Word: bootleged
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...Charles G. Hurst Jr.-yet. He is a high school dropout who was a husband and father at 15. He has been a boxer, ditch digger, janitor, foundry hand and crane operator, and has served four months and 14 days in a North Carolina jail for being caught with bootleg liquor. Now 43, he delivers evangelistic speeches to his student body, garbed in dashikis, while from a gold chain around his neck hangs a carved African-style tiki in the form of a clenched fist...
...Today," says Rock-Concert Producer Dennis Wilen, "any kid can take his tape recorder to a Rolling Stones performance and become a millionaire." Bootlegging-the production and sale of records by black-market operators -is easy. Enough of it is going on that record-industry executives are in a spin. Perhaps one out of every four stereo tapes sold in the U.S. is a bootleg, turned out by somebody who simply copied the original. According to industry estimates, bootlegging costs the recording companies, music publishers and artists as much as $100 million yearly in lost sales and royalties. Except...
...most common bootleg victims are front-running artists: Bob Dylan, The Band, Jefferson Airplane-any star or group whose name alone is worth fat sales. The practice has long been a problem (Frank Sinatra records were bootlegged in the '40s), but technology has only recently made it attractive to young entrepreneurs. A variety of tape copiers, from $40 recorders to $100,000 stereo duplicating systems, can turn out cartridges, cassettes or reel-to-reel tapes, usually in less time than it takes to listen to them. Music-trade publications and underground newspapers carry ads for the machines, and many...
Sonic Treasures. The audio quality of bootlegs ranges from good to nearly unintelligible, but demand is soaring, partly because prices are usually about half as high as for legitimate recordings. Some sonic treasures can be found only on a certain type of bootleg, the so-called "underground" variety, which is put together from snippets of previously unpublished rehearsal tapes, live concerts and even radio broadcasts. The classic example is Great White Wonder, a hot seller that was made up of unused Bob Dylan tapes, some of which Dylan fans claim had been stolen from the basement of his Woodstock home...
Uncle Wiggly offers his customers a selection of twelve records, with the guarantee of a new title every six weeks. "Right now we're working on a Janis Joplin album that's going to be the biggest bootleg ever," he says. "We're taking orders, and then we're going to deliver them all in the same 24-hour period. You see, if we don't do it that way, somebody will get hold of an early copy, duplicate it and start competing with us." One of his worst problems, he notes, is bootlegging...