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....
Pod Records
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)
Mushroom Records
Impossible Recordworks
Excitable Recordworks
Pharting Pharaoh
Toasted Records
Flat Records
Holy Grail
Spindizzie
World Records
Full Tilt Records
Monique D'Ozo
GLC Records
Songs For Swinging Mothers
UFO Records
Creative Artistry
Raring Records
Aftermath
OZ Records
Beacon Island
Singers Original Double Disks (SODD)
Highway Hi-Fi
RSR International
Raven Records...
...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 several Floyd titles. The man behind the label was John Tschirgi. Whom, having started out as an avid collector of bootlegs, started to produce his own. Apart from his main label, Tschirgi also released albums on Fan-Buys Marketing, Old Glory Records and Dog & Cat Records. Later on he teamed up with a partner (Andrea Waters) known as Vicki Vinyl, who already had her own labels - IMP (Idle Mind Productions), Teddy Bear records, Ruthless Rhymes, Dragonfly & Slipped Disc Records - and they produced some titles together. This is why her logo's and/or labels occasionally appear on Wizardo releases. There was also a strong connection between John Tschirgi, Andrea Waters & Ken from TMOQ and one issue of 'Libest Spacement Moitor' is said to be such a collaboration between the three of them. Releases on IMP have appeared with Ruthless Rhymes Labels and Mushroom Records inserts whilst Wizardo albums have appeared with World Records labels. Several of Ken's releases have appeared with Slipped Disc Labels. In addition to this, John Wizardo was credited on TAKRL's 'Raving And Drooling' for supplying the tape.Similarly to TAKRL, Wizardo albums also had variations between pressings and Wizardo inserts came in the usual A4ish size and also a larger one (see entry for 'The Midas Touch'). Again, there is no evidence to suggest that the larger inserts were for first pressings. Wizardo also had custom printed labels and these are certainly more desirable to a collector than the blank white ones they also used.
The Nietsch Brothers
Although not particularly well known amongst many Floyd bootleg collectors, these two twin brothers - known as Ra. & Ro. (Ralf & Rolf?) 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, 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.
