nerdcereal.com

While searching for Townes Van Zandt (a key word which luckily isn’t inundated with spammy sites selling merchandise) I stumbled upon some janky geocites personal pages with lists of bootlegged music available for trade. Coincidentally, my new roommate gave me my first bootleg of Bob Marley and the Wailers at the Record Plant in Sausalito in 1973. It’s the seed I’m going to use to grow my own bootleg collection.

It reminded me of a conversation I had years ago with someone who picked me up hitch-hiking. I made the mistake of using “bootleg” and “pirate” as synonyms and he quickly corrected me. Pirates sell illegal copies of commercially recorded material or software for profit. This is rampant in third world countries where first world visitors frequent; countries like Thailand and even Brazil.

Bootleggers and collectors “do it for the music.” Most will not sell bootlegs; they’re not in it for the profit. They will only trade them with people for other bootlegs. They justify their ownership of this contraband in that it is not made commercially available. Assumedly, if it ever is made available for sale, they’ll halt the trade of the recording and purchase the music on iTunes like a good American consumer should. In this way, they are providing the music lovers a service by making available that which they can’t buy if they even wanted to. Sort of like a freedom of information.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right? A band or record company that is bothered by bootlegging can do what Pearl Jam does: record every concert and sell all of them online. I saw them in San Diego at the Sports Arena on their Riot Act tour. The next day I bought the show online and was able to listen to an unpolished recording online until the hard copy arrived in the mail.

Today I’ll be initiated into the underground cult of bootleg trading as I send off this CD to my first trade partner. I promise not to get obsessed, though. As with all types of collecting, this can become an obsession and I don’t like being obsessed.