  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.44 Opera piracy might have been a minor irritation to record companies, but bootlegs of the Beatles or Bob Dylan were harder to ignore.45 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.”46

  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.”47 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.48 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.49 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.50

  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 1972.51 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.52

  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.”53 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.54 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.”55 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.56

  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.57 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 va
riety 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.59

  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 t-shirts, 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.