So you’ve finally given in to the hype — or at least rekindled that lingering passion — and set your sights on a pair of tickets to one of Bruce Springsteen’s three concerts at the United Center.
Good luck. Shows across the country have been selling out faster than you can say “Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.” And tickets to the Boss’ shows, though not in the stratospheric price range of recent Eagles and Rolling Stones tours, can do some serious damage to your bank balance.
However, hearing Springsteen on a bootleg, or an illicit live recording, is another matter entirely. Since his popular breakthrough in the late ’70s, Springsteen has remained one of the most heavily bootlegged performers: Audience members have made hundreds of recordings of Springsteen’s infamous epic live sets, documenting almost every note, grunt and riff made by the Boss during the last two decades.
For years, these bootleg recordings were limited to vinyl-only domestic releases, or semi-legal imported albums, with sound and packaging often of questionable quality. That’s rarely the case now.
With affordable and portable products such as DATs (Digital Audio Tape), CD-Rs (recordable compact discs) and MiniDiscs widely available, recording live music — even from your seat — is easier than ever.
“About every Bruce show has been taped and has been for years,” says Richard Breton, who maintains an extensive Springsteen bootleg resource guide on the Web. “But the real breakthrough is the number of people that are taping the shows now. They’re taping them on DAT, they’re taping them on MiniDisc; MiniDisc players are more affordable to the people that couldn’t afford DATs. With CD-Rs what you see is that people are a bit more open about making copies for other people than they did with (analog) tapes.”
Just like computers, audio recorders have gotten smaller, cheaper and more advanced with time. DAT players are the most specialized of the bunch, costing around $600 and appealing mostly to high-end stereo fanatics and professionals. Digital Audio Tape, or DAT, is the digital equivalent of analog tape, similarly capturing sound on magnetic tape yet offering much higher fidelity. MiniDiscs, however, have been marketed to those music fans who may have missed out on DATs. Small enough to fit into the palm of your hand — or a pocket — portable MiniDisc player/recorders can be purchased for as little as $200. Used in tandem with CD-Rs — recordable compact discs that offer perfect digital duplication — one can create a tiny recording industry anywhere.
And with distribution formats such as MP3 becoming more commonplace, high-quality bootleg recordings are only a mouse-click away. MP3 is a form of compression that allows bulky sound files to be downloaded and transferred with relative ease, even by slow computers. Of course, the difference between slow and fast can mean the difference between an hour and several minutes, a wait time that may annoy all except music fanatics, but as connection speeds improve more people will be able to download MP3 quickly and efficiently.
Even more than new technology, the Internet may be the biggest single factor to have galvanized bootleg enthusiasts.
“What the Internet has done is brought a lot of people together,” says Breton. “Where you had closed groups before, trading (recordings) through mailing lists or advertising, the Internet is almost immediate. Every night while Bruce is on tour you can go out on the Internet and get the set list. And soon after that tapes and/or CD-Rs will start coming out. I fully expect every single show on this tour to have been taped and maybe a CD-R released.”
While compact discs are the most common means of bootleg distribution, computers have created new ways of trading music. Mike Silverman, a software engineer living in Lawrence, Kan., is a convert to the MP3 file, which allows him to download entire concerts from the likes of U2 and R.E.M. “Prior to the Internet, there were only a few CD bootlegs, and perhaps only one or two stores in a city would carry them, and only if you knew whom to ask. These days, any fan can find good, quality stuff on the Internet with a little bit of work.”
Though the much-ballyhooed MP3 format is still too young and primitive to do all the things its supporters say it can do, there’s no telling what could happen in the near future. A Springsteen bootlegger could conceivably attend a show, covertly record the event, transfer it to his or her computer and post it on the Web as an audio file in just a few hours.
While Silverman doesn’t condone CD piracy — the illegal recording of officially released albums — he does defend live bootlegs as a resource for fans located outside major cities or people otherwise prohibited from spending the time and money necessary to follow a band. “First of all, these bands do not play everywhere when they tour,” points out Silverman, “and secondly, even hard-core fans usually have jobs, families and lives which make it kind of hard to see more than a couple shows on any particular tour.”
Breton notes that “there are fans all over the place. There were some people who flew up from Australia for a couple of the New Jersey (Springsteen) shows. I think the full cost of airfare for both of them was $5,000 Australian. That’s really a lot of money, so even if you’ve gone to the shows, you want to relive that experience” with a bootleg.
Predictably, the Record Industry Association of America frowns upon the proliferation of all bootleg CDs, pirated or not. Its policy states that “(P)erformers deserve (and legally retain) the right to control the content, reproduction and distribution of their own performances.” Yet the association and the artists it represents may be overlooking one of the most interesting effects of bootleg collecting: free publicity. A case could be made that were it not for the enthusiasm of concert collectors, Springsteen and the E Street Band may not have been met with the amount of enthusiasm that surrounded previous tours, especially considering that Springsteen’s last few albums have not been met by the mania inspired by his earlier records.
In many ways, new recording technology has allowed underground bootlegs to reflect even the mainstream record industry’s practice of repackaging old music to maintain interest in an artist. “They’re not new albums per say, not official releases, but there’s always something new in the bootleg world,” says Breton, “some new show, or some old show that’s coming out in much better sound than it used to be on LP. Even some companies are releasing (officially released) titles that may have already come out on CD but have been given better sound.”
While there’s no substitute for actually seeing Springsteen or any other artist in the flesh, bootlegs do offer some sort of consolation. With ticket prices for shows such as Springsteen’s so high and actual tickets so hard to come by, the new wave of bootlegging lets the little guy get some enjoyment from an event he may have been squeezed out of. And bootleg collecting allows die-hards to take their fandom to the next level.
