Your first Queen bootleg

Gregsynth wrote:

Unauthorized recording = Bootleg

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Yes, but not always.  And these days with cell phones and youtube, bootlegs are less than 1% of what's floating around now.

That wikipedia article was not written by a music collector.  It was written by someone with a very limited and, quite frankly, myopic understanding of music recordings.

If I go to a show tonight and record it, it's not a bootleg.  It's just a recording I made.  It isn't a bootleg until some company decides to sell it for profit with a pretty cover.   When collectors dish out the big bucks for a bootleg, they generally do it for the collectible value of the disc and artwork itself, not just for the music contained therein.

There are plenty of "Queen bootleg" websites where people create their own covers for audience recordings they have on CDR, but these are not bootlegs.  This pisses many collectors off, because it adds to the confusion over which version is which, and whether or not this is a valuable collector's item to seek out.

www.queenonstage.com - this is the most complete list of Queen bootlegs available online.  About 99% of the Queen bootlegs ever pressed are listed here.  Just about everything else is home made - they are not bootlegs.

The word 'bootleg' has a stigma attached to it, dating back to the bootlegging of booze during the depression.  As for music, throughout the 70s the only way for most people to get unofficial recordings was to buy bootlegs, and this led to the term as most people understand it today.  But these days there is a large plurality of unofficial recordings and ways to release them to the public, hence the need for terms to differentiate between the different types.  It's not as black and white as it used to be.

I bought my first bootleg, also of 'Sheetkeeckers' on my first date with a college girlfriend at It's Only Rock-n-Roll, the great (and long defunct) bootleg and rock memorablia store in Greenwich Village, NYC, back in the Summer of 1987.

I had heard about the store from a friend of mine, telling me had seen some live Queen shows there (all vinyl!)...I was of course, extremely excited by this news and we ventured into the city on the train one night. Unfortunately, he was a strange and rowdy type and wound up smoking a cigarette on the train, which was duly noticed by a police officer who pulled us both off the train. He was underage and got some sort of citation and we wound up not making it into the city at all.

It was a  few months later before I actually made it to the shop, on that above mentioned date.  I had spent pretty much all my money for the night and was too excited by the prospect of hearing Queen live, so I had the gall to ask my date for $20 to purchase the album, and she sweetly obliged me. (we dated for another 6 months, just fyi)...

After that, I think the next purchase, also from It's Only Rock-N-Roll, was the double LP of 'A Night At The Warehouse' from Denmark, 5-12-77. Since it was a double album, it was $40...I remember that being a nice chunk of change for a college kid in those days, but I HAD to have it!  Then, I noticed the store had some boot tapes for sale, cheaper, at around $10 each and I bought a few of those..one of the first was the Hammersmith Christmas Eve '75, gig but the sound was AWFUL..strange, considering it was a radio broadcast, but this must have been like a 100th generation copy! 

From there, it just steamrolled, with picking up copies of Goldmine and scouring the ads. One guy sold me tapes of older vinyl boots for a few bucks each; I also got 'Gettin' Smile' from him...then I met one of my, to this day, closest friends from an ad in Goldmine, looking for fellow Queen traders, and we spoke on the phone a few times, and eventually he made his way down to my house with a milk carton full of vinyl boots, which he copied for me. 

From there, more contacts in Goldmine ads and years of trading tapes through the mail with people all over the world.

The excitement of looking over trade lists and waiting weeks for trades to turnaround is definitely lost in this day and age of instant downloadable gratification..not that I'm too upset about that these days!...I put in the time for years to acquire my collection, but I'm happy now that I can see a post on Queenzone or dimeadozen and download a torrent of an unearthed treasure in minutes!

The joys of technology.

Queen Forevermore!!!

I think mine was Sheetkickers, also had Mercury Poisoning and Duck Soup from Seattle.  What a treat looking for and finding those things.  There was a shop in Toronto called Flash Jack's and for a kid from the suburbs, it was like another world, great tee shirts, posters, bootlegs and drug paraphernalia.

I think we're hair-splitting on the definition of bootleg. 

Not all recordings need be of good quality or 'company' produced. It used to be that there were fewer ways to create a bootleg recording: 

a) sneak recording equipment into a venue and tape all, some or most of a show.

b) get a soundboard recording, either officially recorded or done on the sly by the guy at the console.

c) record something broadcast on TV or the radio.

Some of these circulated on cassettes, as people just made copies and sold/gave them to other people. Some companies with resources to press vinyl would hunt the best versions down (or weren't worried about audio quality and found whatever they could) and pressed them. CDs allowed them to do the same thing, replacing the vinyl. Now we file-share and post online, including on YouTube. It's all still bootlegging.

"Bootleg,"  as defined by Dictionary.com is:

"something, as a recording, made, reproduced, or sold illegally or without authorization".

...which is basically what was noted earlier, originally by Gregsynth.

It doesn't necessarily refer to the final product, but includes the process and legal-status of the recording, plus the medium it's presented on.

I bought the album  "Sheetkeeckers" = vinyl, 8 songs, total 36:42 length, (with instructional 'eye-gougeing' technique illistrated on cover) from the "Beggars Banquet" record store around 1977-78.   ..also "The Mad Platter" had these albums that I bought as well :  "Queen the Royal American Tour 1975,(03-22-75 Santa Monica Civic, Long Beach), 'Queen' (first album) w/gold printing, *rather than the common white printing, , also 'Queen II' in rare 'high-gloss' cover, a "White" Night At The Opera, a few others, ...although, I did miss my oppertunity to buy 'Mercury Poisoned' (still regreting it), bootlegs seem a little more rare here in the U.S. ..can't really find much in albums, since CDs

My first Queen bootleg is MERCURY POISONING.
In 1999, I found this in a store in Yamaguchi, Japan.
MERCURY POISONING I have is orange-colored.

I upload a scanning. Although original size was 5271pix X 3476pix, I made it small.

live at the warehouse 1977 great gig :) i sat down with an 8 pack of guiness and aboot 10 blue valium ah those were the days lol

King's Favourite

Actually, that 'what is a bootleg' discussion reminds me the first Queen 'unauthorised' (to be on the safe side) release I got was the Ultimate Back Catalogue Vol 1 (the good one with the Smile tracks and non album tracks) ON TAPE in the early 90's. Was the first time I'd heard those tracks. A great compilation that would be nice officially.

Also IMO - 'pirate' is a copy of official release - like fake copies of the Larry Lurex single, or those curious unsantioned foreign versions of the official albums. 'Bootleg' is anything else - be it live or studio. The first rock 'bootleg' was studio material.

Your description is exactly right, dysan.

Copy of something unreleased by the copyright holder (either studio or live) = Bootleg

Copy of something released by the copyright holder (either studio or live) = Pirate

If I make a recording on my phone (or tape deck or digital recorder), post it on YouTube, or do nothing with it but save it to my computer, or make 10 CDs for my friends, or 500 CDs to sell on eBay, it's all still bootlegging.

As to what bands think of bootlegging, it varies. I think most bands, at least in the old days, had no real problem with it so long as money wasn't disappearing from their bank accounts because of it, which wasn't often a problem with fans exchanging cassette copies of concerts. It also helped promote the band, as people shared these with non-fans and inducted them into the awesomeness of the performance, the same way we all made mixed tapes for each other (or mixed CDs if you're of that generation).

I think a lot of bands are still fine with it, but it's becoming unnecessary for some bands, who now tour, then release a good quality concert DVD/Blu-Ray and CD/download of at least one whole show from the tour, for every recent tour.

rhyeking wrote:

I think we're hair-splitting on the definition of bootleg.

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Yes, because it's very necessary.

Wikipedia and the dictionary are not written by collectors of music recordings.  The definition of the word 'bootleg' I have given is that according to most COLLECTORS who have come to use the word to differentiate company-pressed unofficial releases from everything else.  Language evolves.  It's a reality of our very existence.

If someone records a show from the tenth row and shares it online, it's just a recording.  When it is bootlegged, that taper has thereby been ripped off, because now some company is making money off something that was intended to be shared freely.  These days some collectors go to extraordinary lengths to transfer old tapes preserving otherwise unheard pieces of music history and circulate them in the best quality possible.  It is an insult to refer to their work as bootlegging.

As you know, there is a Queen bootleg from the 70s called "Sheetkeeckers."   There is no bootleg called "Rocking at the Rainbow."   If I choose to share that same recording online with a cover that is entitled "Rocking at the Rainbow," it won't suddenly be added to the canon of Queen bootlegs of that show.  A couple years back someone anonymously posted what is presumably a stolen soundboard recording of one of the Sun City '84 shows.  That doesn't suddenly make them a bootlegger.  The word bootleg was never once used. It's just an old tape.

Yes, we are splitting hairs, but it is a very necessary exercise.  The dictionary says what it does, but most collectors would disagree, since terminology for unreleased recordings has evolved greatly in the last 20 years.  It's not collectors who write the dictionary.

Look at the replies in this thread  - people are referring to bootlegs exactly as I'm describing them.  They are mentioning vinyl and silver bootlegs from the 70s through the 90s. They're talking about the physical product, not the music.

Go to any forum where people collect unreleased music on a semi-serious level and the overwhelming majority will agree.  Or go to Dime and start this thread.  You won't last an hour.

My first Queen-bootleg was on vinyl and was called "Halfpence". A recording of the famous x-mas gig in 1975. I think i bought it in 1990 or there about. Unfortunately it was stolen from me some 3 years later with the rest of my records. But then again it is one of the easiest recordings to get hold of. Well now i have 2 different versions but none of them is called "Halfpence".

I never bought any vinyl bootlegs, but the first CD was "18 greatest hits live from Queen" containing live recordings from Zürich 1982 & 1986

"Duck Soup" lp
i found it at the local market
must have been 1978 or so

Mines was Mercury Posioning as well but it had a slightly different tracklist to it from the one that Whollsocks has.

Mines included Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon just after Doing Alright and before Keep Yourself Alive. And after KYA, I had Now Im Here,

Unfortunately this was all on a cassette which has since been lost :(