Top 10 Bootleg Presses through History

Music on Ribs is our top pick for the most interesting bootleg records of all time, and we think you’ll quickly see why! Originating from the Soviet Union in the 50’s and 60’s, a time in which many types of music were banned from broadcast and distribution, birthed the first rib records. 

These bootlegs are created by pressing music onto X-rays bought or taken from the bins in hospitals, in place of the regular vinyl records we are used to. Hospitals were required to dispose of x-rays after a year because they were considered a fire risk – this lead to a consistent supply. It was necessary to print on x-rays because the state controlled all the means of manufacturing music and raw material supply. 

There was a black market for real copies of banned records, but these were extremely sought after and became extremely rare and valuable. So, a need for cheaper alternatives arises – and so ribs records were born.

This is one of the few examples where an artist has actually condoned and encouraged the creation of bootleg records for their own work. King Gizzard released this record under an open-source license, which meant that all the master tapes and files were uploaded to the band's website, free for anyone to use for any means. 

Through this, the band encouraged their fan base to create their own versions of the record. They even said “Ever wanted to start your own record label? GO for it! Employ your mates, press wax, pack boxes. We do not own this record. You do. Go forth, share, enjoy.”

A couple of our favourite presses include this multi-coloured vinyl pressing which also includes alternate artwork, as well as this version printed to a floppy disk, which also included a fan-made video game!

Released in July 1969, the bootleg Great White Wonder was pressed and distributed by two Los Angeles-based record business hustlers, Dub Taylor and Ken Douglas, who went on to become the biggest players in the bootleg market. The album set a high-quality benchmark for bootlegs with great music and good audio. Like almost all bootlegs of the early 1970s, it came in a white cardboard sleeve with a rubber-stamped title but no artist name. The most talked-about G.W.W. tracks were those recorded with The Band in 1967, which were not officially released until 1975, as part of The Basement Tapes.

One of the most widely circulated of The Velvet Underground’s bootlegs is also one of the most enjoyable, not to mention one of the better-sounding, as it was recorded by a professional engineer (for personal use, with the band’s permission). Several of these cuts, along with some from San Francisco’s Matrix, were officially issued on the fabulous 1969 Velvet Underground Live double LP in 1974. Another example of how bootleg didn’t mean poor quality! This bootleg was numbered and limited to 2000 copies and came pressed on blue vinyl, making it a rather valuable record.

A huge number of Led Zeppelin’s performances were bootlegged, however, and this 1977 Los Angeles date (featuring a guest appearance by Keith Moon) stands out from the rest. The album title comes from the band’s name for groupies, which Robert Plant frequently references between songs. Led Zeppelin’s notoriously thuggish manager, Peter Grant, made no distinction between home-tapers and bootleggers. Anyone found recording gigs was threatened or roughed up and had their equipment taken, and if Grant found band bootlegs in a record store he would demand they were handed over there and then, or else.

Making an effort to revive the group again after the difficult sessions a year earlier for The Beatles creating the White Album, The Beatles began rehearsing, with a film crew in tow, and trying everything from old rock and roll to new numbers such as Paul McCartney’s piano boogie “Get Back.” The sessions were recorded in full, and they were even tenser than the White Album’s. 

“I had thought it would be good to let the shitty version out because it would break the Beatles, break the myth,” John Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1971, calling it “the shittiest load of badly recorded shit, with a lousy feeling toward it, ever.” Phil Spector’s cleaned-up versions became Let It Be in 1970, but these two eight-CD bootleg sets offer a far more complete picture.

This is generally considered to be the first-ever live rock bootleg, recorded professionally for later radio broadcasts. Live’r Than You’ll Ever Be was recorded on a concealed tape machine during the Stones’ November 1969 US tour, and the album was on the market, in a stamped white sleeve, within a month of the show. “The way to kill the new live Stones album would be to release a similar LP that was even better,” Greil Marcus noted in Rolling Stone; the band issued Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! from the same tour, a few months later.

Rolling Stone magazine’s contemporaneous review called the bootleg “the ultimate Rolling Stones album.”

The Black Album was originally planned as the follow-up to Sign o’ the Times, but replaced by Lovesexy, however, Prince cancelled this a week before its scheduled release in late 1987. Due to benign cancelled so close to release, several hundred promos were already in circulation, from which various bootleg editions were made over the next couple of years. The album was only officially released in limited edition in November 1994, when Warner Bros offered a free copy of the record to the first 1000 people who sent back their bootlegs.

As for why Prince pulled the record, he allegedly had a crisis of faith brought on by being slipped a dose of Ecstasy. “I suddenly realized that we can die at any moment,” he later told an interviewer. “And we’d be judged by the last thing we left behind. I didn’t want that angry bitter thing to be the last thing.” So he had Warner Bros. destroy 500,000 already pressed copies, but it was too late for the promos which were already in public hands.

Mystery Box is a 1986 bootleg consisting of ten (ten!) albums. The material featured everything from pieces recorded at St. Mary’s College in Claremont, California, to performances on Mike Douglas and SNL and covering many more live dates as well as alternate studio takes and rehearsals. Zappa despised bootlegs and fought back against them himself in 1991 with Beat the Boots, a box that re-bootlegged existing bootlegs, artwork and all.

This bootleg is an unofficial bootleg compilation of the early recordings of Pink Floyd, which featured recordings unavailable on the albums released in the US. Unlike other bootleg Pink Floyd records, this album was entirely made up of recordings that had at least one commercial release. The name parodies The Dark Side of the Moon, the band's most commercially successful album, and the front cover of Atom Heart Mother, which featured a cow.

The bootleg was created by an anonymous label known as "Trixie Records" by a bootlegger known as "Richard", and to avoid detection by authorities, used an early name for the group, "The Screaming Abdabs" on the record label. "Richard" created the bootleg because he was frustrated at the amount of material that had been released by the band but had not found its way onto any widely available album, even compilations such as Relics, or even seen a US release. He said that a key motivation for creating it was the album cover, which he created using his own photograph of a cow in a field.

Do you own any of these records, or is there another one you'd like to share?

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