The Record Store Years 30) The Bootleg Years Pt. 1: Underground Records

A memoir of 25 years (1975-2000) spent working in the world of records & music in Seattle, with occasional side trips into writings on Led Zeppelin and other adventures from my musical life.

Concurrent with the ‘collecting boom’ of the late ‘70s a huge market for bootleg albums developed – generally live or unreleased recordings of big-name artists – and Cellophane Square did a profitable business in this technically illegal product pretty much from the time the store opened until 1981, when we were forced to stop selling them by the federal government.

The history of bootlegs in the rock era has been well documented elsewhere, most enjoyably in Clinton Heylin’s book Bootleg: The Secret History of The Other Recording Industry, which rang true for me as it described the fringe business world of bootlegs in the 1970s. As a kid growing up in New York, I got bootlegs by mail through classified ads in the back of Rolling Stone – it was hard to find stores that carried them, though I do remember getting my very first bootleg LP (Led Zeppelin’s Live On Blueberry Hill) at a little record store in Provincetown, Massachusetts during a family vacation in 1971.

As the decade progressed the demand for bootlegs continued to grow and of course the supply increased accordingly, and it became common to find bootleg sections in small independent record stores like Cellophane Square all around the country. Buying and selling them as a retailer was completely illegal and the labels would occasionally go after a store or manufacturer with legal action (and win), but this was infrequent, and though it was a calculated risk to carry bootlegs we felt the profit and customer interest warranted that risk. Never mind the ethics!

At their peak in 1979 - 80 we had as many as two full record racks designated for bootleg LPs in our stores, which would amount to anywhere from about 100 to 200 different titles in stock in each store at any given time. The markup was huge, with a rack price generally three to four times the wholesale cost - which we felt was justified considering the risk we took in carrying them - and they were hugely popular. We made large orders regularly and customers would anticipate new shipments and be there promptly to snap up the best stuff right out of the box.

Since the early days when they were packaged with plain white sleeves and a rubber-stamped title, bootlegs had come a long way by 1980. Though many boots still came with relatively simple covers or blank sleeves with a paper enclosure, there were also many more elaborate packages coming out, some with full color printed covers and official-looking logos and [later] even bar codes. Many of the most in-demand albums were multiple-LP boxed sets which sold for fairly steep prices for the day – up to $40 or $50 in some cases – and they sped off the racks as fast as we could stock them.

Certain artists were pretty much money no matter what the bootleg looked or sounded like – and some of them sounded wretched, recorded in boomy halls on shitty little cassette recorders. In particular Springsteen, Zeppelin and Pink Floyd concert recordings inspired near-frenzy amongst the customers, with the Stones, Who and Beatles coming in close behind them. One of the biggest sellers was a Springsteen 3-LP set called Piece de Resistance. The original issue was a numbered edition, and though it was cheaply packaged with a black & white paper slip cover not even attached to the box, the album presented an amazing concert taken from an excellent stereo FM broadcast. Springsteen was already a legendary live performer and nothing official had been released yet, so plenty of people were happy to hand over $40 for a complete, great-sounding Bruce show.

Similarly, there was a huge demand for live Led Zeppelin recordings and precious few good-sounding ones around at the time. There was a tremendously popular Zeppelin bootleg called Destroyer, a 4-LP set presenting a complete 1977 concert with a dazzling color cover and flashy graphics, though still plenty of typos in the copy. The demand for this one was particularly high because it was a rare recording of Zeppelin taken from the soundboard, but unfortunately the recording is dry and poorly mixed, and the band’s performance sub-standard. Such was the risk one took in pursuing the world of unauthorized recordings, but no one balked at paying a premium for that risk, and bootlegs were big business for Cellophane Square.

Some of the better-sounding and most interesting boots were comprised of studio outtake material or rare singles and tracks that may have been commercially released at one time but had long been unavailable. Of the former type, two Beatles titles were particularly popular: Sweet Apple Trax and The Black Album. Both had deluxe printed covers, and The Black Album actually re-created the ‘White Album’s’ design with an all-black cover embossed with the band’s name and even included a poster cleverly designed to look like the one included with the Beatles’ original album, but with all different pictures. The music on both of these LPs was derived from the many hours of Get Back/Let It Be studio material from 1969 that was used in Peter Jackson’s Get Back film in 2022. There were also various bootleg LPs purporting to be the original Glyn Johns mix of the Get Back album (some were and some were not), which was also finally released commercially in 2022.

As far as making out-of-print material available, the TMOQ (Trademark of Quality) label did a run of deluxe albums with beautiful color cover art by William Stout in the early ‘70s – some of the first bootlegs with actual printed covers – of the Yardbirds and The Who. Golden Eggs and Golden Eggs Vol. 2 were comprised of rare Yardbirds singles, b-sides and oddities. Who’s Zoo featured radio broadcasts and single b-sides by The Who, and in the same series was a live Who album from their 1973 U.S. Tour called Tales From The Who. These albums were all subsequently re-issued (or re-bootlegged, if you will) in inferior forms, but the originals featured textured paper on the jackets, printed labels on the LPs, and good quality pressings, also something of a rarity in the bootleg world.

NEXT: The Bootleg Years Pt. 2: More Hippie Capitalism and Busted by The Man

Below: A bootleg catalog from February 1974, procured from a classified ad in the back of Rolling Stone before I worked at Cellophane Square. From 1972 to early ’74 I placed orders regularly from ol’ Wayne at ‘Rock & Roll University’.