These Boots Were Made For Rockin' (Very Lengthy)
Posted: September 3, 2004 11:14 am
From Perfect Sound Forever
http://www.furious.com/perfect/bootlegbands.html
Bands' official 'bootlegs'
by Joseph Larkin
The CD's packaging is plain, generic and unassuming. The sound found
on the CD is good, but not perfect—like a hippie's logic, it is
severely flawed, but, also like a hippie, its many flaws are part of
its numerous charms. This CD is not a legitimate "live album" in the
strictest sense of the term, it is a bootleg. Yes sir, a bootleg, but
one with a twist: this bootleg was released by the band that has been
bootlegged! That's right, kids: the lunatics have taken over the
asylum and rock bands have started bootlegging themselves. We are
through the looking glass here, people.
In the past, bands sometimes released live and rare material
exclusively to members of their fan clubs (see Live in Stockholm by
the Breeders and the Bun E.'s Basement Bootlegs series released by
Epic recording artists Cheap Trick). There was also the history of
ultimate jam-band gods the Grateful Dead setting aside special
sections at their concerts for fans to tape their shows. Sometimes,
other bands would release live discs in limited runs through smaller
labels (see Cave in's recent offering, Live Airwaves, put out on the
tiny Magic Bullet Records imprint). Later, bands started to get
forceful and live recordings that were originally released via the
black market started getting released via legitimate outlets.
Take the Butthole Surfers as an example. Eleven years ago, the band
dropped The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt on its fans even though the
same exact set had already made the rounds in collector's circles.
Their recent Humpty Dumpty LSD collection contains a number of tracks
that were originally released on bootleg seven inches years ago.
Bob Dylan has done this sort of thing as well with his Bootleg series
(including a famed 1964 concert that was finally released this year).
Hell, even the Monkees got in on the act with Missing Links, a series
of CD's that collects numerous outtakes that first saw the light of
day on bootleg LP's, one of which was called Monkeeshine. But
nowadays, bands are actually cheaply recording their own bootlegs and
selling them directly to their fans via their websites and live
concerts.
In the mid-nineties, noise-rockers the Swans opened up the doors to
their vast vault and let fans buy copies of numerous shows that they
had recorded from the soundboard for ten dollars a tape. In 2000,
earnest grunge-rockers Pearl Jam took the concept one step further
when they decided to unleash seventy-two live albums on the world--
every show from their 2000 U.S. and European tours minus the one
where all those kids died (hey, you buy yer tickets, you take yer
chances). In 2003, they released seventy-three more live concerts and
sold `em directly to fans through their website. Following Pearl
Jam's success, the proverbial floodgates opened-- bands as varied as
The Who, Yes, Duran Duran and Peter Gabriel started releasing whole
tours' worth of live concerts on CD, none of which were actually
worth listening to. Even Hawaiian shirt rockers Incubus have gotten
in on the act, selling live concerts on their webpage and donating
the profits to charity or something. All of these live recordings
were made available to the consumer just days or weeks after the
shows were played.
This is all well and good, but what if you could buy a live CD of a
show mere minutes after it ended? The country's largest concert
promoter is all set to sell such an item! The project has been dubbed
Instant Live and its goal is to make CD recordings of shows available
to concertgoers within minutes of the last song-- these live CD's are
basically an impulse buy, like a t-shirt. Though the idea is
interesting, most fans and industry types remain skeptical.
Superchunk's Mac McCaughan says "I'm not terribly interested in it,
though maybe I would be if I saw some amazing show and knew I had to
own it right then but that doesn't happen very often. As a performer,
it's not that appealing to me because we've played lots of great
shows, or shows that seemed great at the time, but then listened back
to board tapes or whatever and it turns out that while it was a great
show in terms of energy, crowd participation, intensity, whatever, it
just didn't sound that great when recorded! I think if you're going
to sell something to people you should really be able to vet its
quality first, and you can't really do that with those Instant Live
recording things."
Clear Channel, the evil corporate ogre, is behind Instant Live and so
far the company has had success with annoying jam bands like the
Allman Brothers Band and moe, two bands that already have a proven
track record when it comes to their gullible fans buying and trading
their stupid live concerts. Furthering tightening its grip on the
music industry, Clear Channel bought the patent from the technology's
inventers and now claims exclusive rights to sell concert CDs after
shows.
Tell that to DiscLive, who recorded the Pixies at every show of their
recent fifteen-date North American tour, making every CD immediately
available after the performance. DiscLive printed one thousand copies
of each performance as a double-disc set which were made available
for purchase at twenty-five clams a pop after each show or twenty-two
dollars if pre-ordered on DiscLive's website--five hundred CD's from
each show were made available for pre-order online. DiscLive sold an
additional five hundred CD's at each performance, along with any
remaining CD's that were not pre-ordered. For the final show of the
tour, the Coachella Music & Arts Festival, two thousand CD's were
pressed. The band's later shows in Brixton were also offered up for
sale and there are plans to offer live CDs of every show off of the
upcoming reunion tour of the U.S. According to DiscLive, once the
CD's have sold-out, they will not be re-pressed. In the interest of
making some extra cash to buy drugs, I dropped three hundred dollars
into DiscLive's lap and bought every single Pixies show save the
first one in Minneapolis, which sold out before I could secure a
copy, in the hopes of later selling the discs on the Internet for a
tidy profit--this was a sound business decision on my part as the
Minneapolis show was going for well over one hundred dollars on eBay
just hours after the show had ended. These Pixies CD's are basically
just glorified CD-R's in cheap digi-packs, but they sound decent
enough. DiscLive also works with artists as diverse and outdated as
Billy Idol, Newsboys (!), The Doors of the 21st Century (!!),
Jefferson Starship (!!!), Robby Romero (?) and Janita Antibalas (?!).
It's shocking to think that anyone would go see any of those artists
live let alone want to take home a document of such an experience.
This is the problem with the whole legitimate bootleg experiment--no
bands that are worth a s*** have been participating. Until now, that
is.
Enter indie-rock superstars Superchunk, who have started up their own
Clambakes series of live recordings, and Fugazi, who have recently
launched a new website, found on the Internet at
www.fugaziliveseries.com, which they are using to sell twenty shows
from throughout their illustrious career. Yes, you read that
correctly: twenty shows. Fugazi are making Superchunk look like slack
motherfuckers, as Superchunk have released just three extremely
limited edition Clambakes live CD's.
To be fair, the first two Clambakes discs aren't live albums,
strictly speaking, and they are certainly not recommended to those
who are not hardcore fans of the band. The third one, however, is a
scorcher with a solid setlist, decent sound and a scintillating
performance. In the liner notes to the newly released Clambakes set,
recorded live in 1999 at the Merge Tenth Anniversary Celebration in
North Carolina, McCaughan calls it "Superchunk's first live album,"
despite the fact that two other live sets preceded it.
McCaughan exaplains: "the first Clambakes was a collection of
acoustic performances from different sites, and while I suppose they
are indeed `live' performances in front of audiences, it's more like
a different look at a bunch of Superchunk songs than a
typical `Superchunk live show.' The second Clambakes, which is maybe
the least accessible but to me the most interesting since it's a full
hour's worth of material that only exists on that disc, was also
performed live to accompany a silent film, Page of Madness--the
recording is of the only time we performed it--but again, it's not
really a Superchunk concert per se, so this new one seemed like the
first time we've ever released a recording of a Superhcunk live show
in its entirety."
Expect more Clambakes CD's in the future, just don't expect too many
of `em. "There are tons of shows recorded, but I'm not interested in
flooding the market with crappy live recordings just because we could-
-and, believe me, we could! We've got tons of `em! But there are some
that sound good and the performance is good (a rare combo), so
hopefully there will be others in the future," declares McCaughan.
Fugazi's approach to live CD's is quite different from Superchunk's--
Fugazi's CD's are meant as "warts and all" affairs that capture the
shows just as they happened with almost no corrections for quality
being made. Aside from the first show, none of the shows have been
mixed or remixed in any way. "The first show was a second generation
tape so we used a digital program to remove as much hiss as we could.
Otherwise the shows were transferred to CD as they were," bassist Joe
Lally explains. "It should be noted that these are very much the
original recordings without any attempt to correct for things like
volume changes, strange mixing effects, the occasionally out-of-tune
guitar or the tape running out. Though the sound quality on these
tapes does vary, if a show was too poorly recorded it didn't make the
cut," says Fugazi's website.
Why did Fugazi release all these live shows? "We could never decide
on one show that represented Fugazi live," Lally reports. "We always
wanted to make a number of shows available. I suppose we'd like to
make all the ones with decent sound quality available. So this is a
beginning and we'll see what interest there is." And why now? "Now is
a good time because the band isn't playing shows or recording, so
there's time to focus on it." Well, alright. Fugazi's website further
explains the band's decision to make these shows available to the
publics in plain standard straightforward English: "For many years,
Fugazi has made a point of taping our live shows. We started out
using a simple cassette recorder, then moved on to a digital audio
tape recorder (DAT) and finally just burned straight onto CD's. Most
of the tapes were made from a combination of board mixes and live mic-
ing and over the years we have amassed literally hundreds of these
recordings in our tape library. We have digitally transferred to
compact disc an initial sampling of twenty of these shows from
various points in the band's career and outfitted each with a uniform
generic cover with individual concert information and a track
listing." The discs are exceptionally affordable when compared to
those being sold by DiscLive: shorter shows that fit on one disc are
available for eight dollars postpaid while longer sets are on two
discs and are available for ten dollars postpaid.
There are tons of Fugazi shows taped right from the soundboard
already out there that can be heard if someone is willing to root `em
out. For example, I already have a copy of one show that Fugazi is
selling [5-2-97 NEW YORK/NYU LOEB CENTER] on tape and I'm fairly
certain there's a heavily truncated bootleg of the 10-8-90 BEILEFELD,
GERMANY/PC 69 show, ironically titled Stage Dive Masters, floating
around. Though these shows aren't on professionally printed CDs and
the band doesn't take responsibility for letting the tapes slip out.
Lally makes it clear that the band isn't worried about its bootlegged
competition: "If you already have a great copy of a show, I guess you
won't buy it. That's cool."
With "literally hundreds of [live] recordings in [Fugazi's] tape
library," how did the band go about choosing what shows to
release? "I'm the one who chose this first set of shows," Lally
elaborates. "I felt the first show, since we actually had it, would
be of interest along with the tenth anniversary show and both have
proven to be popular. On the other hand, I thought a variety of
countries should be represented, but since most people want a show
they were at, places like Kuala Lumpur, Canberra, Fredericton and
Dunedin don't get ordered as much. Although if you're purchasing [the
CD's] as a set, you get to see the big picture. Of course, I had no
idea people would want to purchase them as a set. For some reason I
didn't do shows that I felt we had just played, so I stopped at 1999.
It took so long to get this together [that] I should have realized
putting in later shows would be good. Since the shows after `99 are
being requested most, there will certainly be some on the next set we
make. So it goes."
Lally insists that the success of similar ventures by bands like
Pearl Jam did not prompt this undertaking. "We didn't know of anyone
having success with this type of thing and even if we had, every band
is different. Success was never a word that got us interested in
doing something. We'd been trying to approach this for years but
never had time to deal with it. Besides, all these tapes don't do
much good sitting in a closet." Joe's story checks out, but the live
CD's have clearly been a success, as one can see by reading this
quote from the website: "We were not prepared for the number of
orders we've received so please be patient with us and we'll get them
out as soon as we can." The website was actually shut down for a
couple o' weeks so that the band could repress CDs and somehow keep
up with the high demand for the full set of twenty shows. Lally
elaborates: "Basically, we low-balled the first pressing. We could
have doubled it at least, but it's better to have people asking for
them instead of a house full of unwanted CD's." For the cash-strapped
fan that can only afford one show out of the twenty, Lally
recommends "the Berlin show [Volume 6]. We always remembered playing
well that night and the crowd being exceptionally enthused."
If I may be so bold as to make a pithy remark, I shall quote Fugazi
and suggest that you "keep your eyes open" for more live CD's. "We
don't know when but another set of ten or twenty will be added some
day," Lally promises. I can only hope the band will keep that promise-
-these CD's are a revelation. Since Fugazi has always been in the
habit of playing new and unrecorded songs, the fan that purchases
multiple shows gets to hear several early versions of old favorites
that sometimes differ vastly from their recorded counterparts. For
example, "Recap Modotti" is a completely different song and the
original lyrics to "F/d" prove that Fugazi do have a sense of humor
after all: "Son of a gun, I'm having fun / Son of a b****, I'm
getting rich." Should these CDs continue to be as popular as they
have already proven to be, then there may be some major truth to that
thrown-away line...
As an enthusiastic music fan, I can only hope that more bands will
witness the success of Fugazi `n' company and follow suit with their
own live CD ventures (are you listening, Rocket from the Crypt,
Clutch, Pleasure Club, Chokebore and Cheap Trick?!). A few bands here
and there do appear to be dipping their feet into the live CD pool.
For example, Comets on Fire recently pressed up one thousand copies
of a live CD to sell on tour and, according to McCaughan, "Lambchop
is the master of [making] limited edition live CDs to sell on tour;
they always do cool little packages, have live or unreleased songs on
them, think of charming titles and sell the hell out of them." One
can only hope that this trend will continue ad infinitum.
If Instant Live and legit bootlegs keep taking off, then it could
render bootlegging unnecessary. So think before you buy! Sure, you're
putting money back into the pockets of artists who have been robbed
for years by bandits and shady businessmen, but you could also be
putting some poor thief out of business. Without your money, how will
these modern day pirates be able to afford going to the discos every
night? How will they buy their designer drugs and fine wine?! They
may have to start drinking wine coolers to get their much needed
buzzes! Can you live with that, tuff guy?
http://www.furious.com/perfect/bootlegbands.html
Bands' official 'bootlegs'
by Joseph Larkin
The CD's packaging is plain, generic and unassuming. The sound found
on the CD is good, but not perfect—like a hippie's logic, it is
severely flawed, but, also like a hippie, its many flaws are part of
its numerous charms. This CD is not a legitimate "live album" in the
strictest sense of the term, it is a bootleg. Yes sir, a bootleg, but
one with a twist: this bootleg was released by the band that has been
bootlegged! That's right, kids: the lunatics have taken over the
asylum and rock bands have started bootlegging themselves. We are
through the looking glass here, people.
In the past, bands sometimes released live and rare material
exclusively to members of their fan clubs (see Live in Stockholm by
the Breeders and the Bun E.'s Basement Bootlegs series released by
Epic recording artists Cheap Trick). There was also the history of
ultimate jam-band gods the Grateful Dead setting aside special
sections at their concerts for fans to tape their shows. Sometimes,
other bands would release live discs in limited runs through smaller
labels (see Cave in's recent offering, Live Airwaves, put out on the
tiny Magic Bullet Records imprint). Later, bands started to get
forceful and live recordings that were originally released via the
black market started getting released via legitimate outlets.
Take the Butthole Surfers as an example. Eleven years ago, the band
dropped The Hole Truth and Nothing Butt on its fans even though the
same exact set had already made the rounds in collector's circles.
Their recent Humpty Dumpty LSD collection contains a number of tracks
that were originally released on bootleg seven inches years ago.
Bob Dylan has done this sort of thing as well with his Bootleg series
(including a famed 1964 concert that was finally released this year).
Hell, even the Monkees got in on the act with Missing Links, a series
of CD's that collects numerous outtakes that first saw the light of
day on bootleg LP's, one of which was called Monkeeshine. But
nowadays, bands are actually cheaply recording their own bootlegs and
selling them directly to their fans via their websites and live
concerts.
In the mid-nineties, noise-rockers the Swans opened up the doors to
their vast vault and let fans buy copies of numerous shows that they
had recorded from the soundboard for ten dollars a tape. In 2000,
earnest grunge-rockers Pearl Jam took the concept one step further
when they decided to unleash seventy-two live albums on the world--
every show from their 2000 U.S. and European tours minus the one
where all those kids died (hey, you buy yer tickets, you take yer
chances). In 2003, they released seventy-three more live concerts and
sold `em directly to fans through their website. Following Pearl
Jam's success, the proverbial floodgates opened-- bands as varied as
The Who, Yes, Duran Duran and Peter Gabriel started releasing whole
tours' worth of live concerts on CD, none of which were actually
worth listening to. Even Hawaiian shirt rockers Incubus have gotten
in on the act, selling live concerts on their webpage and donating
the profits to charity or something. All of these live recordings
were made available to the consumer just days or weeks after the
shows were played.
This is all well and good, but what if you could buy a live CD of a
show mere minutes after it ended? The country's largest concert
promoter is all set to sell such an item! The project has been dubbed
Instant Live and its goal is to make CD recordings of shows available
to concertgoers within minutes of the last song-- these live CD's are
basically an impulse buy, like a t-shirt. Though the idea is
interesting, most fans and industry types remain skeptical.
Superchunk's Mac McCaughan says "I'm not terribly interested in it,
though maybe I would be if I saw some amazing show and knew I had to
own it right then but that doesn't happen very often. As a performer,
it's not that appealing to me because we've played lots of great
shows, or shows that seemed great at the time, but then listened back
to board tapes or whatever and it turns out that while it was a great
show in terms of energy, crowd participation, intensity, whatever, it
just didn't sound that great when recorded! I think if you're going
to sell something to people you should really be able to vet its
quality first, and you can't really do that with those Instant Live
recording things."
Clear Channel, the evil corporate ogre, is behind Instant Live and so
far the company has had success with annoying jam bands like the
Allman Brothers Band and moe, two bands that already have a proven
track record when it comes to their gullible fans buying and trading
their stupid live concerts. Furthering tightening its grip on the
music industry, Clear Channel bought the patent from the technology's
inventers and now claims exclusive rights to sell concert CDs after
shows.
Tell that to DiscLive, who recorded the Pixies at every show of their
recent fifteen-date North American tour, making every CD immediately
available after the performance. DiscLive printed one thousand copies
of each performance as a double-disc set which were made available
for purchase at twenty-five clams a pop after each show or twenty-two
dollars if pre-ordered on DiscLive's website--five hundred CD's from
each show were made available for pre-order online. DiscLive sold an
additional five hundred CD's at each performance, along with any
remaining CD's that were not pre-ordered. For the final show of the
tour, the Coachella Music & Arts Festival, two thousand CD's were
pressed. The band's later shows in Brixton were also offered up for
sale and there are plans to offer live CDs of every show off of the
upcoming reunion tour of the U.S. According to DiscLive, once the
CD's have sold-out, they will not be re-pressed. In the interest of
making some extra cash to buy drugs, I dropped three hundred dollars
into DiscLive's lap and bought every single Pixies show save the
first one in Minneapolis, which sold out before I could secure a
copy, in the hopes of later selling the discs on the Internet for a
tidy profit--this was a sound business decision on my part as the
Minneapolis show was going for well over one hundred dollars on eBay
just hours after the show had ended. These Pixies CD's are basically
just glorified CD-R's in cheap digi-packs, but they sound decent
enough. DiscLive also works with artists as diverse and outdated as
Billy Idol, Newsboys (!), The Doors of the 21st Century (!!),
Jefferson Starship (!!!), Robby Romero (?) and Janita Antibalas (?!).
It's shocking to think that anyone would go see any of those artists
live let alone want to take home a document of such an experience.
This is the problem with the whole legitimate bootleg experiment--no
bands that are worth a s*** have been participating. Until now, that
is.
Enter indie-rock superstars Superchunk, who have started up their own
Clambakes series of live recordings, and Fugazi, who have recently
launched a new website, found on the Internet at
www.fugaziliveseries.com, which they are using to sell twenty shows
from throughout their illustrious career. Yes, you read that
correctly: twenty shows. Fugazi are making Superchunk look like slack
motherfuckers, as Superchunk have released just three extremely
limited edition Clambakes live CD's.
To be fair, the first two Clambakes discs aren't live albums,
strictly speaking, and they are certainly not recommended to those
who are not hardcore fans of the band. The third one, however, is a
scorcher with a solid setlist, decent sound and a scintillating
performance. In the liner notes to the newly released Clambakes set,
recorded live in 1999 at the Merge Tenth Anniversary Celebration in
North Carolina, McCaughan calls it "Superchunk's first live album,"
despite the fact that two other live sets preceded it.
McCaughan exaplains: "the first Clambakes was a collection of
acoustic performances from different sites, and while I suppose they
are indeed `live' performances in front of audiences, it's more like
a different look at a bunch of Superchunk songs than a
typical `Superchunk live show.' The second Clambakes, which is maybe
the least accessible but to me the most interesting since it's a full
hour's worth of material that only exists on that disc, was also
performed live to accompany a silent film, Page of Madness--the
recording is of the only time we performed it--but again, it's not
really a Superchunk concert per se, so this new one seemed like the
first time we've ever released a recording of a Superhcunk live show
in its entirety."
Expect more Clambakes CD's in the future, just don't expect too many
of `em. "There are tons of shows recorded, but I'm not interested in
flooding the market with crappy live recordings just because we could-
-and, believe me, we could! We've got tons of `em! But there are some
that sound good and the performance is good (a rare combo), so
hopefully there will be others in the future," declares McCaughan.
Fugazi's approach to live CD's is quite different from Superchunk's--
Fugazi's CD's are meant as "warts and all" affairs that capture the
shows just as they happened with almost no corrections for quality
being made. Aside from the first show, none of the shows have been
mixed or remixed in any way. "The first show was a second generation
tape so we used a digital program to remove as much hiss as we could.
Otherwise the shows were transferred to CD as they were," bassist Joe
Lally explains. "It should be noted that these are very much the
original recordings without any attempt to correct for things like
volume changes, strange mixing effects, the occasionally out-of-tune
guitar or the tape running out. Though the sound quality on these
tapes does vary, if a show was too poorly recorded it didn't make the
cut," says Fugazi's website.
Why did Fugazi release all these live shows? "We could never decide
on one show that represented Fugazi live," Lally reports. "We always
wanted to make a number of shows available. I suppose we'd like to
make all the ones with decent sound quality available. So this is a
beginning and we'll see what interest there is." And why now? "Now is
a good time because the band isn't playing shows or recording, so
there's time to focus on it." Well, alright. Fugazi's website further
explains the band's decision to make these shows available to the
publics in plain standard straightforward English: "For many years,
Fugazi has made a point of taping our live shows. We started out
using a simple cassette recorder, then moved on to a digital audio
tape recorder (DAT) and finally just burned straight onto CD's. Most
of the tapes were made from a combination of board mixes and live mic-
ing and over the years we have amassed literally hundreds of these
recordings in our tape library. We have digitally transferred to
compact disc an initial sampling of twenty of these shows from
various points in the band's career and outfitted each with a uniform
generic cover with individual concert information and a track
listing." The discs are exceptionally affordable when compared to
those being sold by DiscLive: shorter shows that fit on one disc are
available for eight dollars postpaid while longer sets are on two
discs and are available for ten dollars postpaid.
There are tons of Fugazi shows taped right from the soundboard
already out there that can be heard if someone is willing to root `em
out. For example, I already have a copy of one show that Fugazi is
selling [5-2-97 NEW YORK/NYU LOEB CENTER] on tape and I'm fairly
certain there's a heavily truncated bootleg of the 10-8-90 BEILEFELD,
GERMANY/PC 69 show, ironically titled Stage Dive Masters, floating
around. Though these shows aren't on professionally printed CDs and
the band doesn't take responsibility for letting the tapes slip out.
Lally makes it clear that the band isn't worried about its bootlegged
competition: "If you already have a great copy of a show, I guess you
won't buy it. That's cool."
With "literally hundreds of [live] recordings in [Fugazi's] tape
library," how did the band go about choosing what shows to
release? "I'm the one who chose this first set of shows," Lally
elaborates. "I felt the first show, since we actually had it, would
be of interest along with the tenth anniversary show and both have
proven to be popular. On the other hand, I thought a variety of
countries should be represented, but since most people want a show
they were at, places like Kuala Lumpur, Canberra, Fredericton and
Dunedin don't get ordered as much. Although if you're purchasing [the
CD's] as a set, you get to see the big picture. Of course, I had no
idea people would want to purchase them as a set. For some reason I
didn't do shows that I felt we had just played, so I stopped at 1999.
It took so long to get this together [that] I should have realized
putting in later shows would be good. Since the shows after `99 are
being requested most, there will certainly be some on the next set we
make. So it goes."
Lally insists that the success of similar ventures by bands like
Pearl Jam did not prompt this undertaking. "We didn't know of anyone
having success with this type of thing and even if we had, every band
is different. Success was never a word that got us interested in
doing something. We'd been trying to approach this for years but
never had time to deal with it. Besides, all these tapes don't do
much good sitting in a closet." Joe's story checks out, but the live
CD's have clearly been a success, as one can see by reading this
quote from the website: "We were not prepared for the number of
orders we've received so please be patient with us and we'll get them
out as soon as we can." The website was actually shut down for a
couple o' weeks so that the band could repress CDs and somehow keep
up with the high demand for the full set of twenty shows. Lally
elaborates: "Basically, we low-balled the first pressing. We could
have doubled it at least, but it's better to have people asking for
them instead of a house full of unwanted CD's." For the cash-strapped
fan that can only afford one show out of the twenty, Lally
recommends "the Berlin show [Volume 6]. We always remembered playing
well that night and the crowd being exceptionally enthused."
If I may be so bold as to make a pithy remark, I shall quote Fugazi
and suggest that you "keep your eyes open" for more live CD's. "We
don't know when but another set of ten or twenty will be added some
day," Lally promises. I can only hope the band will keep that promise-
-these CD's are a revelation. Since Fugazi has always been in the
habit of playing new and unrecorded songs, the fan that purchases
multiple shows gets to hear several early versions of old favorites
that sometimes differ vastly from their recorded counterparts. For
example, "Recap Modotti" is a completely different song and the
original lyrics to "F/d" prove that Fugazi do have a sense of humor
after all: "Son of a gun, I'm having fun / Son of a b****, I'm
getting rich." Should these CDs continue to be as popular as they
have already proven to be, then there may be some major truth to that
thrown-away line...
As an enthusiastic music fan, I can only hope that more bands will
witness the success of Fugazi `n' company and follow suit with their
own live CD ventures (are you listening, Rocket from the Crypt,
Clutch, Pleasure Club, Chokebore and Cheap Trick?!). A few bands here
and there do appear to be dipping their feet into the live CD pool.
For example, Comets on Fire recently pressed up one thousand copies
of a live CD to sell on tour and, according to McCaughan, "Lambchop
is the master of [making] limited edition live CDs to sell on tour;
they always do cool little packages, have live or unreleased songs on
them, think of charming titles and sell the hell out of them." One
can only hope that this trend will continue ad infinitum.
If Instant Live and legit bootlegs keep taking off, then it could
render bootlegging unnecessary. So think before you buy! Sure, you're
putting money back into the pockets of artists who have been robbed
for years by bandits and shady businessmen, but you could also be
putting some poor thief out of business. Without your money, how will
these modern day pirates be able to afford going to the discos every
night? How will they buy their designer drugs and fine wine?! They
may have to start drinking wine coolers to get their much needed
buzzes! Can you live with that, tuff guy?