I can remember mine like it was yesterday. I walked into this small hole in the wall used record store looking for anything new by Prince. To my knowledge I had everything Prince ever put on CD and wax. As I walked up to the counter I asked the woman working the register if Prince had any new maxi-singles out. She pointed me in the direction of the usual weak Prince section and said, "Check it out."
I explained to her in my best I have everything and you don't have as much as me, proud to be a walking Prince music encyclopedia voice, that I had all that stuff. As I was talking loud and saying nothing she revealed a portion of the glass counter that she was leaning on. She then coyly said to me "Do you have these?" Within the the glass case there were 3 purple jewel cases with pictures of Prince on them! and they appeared to have album titles on them too! All I could say was "err uh", "err uh." All the while thinking to myself WTF!? Those can't be real! and they can't have real Prince music on them! She let me take a listen, and they were real. Crystal Ball, Crucial and Cookie Jar. I couldn't believe what I was hearing so I asked her how these could get out without getting any publicity. She leaned over to me and said "ssshhh! They're bootlegs!" I replied "Boot what!?" "and why are you whispering?" Boy did I almost blow that. Those were sure some good times, music overload! Reading the topic on 12' records and extended remixes brought back this memory and I was a little curious about what other Prince.org members experiences were like.

my first boot was the original Wonderboy-set. I paid a lot of money for it...in fact more than 100 Deutschmarks....it was worth it at the time

I had never heard a bootleg when a friend introduced me to Small Club.

Prince performs "Just My Imagination".

That BLEW ME AWAY!!!!!

Great thread! I was in one of those marketplaces where there are a bunch of different stalls, and in this one stall they had about 15 Prince bootlegs! The packaging was dodgy but so exciting! I managed to talk my parents into buying me one, it was $50 ($100 for the double disc sets). It was Le Bataclan. I didn't realise it was live (or at least, an audience recording), so I was disappointed with the quality, but I ended up listening to it a million times! Loved the extended versions of Days of Wild and Now, including the references to Hair and Babies Making Babies. I went and bought some Sly and the Family Stone records after that. The next time I went back (my parents began to dread these trips) I got The Jewel Box 1. 3 cd's of awesome unreleased stuff, I was in heaven! Some of those songs are my favourites to this day, and I'm so glad Prince has released some in better quality!

I have never had a bootleg experience.

In the car with my friend, 1988, never even knew bootlegs existed. she grabs a tape and says she wants me to hear a song:

New gold huh?
Did you buy it?
Yeah Right
You're seeing that bitch motherfucker again...

Me: WHO IS THAT?!

her Prince!

Me


Imagine how shocked I truly was over that shit

my first was probably a cassette bootleg of the black album (of course) that a friend of mine let me listen to during my freshman year of college. back then i lived in smalltown indiana, so i might have heard about some of the bootleggage going around, but i never figured i'd ever have the resources to ever HEAR any of these bootlegs (this was before the interwebs, young'uns) so meeting a new friend who actually had a copy of a copy of a copy of the black album was a pretty big deal to me at the time.

THEN i discovered the guy in the dorm across the hall from me was a prince freak, and he had assorted studio outtakes and some concert recordings, which he copied for me. i nearly lost my mind.

and THEN, i discovered the local campus hippie wrecka stow, where i found a 5 album vinyl box set of "Family Jewels" demos and outtakes. i grabbed that one right up and bought a few other bootleg albums on vinyl in the following months.

no matter what may or may not come my way via mp3 these days, nothing is gonna be as special as the vinyl bootleggage i got way back in the day.

Mine was the 85 "From now till 1999" 12".

First pressed boot I believe.

Mine was in 1989. A friend of mine in college had "The Black Album" and "Charade" on tape cassette. He charged $20 dollars to make a dub of the tape.
He made a ton of money that semester!!!!!

My only experience was not even knowing "Yellow," was a bootleg when I bought it...It was on the Import shelf for 8 dollars...

Tame said:

Its such a great disc, I bet you thought it was a new album for ages!?

My first bootleg experience was in the early 90's. A girl I was involved with at the time had gotten a hold of a copy of Crystal/Black Album. She brought it over to my house and gave it to me. Then she wanted to make out. I remember trying to rush through it so I could hear the music.

20 years ago listening to Tricky on a cassette tape.

What's almost even more amazing is all of the boots that I haven't heard. Yellow, Tricky, Charade, From now to 1999 12",Small Club and Wonder Boy set? They were VERY expensive and it was hard to keep up. 50 dollars a pop in 1990, that was some serious bread!
How does one man do all that, I guess his toothbrush really does vibrate when he brushes his teeth. I remember Bataclan, they put out some good quality boots. I remember Just my Imagination's guitar solo and Prince's sirene voice in that performance was really nice. It took me a while to catch on to what bobgeorge was doing(No no, No no, the reddish brown one) but once I did I had a new appreciation for Prince's humor (For someone who can't stand tv dinners, you surely eat enough of them mothafuckas) LOL. Damn it was nice to be just begining my journey with Prince! We were spoiled in a good way. I envy the new Prince fan, they have so much to explore. I wonder what their outlook is on Prince's music now, opposed to what they've heard or have from the past. I wonder which era of Prince's music entertains them the most.
[Edited 5/20/09 19:43pm]

I worked in a cool little used record store during my junior and senior years of high school. We got an insane employee discount, and our boss let us take 5 used items home at a time to copy, so my library mushroomed in just a few months. I quickly amassed every available Prince and Prince-related release known to me. I thought I was the !@#$

One night, a couple walked into the store and started to flip through the stacks. I saw them in the Prince section, excited to find 12" extended versions of readily available stuff. The Prince snob in me immediately decided they weren't worth my time. Well... after a few minutes, the guy audibly gasped and yelled, "THE BLACK ALBUM!!!" I had no idea we had a copy! At that point they were pretty scarce, and that dude must've dropped about $100 for that thing... happily.

I was DEVASTATED! My boss told me he had no idea when we'd get another copy, so for a good month I walked around like I'd suffered some sort of miscarriage.

One evening, I arrived at the store after school, and a superior co-worker -- some bonged-out, sexually frustrated college dude named Dave-- flashed 2 copies of the Black Album at me! BUT... just to be a jerk, he invoked a policy we never typically honored: Customers get first dibs.

All evening I watched the Prince section, and I almost died when a customer bought one of the two copies! When closing time came, I pounced on the second copy. I had to borrow money from my dad to buy it. He looked at me like I was crazy when I asked for $60 (employee discount) for a "damned record," but for whatever reason he coughed it up.

I treated that thing like it was an ancient papyrus. The sound quality was crap, but I didn't care because I'd found what at that time was the Holy Grail.

And I was the !@#$ again.

Geez, all those emoticons... I never realized how much of an emotional roller coaster early record collecting was.

Vendetta1 said:

Tricky was a B-side not a boot

IAintTheOne said:

unless it was a demo version with prince doing vox...?

Hmmmm that sounds almost like my first boot experience, and i happen to be a Taurian also - there was no turning back after that

Taurus said:

Yellow

Anxiety said:

dont think one exists

It was an Orger, who was around way before an internet or Prince.org, that I knew in the Navy. He gave me my first copy of The Black Album in 1987 or 1988. It was hissy, and at least a 3rd generation or 4th, but it was awesome.

Later, in about 1993, the first time I really got into boots, I bought Prince In Rock, and LURVED it. I then bought VHS tapes for The Beautiful Experience, Glam Slam birthday party (which was apparently taped over the Tonya Harding honeymoon video because there was a lot of her in a wedding dressing being violated by some dude's hand at the end of the tape), The Sacrifice of Victor, and other stuff.

Then when Napster hit...it was over. I took EVERYTHING I could find.

1989
The Black Album on cassette
Price: $7 dollars

1998, the Crucial album, demo cd for radio stations, somehow it was handed to me from a friend when I was in college... loved it! After that I met a guy who had all sorts of tapes, it was amazing, he gave me everything, said he's already made copies of them. That dude was f'n cool!

Trojan Horse...

1986 - I answered an ad in the back of rolling stone magazine saying it had unreleased prince songs. The woman that replied to me was Linda Everett (I think she later was part of Controversy Magazine or somethin) and she lived in 99 Palms Califormia. I paid (GLADLY, btw ) FIFTY dollars for a scratched-up and battered cassette tape that had shit-quality Purple rain and Parade outtakes. By the time I made it to "others here with us" on the tape I was a leveled mess and there was no turning back. I then sold my ass to come up with another fifty bucks for 1999 outtakes.


.
[Edited 5/20/09 21:52pm]

Hmmmm...I think it was 1990-91-ish. It was a small indie recordstore called "Discs" in a little strip mall thing next to the old Shakey's Pizza (gawd I miss Shakey's ). They had a whole little shelf of just Prince boots. I bought the only one I had the cash for at the time, Possessed. A few weeks later I went back and bought Uncut Diamonds. The next time I tried to go there, they had closed down

MantuaPharoah said:

They actually played that song on the radio here. It was a community radio station, WORT, and there was this one DJ who was a Prince fan (he even called his radio show Pop Life).

my first was in 1988:

The Black Album( Tape, vinyl, and finally on cd),
Small Club (vinyl and cd),
Lovesexy live Dortmund (cd)

Nikademus said:

Hmmm. 1992?