Almost every record collector has one thing on his shelf: a bootleg. At first, the manufacturers and sellers of unauthorized studio and concert recordings were washing their way through loopholes in the Code. But the record industry and the artists it represented quickly declared war on the hustle and bustle to recover lost profits. 50 years ago "Great White Wonder" was released, a double LP with songs by Bob Dylan: the first bootleg in rock history. The news spread rapidly, first on the west coast of the USA, then throughout the country: a new Dylan album, the cover completely in white, was on the market. However, this did not come from Columbia Records, where Dylan was under contract. What lay there in the record shops in July 1969 and was sold openly went down in rock history as the first bootleg under the name "Great White Wonder".
The two vinyl discs also had white labels at first. The pieces on pages 1 and 3 had already been recorded by the young Robert Zimmermann in December 1961 in the apartment of a school friend, on page 2 there were some studio outtakes. The greatest interest, however, was the seven titles on the fourth page: Dylan had recorded them with The Band in the summer of 1967 and, like everything that could be heard on "Great White Wonder", had not been released by the master before (exception: "Man Of Constant Sorrow"). But there was soon a special version of "I Shall Be Released" by The Band on their debut "Music From Big Pink" and a very strong version of "This Wheel's On Fire" by British singer Julie Driscoll with Brian Auger And The Trinity; the group Manfred Mann made "Mighty Quinn" a worldwide success.
What Dylan hadn't expected: His fans absolutely wanted to hear the original versions of these songs, as they formed something like a bridge between the material of "Blonde On Blonde" (1966) and the "acoustic bob" of "John Wesley Harding" (1967). When the "Rolling Stone" released a cover story about "The Missing Bob Dylan Album" in June 1968 and demanded: "Bob Dylan's basement tape should be released", the anticipation was great. But Columbia didn't think about releasing the material, and the musician himself became a country bob with "Nashville Skyline". Against this background and because of the lax copyright laws in the states, this was practically an invitation to future pirates to take things into their own hands.
From radio to the world
The recordings from 1967 on "Great White Wonder" came from an acetate with 14 tracks, some of which were made famous by pirate radio stations on the West Coast; the songs, recorded on the radio, spread at lightning speed. So Ken Douglas and "Dub" Taylor, employees of a record wholesaler in L.A., came across the unpublished material. Taylor: "In a store we returned tapes - I think Donovan's - that hadn't sold, and took those Dylan tapes with us instead." An acquaintance of Douglas provided them with the start-up capital with which they had 1000 double LPs pressed. The employee of a branch of the underground magazine "Los Angeles Free Press" included the "new edition" in her assortment and suggested the name which became a trademark: The bootleg was born.
The commercial success surprised even the makers. Taylor: "At first we didn't even know what we got into." With "Trademark Of Quality", abbreviated TMOQ, the two founded their own bootleggabel and released a series of concert recordings as the first "Live'r Than You'll Ever Be", recorded with Sennheiser microphone and Uher tape during the Rolling Stones' '69 US tour. Although Columbia Records tried to put the Dylan-Bootleggers on a leash legally, they had to realize that it wasn't that easy. The artist's name wasn't on the cover and labels, Dylan hadn't had his arrangements of the pieces recorded in 1961 (most traditionals) protected, and he wasn't signed to CBS at the time of recording. Above all, however, copyright law in the states protected the sound sequence of a piece of music, but not its public performance.
Unauthorized recordings of concerts by Dylan, the Stones and Led Zeppelin found their way from the states to Europe in the dozen. Under the shaky headline "Underground raubt Dylan" the "Westfälische Rundschau" reported on Whitsun 1970 about the "not quite legal doing" of German record dealers, while "Die Zeit" wrote about "Die Topstars der Popmusik auf amerikanischen Raubplatten". One of the European bootleg centres was Amsterdam. There, resourceful people quickly found out that it was much more lucrative to make blackpresses yourself than to import them from the USA for horrendous sums. In 1970 there was already a Dutch counterpart to "Great White Wonder" ("Little White Wonder", Hobo Records). The sound quality was underground, as with many pirated copies, but the buyers were satisfied: On their turntables rotated in the studio not subsequently processed and thus, in their opinion, unadulterated recordings.
