Between 1976 and 1978, a series of managerial and contractual wranglings effectively barred Bruce Springsteen from entering a recording studio. It was a frustrating time, all the more so since Springsteen's last album, Born To Run had finally set in public motion a superstar career, which the critics had been predicting for years.

So the singer went out on the road instead, honing a live show that still draws comparisons with the best on the block, and making sure that as many people got to hear what he was doing as possible. His 1978 tour saw an unprecedented five entire shows, over 15 hours of live music broadcast on American radio, and Springsteen made no secret of his hopes for each one. "Bootleggers, roll your tapes," he requests during one show; another has him hoping that distant friends would hear a dedication "through the magic of bootlegging." And when the British New Musical Express pinned him down on the subject in October, 1978, Springsteen's support for bootlegs seemed unequivocable: "Most of the time, [bootleggers are] fans. I've had bootleggers write me... saying, 'listen, we're just fans.' And the kids who buy the bootlegs buy the real records too, so it doesn't really bother me. I think the amount of money made on [bootlegging] isn't very substantial. It's more like a labor of love."

Less than a year later, Springsteen co-filed a civil suit in a Californian Federal District Court against two of these "fans," Vicki Vinyl and Jim Washburn, for "infringement of copyrights, unfair competition, unjust enrichment, unauthorized use of name and likeness, and interference with economic advantage." Coincidentally, Springsteen's own latest album, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, had finally just made it into the stores.

Take a poll of any sizeable grouping of "serious" music fans, and few issues raise so many emotions as bootlegging the art of acquiring unreleased live and/or studio material by whichever band takes your fancy, then making it available to a fanatical underground of collectors, fans, and anal retentives. It is a calling fraught with danger, not least of all the sheer illegality of indulging at any level - manufacture, distribution, and "trafficking" are all Federal offenses.

Though it hasn't been trumpeted elsewhere in the media, 1999 marks the 30th Anniversary of the birth of the rock bootleg - the day a couple of L.A. Dylan fans got hold of some of their hero's unissued back pages, and pressed them up as The Great White Wonder, a two-LP collection that hit the music business like a tsunami. The illegalities of the matter didn't even enter into it [and besides, at that time, nobody was sure precisely what they were); The Great White Wonder represented a hitherto unknown opportunity for fans to hear music which neither artist nor record company had seen fit to release, an unprecedented creation that inspired effusive reviews from Rolling Stone to the Wall Street Journal, and sent some publications even deeper into rapture. Entertainment World even prophesied a day when the record's success might inspire real record labels "to look to their vaults, so that significant material such as this will be more readily and legally available to the consumer." And while the world awaitedthat particular day, the bootleg industry just kept growing.

By 1970, both the Rolling Stones and the Beatles had joined Dylan in the ranks of the bootlegged few, but if any single event confirmed the ascendancy of the newborn boom, it was the release of John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band's Live Peace In Toronto live album. Documenting the group's debut at the Toronto Peace festival in September, 1969, the album was released solely to suppress a bootleg of the same event, which itself hit the streets within weeks of the show. The official release's utilitarian sleeve, an Yves Klein painting of clouds against a blue sky, testifies to the speed with which the record was conceived [it was in the stores less than three months after the concert); the record's very existence, however, indicates the potential power of bootlegs.

Before then, bootlegs still struck most people as ephemeral oddities, eccentric adjuncts to the main attraction, bearing music that had no chance, and maybe no business, appearing on a mainstream release. Live Peace In Toronto proved otherwise, and its headlong rush into the Top 10 only confirmed that. Bootlegs themselves were not big business - most existed in quantities of a couple of thousand at the most. But if their contents could be harnessed to official releases, the sky was apparently the limit.

Before the new year (1970) was out, the Rolling Stones were responding to the hugely praised Live'R Than You'll Ever Be bootleg with their own official document of their last American tour, Get Yer Ya-Yas Out; four years later, following his own latest tour, Bob Dylan not only released a live album so swiftly that he beat the majority of bootleggers to the punch, he also celebrated the fact in its title: Before The Flood. The next year, he authorized an official release for The Basement Tapes, and the wheel had come full circle. Many of the songs included on that album originally appeared on The Greet White Wonder.

The Who's Odds And Sods outtakes collection was another well-conceived stab at beating the bootleggers, but as the 1970s progressed, it swiftly transpired that it was not only the superstars who were being bootlegged. Indeed, labels like Trademark of Duality and the Amazing Kornyfone were establishing standards of dilettante excellence that still seem remarkable.

Bill Glahn, editor of the monthly bootleg watchdog magazine Live! Music Review, explains, "bootleggers [were] quick to spot those artists with talent and long-term futures. Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Patti Smith, and The Cure (among others] were bootlegged heavily in their early careers and continue to be to this day. Artists like Barry Manilow, the Bee Gees, and Dexy's Midnight Runners, on the other hand, were rarely bootlegged, if at all, despite substantial chart success."

In other words, the mainstream marketplace itself held little interest to bootleggers. They were seeking out the artists with "intelligent" followings, those whose fans cared for something more than a Top 10 hit to play on the jukebox, and a new album every year or so to complement the wallpaper.

In 1975, for example, Peter Frampton released the biggest selling live album of all time - Frampton Comes Alive - and the bootleggers completely ignored him. They were more interested in documenting the rising star of Patti Smith, and looking back on their decision today, it is plain that they made the right choice. Smith remains the object of fanatical collector interest. Frampton, on the other hand.... The '70s were the golden age of vinyl bootlegs, the early '80s less so, and by the middle of the decade, with the "official" music industry busily engineering the changeover from vinyl to compact disc, it seemed that the day of the bootleg was over. CDs were expensive to manufacture, after all, and there were only a handful of pressing plants capable of producing them. Yet after but a short lull, by the early '9Os, the market began to pick up speed again. Indeed, by the middle of the decade, production was even heavier than ever before and with it, a whole new aspect of controversy.

The vagaries of international copyright law have dogged the arts for years now. Throughout the 19th century, for example, before modern copyright agreements came into place, American publishers blithely reprinted best-selling novels from the U.K. and elsewhere, knowing that the authors had no redress whatsoever. In other words, all those early American editions of Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, and Beatrix Potter, which modern collectors cherish so much, are bootlegs; while today, there are still a few countries in the world whose own artists remain unprotected (and uncompensated] by American law, yet whose work is readily, and legally, available here. In those [primarily Third World] artists' eyes, bootleggers aren't the only people making bootlegs.

When the boot was on the other foot, however, and American label interests started running afoul of other country's laws, the outcry was immediate, and the introduction of CDs sent an already loophole-ridden situation into Gordian paroxysms. Simply put, CDs represented an entirely new medium, one which no past contractual agreement could ever have legislated for - and which it couldn't protect against. Releasing a Beatles bootleg on vinyl was clearly an infringement of one law or another. But releasing it in this new format was another matter entirely, a gray area amidst the red tape.

Add to that the differing periods and terms of copyright granted under different national laws, and suddenly, releases that were utterly illegal in the U.S. and Britain turned out to be perfectly legitimate in other countries: Italy, Luxembourg, and Australia included. Bootlegging was back, and bigger than ever. Only now, the albums were dubbed "imports." Again, the modus operandi was the same, the exhumation and release of material that had little or no chance of ever making it out through conventional channels: studio outtakes, concert recordings, radio broadcasts and sessions and, of increasing importance as vinyl moved ever closer towards extinction, forgotten and unknown releases by artists who might otherwise never have seen the business end of a CD laser.

The hasty revision, and rewriting, of copyright law has, in recent years, seen the early free-for-all curtailed considerably, but though the forces of law and order, have moved heavily against bootleggers in recent years. The best weapon in the fight against them turned out to be one that the music industry itself has had at its disposal since the beginning, the same one, in fact, that John Lennon, the Stones, and Bob Dylan used to such massive effect in the early 1970s, and which Entertainment World mulled over right at the start: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

What, after all, are Sony's "Live Legacy" series, the King Biscuit Flour Hour, and BBC Radio releases, and so many other archive projects, if not open acknowledgement of what the bootleggers started telling us all those years ago: that the archives are littered with classic recordings, and people want to hear them. Recent live releases by Janis Joplin and the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead's Dick's Picks series of concert marathons, Robert Fripp's Discipline Global Mobile collectors club, BMG's Essential Elvis series, commendable releases one and all, brought to you by people who... well, Dylan's Official Bootleg Series probably sums it up best. People who are so anxious for you to stop buying bootlegs, that they're willing to give you something in return.

It is ironic, then, that without the so-called bootleg problem, a lot of the archive releases we are now seeing wouldn't even exist today. Long before bootlegs "per se" came into being, private collectors were trading and taping live shows and radio broadcasts for their own enjoyment, preserving recordings which, for any one of a myriad reasons, would not otherwise even exist today.

Jon Astley and Chris Charlesworth, compilers of the universally applauded series of Who remasters, have, on several occasions, turned to bootlegs in search of certain rarities missing from The Who's own vault, and they are not alone. Much of Charlie Parker's most important work was only preserved because someone bothered to tape it - someone who wasn't affiliated with the record company, someone who didn't then blank the tape the moment the next "star" came along to record.

Many of Hank Williams' radio broadcasts circulated on bootleg long after the original performances were forgotten, and even longer before anybody decided to seek them out for an official release, while Episode Six (and future Deep Purple] bassist Roger Glover admits he was "thrilled" to learn that 30 years ago, a fan taped all of the group's live appearances on BBC Radio's Saturday Club program, something which the BBC themselves didn't do. Those recordings are now available on an official CD, and Glover glowingly acknowledges that it's one of his favorite records. "Just hearing some of those performances again was magical, and it's through bootlegs, and bootleggers, that things like that even still exist."

It is also, he says, because of bootlegs that Deep Purple themselves still exist. "When we first started talking about a reunion in 1984, I didn't know if I was in favor of it or not - if we should just let sleeping dogs lie. And then I started listening to bootlegs and to what we really were. Listening to bootlegs from 1971, 1972, into 1973, 1 realized what a dangerous band we were and how exciting it was not to know what was going to happen next. We walked a very thin line between chaos and order, and that was the magic, that was why people bought our records, this band veering off and suddenly the solos in E when it should be... hey, what's happening here? That was the magic. So when I said 'yes' to the reunion, that's what I set out to recapture."

Elvis Presley is another artist whose catalog has benefited from the presence, at a show almost 40 years ago, of an "illegal taper." "Not counting television, the only live performance Elvis gave between 1957 and 1969 was the 1961 USS Missouri benefit show. Somebody taped it, a bad, mono recording, but it's Presley with a staggering band - DJ Fontana, Scotty Moore, Chet Atkins, Floyd Cramer, Boots Randolph - and Presley was in incredible form. It was officially released years after the boot came out (on the 1980 Elvis Aaron Presley boxed collection), and the official release was no worse or better. Same source, same fidelity, but it's a must-have for Presley fans."

There is not even any room for doubt here. Without bootlegs, this performance would have been lost forever, and while Presley's label, RCA, could argue that they themselves had little reason to record the show (who, after all, could have predicted that Presley would wait so long, and change so dramatically, before his next gig?), that very argument in its own way justifies bootlegging. Who knew, when Nirvana played Rome in March, 1993, that it would be the last concert Kurt Cobain would ever give? That Knebworth, 1979, would mark the end of Led Zeppelin? Or that San Francisco, 1977, would be the final Sex Pistols concert? No one, but bootlegs preserve all three.

One can also applaud [if not necessarily approve of] the bootleggers' penchant for retrieving music that might otherwise have remained unavailable to all but the most patient collectors. Even in this age of widespread CD reissues, many classic albums remain "officially unavailable," everything from mono pressings of old Beatles albums to obscure gems by commercially unviable unknowns, and onto records that red-tape politics have bound up in a vault someplace. A Rolling Stones live album, dating from their 1972 tour and owed to Decca under the terms of their severance, ultimately never appeared in the "real world," despite regularly turning up on the Stones' own release schedule well into the mid-1970s. Bootlegs, however, remind us what we missed out on: an album that leaves every other Stones live disc in the dark.

More recently, Pink Floyd's fondly remembered early 1970s Relics rarities compilation made it onto a bonus track-stacked bootleg CD long before its official counterpart came along, while fans of Question Mark And The Mysterions' first two albums have never had any option at all. If they want those seminal albums on CD, they have to buy the bootlegs. Mick Farren, vocalist with the legendary Sixties revolutionary rockers the Deviants, also has experience of the ease with which bootleggers can circumvent the tightest licensing minefields. Disposable, the band's second album, might never appear officially. But the Japanese Captain Trip label got it out, adhering to the letter of local law regardless of what any other nation's regulations state, and Farren himself is delighted to see it (and any other treasures that may come along). "I totally approve of bootlegging and always have. The record labels can essentially go fuck themselves. I want to hear those lost tapes, demos, and live shows."

Martin Rossiter, vocalist with BritPop figure-heads Gene, agrees with him. "I have absolutely no objection to bootlegs whatsoever, they really don't bother me. In fact I've bought a few of our own myself. I approve of bootlegs; if there's a song you love, or a performance, you want to own it on CD regardless of whether it's been released officially or not. You want to buy it, you want to have the sleeve and smell it and touch it and be able to say 'I love this, and I've made the effort to buy it, it's now mine."

In the face of such devotion, artists have two choices. They can go with the flow, or they can lash out furiously. Bruce Springsteen took the latter course. Pink Floyd fans, however, still recall the day when their idols did the complete opposite. Indeed, without bootleggers to force, or at least influence, the issue, one of Pink Floyd's best-loved albums might never have come into being.

In 1974, a very professionally packaged boot came along, which, well over a year after Dark Side Of The Moon, essentially offered a brand-new album by one of the hottest bands of the age. Recorded live, Raving And Drooling [a.k.a. British Winter Tour '74] featured just three tracks - the title track, "Gotta Be Crazy" and "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" - all of which were then unavailable in any other form.

It sold, according to legend, like the proverbial "hotcakes," and continued selling even after the last of those tracks turned up a few months later on Floyd's own next official album, Wish You Were Here.

Six months later, in an interview with the French Rock Et Folk magazine, Roger Waters finally bowed to the inevitable. Floyd's bootleg repertoire abounds with the unfulfilled promise of songs in the making, and it would have been very easy for "Raving And Drooling" and "Gotta Be Crazy" to go the same sad way as "Fingal's Cave," "Oenone," "Baby Blue Shuffle," and "The Embryo." Instead, when asked what he was going to do next, Waters replied, "record 'You Gotta be Crazy' and 'Raving And Drooling."' They eventually emerged as "Dogs" and "Sheep" on 1977's Animals album.

The idea of bootlegs acting as a conduit for new musical ideas, or even new acts, is again not an uncommon one. Patti Smith is not the only "new" artist whom bootleggers helped to break, nor are record companies themselves blind to the impact that bootlegs can have on nascent careers. Again, around the mid-197Os, newcomers Nils Lafgren, Tom Petty, and Graham Parker were all recipients of oxymoronically titled Official Bootleg promo releases, as their labels hit upon the admittedly ironic notion of legitimizing an artist by making him appear palatable from an illegitimate angle. If Nils Lofgren was worth bootlegging, the theory went, he must be worth listening to, and the fact that Back It Up! An Authorized Bootleg would itself soon be bootlegged, only proves what an effective idea that was.

Much of the collector-oriented devotion surrounding the Brit Pop bands of recent years, too, stems from those bands' awareness of the allure of bootlegs, with each of the leading bands maintaining a barrage of "rare promo releases, obscure B-sides, regular TV and radio performances and so forth, all of which will then be dutifully compiled by one enterprising bootlegger or another, before then turning up on an official release. Gene's To See The Lights album, Oasis' The Masterplan and London Suede's Sci-Fi Lullabies have all reiterated routes that boots originally mapped out, with the latter's drummer, Simon Gilbert, admitting his biggest problem with the bootleggers is that they don't always know what they've got. "There's bootlegs with songs on them saying "demos," but some of them are actually versions for a BBC Radio One show," and that opens up yet another window of opportunity.

The steady stream of official releases for vintage BBC radio sessions is another indication of the bootlegger's pioneering spirit. Many readers, for instance, will be familiar with the bootleg recordings of Jimi Hendrix's BBC Sessions, several of which were markedly superior to the one "official" compilation that existed through the late 1980s and early 1990s. More tracks, more between-songs chat, all the false starts and retakes that bootleggers throw on because they can, but which "real" record labels balk at because they don't think they're "commercial." The success 1998's Experience Hendrix/MCA comprehensive Jimi Hendrix: BBC Sessions album proved how wrong that belief was, but look how long it took before anyone even tried it!

The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Genesis (within the Archive boxed set) rank amongst the other supergroups to have finally laid to rest their Beeb boots, with The Who due to join them this fall. Yet even with so much official activity swarming around, bootlegs remain a major part of the rock 'n' roll life, and a major bone of contention as well.

The manifold legal issues aside, most musicians pride themselves with a degree of quality control. It is no secret, after all, that very few ostensibly live albums would actually pass muster under the Trade Descriptions Act. A lost mike here, a bum note there, before you know where you are, an entire concert could be re-recorded in the studio, with even the audience response pulled off a synthesizer. Bootlegs give you the concert as it happened. Official live albums offer it as it might have happened, and it must be horrifying for a conscientious artist to suddenly discover an umpteenth-generation concert tape, or a clutch of discarded outtakes circulating on a $25 CD.

Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave is adamant, "if I find people bootlegging my stuff, I do my best to confiscate it. I'm very precious about what I release, and certainly very precious about what gets released in a live context. It terrifies me to think that concerts are bootlegged."

Seventies rockers Mott The Hoople went even further, famously employing people whose sole job was to watch for tell-tale microphones out in the audience. They obviously did their job very well; muffled mike-in-pocket cassettes natwithstanding, no more than three different Mott shows have ever circulated at all widely on bootleg, and two of them were FM radio broadcasts.

Fans of retro-hippie rockers Phish are equally opposed to bootlegging, although for very different reasons. For Cave, the objections are artistic, an acknowledgement of the fact that there are bad concerts as well as good ones, and an unwillingness to concede such objective control to complete strangers. Phish, however, actively encourage their fans to tape their concerts, regardless of the quality, and don't start drawing lines in the sand until the subject of commercial gain comes up.

The unofficial Phish Net internet site succinctly summarized this argument under the heading "why bootleg CDs are bad": "The band and [their record label] have been kind enough to allow us to tape shows legitimately, and this should be the [sale] means of enjoying this great music." In other words, don't spoil the party, and keep music free. But a spokesman for the now-defunct Kiss the Stone bootleg label argued back, "Phish, like many other bands, have realized how important it is to have not only a live following, but also a certain amount of live product on the street, which counts as extra promotion for the band... [and] in turn generates an interest in them as a live band. And while there are many live tapes to be found. Most people still prefer to have a good CD copy." Two Kiss The Stone titles, Follow Me To Gamehendge, from 1992, and 1994's Simple, bear him out. Both rated amongst KTS' best-selling releases of all time.

Such high-flying notions of honor and justice, of course, blithely overlook one harsh fact. Current Federal law makes no distinctions whatsoever between trading tapes [or CDs] and selling them, which means that no matter how deeply you entrench yourself on the moral high ground, you're still dog food if you're caught.

There is, of course, a simple answer to the whole problem of bootlegging, and one which a handful of artists have already started addressing. Prince, The Cure, Robert Fripp, and Peter Hammill are just four of a growing number of acts who have recognized the demand for their music by releasing limited edition albums containing live shows, outtakes and the like, and selling them either through fan clubs or the internet.

Others, most notably The Who, David Bowie, The Beatles, and the current owners of the Marc Bolan and Elvis Presley estates have seen fit to cull the best of their own bootlegged archives for official releases, and again, the rewards which they have reaped have far, far surpassed any profits made by the bootleggers.

Even closer to home, Experience Hendrix offers the diehard Jimi fan the best of all possible worlds, not only reassembling the guitarist's studio archives in coherent fashion For "mainstream" releases, but also creating Dagger Records as an outlet for limited edition live material, which a conventional label would never dream of releasing. Not every new album, after all, has to be accompanied by a ten-part TV series and full-color ads in every magazine; not every archive release has to be treated like the Second Coming of the Messiah.

Of course, the very act of opening a vauIt can lead to aII manner of untoward events. It is well documented, for instance, that barely had journalist Mark Lewisohn commenced his tape-scraping analysis of the Beatles archive at Abbey Road, than bootlegs of those same tapes were appearing on the market, a mystery in which the only known fact is, Lewisohn himself had nothing to do with it.

Rare tapes consigned for auction have frequently turned up on bootleg, both before and after their sale, while the release of BMG's Jefferson Airplane Loves You boxed set was followed, very swiftly, by a bootleg offering "outtakes from the boxed set," The Soya Of Sidney Spacepig.

Many of the people associated with the box acknowledge it was most likely an inside job; according to Jeff Tamarkin, author of the set's liner notes, "several people, including myself, were given the complete tapes of the outtakes prior to the box being put together, and someone got them to the booters." The only other information he can confirm is that "no, it wasn't me!" Elsewhere, there are [naturally unconfirmed] rumors that members of both the Stones' and David Bowie's camps have, over the years, been responsible for leaking tapes to certain favored bootleggers, a charming notion which raises yet another industry specter, that of the artist who goes beyond simply encouraging the bootleggers, and begins actively assisting them.

Lowell George, the late leader of Little Feat, is well known as the brains behind one particularly well-recorded and mixed boot, Electrif Lycanthrope, while at least one former bootlegger confirms, "very often, it is an inside job. An artist wants to get a piece of music out, his record company disagrees, so he finds someone else to put it out instead." The rights and wrongs of all this activity should not concern us, largely because they are so ambiguous. The person who taped Elvis' USS Missouri show, then passed the tape onto a bootleg manufacturer, was committing a crime. But if he hadn't taped the show, if the entire event had simply passed by unrecorded, wouldn't that be an even greater crime?

Similarly, we are constantly being told that artists do not receive payment from bootleg sales, which is true. But many artists don't get a bean from records they made for "real" labels either, as Jeff Beck and Peter Frampton told Experience Hendrix back in 1998. Again, two wrongs don't make a right, but hypocrisy isn't a pretty sight either.

And finally, there is the issue of artistic control, the fact that the artist has no say in what is or isn't made available to fans. Again, this is true, and it is wrong. But how many bands, even today, have 100X control of the music released in their name by record labels? Ministry's Al Jourgensen still rails against his first album, 1983's With Sympathy, claiming his label of the time forced him to make it, even though it was utterly unrepresentative of what he wanted to do, and his complaints are so not unique that nobody even pays them much attention. For many artists, a bootleg of the album that the record company rejected should be a cause for celebration. Because, at least, it means the real fans will get to hear what it sounded like.

Perhaps the last word on the subject, however, should be reserved for Frank Zappa, another artist who was aghast to discover great swathes of his career served up for bootleg consumption. In 1991, two years before his death, Zappa took his outrage at this unwanted intrusion to what he considered its logical extreme, by bootlegging the bootlegs for a massively overpriced boxed set, which re-presented eight classic vinyl boots in their original pirate sleeves, with original muffled pops and hiss intact. It did well; so well, in fact, that the following year, he recycled six more. But who had the real last laugh? Zappa, for cocking such an audacious snook at the likes of Discreep Records, TSP, Bizarre, Lost Rose, Pyramid, and Chamelion, none of whom had released a record in a decade or more? Or the original bootleggers, whose dream of becoming "a real record label" had finally, if unconventionally, come to pass? Because, as many bootleggers will tell you, what is their trade anyway, but an extension of making compilations on the stereo at home? And who hasn't made a tape that wipes the floor with anything on the shelves?

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