All my life, I always bought the original collectible material whether it be comics, toys, or records. I was never interested in buying pirated compact discs, downloads from file sharing sites, or even streaming.
When I returned to vinyl, I made a lot of fundamental mistakes.... not knowing my way around after being out of the loop for so long. And not checking out for counterfeits.
The Beatles record pictured above is a counterfeit. And I fell for it. I bought it from an elderly man who had this massive collection and swore it was the real deal. When he offered it to me, I had some doubts because it was in near mint condition. Nothing wrong with that except almost all his records looked beaten up and poorly maintained. First red flag. The second red flag was a post-it that said "REPRO". It was on the plastic cover. And I didn't notice it right away. You have to realize that this was when I just got back into vinyl and was kinda picky with near mint records. For some stupid reason, I didn't notice the post-it. My mistake was not checking the Beatles sites to validate its authenticity.
Only when I got home did I realize I had been had by this elderly con artist! I cross referenced it to the Beatles sites and I felt really bad after that. Now this cost me about $75 so boy, was I upset. Even up to today, I wanna kick that old man in the nuts.
Okay. Not that I have gotten that bile out of me, let's move on to the bootlegs. I am somewhat more amenable to bootlegs as opposed to counterfeit records. Technically, they are unofficial so there is the difference between bootlegs and counterfeit which are fake and unoriginal. Plus, bootleg recordings have "labels" while counterfeits do not have any.
Now, I have had a few. My first ever bootleg was a Nirvana concert on compact disc and I still have that. I have another live bootleg featuring Filipino metal bands and that one really sucks. Lousy quality. The Nirvana was outstanding in sound quality. The packaging though was terrible. I got the Nirvana disc in this shop at Tsim Sha Tsui that sold only bootlegs. This was back in the 1990s and that shop is no longer there.
I do have these two bootleg vinyls of Led Zeppelin (Jester Productions) titled "Live '71" and Duke Ellington (Sunburst) titled, "Rarest Style 1952 Duke Ellington private sessions".
The Led Zep record sounds like it was recorded at a rehearsal or soundcheck because I don't really hear a noisy audience except for some polite applause. So what this at a club somewheres? And the mix between vocals and instruments isn't balanced. That contributes to the less than stellar recording.
Duke Ellington also suffers from consistent quality. I got this because these recordings aren't available anywhere as they were intended to be private. I love the old jazz masters -- Coltrane, Davis, Ellington, Bill Evans and to a certain point, Thelonius Monk. Still happy to have this....
And that leads us to the next record...
This double LP is a bootleg despite not having a "label" like the aforementioned Jester Productions and Sunburst. But this is a real album, right? Yes, it is and it was issued only on compact disc. Never on vinyl though. And this one, pressed in Europe, is the unofficial vinyl. With a somewhat different track listing so on two counts, that makes it a bootleg album and not a counterfeit one.
I have three copies of the CD. But I got the vinyl just the same knowing it was a bootleg. How is the sound quality? Not bad. Could be better but not bad.
No comments:
Post a Comment