The Curious Case of the Bootleg Beauties: 2010

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Fjord Pleasure

Here is an album with the single worst pun in the universe as a title. GROAN!

This is an interesting compilation. It combines ten tracks from an (edited) radio broadcast with nine audience-recorded tracks from an earlier concert, both in Oslo in 2000. The design is by "opd" and this was traded and treed on the Avalon mailing list and, ideally, would never be sold. I do like the way that opd used the inside of the front to provide a translation of the announcer's opening chat and interstitials. Unfortunately, this is an old, low-quality scan of my printout of this CD-R, and I do not have original artwork files to share.

Flesh + Blood Live

More very interesting work from Strimpldisc, taking a crop from the Flesh + Blood cover art and turning it into something quite odd and different. Despite a flaw in the track list ("Love is A Drug"?), I like the layout and wouldn't mind hearing this one. I don't think that Roxy did "Over You" all that often.

Edizioni di Milano

Hmmmm. Good eye, awkward hands? I assume this was assembled for private trading. I do like the layout, but there's a lot of image stretching and artifact issues with the images, making this something of a well-intentioned failure. Nice choice of fonts, anyway.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Birthday

I think that whomever designed this got bored halfway through. It looks like they had a good idea for the front cover (it's from the "Kiss and Tell" video) and a notion that they should credit the musicians and... they petered out. Was somebody screaming on the telephone at them to get finished because the mailing list tree wouldn't wait one more second?

Live at Crystal Palace

One of just a handful of audience tapes from that first tour to circulate, this wasn't designed by anybody who had any sense of design or skills at PhotoShop. Just plain awful.

Cry in Your Cognac

I love how this one says that it was recorded on May 2nd or May 3rd. It was one or the other, anyway. Distributed by Ennui Records around 2001, I don't have a back cover for it.

Beacon Theatre

This is some artwork made by the taper of this show for his own copy, and shared with the people with whom he swapped it. I always like it when artwork from a concert poster is incorporated into these sleeves.

Cap d'Agde

"Old school" fan art makes it onto a sleeve! This is something I found attached to a very recent download of Roxy's 1982 show in Cap d'Agde. This show has also been seen to circulate on Ace Bootlegs's Les Arenes.

Boston 76

Found this one online while "researching" (ba-hyuk!) this project...

I'm amused by things like this... I know there are several sleeves for this, and other shows that were made ages ago, already. Does the current generation of fans just not know about them, or would they rather make their own?

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

The Avalon Ballroom

I love the cheek of calling this collection by this name. If you happened to be a grouchy manager-type who didn't like fan trading and you wanted to know where the heck this came from, and you also knew that there was a mailing list called Avalon...

Anyway, this is the same concept as the later double-disc As the World Turns, only done as a single disc and, I think, using only the handful of radio shows as the sources for the lineup. It actually repeats three performances from the earlier All Styles Served Here 2, suggesting that just because a mailing list can get behind a fan trading project, it doesn't necessarily follow that all its members have to agree on what the heck should go into it.

As with most of the mailing list trees spearheaded by the older, British fans, this was passed along with a sense of "official secrets act" plausible deniability and no names attached. The project coordinator and artwork designer are, unsurprisingly, anonymous.

BBC Sessions

Here's somebody else's take on First Kiss, turning the project from a sale bootleg by Gold Standard into a fan compilation by omitting the Old Grey Whistle performances. I occasionally saw notes that the sound quality on this collection was better than on First Kiss but never had a copy to compare them.

At the Pavilion

I really like this design that I did. The problem was that a certain so-called Mechanibax passed along a tape of Roxy's 2001 DC show with apologies for the damage to two tracks. For the resulting album, tracks were inserted from Strimpldisc's recording of the first night in NYC three days later.

The cover photo was from Vanity Fair's 2001 "The Music Issue." It's one of my all-time favorite pics of Bry and I think it makes a darn good album cover. Here, I inverted the usual album tradition and put Bry on the front and a girl - Milla Jovovich, I think - on the back. Turns out this is one of my favorite designs, in part because of the unintentional match in tone and shade between the two images. It's a design that required minimal fiddling.

All Styles Served Here

A pair of fan-made compilations that made the rounds in 1999-2000 for free trading. These are unfortunately of low enough resolution to make any print job look awful, but, except for that second back cover, they are - I believe - the originals. Other fans, notably Patrick Victoria, made new versions, because 72 dpi text is unreadable!

Among other highlights, ASSH1 contains Bry's great two songs from Saturday Night Live in 1987. I liked the '88 Bete Noire tour, but how much more damn terrific would those shows have been had he gone out with Johnny Marr and the SNL house band? That "Right Stuff" kicks all kinds of butt. And on ASSH2, there are six songs from one of Bry's 1994 shows in Los Angeles. This whole show, professionally recorded, is out there separately. These are the six songs broadcast on some radio show or other, possibly King Biscuit.

Out of the Sky Came the Sun

This is another one that I did anonymously.

Earlier in the blog, I mentioned that a copy of Laughing Cow Records's bootleg of Roxy's 2001 Atlanta show had been purchased, by a fellow fan, from a record store in Marietta. She wanted to redistribute it but wanted new artwork and asked me to take it from there.

What I didn't mention earlier is that Laughing Cow's copy of Atlanta show, despite its slack set list, is, by a nose, the best-quality "audience" tape from this tour. It was suggested that it's an "ALD" tape, though at least one fan disputed that. Whichever, it was definitely a tape that deserved to circulate. I suggested using the same picture of Bry that Laughing Cow had used on the front cover, just in case the Laughing Cow guys ever saw it and were amused or annoyed by my cheek. The Atlanta skyline is disagreeably low-res, but was the best that I had available at the time. Back cover photos were from Phil's site.

There is, incidentally, another audience tape of this show, distributed (and allegedly taped) by Breadfruit Obsauditory. It goes by the name Downs 'Outh and is of much lower quality than Cow's. It also contains far too many drunken season-ticket yahoos from the table next to the taper. If you live in the area and know that this was recorded at Chastain Park, you probably aren't too shocked to read that.

1982 Tour Rehearsals

Found this one while doing a little research. This isn't the only sleeve out there with Dita von Teese as the cover model.

Admittedly, this is not a recording that I've heard, but I couldn't imagine it being all that entertaining until I saw the track list. I mentioned previously that the 1982-83 tour was my least favorite Roxy tour, in part because of the tired set list and in part because, from the tapes available, if they were giving 100% every night, something was making 100% a little rough going. (Except Glasgow '82 - that show was awesome.) On the other hand, they rehearsed both "More Than This" and "The Space Between," neither of which were present on any night that I heard, and either one would have spiced that lazy tour up considerably.

Anyway, not a bad sleeve, and Dita is a terrific choice for a cover model - a helluva better choice than Kate Moss, I'd say - but she looks downright creepy in that front cover photo.

Friday, September 17, 2010

Live in Tokyo 1979

There's no credit on it, but I am pretty sure I remember this being a Reklaw Record, and I think it's terrific. They did a great job using the images of both variants of the Manifesto sleeve - clothed and nude - and using that great promotional photo of the 1979 lineup. I remember being quite envious that I didn't come up with it.

Les Arenes

Here's an interesting surprise that I turned up researching this blog. Turns out I was wrong, and people still make CD-R artwork.

Case in point: Here's an album of Roxy performing in 1982 in Cap d'Agde, France on the Avalon tour that was not generally circulating while I was active in fandom. The sleeve is by Ace Bootlegs, who assembled artwork at least from 2007 to 2009. There are certain standards to Ace's design, including the stock green background to the rear cover and a little inset detail from the Avalon cover.

Ace picks some pretty good cover models, but this would have been greatly improved, to my eye, if he reversed the image so that the model's face was on the front cover, and put the name ROXY MUSIC on the same panel as her face. Also, the text on the spine is upside down. Still, Ace has a better eye than most. I'll find a few more before I'm done.

Living Just For Fun

This is a Mr. Monopoly design. Nothing memorable; it's one of the Mamouna single sleeves tinted rose. Many other designers have tackled this show as well. Never seen a sale copy.

Hello Glasgow!

I only have the front cover to this. It is Ennui Records' take on the third (?) Roxy appearance on The King Biscuit Flower Hour.

There is some conflicting information out there about this broadcast. Apparently it contains eight songs, some of which were recorded in July 1980 in Glasgow, and some of which were recorded by the BBC at Wembley Arena in London for a different broadcast, which you can find on CD-R under the title In the Dread of Night and on vinyl as The Best is Yet to Come.

This and other KBFH shows have made their way to several different bootlegs thanks to overlap between King Biscuit's large fanbase and Roxy's smaller one, but it looks like these have all been freely swapped CD-Rs and tapes, and never sold.

First Kiss

Here is another group's take on Gold Standard's First Kiss.

This really isn't a good sleeve at all; it looks like somebody's idea of what a Roxy Music sleeve should look like after they heard about it on the radio. It just fails on every level, especially the documentation. Why does this not contain details on when these BBC sessions were recorded and who the musicians at each were? I like some of the other Patrick Victoria Records, but this one is lousy.

Jubilee

Here's an anonymously-made sleeve for one of the Frantic FM broadcasts.

No comments other than that I like it. It's the same show as In Days Gone By with one less bonus track. Good work, whomever did it.

Wild Weekend / A Wilder Weekend

This one has another silly explanation.

Wild Weekend was a Siren-tour boot released by Scorpio Records and it got pretty heavy distribution. I saw it at close to a dozen different shops across the southeast. The problem was that it was taken from an FM broadcast with a little static and interference in a couple of places.

A few years later, a better copy of the FM master, not a copy from the broadcast, was sourced. This went into distribution with a fan in the DC area creating an amusingly revised cover. Unfortunately, neither my scan of the front nor the back are worth a darn. The back's just filled with artifacts and there should be an interior photo to go with the front. Any upgrades out there? Surely somebody can put the Scorpio CD on a flatbed and scan it at 600 dpi... we didn't all pass up on the silver CD because we had a CD-R at home, did we?

As for the original image, yeah, that's the band in front of one of those beautifully tacky old Holiday Inn signs adapted for the cover. The original picture might have first appeared in the pages of the cheeky American rock magazine Creem.

Twin Disc from Twin Cities

Here's a case where Mr. Monopoly barged in and made a new back cover for somebody else's show. It was one of those less inspiring mid-USA shows without the the four "sometimes played" songs that everybody wanted to hear (Seriously, it's lacking "If There is Something" AND "Mother of Pearl" AND "Virginia Plain" AND "More Than This"...? Does Minneapolis have a curfew?), but the taper's skill in getting a good recording was... not matched by their design skills. With the taper's permission, Mr. Monopoly made a new back cover with the thanks of a grateful ego.

Golders Green

This is a CD-R bootleg found in an Atlanta (Norcross) record store and purchased for $15.

I thought I might know who Dorian Graey was, but I'm not sure. They did CD-R bootlegs for several other artists, most notably Frank Zappa, and, as I'll come back to in some other entry, their stuff occasionally still turns up in area record stores.

Note the catalog number. Was this Dorian Graey's first release?

(Actually, the thing that Mr. Monopoly thought was a rotten jawdropper was seeing that catalog number while at the same time he was trying to do a CD club with the name POPocalypse. The POPocalypse CD club ended after 14 releases when Mr. Monopoly and his then-wife Tatiana separated, but there are Dorian Graey Zappa CDs out there numbered upwards of 20. Whomever was behind Dorian Graey, they like Zappa. Mr. Monopoly does not like Zappa. That should settle any suspicion.)

Live 2001

This is an anonymous design for a single-disc compilation of material from two sources.

What an odd little collection. It's eleven songs from Sydney and the five songs from the band's appearance on Top of the Pops 2 that predated the tour.

I don't have any information about this disc or the design, except that I don't think much of that cheesy airbrush girl on the front, and I might consider killing a man to get that jacket Bry's wearing on the interior shot of him, Phil and Andy.

This disc was spotted on eBay a few times in 2001-02.

Archive Volume Three

This is the third, and believed to be last, of Omnibus's Archive series.

The model on this record appears to be fetish model Lydia "Ivy" West. She would appear on the other two volumes of the Archive series. Where Omnibus sold or traded their wares, I do not know.

Volume one was a Country Life show, volume two was a Siren show and this third one is from Manifesto. I hold some small hope that one day I'll learn that Omnibus did a fourth album, a Flesh + Blood show with this girl on the front!

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