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Rock & Roll Bootleggers & other strange people

It started off, as with a lot of other innovations, with Bob Dylan. The whole thing was very simple; somebody had ripped off a number of old (and not so old) tapes of Dylan singing his own tunes and marketed them, in disc form, as The Great White Wonder!, a two record set in an all-white package.

November 1, 1969
Dave Marsh

Rock & Roll Bootleggers & other strange people

It started off, as with a lot of other innovations, with Bob Dylan. The whole thing was very simple; somebody had ripped off a number of old (and not so old) tapes of Dylan singing his own tunes and marketed them, in disc form, as The Great White Wonder!, a two record set in an all-white package. Literally, all white; no notes, no label, no words — white. Originally marketed on the West Coast black market several months ago, the Wonder made its Midwestern debut around four weeks back.

It’s a completely underground operation; the purchaser meets a middle-man, who sells him the records, money in front, flys the discs in from the coast and splits. No guarantees — half the.^ discs could be blank. The analogy between wholesale dope dealing and wholesaling bootleg records is near complete; the mystique of the whole trip is half its value.

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