Confessions of a Teenaged Beatleg Fanatic

Longtime readers of this blog will recall my fascination with bootlegs, especially as a teenager and into my 20s. Lucky for me, the 1980s and especially the 1990s were an excellent time for this passion, spanning the period between the legendary John Barrett Tapes to all the deluxe CD series and box sets that basically forced Apple to initiate The Beatles Anthology. (George’s financial situation probably had something to do with it, too.)

I don’t know what fans think of boots anymore. For me they caused a genuine kind of ecstasy, but I don’t know if the thrill of them is possible these nowdays, with every track available via YouTube. I can only report that for a fan who came to maturity in the bleak years after Lennon’s death–when we knew there would be no reunion, for the most awful reason possible–bootlegs were as close I’d ever come to what it must’ve felt like during the Sixties. “NEW ALBUM OUT NOW.”

My beloved Aunt, our family’s Patient Zero for Beatlemania and the person who introduced me to the group at five (though in 1974 no introduction was necessary; they were still omnipresent), never understood my fascination with boots. “It’s like the real song, only worse,” I remember her saying as I played a vinyl LP (NEMS’ Strawberry Fields Forever) I’d just picked up at Vintage Vinyl. I’m happy to report that VV is still in business by the way, squatting proudly on St. Louis’ Delmar Loop like a proud hippie; I just went there with my Uncle, and yes, I did look for bootlegs.

During high school boots were a mania, and I’d trek nearly every weekend into Chicago looking for them, because my local shop (Val’s Halla underneath the El tracks) was too sensible to stock them. I’d walk into Wax Trax on Ashland or Gramophone on Clybourn (also still there!) looking for Beatles boots but would more often come out with some new UK import instead, The Smiths or The The or XTC, any one of a million great English bands that scratched that Beatles itch just a tiny bit. But of course a new boot was the best outcome of all.

When I think of my mania now, I always remember that for me it wasn’t simply the secret aspect, though it was cool indeed to know a Beatles song your friends had never heard. Nor was it just about collecting, though anyone who sees the various book piles I have amassed knows that gene is mightily expressed in me. My love of unreleased Beatles was something more difficult to explain.

By the time I was ten or so–that would’ve been 1979–I had determined I would become a writer. I wanted to be as popular as possible, so I turned to the Beatles for instruction. If you were training to be an artist, I thought, why not pick the most successful ones in history? So I didn’t just listen to a bootleg, I studied it, like a Rabbi-in-training studies the Talmud. I would compare the unused take to the final, trying to tweeze out all the decisions that had been made. What made this shabby-sounding track into a masterpiece? How did they do it?

Forty-five years later and a finished product–for better and worse–I still find myself doing this on the rare occasions that I listen to some unreleased Beatles on YouTube. How did the guys do it? How can I do it myself?

Of such things, editors are born.