The Record Store Years (Side Trip): Bootleg CDs – The Story Behind Two Led Zeppelin Stunners from 1991 Pt. 2
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.
This is part 2 of the story/interview that appeared in Proximity #32 in January 1999, the theme of which was “The Holy Grails of Zep Collecting.” The bootleg trade continued to flourish into the CD era, and in 1998 I managed to connect with a fellow who was responsible for some terrific unreleased Zeppelin material being ‘liberated’ and released on the CDs Studio Daze and Jennings Farm Blues.
The issue featured a variety of articles discussing the live audio and video material on Led Zeppelin which at the time was known to exist but not circulated. Much of the material on these CDs (but not all) has subsequently been released officially on the 2003 live album How The West Was Won and as bonus material for Led Zeppelin’s remastered catalog reissue series in 2014.
Note: the ‘babysitter’ referred to here regards an incident where someone employed by Jimmy Page at his home in the 1980s stole materials from his personal archives.
I feel compelled to state that I do not condone this sort of ‘liberation’ and pass no judgement on ‘Mr. Jennings’ use of it one way or the other – but the fact remains that the material did get out and has become part of Led Zeppelin lore, for better or for worse.
Thai Food, Two Grand and a Shopping Bag Full of Tapes:
A Conversation with The Man Behind Studio Days and Scorpio Records
[Interview continued from the previous Record Store Years ‘Side Trip’, discussing Mr. Jenning’s acquisition of the tapes]:
Mr. J: I was on a schedule so I went home, and about ten days later, I rustle up some dough and fly back and meet these guys through the intermediation of this fellow who’s no longer with us, meeting at the Kensington Market. Actually it was in a little Thai restaurant behind there. And they had a shopping bag with the tapes in it. I mean I open ‘em up and I take a look and I say, “Shit, these are them.”
P: And these are the seven reels of varying formats.
Mr. J: Precisely, of varied formats. They wanted to sell the reels for three thousand pounds. I’m thinking like, I don’t know, what the hell am I going to do with these things? So I said “Wow, that’s a bit dear,” and he goes, “Well if you want, we could just let you dub ‘em.” I go, “Ok, that’s interesting.”
So I spent the afternoon on the phone with a fellow who has a little demo studio somewhere in South London, in like the back of a garden shed. Literally the studio couldn’t have been more than twelve feet square. And he had a sixteen-track board in there and such and so forth. I come and meet this guy and say, “you know, we’ve got all these different formats,” and he had to rent equipment because of these different playback things. Some were dolby encoded, and the way the tracks passed on one needed some kind of special. . . like it went backwards or some damn thing. I don’t know the technical specs. We had to spend six hundred quid to rent machines for the day to transfer all these things to DAT (digital audio tape). This is, I guess, 1990 or ’91 so DAT was just in – it was the first DAT player I’d ever seen, a little Casio portable one.
So the next morning he picked me up at my hotel, bag of tapes, jumped in the car, got lost somewhere in the depths of South London going to this guy’s studio. And then we spent like ten hours putting these things up, cursin’ and kicking the machines and adjusting the heads and such, to the point where we had effected transfers onto seven DAT tapes, one DAT reflecting the content of each of the seven individual component reels. So after the completion of this afternoon, I had a whole box of seven DATs. I’d never seen a DAT before! And I’m thinking, “Ok, here's the money.”
P: And you had worked out a price for the dubbing ahead of time?
Mr. J: He said I could dub it all for two thousand pounds plus the cost of the machines. So I said “Ok, we’ll do that.” And I’ve got this tiny little box with seven DATs in it and I’m thinking, “How do I know that these things even got any music on them? How do I know they even recorded?” We’re on the way out the door and I said, “Just wait a second, let me check something here.” I just grab one of the ones randomly, drop it in, fast forward, boom! Comes exploding out of the speakers. Similarly the second one, so ok, they’ve done a square deal.
And the fellow gave me the xerox that he had shown me originally of the Studio Days tape box cover [Since lost, unfortunately]. He was like, “Are you sure you don’t want to buy the tapes from me?” and I said, “Look, I just don’t have the dough.” Fellows drove me back to the tube station in London, took off in a car, never saw ‘em again. Have no idea who they were.
P: And you have no idea where those tapes have ended up.
Mr. J: Other than that, supposedly some gal had ‘em. They were acting as an intermediary for some gal, so I think it’s that story about the babysitter who boosted all the gear [tapes].
P: Going back to that Long Beach tape, that you said was twenty four tracks, in your opinion, do think that entire show was recorded?
Mr. J: Of course. Absolutely. I’m sure the source for the existing tape was probably just as much stuff as you can randomly grab out of the front of a storage compartment or something.
P: And was the tape with that material on it full?
Mr. J: It’s the twenty or twenty five minutes that would have been the running time of the tape [at that speed], yeah.
P: So you gotta figure there’s probably four or five more tapes exactly like this with the rest of the show in segments.
Mr. J: It’s conceivable that they exist, but by no means is it a certainty.
P: But it seems likely in your opinion that they must have taped the whole show if they’re going to go to the trouble to mic everything up for a live recording?
Mr. J: In my opinion they taped the flippin’ tour!
[Ed. Note: The 1972 multi-track recordings discussed here are what comprised Led Zeppelin’s authorized 2003 live album How The West Was Won]
P: Do Studio Daze and Jennings Farm Blues represent all the material from those seven reels?
Mr. J: With the exception of the Long Beach “Moby Dick,” which subsequently turned up on One More Daze, and the Hampton ’71. See the idea with this – I had spent what was certainly for the time and for me a fair amount of money. The optimal way to have done it would have been to put “Jennings” on Studio Daze, but there was the need to effect a bit of return there. So I felt that the two titles paired did give people. . . because how many ’71 soundboards were on the ground at that point, you know? I think they paired to reasonable effect, the overview, and I did enter into it as a business-y kind of thing even though I tried to put together the best effect.
Obviously, [with] the nature of the content at the time I figured “well, I’m sure these were gotten by some funny ways,” but by the same token I got the Who stuff for Lifehouse To Leeds from a store who got it from a guy on the street, picked it up in a dumpster!
P: Yeah, I remember that story.
Mr. J: And like six years after getting the Who Lifehouse stuff, word came through that their next project was going on so I said “here, take the tape,” and through an intermediary got it to Pete Townshend. You know, I only saw myself as a steward of it. In retrospect if I had those Zep tapes I’d give ‘em back to Jimmy in a heartbeat, you know.
P: Do you regret not coming up with the bucks to buy the Zeppelin tapes outright?
Mr. J: With the benefit of hindsight? There are lots of things we’d do different in our lives, aren’t there?
P: Sure.
Mr. J: Regret? Regrets, I’ve had a few. [laughs]
P: God, you gotta wonder where those tapes are now. . .
Mr. J: Right. Do I regret it? I don’t regret it because at the time I was operating to the limits of my ability.
P: Sure, you did the best you could. Getting the tapes out was the important thing.
Mr. J: well, I don’t think I impacted on their, us, sort of approach by the time it was released in the early ‘90s. And you know no one’s being insulted by these performances. Obviously I suppose Page would probably be a little bit perturbed, but. . . you know, the alternative is – lost forever.
P: That’s my attitude about bootlegging in general, I mean there are a lot of bootleggers that aren’t big music people, that are just in it for the money and many collectors are very negative about the whole process of bootlegging because of that. But my attitude is, I don’t really care about somebody’s motives if they getting something out there. So they made some money on it, whatever.
Mr. J: An analogous situation that I reflect upon is the old one about if the tree falling in the forest [makes a sound if] there’s no one there to hear it.
P: Obviously, you’re somebody that’s a music fanatic and that’s your prime motivation – or it must have been at least starting out, yes?
Mr. J: Yeah. I’ve worked in record stores since 1973. You know, what do I want to do? I just wanted to be involved in records and believe me, I tried the other channels. Wasn’t happening. So I just began to. . . you know, as these things, uh. . . [turned up].
You know the first thing I ever did was a Syd Barrett EP. These four solo tracks turned up, some of the stuff that subsequently came out on Opel. So if you’ve got this total Barrett fanatic, these four tracks come out and its, “holy shit.” So here I got this marvelous material, put out this little EP, the response is enormous. Then I followed up – this guy came by with the Cramps demos recorded in Ohio in some demo studio. He was a roadie for the band, he gave me like 15 Cramps demos. Cramps were the biggest thing around in the early ‘80s or whatever it was. So put that up. Boom!
P: So, it’s really just sort of circumstances that got you going in the whole thing.
Mr. J: It was an opportunity that I sensed, you know, putting out four Syd Barrett tracks? Hmm. Not a problem. Put out some Cramps things that the guys gave him and said, you know, “who the fuck cares?”
I mean, you look at the product and it’s, you know, it’s fan oriented. I’m just as happy to have the opportunity to release a Zeppelin as a Bob Dylan. To me it’s just some of the same idea, music that’s nice to hear that we’re not gonna hear otherwise. It’s trading in tape circles and yes, there is a gain realized that’s not going back to the artist, but then again by the same token, these folks are bathed in groupies and Dom Perignon and Peruvian flake. So what’s the five hundred dollars, you know?
P: In your experience how many people involved in the [bootleg] industry are truly music fans?
Mr. J: Swingin’ Pig liked the Rolling Stones. The Tarantura guy likes Led Zeppelin. Another guy, I’m pretty sure he used to like Deep Purple. You know, the Great Dane guy liked Springsteen.
P: So essentially most of these people started from the standpoint of being fans of the artist.
Mr. J: Yeah, I’m sure most of them enjoyed rock, but are they collecting? Are they fans? Maybe they start out as fans, but. . . the point is. . . do they collect? Most of the CD guys are just bandits. The Italians, the Germans. . . there’s a few, but the majority of guys? Yeah, they’re fans, but are they nuts like you and me? Not really. You know, I’m doing these things so I can buy Japanese picture sleeves!
To me this is a means of furthering the collection. If more things come out that people can hear that they can enjoy hearing, they can collect that then it enables us all to further our collections. I’m not, you know, making twenty thousand payments to the starving children of the world fund. It’s the fact that it enables me to become deeply immersed in the music.
P: That’s what your motivation is.
Mr. J: And by virtue of the fact that the Studio Daze CD came out, a fellow sent me that nice Destroyer tape, that came out as the Archive version. Somebody says, “You put out that little Syd Barret EP? Great, here’s a first gen of a [Pink Floyd] Star Club recording from 1967.” You know, so it would just further folk’s interest in that area. You know, “you put out Lifehouse? Here’s Fillmore East 1968, best quality.” You know what I’m saying?
P: Yup, it keeps you going.
Mr. J: Yeah, it’s almost like it developed a sort of momentum of its own. I mean, I’m not going to characterize myself as some sort of philanthropist, it just enables me to make rock & roll my life.
NEXT: The Famous Store-Wide Sales
Above: The authorized 2003 live album How The West Was Won, comprised of the 24-track professional recordings from Long Beach and Los Angeles made in 1972.
Below: The 2014 CD reissue of Led Zeppelin III featuring the most complete take of “Jennings Farm Blues” on the bonus disc - there are several earlier takes of the song in addition to this one on the Scorpio bootleg CD.
