Bootleg Country

When I moved back to the States from France I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what to do with this blog. I knew my life back in Indiana would be pretty boring so I wouldn’t have so many interesting stories to tell, but I wanted to keep writing. I’d been writing movie, music, and book reviews for a while so I knew I’d keep doing that, but I wanted more. I wanted to make my mark.

You’ve already seen some of that in the things I’ve recently reposted, and you will continue to see how the blog changed and grew. By this point, sometime in 2006, I’d been collecting bootlegs for about a decade. At first, it was cassette tapes and then CDRs. If memory serves by this point things had already started moving towards digital files – SHN and FLAC – but there wasn’t really enough hard drive storage to keep everything on a computer. So I’d download and then burn to disk.

Torrents were readily available but this was just the beginning of folks beginning to use cloud storage sites to share the music. I certainly didn’t know anything about that stuff. But bootlegs were a big part of my life and so I naturally began writing about it.

I decided it would be fun to review the bootlegs and I created a little series entitled Bootleg Country. At the time it seemed like there were a lot of things being called something-Nation – Live Nation and the like, and I originally wanted to call my series Bootleg Nation but I was afraid that would sound too cliche so I switched it to Bootleg Country. That seemed to tie in well with my love of country, folk, bluegrass, and what at the time was called alternative country.

I immediately regretted the name, but since I was posting it to Blogcritics I was stuck with it.

If you receive my e-mails then you’ve already seen my first entry into this series – a review of a David Nelson show. It is funny to read now, all these years later. I made a big deal about how bootlegs were perfectly legal, which of course isn’t true at all.

Bootlegs, of course, really only apply to music that is illegally being sold in stores and other sordid places, but when I speak of bootlegs I’m really talking about what is sometimes called ROIOs (Recordings of Independent Origins) that is music that is taped by audience members or otherwise acquired through unofficial channels. While sometimes this is perfectly legal, when bands allow the taping of their shows, etc., it is more than often more of a gray area, if not outright illegal.

I really don’t remember now if I decided to make a big deal out of it being perfectly legal because I didn’t want Blogcritics to shut down my articles, or if I really wasn’t aware that illegal bootlegging existed. I entered this little fandom of ours through the Grateful Dead and other bands that were pro-trading. For years I wasn’t aware that so many shows from so many different artists existed. I had no idea that many of those artists frowned on recording and trading their concerts.

Anyway, I don’t need to tell you all any of this. But in those early days of writing, I thought it was important to preface each review with a little insider knowledge of this hobby.

It is also amusing to me that my first article was a review of a David Nelson show. No disrespect to Mr. Nelson, but he’s such an obscure artist it seems hilarious to me to start out a series with him.

I really should start reviewing bootlegs again, that was fun to do.