Rock & Roll Bootleggers & other strange people

Rock & Roll Bootleggers & other strange people

It started off, as with a lot of other innovations, with Bob Dylan. The whole thing was very simple; somebody had ripped off a number of old (and not so old) tapes of Dylan singing his own tunes and marketed them, in disc form, as The Great White Wonder!, a two record set in an all-white package. Literally, all white; no notes, no label, no words — white. Originally marketed on the West Coast black market several months ago, the Wonder made its Midwestern debut around four weeks back.

It’s a completely underground operation; the purchaser meets a middle-man, who sells him the records, money in front, flys the discs in from the coast and splits. No guarantees — half the.^ discs could be blank. The analogy between wholesale dope dealing and wholesaling bootleg records is near complete; the mystique of the whole trip is half its value.

While the album is a technical atrocity, as an addition to the record collection of people still afflicted with Dylan-mania (despite Nashville Skyline), it’s probably worth its weight in gold. Certainly, some of the songs contained in Wonder are among Dylan’s best work (e.g. / Shall Be Released) but the real question is whether hearing Dylan poorly is better than not hearing these particular tunes at all. It’s hardly worth the $12 asking price in the Detroit/Ann Arbor/Chicago area. (Prices can zoom — some places get as much as $20.00).

Columbia Records, Dylan’s official recording company, said little, at first. They did release a statement saying they were concerned for the artists’ integrity. They termed it “unfortunate that Dylan wasn’t allowed to choose his own tunes to be presented to the public. Apparently they overlooked the fact that they had censored Talkin' John Birch Society and Let Me Die In My Footsteps out of the Freewheelin ’ album.

This week, however the story is that Columbia and Albert Grossman, Dylan’s personal manager, will prosecute the manufacturers if they’re found (rumor has it that the bootleggers split to Canada with the bread. To avoid the Army, not Columbia or Grossmam) Store owners are being warned against carrying the set.

Columbia and a lot of other companies must quake at what might happen. Privately processed renegade recordings of any artist’s works, either scarce or entirely unavailable, merchandised by every mercenary hippie with a conniving skull and a minimum of bread, are an executive nightmare.

No one really thought the Dylan set was much more than a fluke. After all, a goodly portion of the material on the record had been in circulation for quite some time. The material with the Band, according to most the best on the album, has been in circulation (under the pseudonym “The Basement Tape”) for over a year. It had been recorded in ' Woodstock, sometime between Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding. The phenomenon seemed certain to remain singular.

Yet an even more involved plot emerged two weeks later. Rolling Stone had run a shuck and jive record review of a double record set called The Masked Marauders, which they claimed featured Dylan, George Harrison, John Lennon, Mick Jagger and an unknown drummer. No one really took it seriously (except as a classic satire); after all an 18-minute version of Season of the Witch, replete with drum solo? The whole thing produced by A1 Kooper?

Then WKNR and WABX, the two progressive rock stations in Detroit, came up with a tape that purported to be a bowdlerized version of the Masked Marauders. It featured Dylan doing Duke of Earl (in his best neo-Merle Haggard style), Mick doing I Can’t Get No Nookie and a jam called Cow Pie, in the same country-slick style as Nashville Skyline.

The record was to be released on Deity Records, according to the review by one T.M. Christian. The first one to pick up on the whole thing was New York disc jockey Alex Bennett. Bennett was first to confirm that the whole thing was a hoax, on his WMCA radio show. Yet the record is going to come out - sans stars perhaps, but released it will be.

The press release from Deity Records is a masterpiece of noncommital bullshit. It calls the album “the object of some excitement in the rock press,” claims to have pressed 400 albums the first week but, needing help because of the huge demand, consummating a deal with Warners/Reprise for production and distribution. The release is datelined “Hudson Bay, Canada” in keeping with the Rolling Stone hype.

On a CBC trans-Canada telephone hook-up November 3rd, WKNR disc jockeys Dan Carlisle and Russ Gibb talked to a man who purported to be T.M. Christian. When asked if he would deny rumors that the alleged musicians appeared on the album, he refused. He also declined to answer why the supposedly Canadian firm had a San Francisco lawyer.

As far as technical quality goes, 4he best of what we’ve heard so far is Duke of Earl. The other songs are far weaker as satirizations (probably because Dylan’s “ne voice is so open to mocking.)

It’s hard to believe that anyone would lend creedence to such an obvious shuck by playing it on the radio. Yet this has gone on, apparently across the country. And thus the record will be released and the suckers will buy it; not anyone’s fault really, except for helping somebody’s greed get out of hand.

The greed includes established recording companies. Besides Reprise‘s sponsorship of the Maruaders hype, Dot has turned Kim Fowley loose with a thing called the Underground All Stars, whose album came out the same week as the Marauders story first broke.

The All Stars album does everything possible to suggest it’s exactly that. No personnel are listed, though some very extenuated notes (which are supposed to raise your hopes) are provided. But the only thing that is for sure is that it was produced by Fowley, one of the true loons of rock and roll.

While the Dylan lp is mediocre but exciting because of the fact that it is Dylan, and the Marauders is extremely funny (if only to laugh at people debating as to its reality on the air) and musically inept, the Underground All Stars is merely boring. Oh, as Fowley notes on the album, “if’s certainly teenage.”

But then the whole thing is certainly juvenile. No one will buy the Marauders album except certain disc jockeys, no one except Kim Fowley fans (if there are any) will buy the All-Stars (great — first an album, illegal, but with somebody — then one that looks like what it might be but isn’t — now one where the nobodys do nothing music) and the Dylan album is already owned, before Columbia did anything, by most everyone who wants it. Now maybe the record scene can grow up for a while.

Dave Marsh