I must confess that the transition of The Midnight Cafe from a pop culture blog (where I posted about movies, music, books, and other assorted oddities) to solely being a bootleg blog was mostly due to hit counts. I had a brief but passionate affair with the idea that I could somehow become big enough of a site to, well not make a living from it, but at least supplement my income. I dreamed of being a cool little corner of the internet where people would come to read my thoughts on art and entertainment and maybe discuss them with me.

During this time I paid a lot of attention to my hit counter. I poured over my stats looking to see where folks were coming from and how they’d gotten to my little blog. As I started posting more bootlegs I noticed that a lot of searches were for various live shows. I also noted that since posting bootlegs my daily hits were increasing. The transition was slow but eventually all other non-bootleg things fell away.

I now actually do some pop culture writing, but it’s on other sites so that the Cafe could remain pure.

These days I pay very little attention to hit counts and all those stats. Now and again I like to see where people come from and what links they click on but it’s not something I keep up with. But were it not for those early days of counting I’d never have become The Midnight Cafe I am today.

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The Midnight Cafe’s #8 most viewed bootlegs of all time: The Genuine Never Ending Tour Covers Collection (1988-2000)
Because my hit counter really was fluctuating a lot due to me linking to the posts in this little countdown I finally got around to writing the top ten down somewhere permanent so as to not get confused as the numbers changed. Today’s post is technically now sitting at #10, because the original #10 and #9 have since moved up in the count so we’ll pretend its actually #8.

The always-great DylanDave gave me this compilation.  It contains every cover song Dylan sang on the Never Ending Tour up until 2000 (I keep hoping someday someone will do a Part II to catch us up.) While Dylan is one of the great songwriters of our time it’s kind of fun to have a whole compilation of him singing other people’s songs.

It was originally posted in July of 2016 and has accumulated a total of 2,345 hits. Smart readers will note that this is actually more hits that I posted for #10 and #9 but again those have since moved up quite a bit. Those same readers may also notice this is the third Bob Dylan boot in a row for the countdown. Get used to that as all but one bootleg in the top ten comes from Dylan (there are a couple of others that have Bob playing with other artists, but he’s in 9 out of the 10).

That’s it. If you haven’t grabbed this boot I highly recommend it.

You can read about the #10 show here and #9 here.

When I first started posting bootlegs I had no idea what I was doing. I’d been collecting bootlegs for a long time but that was mostly through snail mail trades and vines. I grabbed some shows from torrents but Internet speeds and bandwidth allocations kept me from doing that with much enthusiasm. I’d not yet discovered bootleg blogs so I was pretty clueless as to how to actually host the boots. Initially, I found some janky MP3 hosting sites that were full of ads and likely a variety of Internet poisons. Eventually, someone suggested Megaupload so I tried that. I was so unskilled that I started uploading each song individually which must have driven my early readers completely mad. Eventually, I realized I could zip an entire show and upload it which made things much easier.

Around this time I discovered other bootleg blogs and learned a lot from them as to how my site should work. It also opened up a new world to me. Though I was a competent bootleg collector at this point the only places I’d ever gone were Grateful Dead-related circles. I had no idea there were so many other boots from so many other bands. I downloaded like a maniac.

More and more I was uploading like a maniac as well. Bootlegs were getting a lot of traction and at the time I was hungry for more blog visitors. Initially, I posted all the bootlegs I owned on CD. Soon that ran out and I started posting the MP3s I had downloaded from other blogs, but I couldn’t keep up. For a while I had two computers going. One was constantly torrenting new shows and the other was uploading and posting those same shows nearly as fast as I could download them.

Ten years later I am still uploading multiple shows a day but I have so many shows on my hard drive I sometimes feel I’ll never get through them. Especially as I continue to find other shows I simply “must” download.

When I posted the #10 show in this little anniversary collection there was a conversation in the comments about how one might start visiting your favorite shows in hopes of boosting their ranking so that they might be included in the list. Truth is that is quite a possibility. As I am going to be dolling out these posts over the next several months it is quite likely the rankings will change quite a bit between now and October when my #1 gets posted. In fact, as I write this now, just days after writing about the #10 ranking that post, Abandoned Desire, has moved itself up to the #5 position. I guess I shouldn’t have linked to it 😉

My next confession is that when I wrote about #10 I miscounted and Abandoned Desire was actually number 9 with this 1978 Tour Collection coming in at # 10. I would fix that posthumously but as noted it’s already changed places. Not that any of this matters. There is no prize for being in my top 10 bootlegs posts. This is just a way for me to say thanks to all of you guys for supporting the site for so long and for a fun chance to revisit some old posts.

I posted this compilation of songs from 1978 not all that long ago. I first hit the site in June of 2017 and have since racked up 2,125 hits. It was DylanDave who turned me onto it, pointing me to where it had been posted on another site. It is a nice little comp from a very good year for Bob Dylan. Turns out you guys like Bob Dylan an awful lot as he shows up in almost every single spot on this list. But that’s a discussion for another time.

I started this blog (well the first incarnation of this blog which originally was on Blogger.com) back on May 29, 2004. Its initial purpose was to journal the 10 months my wife and are were spending in Strasbourg, France. I wanted a way to store my experiences there for posterity and share them with my friends and family. At first, I was writing breathlessly about my experiences in a foreign country, amazed and excited about every little new thing. But as these things happen the new and exciting slowly became old and familiar. I wrote less and less about my French experiences and began writing movie, music, and book reviews. When we moved back to the States I kept that aspect of the blog up and The Midnight Cafe became less a journal and more of a pop culture site.

It didn’t take long for me to start writing about bootlegs. At first, I was reviewing them and then I started actually posting the music. It was very trial and error in those days as I was still figuring out the best way to upload the shows and make them readily available to my readers. For a time I was writing about pop culture, sharing interesting things I found on the Internet, and posting bootlegs. But more and more the bootlegs began taking over and eventually The Midnight Cafe became the bootleg blog you all know and (hopefully) love.

The very first bootleg I ever posted was a show featuring Jim James, Conor Oberst, and m. ward. Sadly I no longer have that show (lost in one of many hard drive failures since then) but you can see that early post here. It should be noted that the free music I mention in that post isn’t bootlegs but rather studio MP3s I had been writing about (and sharing) at the time.  That first bootleg was posted in October of 2008.  To celebrate the 10th anniversary of me posting bootlegs to this blog I thought I’d highlight the ten most popular bootlegs I’ve ever posted.  The plan is to do one each month.  I’d like to repost the shows and maybe talk about them and my blog a little.  Since I missed January I’ll try to post two in February and then if everything goes smoothly I’ll count town one show each month until we get to October and celebrate the most popular bootleg I’ve ever shared.

I’ll be using the WordPress counter, sorting by the number of views over the entire history of the blog. As mentioned this blog started on Blogger, migrated to a free WordPress site then spent many years on my own paid-for space (though using the WordPress platform) and then a few years back I loaded everything back onto the free WordPress site.  My guess is that this has royally screwed up the counter, but it’s all I got.

Interestingly (and this may point directly to how screwed up the counter is) none of the top ten posts have been accessed more than a few thousand times.  Truth is I’ve never been a really huge site in terms of hit count.  I average somewhere between 1000-1500 unique visitors a day.  I have a small, but really enthusiastic base of regular readers (and commenters – you guys are awesome) but like any site, most of my visitors come randomly via web searchers and don’t stick around very long. I also post a lot of shows.  My average is probably 2-3 boots a day which adds up pretty quickly.  Because of all this, no single post gets that much love, even after ten years.

When I first started preparing for this series I was shocked to learn that the majority of my most popular posts are not bootlegs but old pop cultural posts I did ages ago. Far and away my most popular post ever was a little thing I did on the movies I have seen on Premier Magazine’s list of the most dangerous movies ever made. I wrote that one back in 2007 and periodically still get messages about it.  I try not to be disheartened about how my sillier posts from more than a decade ago still get more love than all the bootlegs I’ve posted since then.

Anyways without further ado here’s the 10th most popular bootlegs post on The Midnight Cafe.

Bob Dylan – Abandoned Desire

As you might expect from the title this is a compilation of alt cuts to Dylan’s 1976 album Desire. The bootleg combined combines the quadraphonic mix  (taken from a vinyl source) with studio outtakes from the album sessions in July 1975 and a recording session with Bette Midler in October 1975.   Unfortunately, the first 8 tracks have been removed because they have been officially released. The Dylan Stubs site has full images of the liner art for the bootleg which comes with lots of info on these sessions.

I originally posted it on Nov 21, 2015.  It has since been viewed 2, 251 times.  That seems an insanely low number to me.  I really suspect that the counter is only counting hits that have come in via this free WordPress site and none of the others transferred over.  Whatever the case it’s a cool collection of songs and well worth the listen.