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.”60 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.”61 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.62
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.63 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.”64
In other words, even the Mafia can claim to be true adherents of laissez faire. Indeed, Gleason’s criticism gives a sense of where the musical black market was headed in 1971. As was seen in the crackdown on illegal jazz records in the early 1950s, bootleggers who expanded beyond small-scale operations ran afoul of the law. As record copying became bigger business in the 1970s, the market drew the attention of both the major labels and organized crime. The days of 1,000-copy batches of Louis Armstrong reissues were gone, as the potential profit of this quasi-legal activity began to attract professional criminality and violence.65
The line between entrepreneur and criminal was often hard to draw, though, especially since the legal status of recordings remained unclear. “I wasn’t exactly representing the nicest people in the world,” admits Francis Pinckney, an attorney who worked for several pirates in the late 1960s and 1970s. Still, there were many players in the business he refused to represent. “There were really some shady characters in it, who just surreptitiously copied these things and sold them out of the back of trucks,” he recalled. “They would be in South Carolina until the law started catching up with them, then they’d move to North Carolina.”66 When a friend asked Pinckney about copying sound recordings, he assumed that it could not possibly be legal. The friend said that a man in Atlanta had gotten legal advice that there was a loophole in the copyright law, and he decided to go into business selling his own tapes of popular music.
The Charlotte attorney looked into it further and discovered, as so many had before him, that sound recordings were not copyrightable. Technically, it seemed, one could copy existing recordings and pay song publishers the flat royalty for their compositions created by the 1909 Copyright Act. Before letting his clients proceed, though, Pinckney wrote a letter to the major record companies, explaining his theory about the loophole and offering to pay an additional royalty to the labels in exchange for the permission to use whichever recordings they wanted. He even suggested a proviso that would bar his clients from taking more than half the songs from any given album, to prevent the copiers from identically replicating the original release:
The idea was that they were going to take the top 10 songs, and put them on one tape, and it was going to be a great product. Instead of having to go out and buy ten records, each one of them had one of the top ten songs, instead you’d have them all on one cassette tape.… I never heard from any of them. I thought I’d at least get one response that says, “Go to Hell.”67
Pinckney’s legal and ethical take on piracy reveals much about a certain breed of copier in this period. Disliking the pejorative term “pirate,” they preferred to call themselves “anti-monopolists.” They thought that consumers should be able to obtain the recording they wanted without having to buy it in the form the record company determined—for instance, as part of a full-length LP. Just as any artist could record a cover of any song they chose, thanks to the compulsory license system, other firms would be able to sell the product on their own terms, while paying both the songwriter who composed the music and the record company that recorded it separate royalties.68
In 1971 Pinckney and several other lawyers representing the pirate firms proposed such a system to Congress. All the while, they aspired to present the pirates as respectable businessmen. “The clients which we represent have known places of business, open to the public, are advertised, and anybody can come and see them and talk to them,” attorney Thomas Truitt told lawmakers, speaking on behalf of G&G Sales, Eastern Tape, and several others. Truitt held up a tape, telling the copyright committee, “This is an example of their product. It states on its face who makes it and where you can come and find those people.”69 Pinckney had insisted that his clients include their name and address on the tapes; though they had done so reluctantly, they soon discovered that the practice helped them sell the product: “They would go into a 7/11 and say, ‘We’ve got these tapes we want to sell,’ and the guy would say, ‘There ain’t no way I’m gonna buy those things’ … And they’d say, ‘Look, here’s our name and address. Come by and see our place of business. If it weren’t legitimate, we wouldn’t be doing it.’”70
Unlike the hippie bootleggers, who sought to liberate l
ive or unreleased music, this group of pirates focused on making “mixes” of readily available songs. “You can’t buy a legitimate product with songs by all the top artists, because they have exclusive contracts with different companies,” Bruce Weber observed in Billboard. “So the illegal operator picks selections from several leading albums, puts them together on a tape and offers all the hits in one.”71 One could find this product in unconventional outlets such as gas stations and flea markets. Time noted in 1971 that “nearly every city has record stores, gas stations and supermarkets with selections of bootlegged tapes and records, which are usually packaged in unadorned boxes and albums with plain white covers.”72 Jan Bohusch, for instance, sold music mixes with his partner at the Wisconsin state fair in the early 1970s, raking in large sums of money for anthologies that were calibrated to particular tastes. After he abandoned the business, E-C Tape, he testified before a 1974 hearing called by New York attorney general Louis Lefkowitz. “E-C Tape did issue royalty checks to copyright owners [composers and publishers], the vast majority of which were uncashed,” he said.73
Bohusch: E-C was a unique pirate because they did not take any existing record albums. They took simply cuts from albums and combined them into anthologies.
Lefkowitz: Made a contribution with some talent in other words?
Bohusch: Yes, I would say.
Lefkowitz: A little high class.
Bohusch: We were the highest class of pirates. Yes, generally I would say that we also had the audacity to charge $7 for the product.
Lefkowitz: Which cost you what, $1.11?
Bohusch: Under a dollar. We were the only people in the entire nation selling 8 tracks for the full list price.74
Bohusch took pride in what he had done, even if he had come to believe it was unethical. Other tape pirates produced a product with bad sound quality, or simply copied existing albums track for track, with no creative input. “The quality runs from absolute trash to good,” Bohusch recalled. “[E-C] was garbage, but it was the best garbage.”75
Some pirates built on Bohusch’s idea of anthologizing popular music by using the mix as an opportunity to satirize the material, while making a unique product available. One wag at a bootleg label promoted a mythical John Denver compilation called Wish I’d Been Born a Deer.76 Other albums might qualify as a sort of conceptual art if they had been presented in a gallery or university rather than on the black market. Released in 1982, Elvis’ Greatest Shit!! combined the dregs of the King’s catalog with a package designed to insult his most obsessive fans. Although this bootlegger usually used the name “Richard Records,” he attributed the Greatest Shit album to “RCA Victim,” a dig at the RCA Victor label. A slogan on the front cover asserted, “50,000,000 fans can be wrong!” Worst of all, the album brought together the most inexplicable and embarrassing tunes from Presley’s career, including “Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce,” “Dominic the Impotent Bull,” and “Song of the Shrimp.”77
The project inverted the perennial record label tactic of squeezing a few extra dollars out of the audience for an over-the-hill artist by adding one or two new tracks to a collection of his or her best-known hits. The record openly presents itself as an artifact of corporate greed, with the slogan “A New Rip-Off Repackaging Job” emblazoned across the top. (Except, perhaps, for Joni Mitchell, who released both a Hits and a Misses collection, the greatest hits formula has rarely been modified.) Further, Richard used the album to tweak the whole logic of collecting upon which bootlegging largely depended. Most hardcore fans would want to vacuum up any odds and sods by their favorite artist, even if the material were utter dross and the packaging mocked their affection. If nothing else, Greatest Shit presents an alternative view of the artist that would not be apparent from looking at a greatest hits collection or any other individual item in his catalog—a sort of remix on a larger scale.78
Not everyone shared this sense of craft, and here the lines between above-the-board entrepreneur, radical bootlegger, and pure opportunist became the most muddled, revealing a drift toward organized, professional profiteering. Godzilla’s American Phonograph Record Export Service, based in Glendale, California, made its economic intentions about as plain as could be in the early 1970s. The group sold TMQ records like Great White Wonder and LIVEr Than You’ll Ever Be. Jumbling familiar Beatles hits with outtakes, its Renaissance Minstrels album showed how impure the mission of bringing unreleased music to the people often was. “We offer these high quality original productions at the lowest and most competitive prices possible,” Godzilla’s catalog promised. “This enables your firm to have a substantial profit margin when reselling this product.” They also nodded and winked at the notion of counterculture: “We might add, this profit margin is much greater than that of legitimate albums and, due to the nature of being ‘underground,’ is very easy to sell on the wholesale and retail levels.”79 Up to ninety-nine albums could be purchased at a unit cost of $2.10 each, and orders of between 100 and 499 could be had for $1.95 each. Likewise, a Houston-based group called Music City Distributing sent out catalogues promising top albums for $2.75 a piece. The accompanying letter was signed, “Your friendly bootlegger.”80 Business Week claimed that large bootleg outfits were rapidly outstripping “‘mom and pop’ thieves” like Bohusch. They ran their own factories, put display racks in gas stations, printed catalogues, and dispatched salesmen around the country.81
One such salesman was Tom Brown, an idealistic young musician who worked with bootleggers in Texas and California during the early 1970s.82 His story reveals some of the dangers involved in bootlegging, especially as legal suppression loomed. Tom got involved with the illicit market in the summer of 1970, when he found a “day gig” with a group called the Record Plant in Grand Prairie, Texas. He spent the day making labels for Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin records; he claimed to be unaware that the products had not been authorized by the bands or record companies. Management soon recruited him to be an ambassador to the hippie stores in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. “The owner offered to front me a few albums and promised me half the profit on sales,” he recalled. “I didn’t know much about artists’ royalties at the time and figured the artists were getting paid.” Tom started pulling in $2,000 a month, and the managers sent him and his friends on a mission through Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma. When the boys reached Chicago, policemen looked at the Texas plates on their truck and figured their cargo must be marijuana from Mexico. “They were still uptight from the ’68 SDS riots at the Democratic Convention,” Tom surmised. Unable to find the contraband they were looking for, the police dumped the guitars, bongos, and boxes of records in the street and arrested the youths for possession of illegal weapons (a pocketknife and a starter pistol). After watching the police abuse and humiliate two drag queens in jail, they were released on a $25 bond and ordered to get out of Chicago in twenty-four hours. “To this day I have never met anyone else who was ever kicked out of Chicago like my brother and I were,” Tom said.83
Soon, Tom joined the actual Rubber Dubber organization. He came home one day to find the Record Plant’s secretary waiting for him with a “big, burly and tall hippie looking character, who introduced himself as Chuck Kane.” The man claimed to be one of the founders of Rubber Dubber, and he said the Texans had been selling his company’s products without permission. What difference did it make, though, if the Record Plant stole from Rubber Dubber, since Dubber was stealing from Hendrix? The difference, Kane said, was that his people believed in paying royalties to artists. “This impressed me because I considered myself an emerging artist at the time and I didn’t want any bad ‘karma’ to come back on me,” Tom recalled. In any case, Rubber Dubber wanted to take advantage of his midwestern sales base, and Tom soon found himself working for the company in Los Angeles. The group back in Grand Prairie folded, as workers in Los Angeles printed, shrink-wrapped, and mailed records to their former clients in the Midwest.
Figure 4.4 This recording of a Neil Y
oung concert is typical of many Rubber Dubber records, which documented performances by Jimi Hendrix, Elton John, and others in the early 1970s. Recorded in 1971, this disc was made eight months before a bill providing federal copyright protection for sound recordings was passed by Congress. Source: Courtesy of Music Library and Sound Recordings Archive, Bowling Green State University.
In California, Tom worked in sales and recording, capturing performances by artists such as Elton John, James Taylor, and Neil Young.84 Rubber Dubber made sure to snap up tickets for the best seats in the house as soon as they were available. Chuck Kane would carry a high quality reel-to-reel tape recorder to the concert in his backpack, while Tom had to maneuver with a long microphone stuck in his pants. Although it looked awkward, no one ever bothered him about it. “One person would limp in with a shotgun mic down one leg,” Tom said. “That was never noticed because of all the returning Vietnam vets with injuries.” Although the sound quality was not excellent, the recordings captured the feel of the live performance. The Rubber Dubber gang saw this product as having more value than the pirated tape of an album that was already a hit. “We did not put ourselves in the same category as them,” Tom said. “We were selling something that was totally new and captured from the ‘air.’” At the time, he believed that they were giving the fans something they wanted and paying the artists for their work; although he began to suspect that what they were doing was illegal, everybody seemed to win.
Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century Page 16