A Brief History Of Bootlegs
As a point of interest, bootleg records can be traced back to the early days of opera music
but they are not what we're concerned with here, vinyl (rock) bootlegs first began to appear in the USA in 1969.
The first of these was Bob Dylan's 'Great white wonder' which was compiled by two young Californian Dylan fans - Michael Taylor & Ken Douglas
(known as 'Dub' & 'Ken') who both owned Dylan acetates with unreleased tracks due to their connections in the
music industry. It comprised of various studio outtakes and was instantly successful with the
californian record buying public and even received a fair amount of local radio airplay! In California
at that time, there were many small independent record pressing plants who, in the true spirit of the times,
were not too concerned with copyright laws, or whose money they took to press the discs. So getting the discs
pressed was a relatively easy affair. Soon, others followed and within a year bootleg albums were being
produced throughout the USA, Europe and the Far East. As for Dub & Ken, flushed with the success of
'The Great White Wonder', they went on to establish the now legendary 'Trade Mark Of Quality' label,
and between them released more vinyl bootlegs than anyone else in bootleg history.
In the early years most US bootlegs were very simply packaged, either with plain white rubber stamped sleeves
or with paper insert covers. It should be noted that the early european releases were generally better both with
the packaging and sound quality of their releases.
Towards the end of the seventies the US copyright laws began to tighten up and many manufacturers found themselves busted by the FBI. One of the problems they faced was that, as inept at catching them as the FBI were, even they could easily see the difference between official albums and bootlegs, which at that time, still nearly all had the cheap looking paper insert covers to keep production costs down. Hence the change to deluxe colour covers. Although it's fair to say that these days, the old style paper insert bootlegs are generally more sought after. It may be because they look so….'underground'. Whatever, they do have a certain charm about them.
For further reading on the old vinyl bootleggers, it is well worth seeking out a copy of Clinton Heylin's excellent book 'The Great White Wonders' from which the following two extracts were taken….
The Dark Side Of The Moo
Richard (the bootlegger) - "Dark side of the moo was just a pun and a picture of a cow I took 'cos I thought it would be a great cover and title. It sold more than everything and it's still in print….People still ask for it now, and I don't get it. There's no writing on the cover, just a picture of a cow on the front and two cows on the back. I had to slap a sticker on it to say who it was. It sold 15,000 - I was amazed!"
World Tour
'Eric Bristow' (the bootlegger) - "Pink Floyd, when they came back in '87, the first show of the world tour was in Ottawa, and a friend of mine drove up there, taped it, bought a concert programme, Fed Ex'd the tape and the programme from Ottawa the next morning to me in California. I handed it all in. It was mastered that afternoon. I had plates on the day after on the other side of the continent! We had records, in a double gatefold, on pink vinyl, with four colour labels, out on the streets in eight days….and we sold 7,000 of those….One of the guys who worked for the Floyd went into 'It's Only Rock and Roll' in New York and he saw this bootleg and they hadn't even played there yet! 'Jesus Christ! I work for these guys, let me see that!' He looked at it and was absolutely stunned. He took it back to the hotel and showed it to the band. They were so freaked out they sent him back to buy three more for them. This is a week and a half after the show'.
With the demise of vinyl sales throughout the eighties many of the old guard vinyl bootleggers called it a day. The ones who stayed in business now had the real problem of where to get their cd's pressed, but that’s another story………..
Production has continued right through to the present day although (with a few exceptions) the old vinyl bootlegs were superceded by cd bootlegs in the late eighties. Many of the old vinyl bootlegs are now extremely sought after by collectors and fetch very high prices. Most bootlegs were produced in small runs (typically one to two thousand) and this has added to their mystique and desirability.
Pink Floyd & Bootlegs
Major artists (ie. The most bootlegged!) opinions on bootlegs differ greatly. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page, The Grateful Dead and John Lennon etc were/are all avid collectors of their own bootlegs, whilst Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan started out 'pro-bootleg' and then changed their minds. This is often the case as early on in an artists career being bootlegged is considered cool and an indication that you've 'made it'. Later on, things change…….
Nick Mason
I hate bootlegs. I absolutely disapprove of bootlegging. We should be allowed to make the decision about what of our work we will put out.
I'm opposed to bootleggers generally, and I'm not very sympathetic to that particular cause. I think that if you want to run things like the Grateful Dead do, that's fine and that works very well. If the band makes a conscious decision about how they want to operate, then that's fine. So I'd say that from my point of view, I'm not very keen on it, and tend to take a rather jaundiced view when people want to get their bootleg albums autographed!
I do have some bootlegs of our stuff to remind me how much I hate them.
Roger Waters
Q: How do you feel about fans exchanging bootlegs?
A: I think it sounds like a healthy hobby.
Dave Gilmour
The sound quality is usually dreadful, but I've got one with hundreds of things on. Not quite sure where they've got it from. For people like us who've done a lot over the years it's not a major issue, whereas for people starting out it's more difficult to cope with bootlegs.
Bootleggers & Labels
Trade Mark Of Quality
(TMOQ)
Operating out of Los Angeles, Dub & Ken, the people responsible for the 'Great White Wonder'
(see 'A Brief History Of Bootlegs' page) went on to produce the now famous TMOQ label.
All of their early releases appeared on coloured vinyl (at least for the first pressing)
with the band's name and album title rubberstamped on one side of the sleeve, along with a pig sticker,
and (slightly later) a xeroxed paper insert on the other. The early pressings had a large 1 & 2 on the labels
and later they went on to use labels with the famous pig logo's on them. Occasionally they used plain
white labels, and these are of course the least desirable. The early pressings are now highly prized by
collectors.
TMOQ used the services of a brilliant young artist for many of their covers & inserts called William Stout.
Unfortunately he never did any covers for TMOQ's Pink Floyd bootlegs but his work was amazing.
Many of his covers featured brilliant (& sometimes cruel) caricatures of the bands who's bootlegs he designed,
often using the labels pig theme on the artists themselves!. He was also responsible for the great
Smokin' Pig Logo. We have been granted exclusive permission by William himself to dedicate a page to his bootleg
artwork here on the site, and you can link to it HERE! Please remember that all the images in this section of the site are © William Stout 2006.
Whilst together Dub & Ken also released albums on....
Popo Productions
Winklhofer
Har-Kub
Lemon Records
Athapaskan...etc.
.....After a couple of years the two characters behind the label, Dub and Ken went their separate ways.
Dub continued to produce the regular TMOQ product with the 'farm pig' logo (and the occasional release on the
'Pigs Eye' Label), whilst Ken, just to confuse matters, went on to produce a rival TMOQ which used the 'Smokin' pig' logo, often releasing albums which were exact copies of the original TMOQ releases but with his own logo in place of the 'farm pig' and sometimes with completely different artwork, and to confuse things even further Ken sometimes still used Dub's farm pig logo on his own releases. After a while Ken went on to release albums, in partnership with others, using a variety of labels. These are thought to include…..
The Amazing Kornyphone Record Label (TAKRL)
Ze Anonymous Plattenspieler (ZAP)
Impossible Recordworks
Excitable Recordworks
Pharting Pharaoh
Toasted Records
Flat Records
Holy Grail
Spindizzie
World Records
Full Tilt Records
Monique D'Ozo
UFO Records
Aftermath
OZ Records
Beacon Island
Singers Original Double Disks (SODD)
Highway Hi-Fi
RSR International
...and this is just a few of them. Ken had literally scores of labels and is the man behind many bootlegs in this guide.
The Amazing Kornyphone Record Label
(TAKRL)TAKRL were one of the most prolific labels - along with TMOQ and CBM - who also had a slide in quality at the end of the seventies. However, they were responsible for some excellent releases (eg. 'Crackers'). The two men behind this label - Doctor 'Telly' Phone and Ken from TMOQ - used to frequently argue over which titles should be released on the TAKRL label. Telly Phone's main concern was quality while Ken's main concern was with maintaining a large volume of output. As a compromise, they released titles they could not agree over on the TKRWM (The Kornyphone Records For The Working Man) label. They released two Pink Floyd titles on this label, 'Barrett's Revenge' and 'Gotta Be Crazy'.
Many of Ken's earlier labels used paper insert covers (eg. Aftermath, TAKRL & ZAP) and these came in either two colour or Tri-colour variations. It is assumed by many that the Tri-colour inserts are from the original first pressings, however there are no grounds to prove this and it's more likely that they used whatever was nearest to hand at any given time, and I believe the same applies to the TAKRL labels which are much more attractive than the more common plain 'side one' & 'side two' labels which Ken Often used. TAKRL also sometimes included generic back cover inserts for some of their albums, and so, for a collector, the rarest and best TAKRL editions have a Tri-colour insert, custom printed Takrl labels and a generic back insert. To see the difference between two and tri-colour inserts, see the entry for 'Raving And Drooling' (TAKRL 1973).
Wizardo Records
Although specialising in Beatles bootlegs Wizardo also released bootlegs by many other bands including several Floyd titles. The man behind the label was John Wizardo. Whom, having started out as an avid collector of bootlegs, started to produce his own. Apart from his main label, Wizardo also released albums on Fan-Buys Marketing, Old Glory Records, Death Records, OK Records and Dog & Cat Records. Later on he teamed up with a partner known as Vicki Vinyl, who made - IMP (Idle Mind Productions), Teddy Bear records, Ruthless Rhymes and Mushroom, Dragonfly & Slipped Disc Records For more information see the John Wizardo interview.
The Nitz Brothers
Although not particularly well known amongst many Floyd bootleg collectors, these two twin brothers - Robert and Ralph - are top of the list when it comes to early European Pink Floyd bootlegs. Different sources vary on what they were responsible for, but they had something that no other bootleggers can claim... First of all, they never copied the recordings of anyone else (they always recorded their own bootlegs, and always in high quality), secondly, their packaging was second to none - with excellent quality deluxe covers, and lastly, the sound quality of their recordings put the American recordings of the same era to shame. They never used the same label name twice in order to avoid unwanted attention from the German authorities and they are responsible for many iconic and very collectible bootlegs. In 1978 they set up a bootleg stall outside the entrance to a Bob Dylan concert at Westfallenhalle, Dortmund, Germany and promptly got busted. One of them managed to flee to a farm in Luxembourg for a short time (taking a lot of tapes with him) but was only there a short time before he ran out of money and he left the farm in a hurry overnight because the police were catching up with him. He left his tapes behind. It is said that the farm owners threw almost all the tapes away in the mid eighties (no Pink Floyd tapes survived). History has it that one of the brothers died many years ago from a drug overdose in Berlin. There is still some difference of opinion over all the titles they were responsible for and some have been credited to an English guy called Derrick, and others to Dutch bootleggers, but these guys were all deserving of our respect. .
Contraband Music
(CBM)CBM records was a US label masterminded by someone known as Dave D. who was said to operate out of Mid/East America (certainly he was outside of the circle of all the Californian bootleggers). CBM began well enough producing albums from their own original tape sources (eg.'Tampa') but soon became content with merely copying releases by other bootleg labels. The quality of their product also took a slide and their albums in terms of presentation and their actual vinyl pressings were notoriously poor. Many of the pressings did improve however, when they started to use a pressing plant in Fort Wayne Indiana around 1978, the time they introduced the Instant Analysis, Godzilla and King Kong labels. They were also responsible for releases on the Shalom, Carnaby, I.P.F Records and Wisconsin Cheese labels. Dave D quit bootlegging in the late seventies. For a while he was producing bootlegs and studying law at the same time. Maybe he became a copyright lawer? :)
K&S Records
K&S was a label started by Kurt Gleimser (who started the original 'Hot Wacks' bootleg guide primarily by copying the entries in John Tschirgi's notebook of his private collection), operating out of Canada they released a mixture of their own original titles and re-issues of other labels bootlegs, normally re-pressing them from the original plates in small runs on coloured vinyl. Their re-issue of the Floyd’s 'Libest Spacement Monitor’ is particularly rare.
In the past they have been unfairly written off as a copycat label, however they did release a fair number of original titles of their own.
