A couple of decades ago, I mentioned during a radio show that I’d acquired several bootleg records by several bands I absolutely adored, mostly live recordings, some outtakes and alternative mixes. A few days later, I received a letter from the head of a music industry organization in which I was called “morally reprehensible” for trading in illegal recordings. He also had a few other choice words for me.
I didn’t care. I’d bought all the albums, all the singles, all the T-shirts, had been to all the shows, and I still wanted more from my favourite acts. But in those days, the supply of music was strictly controlled by record labels. The only option that existed between gaps in the album/touring cycles was to go the bootleg route. Yes, these were illegal releases that lived outside contracts and agreements. And yes, in most cases, the proceeds from the sales of these records didn’t make their way back to the artist. But once infected with the bootleg bug, it was tough to quit. And hey, I was just following a tradition that went back a hundred years.
The bootleg industry goes back to Lionel Mapleson, the official librarian at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In 1900, he bought Bettini, a phonograph based on Thomas Edison’s talking machine. He was immediately smitten with its recording capabilities. On March 22, 1900, he wrote, “For the present, I neither work properly nor eat nor sleep. I’m a phonograph maniac!! Always making or buying records. The Bettini apparatus is simply perfect.”
Mapleson immediately began to record performances at The Met from a perch high on a catwalk 40 feet above the stage. Although he stopped after a couple of years — someone at The Met got wind of what he was doing — about a hundred of these recordings have survived and are now considered to be priceless documents of that era. They now live at the Library of Congress.
Fast-forward to the ’40s and ’50s. Hardcore jazz fans were frustrated at the inability of record labels to keep up with the demand for new records. Taking matters into their own hands, they used bulky reel-to-reel machines set up in the audience to record performances by Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and other legends. Much of that era of jazz would have been lost to history had it not been for the obsessives determined to capture these gigs
