This post is a response to the late-2021 news about Eric Clapton being a giant wanker, sort of. The original story was that a woman attempted to sell a Clapton bootleg CD on eBay for $11.00 and was sued by Eric. The poor woman was in the process of selling off her late husband’s things, including the CD, and didn’t know it was an unauthorized recording because her husband had purchased it some 30 years prior in an actual German department store. Long story short, she lost the case and was ordered to pay $4000 in legal fees to an immensely rich, privileged man. Talk about your bad optics, Slowhand.
The full story, as uncovered by follow-up reporting, is ever-so-slightly different. Yes, she didn’t know, or suspect, there was any legal issue with the CD and was sued. However, she wasn’t sued by Eric himself, but by a couple of over-zealous legal defenders of his rights as a recording artist in Germany. I think it’s pretty likely that, as he says, E.C. didn’t know the action had been taken until it blew up like a crap-filled balloon in the media. The legal eagles didn’t sue her right away, the first step in any case like this is to notify the seller that what they’re listing is an illegal, unauthorized recording and all they have to do is take it off the market and everybody walks away like it never happened.
In this case, the woman who received the letter decided to fight. No idea why, she was mostly claiming ignorance of the CD’s origin as the reason she should be allowed to sell it. She hired an attorney, and the case went to court. A judge took about 10 minutes to rule against her and order the payment of all legal fees in the case, including those accrued by Mr. Clapton. In his defense, Clapton claims to have no idea the woman was selling the CD on eBay, or that the issue went to court, until the media shitstorm. He issued a statement to that effect and said, of course, he would make no attempt to collect the $4000 in legal fees. His statement came off as a little bitchy, and no apology was offered or implied, so he didn’t fully escape without a bit of stink on him, but that was apparently the end of it.
So, I wanted to talk a bit about bootlegs, what they are, what they aren’t, where they come from, and their impact on music makers and fans. The first important distinction to make is that bootlegs are not counterfeits, two completely separate things. Counterfeits are copies of an artist’s legal releases made to look as much like the original tape, CD, or vinyl (or DVD) as possible with the intention of fooling a potential buyer. For the record – that’s bad! Counterfeiters should face legal action, period. Bootlegs, on the other hand, are privately made releases of material that the artist didn’t intend to release. They usually fall into one of two categories – studio outtakes left over from the recording of an album (or albums), or live shows recorded by either a fan at the show or by somebody actually working the show, often at the artist’s request.
Bootlegs, at first glance, seem like they should be just as punishable, right? Unauthorized releases, the artist not involved in the choice of material or the packaging. There are a couple of key differences, though. First up, nobody is fooling anybody, bootlegs are sold to fans as bootlegs, not crappy-sounding facsimiles of legitimate releases. Second, the musical artist community has never been united against them. Some major stars, including the likes of John Lennon and Bob Dylan, have been big bootleg fans and collectors, and the Grateful Dead was famously in favor of their own shows being recorded and traded among fellow Deadheads, even setting up a roped-off spot at every show for fans who showed up with elaborate recording equipment. The recording industry tried for years to make the argument that bootlegs sales hurt the artists involved by siphoning off money that would have been spent on their official releases, depriving rich rock stars of one more private jet or Italian villa. Not only did that sound bad, even to themselves, but serious research, conducted in part by the recording industry itself, clearly showed that fans who bought bootlegs were completists, and typically spent more money on their favorite artist’s catalog than the casual fan.
The final thing to note about bootlegs is, once the record labels stopped fighting the popularity of bootlegs among collectors, they discovered that by embracing the demand they had a huge, untapped cash cow on their hands. Pearl Jam, Phish, Bob Dylan, the Stones, Neil Young, and many others have started releasing the studio outtakes and concert recordings they’ve been sitting on in tape vaults over the years. Even Bruce Springsteen, long-time vocal (and legal) crusader against the scourge of bootlegs, has started giving his fans what they want through his website. These so-called “vault” releases are now treated as an event by the artist’s fans, and they sell in big numbers, often with big price tags to match.
My own relationship with bootlegs goes way back (as I reach my mid-60s it seems like my relationship with just about everything goes way back). I was a Grateful Dead tape collector and trader back in the 80s and 90s. But even earlier than that, I sent away, by mail, with an enclosed money order (quaint, right?), to a guy in Minnesota with an eye-popping collection of live Springsteen cassettes. Living in the wilds of the U.P during the 60s and 70s, I didn’t see a whole lot of the most famous vinyl bootlegs, but I managed to score a few. The internet became a fascinating playground when downloading music was hijacked by the Napsters and Pirate Bays of the cyber-world, and people could share their bootlegs directly with other collectors for free (the real problems created by file-sharing sites when it came to sharing official releases is a serious discussion for another post), burning the files at home onto blank CDs. There was one, final CD-based bootleg surge in the mid-90s when European companies like Kiss the Stone (KTS) took advantage of a few head-scratching loopholes in international copyright law to flood the U.S. market with what became known as ROIOs (Recordings of Indeterminate Origin).
As you can see in the photo above, I still have some bootlegs in my music collection. No cassettes or vinyl, those are long gone. Some of what I have are the 90s European ROIOs (the Bob Dylan), some I downloaded and burned myself (the “30th anniversary” Stones), and some were given to me by friends who attended and recorded local concerts (Neil Young at Pine Knob). I don’t play them much anymore, I greatly prefer to spend my time staying current on new music via streaming or spinning favorite LPs on my turntable, but I’m glad to have them for the historical and sentimental value. Like every other piece of music I own, they bring me back to a particular time and place.
EARWORM: “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” Bob Dylan and the Hawks (1966) – The Dylan boot shown in the photo above was eventually given a legitimate release in 1998 as Live 1966: The Royal Albert Hall Concert, The Bootleg Series Vol. 4, which is where this earworm comes from. It’s a shame I can’t include a comparison clip from the actual bootleg, it’s the far superior listen. The mix is hotter and more exciting, and the CD is just, y’know, cooler.
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