Bootleg records were once a mysterious thing, seemingly verging on illegal. Shows, concerts, performances you couldn’t hear anywhere else. Finding a bootleg was cool. That was the lure.
Growing up in outstate Wisconsin in the ’70s, we rarely saw bootleg records. Pretty sure I saw my first at Truckers Union, a record store and head shop and underground newspaper and comix seller in Eau Claire, where I lived in the late ’70s. It might have been a Springsteen bootleg, maybe a Led Zeppelin bootleg, but I can’t say for sure.
For years, I had only one bootleg record. This one.
“Live at the Main Point” is one of the great bootlegs, a double LP featuring Jackson Browne and David Lindley — two of my favorites — recorded live at a show at a Bryn Mawr, Pa., club on Sunday, Sept. 7, 1975. It was released in 1979 on The Impossible Recordworks label, which was said to be at Route One, Legerdemain USA.
I bought it from my friend Dave Benton sometime in the early ’80s. He was running Madcity Music Exchange in Madison at the time. It was that long ago because I put tracks from it on mix tapes, and mix tapes were a decidedly ’80s thing for me.
As with many records, I came to know “Live at the Main Point” so well that I played it less and less as the years went by. One day, it went into one of my Green Bay record show crates, where my friend Dave Benton found it and bought it from me, 30-plus years after I bought it from him.
Full circle, from Dave to me and back to Dave.
And now, my second bootleg.
“Local Girls” features Graham Parker and the Rumour recorded live at a show at The Roxy in Los Angeles on Saturday, April 14, 1979. This was released later that year on The Impossible Recordworks label. I’d never seen it before.
Earlier this month, I found it at Madcity Music, where I found my first bootleg all those years ago.
Full circle, from the original Madcity Music location run by Dave on Regent Street to the current location run by Bobby Hussy (and Dave Zero before that) on Atwood Avenue in our old neighborhood.
Behold the bootlegs!
Both of these bootlegged shows are on YouTube in their entirety. Enjoy.
Jackson Browne and David Lindley, “Live at the Main Point” (as broadcast by WMMR radio in Philadelphia).
Graham Parker and the Rumour, “Local Girls” live at The Roxy (as broadcast by KMET radio in Los Angeles).