[alsetmusic]

This is one of the best things I've read about in a bit. It wasn't uncommon to buy marked-up (overpriced) bootlegs of live performances on CDs in the 90s. You never knew in advance if it'd be a quality recording or total garbage. We've lost that.

I still love when one of my live bootlegs of Faith No More comes on with them doing (sometimes mocking) parodies of popular music (their rendition of Nothing Compares to You by Sinead OConnor has been in my head as I type this). When I got to see them in 2010 (I think) they were true to form and played a bunch of short (reinterpretations) covers and it was one of the best aspects of the show. And I still have a Mr Bungle bootleg with them covering Existential Blues by Tom "T-Bone" Stankus (I always thought it was Doctor Demento's Wizard of Oz until just now when I looked it up).

How would you even know about these awesome gems without bootlegs or access to see all their live shows? YouTube is less likely to capture an entire show than a clip, whereas the bootlegs were typically the full show. There are probably areas of the internet where this stuff gets shared and traded, but having it in my local music shop meant everyone had access without requiring special knowledge.

I just did two searches, one Google and one Kagi, and neither turned up the FNM Nothing Compares to You. Who knows how many copies of it exist in the world. If my music library gets nuked, who will even know about it? I think I'm gonna start uploading my bootleg recordings of live shows to IA.

[tuumi]

I remember this too. Those bootlegs were $30 each and my friend group was really into Pearl Jam. If I remember correctly a lot of these were made out of Italy. In college (maybe late 90s) I somehow managed to come up with $500 to buy a CD burner. I would make copies of these bootlegs and sell to friends for $10. I couldn't keep up and made my money back to pay for the burner relatively quickly. I think I was even able to find some to download then burning saving me the $30 at the record store. I made my own funny CD covers. Once I got my money back for the CD burner I just asked for the cost of the Cds. Great trip down memory lane.

[alsetmusic]

> $30 each

Same in my town. For a 14 yo kid, that was a lot.

[roskelld]

Are you certain Faith No More did the cover? There's certainly a Mr. Bungle version [0] from a San Francisco gig in 1990. I remember grabbing this from the Bungle Fever FTP site back in around '99. I'd often download the bootlegs, burn them to audio CD and print out a cover of the gig poster if one was available.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTfSrUThyDk

[alsetmusic]

That's exactly the one I have! No surprise that it was mislabeled. Same vocalist, so that tended to happen before broadband was widely available. I even downloaded a song (Nebula) from Incubus's SCIENCE that was misattributed to Mr Bungle. To be fair, the singer plausibly could have been said to be doing a Mike Patton imitation.

Now that I think more about it, I must have got the track from a P2P service / network. But I had a bajillion Nirvana bootlegs when I was an adolescent. Thinking of the misnaming phenomenon, the hidden track (from Nevermind) was alternately named either "I Hate Myself and I Want to Die" or "I Love Myself and I Want to Live" on those live performances (after Cobain's suicide). 1990s and no or limited internet, so it was whatever someone decided.

Thanks for surfacing the track so readers can hear it! It's one of my favorites.

[roskelld]

Glad I could help! Your post gave me a walk down memory lane. I'd forgotten all about the trips I used to do to this local music store that carried bootlegs. The Nirvana section was substantial. I remember having a number of them with the mislabeled tracks, including the one you mentioned. I also picked up a few live show recordings that were unlistenable, though luckily the store accepted returns.

I found an archive of the full set that includes the Nothing Compares 2 U track. Seems that they opened the gig with the song [0]. There's a neat story in the link about the show and how this bootleg got around.

  Mr.Bungle
  Date: 1990-05-27
  Venue: (BBurnett) @The Full Moon Saloon, San Francisco, CA
  Recorded By: Sean Lyons
  Source: Sony Stereo Clip-On Mic > Cassette Walkman > audience master cassette > Tascam 3-head Professional Cassette Deck Model 130 > Tascam DA40 > Tascam CDRW5000 > Samplitude Professional 7.11

[0] https://archive.org/details/bungle1990-05-27.sony

[alsetmusic]

What a great link. FNM was the first band I loved that wasn't inherited from my older brothers. Patton remained my favorite artist for many years (still my favorite vocalist and I have tickets for one of his collaborations later this year). My music library is a little bit better because of this. Many thanks!

[thinkingtoilet]

Mike Patton loves pop music. Those covers were most likely not mocking anything. I love me some Faith No More but haven't heard them cover Nothing Compares 2 U (which is actually a Prince tune). I'll have to check it out.

EDIT: You weren't kidding. I can't find a cover of it. Please! Share it!

[acomjean]

FNM’s cover of the Commodore’s Easy is both ridiculous and sublime. Man they can play.

There was a good bbc show of theirs floating around on YouTube. The music is so intense that I feel these quieter pieces give one a chance to catch one’s breath.

[alsetmusic]

The EP's title was "Songs To Make Love To." My older brother had just taken me to my first concert when I spotted it in a music shop the next day. Patton would later go on to participate in a collaboration (Nathaniel Merriweather) titled "Lovage: Music To Make Love To Your Old Lady By." Absolute awesome.

Midnight Cowboy was on both StMLt and Angel Dust (which I wasn't allowed to own because of the Explicit Lyrics sticker at first. My father and mother argued about that. Thanks Dad!) What a great track for slowing down. The band wasn't just about heavy and dark tones, they also appreciated and could produce beautiful music. The fulness of the song really overwhelms me when the whole band kicks in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVLYa15xCEY

[alsetmusic]

See sibling comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47768467

[frereubu]

> You never knew in advance if it'd be a quality recording or total garbage.

I once bought a VHS recording of a Lemonheads gig after seeing them at the Glastonbury festival, guess it must have been around 1993, and in visual terms it was absolutely unwatchable - the camera wasn't still for a second - but probably pretty representative of what it was like to be there.

[kkkqkqkqkqlqlql]

If you really want to share it, how about torrenting it?

[CoffeeOnWrite]

IA makes the most sense in the spirit of preservation.

Etree (https://www.etree.org/ ) is the longest running torrent site for tapes. It looks like only about 5% of the hundred thousand torrents have any seeders at all. Not sure how reliable requesting a seed is. I’d expect long tail stuff to get “effectively lost”. Versus IA whose purpose and funding is preservation, in addition to sharing.

[Projectiboga]

This is a fun area, as the DMCA, for its flaws included a loophole for non-commercial distribution of live concert recordings. The only requirement is that it isn't an exact copy of a commercial release. I am not sure about the exact standards, as live albums often aren't the entire concert. Here are some other sites where people share these tapes.

http://www.thetradersden.org/

https://sugarmegs.org/

http://www.dimeadozen.org/

[anjel]

Sugarmegs is up and running for 30+ years now. I knew the guy who started it back then and he was a Sony employee who "inherited" a T-1 connection that Sony forgot they were paying for... At least for the first few years, when content streams were now profoundly ancient real audio files.

[HappMacDonald]

Etree is missing self-seed then. What if IA hosted torrents like Etree does but also self-seeded the content?

Thus they are encouraging amateur third parties to pick up some of the archival slack, that style of torrent could outlive IA in case anything happened to them, and it reduces some of their bandwidth costs

[charcircuit]

IA always does that. Every download page also links to a torrent. Is that not the same as what you want?

[HappMacDonald]

"Are you not entertained!?"

No, but that sounds good. :D