I remember my first Prince bootleg. It was the 18th of July 1986 configuration of the album “Dream Factory”, a precursor to the masterpiece, “Sign O The Times”. I was still a new Prince fan. I had the hits on heavy rotation but I knew my purple-music journey was far from complete.

Of course, I was aware this was “Sign O The Times” era, so I expected something like the title track or “I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man”. After a short instrumental (“Visions”) and some heady introductory track, the screams of Prince with his many vocal abilities proclaim, “This is what it’s like in the Dream Factory!”. I knew within just seconds that this would be a very different experience from what I was familiar with.

Attitudes and reactions like that permeated the album from beginning to end, but there was something about the third track — “Train”. The pulsating bassline, the James Brown-style horns and those many vocal abilities just took my breath away. Even this early in my fandom and discovery of Prince’s catalogue, I held this rather obscure and unreleased track in such high regard, as something on the level of “Baby I’m A Star” or “Alphabet Street”.

https://thevioletreality....2aad200276

[Edited 3/15/18 21:33pm]

What's interesting in that article is that, as far as I know, no whole DF bootleg surfaced before the 2000 Thunderball recreation. By that time DF (the track) had already been released on CB, and Train had long been out on Mavis' first PP record, but it seems the writer first discovered those songs before they heard them on their respective official releases.

.

I wonder how many fans took that path. I myself heard only a few songs on boots before I heard the official version, I can think of Mindbells and Bliss only, though there probably were a few others. Then of course there were the songs we had on boots before they were officially released.

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The perception of P's music was often altered by those bootlegs.

.

Sometimes we were on the verge of trolling because of them: see the shit we gave Prince about the Joy In Repetition intro, when as far as we know the track was always meant to segue out of something else, namely The Ball, and who cares about a few seconds of intro when the song itself is so awesome.

.

Sometimes we were fooled by the chronology, complaining Prince had slaughtered the original 1986 recording of We Can Funk, until it was one day revealed that, well, no he hadn't, because the GB version was actually based on an earlier, 1983 recording, and the joke was on us.

.

Having heard most of Come and TGE long before either album was released, each and every one of us couldn't help at first being disappointed that such or such song we loved had been omitted in favor of such or such we didn't like as much, or liked better in a different form.

.

Both the 2009 rendition of In A Large Room With No Light and the 2011 rendition of Extraloveable were brutally harmed by the cult status of their unreleased precusors. Arguably, both songs would have been well received if we'd never heard the originals, but the new recordings, for all their qualities, were simply unable to compete with versions the fans had been cherishing for more than 2 decades. Their fate had to be the same as 1999: The New Master, even though they were supposed to be new to us.

.

Crystal Ball (the album) was probably the worst victim of bootlegging: it would probably have been well received had all this material been new to us, and had dozens of excellent other outtakes we'd rather have had on it instead of those Come/TGE-era tracks not been in circulation.

.

In the end, Prince bootlegs have at the same time done him a great service and a great disservice.

.

From TBA to Small Club and those other legendary recordings, they have played a great part in creating an aura of legend around Prince's music and his incredible rate of productivity. Masterpieces were revealed to have been unreleased, and the fact that fans could collect such a huge amount of bootlegs while waiting for the next official release (with an already very impressive official catalogue) involved us deeply in our passion, because for decades we could virtually get a new Prince album, official or unofficial, every other week.

Prince wouldn't be as legendary if no bootleg had ever surfaced.

.

On the other hand, access to all those unreleased recordings made us spolied brats in many aspects: every official live release was inevitably compared to "those better shows that should have been released instead", and our expectations regarding Prince's music became unreasonably biased by all those outtakes, with us forgetting that we weren't supposed to have heard of them in the first place, and constantly judging P's new releases not only by the standards of his past catalogue, but also by the standards of what was in the vault that we would have wanted instead of whatever was out. No matter what Prince would release, it would never be as good to us as All My Dreams, and many a fan would just think they'd rather have him release a compilation of 1986 outtakes instead of that new album... On the other hand, I can't help but wondering how our perception of his music would have been altered if outtakes had kept on leaking after 1995: there's a whole musical continent that remains hidden: 20 years of P's unreleased music that we have heard almost nothing of. Maybe our perception of P's new music would have been kinder, or more passionate, if outtakes had kept coming our way.

.

But in the end, as the article points out, for better or worse those recording have given us a unique perspective on Prince's creative process, allowing us to observe how songs and albums evolved for at least the first 17 years or so of P's career. Whatever happens with the vault and the estate in the future, bootlegs will have shaped the understanding and perception that we, contemporary Prince fans, had of Prince's music. Being a Prince fan in his lifetime would have been a completely different experience if not for the bootlegs. And I can't think of any other artist whose music's perception was so deeply affected by bootlegs.

[Edited 3/16/18 2:14am]

NorthC said:

I agree with databank, except for two little things: Crystal Ball wasn't well recieved, but that wasn't because the music wasn't new to us, but because as a compilation, it was a mess, throwing 80s and 90s, released and unreleased songs and remixes all together. And other artists whose reputation was heavily based on bootlegs are Frank Zappa, The Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan. His fans practically invented the bootleg record with Great White Wonder in 1969.

I didn't know boots were so important for Zappa, TGD and Dylan, thanks for the correction.

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As for Crystal Ball I think it was poorly received for many reasons, but as one orger once stated, it was panned more for what it wasn't than for what it was.

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It's a matter of personal appreciation of course, but I beg to disagree with it being a mess. It seems to be a mess but, against all odds, I find it to be incredibly well crafted as an ensemble. I find the sequencing, in particular, to be most effective, with songs flowing into each other very naturally despite the odd mix of 80's and 90's tracks that, indeed, sound very different. I'm pretty certain Prince gave a lot of thoughts to the sequencing. So IDK, I can feel why many people don't think it work, but I'm convinced there was a definite intent to make it work, and as far as I'm concerned it does wonderfully.

databank said:

Sometimes we were fooled by the chronology, complaining Prince had slaughtered the original 1986 recording of We Can Funk, until it was one day revealed that, well, no he hadn't, because the GB version was actually based on an earlier, 1983 recording, and the joke was on us.

.

Except that the released version was about 5% of the might of the full, original track.

.

Both the 2009 rendition of In A Large Room With No Light and the 2011 rendition of Extraloveable were brutally harmed by the cult status of their unreleased precusors. Arguably, both songs would have been well received if we'd never heard the originals,

.

Both would have never been released then if they hadn't been wildly popular leaks.

.

Crystal Ball (the album) was probably the worst victim of bootlegging: it would probably have been well received had all this material been new to us, and had dozens of excellent other outtakes we'd rather have had on it instead of those Come/TGE-era tracks not been in circulation.

.

So if it had been a mostly completely different album? CB was a failure because of a multitude of reasons. And again: that compilation wouldn't have existed if boots hadn't existed.

.

On the other hand, access to all those unreleased recordings made us spolied brats in many aspects: every official live release was inevitably compared to "those better shows that should have been released instead",

.

No, because his official live releases were often shite. Incompetently filmed, incompetently recorded, incompetently compiled. We want rawness, Prince gives us an edited and overdubbed lie.

databank said:

As for Crystal Ball I think it was poorly received for many reasons, but as one orger once stated, it was panned more for what it wasn't than for what it was.

.

It wasn't what it was advertised to be. And because the whole process of it was a bunch of lies, bullshit and hype. As so often, Prince overpromised and underdelivered. Housewifes were earning lotsa money through eBay stores, while Prince couldn't manages to do what bootleggers had been doing for years. Hell, he promised that the damn thing would be packaged as a ball, and instead we got a hockey puck where CDs were jammed in together and thus scratched and damaged.

Just a couple of paragraphs and already this article's author shows his ignorance. "Train" wasn't unreleased, it had been on Mavis Staples' first album on Paisley Park Records. TBA wasn't planned for release in "November 1987", its planned release date was 8 December 1987. It also wasn't "scraped", it was "scrapped". Hell, "someone would rid an entire album" is only approximately English.

BartVanHemelen said:

databank said:

As for Crystal Ball I think it was poorly received for many reasons, but as one orger once stated, it was panned more for what it wasn't than for what it was.

.

It wasn't what it was advertised to be. And because the whole process of it was a bunch of lies, bullshit and hype. As so often, Prince overpromised and underdelivered. Housewifes were earning lotsa money through eBay stores, while Prince couldn't manages to do what bootleggers had been doing for years. Hell, he promised that the damn thing would be packaged as a ball, and instead we got a hockey puck where CDs were jammed in together and thus scratched and damaged.

I'm glad I waited for the jewel case version. That initial release's design was impractical and useless, despite containing the extra disc.

I enjoyed the read, John. It's never uninteresting to read about someone else's experience with Prince bootlegs, as it started out as a pretty isolated experience in the mid- to late-80s before the world of online discussion forums and torrents.

BartVanHemelen said:

Both the 2009 rendition of In A Large Room With No Light and the 2011 rendition of Extraloveable were brutally harmed by the cult status of their unreleased precusors. Arguably, both songs would have been well received if we'd never heard the originals,

Both would have never been released then if they hadn't been wildly popular leaks.lie.

Why do you think that? He pulled other, unkown, songs out of the vault over the years that were unkown to us.

databank said:

What's interesting in that article is that, as far as I know, no whole DF bootleg surfaced before the 2000 Thunderball recreation. By that time DF (the track) had already been released on CB, and Train had long been out on Mavis' first PP record, but it seems the writer first discovered those songs before they heard them on their respective official releases.

.

I wonder how many fans took that path. I myself heard only a few songs on boots before I heard the official version, I can think of Mindbells and Bliss only, though there probably were a few others. Then of course there were the songs we had on boots before they were officially released.

.

The perception of P's music was often altered by those bootlegs.

.

Sometimes we were on the verge of trolling because of them: see the shit we gave Prince about the Joy In Repetition intro, when as far as we know the track was always meant to segue out of something else, namely The Ball, and who cares about a few seconds of intro when the song itself is so awesome.

.

Sometimes we were fooled by the chronology, complaining Prince had slaughtered the original 1986 recording of We Can Funk, until it was one day revealed that, well, no he hadn't, because the GB version was actually based on an earlier, 1983 recording, and the joke was on us.

.

Having heard most of Come and TGE long before either album was released, each and every one of us couldn't help at first being disappointed that such or such song we loved had been omitted in favor of such or such we didn't like as much, or liked better in a different form.

.

Both the 2009 rendition of In A Large Room With No Light and the 2011 rendition of Extraloveable were brutally harmed by the cult status of their unreleased precusors. Arguably, both songs would have been well received if we'd never heard the originals, but the new recordings, for all their qualities, were simply unable to compete with versions the fans had been cherishing for more than 2 decades. Their fate had to be the same as 1999: The New Master, even though they were supposed to be new to us.

.

Crystal Ball (the album) was probably the worst victim of bootlegging: it would probably have been well received had all this material been new to us, and had dozens of excellent other outtakes we'd rather have had on it instead of those Come/TGE-era tracks not been in circulation.

.

In the end, Prince bootlegs have at the same time done him a great service and a great disservice.

.

From TBA to Small Club and those other legendary recordings, they have played a great part in creating an aura of legend around Prince's music and his incredible rate of productivity. Masterpieces were revealed to have been unreleased, and the fact that fans could collect such a huge amount of bootlegs while waiting for the next official release (with an already very impressive official catalogue) involved us deeply in our passion, because for decades we could virtually get a new Prince album, official or unofficial, every other week.

Prince wouldn't be as legendary if no bootleg had ever surfaced.

.

On the other hand, access to all those unreleased recordings made us spolied brats in many aspects: every official live release was inevitably compared to "those better shows that should have been released instead", and our expectations regarding Prince's music became unreasonably biased by all those outtakes, with us forgetting that we weren't supposed to have heard of them in the first place, and constantly judging P's new releases not only by the standards of his past catalogue, but also by the standards of what was in the vault that we would have wanted instead of whatever was out. No matter what Prince would release, it would never be as good to us as All My Dreams, and many a fan would just think they'd rather have him release a compilation of 1986 outtakes instead of that new album... On the other hand, I can't help but wondering how our perception of his music would have been altered if outtakes had kept on leaking after 1995: there's a whole musical continent that remains hidden: 20 years of P's unreleased music that we have heard almost nothing of. Maybe our perception of P's new music would have been kinder, or more passionate, if outtakes had kept coming our way.

.

But in the end, as the article points out, for better or worse those recording have given us a unique perspective on Prince's creative process, allowing us to observe how songs and albums evolved for at least the first 17 years or so of P's career. Whatever happens with the vault and the estate in the future, bootlegs will have shaped the understanding and perception that we, contemporary Prince fans, had of Prince's music. Being a Prince fan in his lifetime would have been a completely different experience if not for the bootlegs. And I can't think of any other artist whose music's perception was so deeply affected by bootlegs.

[Edited 3/16/18 2:14am]

Cool article and excellent response from db!

For all the classic 80s era stuff that I'm eager for the estate to release from the vault, I'm extremely curious and intrigued by what we don't know of from the last 20 years.

one of my first bootlegs was the 8/8/83 video that i saw in 86....hooked immediately

I'm just starting with this underground world.

BartVanHemelen said:

databank said:

Sometimes we were fooled by the chronology, complaining Prince had slaughtered the original 1986 recording of We Can Funk, until it was one day revealed that, well, no he hadn't, because the GB version was actually based on an earlier, 1983 recording, and the joke was on us.

.

Except that the released version was about 5% of the might of the full, original track.

.

Don't be silly

BartVanHemelen said:

databank said:

As for Crystal Ball I think it was poorly received for many reasons, but as one orger once stated, it was panned more for what it wasn't than for what it was.

.

It wasn't what it was advertised to be. And because the whole process of it was a bunch of lies, bullshit and hype. As so often, Prince overpromised and underdelivered. Housewifes were earning lotsa money through eBay stores, while Prince couldn't manages to do what bootleggers had been doing for years. Hell, he promised that the damn thing would be packaged as a ball, and instead we got a hockey puck where CDs were jammed in together and thus scratched and damaged.

Besides the packaging, was a different content advertised that we didn't get? I didn't have the innernet at the time so I don't remember what was advertised.

databank said:

BartVanHemelen said:

.

It wasn't what it was advertised to be. And because the whole process of it was a bunch of lies, bullshit and hype. As so often, Prince overpromised and underdelivered. Housewifes were earning lotsa money through eBay stores, while Prince couldn't manages to do what bootleggers had been doing for years. Hell, he promised that the damn thing would be packaged as a ball, and instead we got a hockey puck where CDs were jammed in together and thus scratched and damaged.

Besides the packaging, was a different content advertised that we didn't get? I didn't have the innernet at the time so I don't remember what was advertised.

Content was not advertised to those who pre-ordered. Nobody knew what to expect until it came out (at Best Buy, weeks before most of us got our pre-orders).

[Edited 3/17/18 6:11am]

djThunderfunk said:

databank said:

Besides the packaging, was a different content advertised that we didn't get? I didn't have the innernet at the time so I don't remember what was advertised.

Content was not advertised to those who pre-ordered. Nobody knew what to expect until it came out (at Best Buy, weeks before most of us got our pre-orders).

[Edited 3/17/18 6:11am]

Interesting, thanks.

Do you or anyone else remember what the speculation was in the community? I remember that I expected a chronologically organized collection covering P's whole career, very much like an official version of the Jewel Box bootlegs collections. I was very surprised to see it wasn't that at all.

databank said:

djThunderfunk said:

Content was not advertised to those who pre-ordered. Nobody knew what to expect until it came out (at Best Buy, weeks before most of us got our pre-orders).

[Edited 3/17/18 6:11am]

Interesting, thanks.

Do you or anyone else remember what the speculation was in the community? I remember that I expected a chronologically organized collection covering P's whole career, very much like an official version of the Jewel Box bootlegs collections. I was very surprised to see it wasn't that at all.

I don't remember speculation and had no idea what to expect myself, as far as tracklist anyway.
I expected to get an exclusive release, not available in stores. I did not expect to see it for sale at Best Buy while awaiting my order.

I was a fairly new fan when Crystal Ball came out. Went in Tower Records in Boston at midnight having decided to part with what was a hefty $50 as a student. But Emancipation had blown me away, so I was confident he could deliver another multi-disc set.

Without expecations or a knowledge of bootlegged material, this collection was a cornucopia of delights. Not cohesive like Emancipation, but it demonstrated to me the breadth of what Prince was capable of.

leecaldon said:

I was a fairly new fan when Crystal Ball came out. Went in Tower Records in Boston at midnight having decided to part with what was a hefty $50 as a student. But Emancipation had blown me away, so I was confident he could deliver another multi-disc set.

Without expecations or a knowledge of bootlegged material, this collection was a cornucopia of delights. Not cohesive like Emancipation, but it demonstrated to me the breadth of what Prince was capable of.

This was my experience too. I was a casual fan and only had a handful of Prince records. I didn't know much about it when I saw it at Best Buy. I thought it was amazing.

^

I love reading stories like the 2 above.I was only 10 years old when Crystal Ball Came out.I remember being a big prince fan and that was sorta my thing in elementary school.my classmates knew I was a Prince maniac and I actually hooked A LOT of my friends to Prince's Music.So they became fans...anyways,I remember my dad bringing the crystal ball cd home.We sampled each track,maybe 30 seconds or so,but I was amazed by "Movie Star".That was the first song that we had to let play all the way through.I said this has got to be a song from the "Under the Cherry Moon" era.My dad looked at the credits and I was right.Crystal Ball is a awesome.My original copy was stollen from me a few years after 1998 but 2 years ago I bought a NEW condition copy from ebay for a hefty price.Glad to have it back in my possession

[Edited 3/18/18 9:29am]

djThunderfunk said:

databank said:

Interesting, thanks.

Do you or anyone else remember what the speculation was in the community? I remember that I expected a chronologically organized collection covering P's whole career, very much like an official version of the Jewel Box bootlegs collections. I was very surprised to see it wasn't that at all.

I don't remember speculation and had no idea what to expect myself, as far as tracklist anyway.
I expected to get an exclusive release, not available in stores. I did not expect to see it for sale at Best Buy while awaiting my order.

I felt EXACTLY the same. I was really pissed to see it available for purchase in Best Buy and not having in my possession my pre-order. I called and cancelled my pre-order and bought the in-store copy instead. I gave up the Kamasutra disk as a result but really didn't care. I wasn't convinced that I'd ever see my preorder copy and wanted the set NOW.

As a "bootleg" release, just a collection of songs, it was great. I loved the newer songs that I had never heard before (Calhoun Square, Da Bang, Poom Poom, Hide the Bone) and it was great to have some gems like Movie Star, Crystal Ball, Dream Factory, and Crucial in the best quality I'd ever heard.

The throwaway remixes like So Dark, Tell Me How U Wanna B Done, and Get Loose were disappointing to me, but there was plenty of love. I still revisit the entire set pretty often.

i do it for the culture!!!!!!!

OperatingThetan said:

dodger said:

databank said:

BartVanHemelen said:

.

It wasn't what it was advertised to be. And because the whole process of it was a bunch of lies, bullshit and hype. As so often, Prince overpromised and underdelivered. Housewifes were earning lotsa money through eBay stores, while Prince couldn't manages to do what bootleggers had been doing for years. Hell, he promised that the damn thing would be packaged as a ball, and instead we got a hockey puck where CDs were jammed in together and thus scratched and damaged.

Besides the packaging, was a different content advertised that we didn't get? I didn't have the innernet at the time so I don't remember what was advertised.

.

It was going to be "filled to the rim".

djThunderfunk said:

databank said:

Besides the packaging, was a different content advertised that we didn't get? I didn't have the innernet at the time so I don't remember what was advertised.

Content was not advertised to those who pre-ordered. Nobody knew what to expect until it came out (at Best Buy, weeks before most of us got our pre-orders).

[Edited 3/17/18 6:11am]

.

The tracklist was leaked shortly before release, and people had trouble believing it because it was so shitty. That was after months of numerous fake tracklists.