Under the counter: 15 essential bootleg albums

As Dylan helped to get the bootleg industry off the ground in the first place, so would he also play a substantial role in keeping it going thanks to his baffling decision in 1967 to retire from the pop-star business and start a brief new career as an anonymous songwriter for other artists. He and The Band cut acetates of some of the tracks they’d recorded in casual basement jams in order to shop them around, and they ended up in the hands of critics who loudly campaigned to get the album officially released. Columbia eventually came through, kind of, with a sloppily assembled LP padded out with Dylan-less Band songs, but there was plenty more material left over for bootleggers to continue reissuing their own editions. (Dylan eventually got the last laugh in 2014 when he released a six-disc, 139-song Basement Tapes that included tracks even the bootleggers hadn’t heard before.) Over the years the bootleg versions became something like holy relics in the rock underground, and Dylan and The Band’s ramshackle sessions would play a formative role in the birth of alt-country and indie rock. [Miles Raymer]

Bruce Springsteen has a well-earned reputation for being one of the greatest live performing acts in the history of rock music. But he may have hit his peak in 1978 with the Darkness On The Edge Of Town tour. While many cite the Boss’ show at the Agora in Cleveland or the Winterland in San Francisco, this gig at the Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles might just edge both of those out as the high-water mark of the tour. Taken from an FM radio broadcast, audio recordings of this show have circulated around the bootleg network for years, sometimes even with the deejay introduction and patter included. Even almost 40 years removed, the intensity is palpable through a pair of headphones. [Corbin Reiff]

Neil Young is a mercurial, prolific, and inscrutable musical force, and over the years he’s walked away from a number of finished albums, or made drastic changes to them, for reasons that even he can’t adequately explain. In 1977 he finished an album he called Chrome Dreams, inspired by a drawing by his longtime producer David Briggs. The material pulls together all the disparate strands of Young’s musical identity—the squalling guitar hero, the country rocker, the intensely intimate acoustic balladeer—in a balance that only a couple of his albums have ever been able to do. If it had been released, it would easily rank near the top of his best recordings. Instead he canceled production and made the far inferior American Stars ’N Bars, which mixed alternate versions of a few Chrome Dreams cuts in with some of his most unremarkable material of the decade. Luckily an acetate of the scrapped album made it into the hands of bootleggers, a fate that his Homegrown album and the almost mythological first mix of Tonight’s The Night unfortunately didn’t meet. [Miles Raymer]

The Velvet Underground is one of those bands whose earliest years are shrouded in fable and enhanced by legend. This recording of a gig the band played on April 30, 1967 in New York goes a long way to enhancing both elements and captures a portrait of the group at its most incendiary. The guitars are cranked, the drums are raucous, and you can almost hear Lou Reed’s vocal cords tearing out of his throat. It’s pre-proto punk. The entire show was eventually released as part of the deluxe 45th anniversary edition of the band’s White Light/White Heat. [Corbin Reiff]

There’s extensive and then there’s the A/B Road bootleg set. Amassed on a staggering 83 CDs, the collection captures nearly every note, every cough, every slight, every joke, and every conversation The Beatles committed to tape during the tumultuous Get Back/Let It Be sessions in 1969. If it seems excessive, it most definitely is, but then again, The Beatles are renowned for having one of the most ardent and dedicated fan bases in music history, and there are apparently plenty of folks out there willing to sort through hours and hours of musical and non-musical moments to try and make sense of the band’s creative process. [Corbin Reiff]

Bootlegs have frequently captured important moments in pop history, like hearing Dylan be mercilessly heckled by the audience during the electric portion of a 1966 show in Manchester, England on the widely bootlegged (and eventually officially released) “Royal Albert Hall” recordings. Sometimes, though, they capture things artists would rather forget, or, in the case of A Toot And A Snore In ’74, had possibly actually forgotten by the morning after. The story goes that while John Lennon was producing Harry Nilsson’s unhinged opus Pussy Cats, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder stopped by the studio, and they all decided to jam. Since this was during Lennon’s famously debauched “lost weekend,” everyone involved is clearly wasted, and this once-in-a-lifetime meeting of the minds (and the last time McCartney and Lennon recorded together) resulted in a completely unlistenable pile of wet noodling that’s only interesting in the most morbid of ways. Standout moments on the album include Lennon offering Wonder cocaine, Lennon berating his band for not being able to follow his changes, and Wonder leading the blacked-out supergroup through a medley of Sam Cooke hits for the one shining moment of the session where everything stopped going completely wrong. [Miles Raymer]

Like Neil Young, Prince has a habit of recording entire albums’ worth of material and then abandoning them on a whim, which has made him a boon to bootleggers, much to his very vocal dismay. In 1987, one album made it all the way to being pressed up in promo form before Prince called off its release. The copies that made it into journalists’ hands came in all-black sleeves and didn’t list Prince’s name or the title he had for the record, which may have initially been called The Funk Bible, but quickly became known as The Black Album. Its inverse-Beatles title and rapturous word-of-mouth reviews gave it a deep dose of renegade samizdat cool, but the record’s biggest attraction came from the mystery surrounding its near-release. Why would one of the biggest pop stars suddenly withdraw a finished album that everyone in the world wanted to hear? There were rumors that the music was too risqué for the label, or that Prince had freaked out on drugs and decided that the whole album was possessed by demons. It’s also possible that Prince is just a control freak who decided at the last possible minute that its more hard-funk-oriented direction wasn’t the right next move. Still, it remains a crucial part of Prince folklore, and eventually saw legitimate release in 1994. [Miles Raymer]

Until Live At Reading was released in 2009, the only official document of Nirvana’s legendarily combustive live performances at the peak of its fame was the bewilderingly spotty compilation From The Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah. Lucky for fans, Italy’s state-owned RAI Radio 1 broadcast the band’s February 22, 1994 show in Rome, and enterprising bootleggers pressed the crisp, professionally engineered recording under a number of different titles, the most popular of which was Roma (from the alt-rock-heavy ’90s label KTS). The band—in its expanded In Utero-era incarnation with Pat Smear on guitar and Lori Goldston on cello—is raggedly magnificent, and Krist Novoselic’s stage banter is phenomenally on point. In an eerie display of the speed with which bootleggers could turn around product, copies of the recording made it to market just weeks after the show, in between Kurt Cobain’s subsequent overdose in a Rome hotel in March and his suicide in April. [Miles Raymer]

This bootleg recording trades more on its legendary status as a meeting of the minds between two of the greatest iconoclasts of the era than for its actual musical merits. The specific date of the jam is a bit fuzzy, but it is said to have taken place sometime between March and June of 1968 at the Scene club in New York. Playing with the house band, Hendrix and Morrison run through a number of blues covers together, with the former doing his best to keep it together, while the latter typically devolves into a drunken embarrassment. Hendrix himself was apparently responsible for recording the gig, and it only became available to bootleggers after the two-track tape was stolen from the guitarist’s apartment. [Corbin Reiff]

The Troggs are best remembered for the seminal British Invasion hit “Wild Thing” in 1966, but they’re also renowned in many circles for this illicit recording made four years later. Not so much celebrated for musical content, the tapes became a huge hit for the sheer level of acrimony and bile spewed among the band members, with singer Reg Presley in particular teeing off on Ronnie Bond for failing to properly play a desired drum pattern. Legend has it that many producers around London and beyond would keep a copy of the tape handy and play it for nervous groups before the red light went on in the studio—to relieve some of the tension. [Corbin Reiff]