Tambourine Man” as well as an “Eight Miles High Jam.” The track list here draws heavily from Untitled, including gems like “Lover of the Bayou,” “Truck Stop Girl,” and the sublime “Chestnut Mare.” Only a single track is from Byrdmaniax – a lovely cover of Jackson Browne’s “Jamaica Say You Will” – and there are the expected performances of “My Back Pages” and “Mr. The band line-up at the time included singer/guitarist Roger McGuinn, the enormously talented multi-instrumentalist Clarence White, bassist Skip Battin, and drummer Gene Parsons. ‘Tis a shame, too, ‘cause if the date of the performance is to be believed, the 1971 concert documented by Pretty Boy Floyd probably falls somewhere between 1970’s wonderful Untitled LP and 1971’s underrated Byrdmaniax album.

1971,” the Byrds’ Pretty Boy Floyd sounds like a poor audience taping mastered from old vinyl than anything that (presumably) WLIR-FM would have broadcast. It seems that the basically anonymous Digital Legends label is vying with Laser Media to see who can sell the crappiest-sounding concert discs to rabid fans, and this unsourced 1971 performance by the trailblazing Byrds is one of the worse CDs, sonically, that these poor ears have ever heard (and I used to review bootleg CDs for Live! Music Review zine back in the day). Now the Reverend realizes as much as any home taper/tape trader that the further back you go in rock ‘n’ roll history, available recordings are harder to listen to due to primitive technology that resulted in shabby recordings. The Byrds – Pretty Boy Floyd (Digital Legends) Get ‘em while you can, kiddies, ‘cause one never knows when copyright treaties will be revised and the availability of these albums disappears.įor this month’s “Bootleg Rodeo” column, the first in a couple of months, the Reverend reviews recent releases by the Byrds, Midnight Oil, and Poco with links to buy ‘em (or not) from. This monthly (give or take) column aims to separate the wheat from the chaff and let you know which of these recordings deserve a place in your collection and which should have been left to collect dust in a closet somewhere. Not all of these so-called “copyright gap” releases are worth your time and money, however, which is where That Devil Music’s “Bootleg Rodeo” comes into play. The situation is a godsend for rock ‘n’ roll fans, who now have access to budget recordings by their favorite artists that were only previously available as higher-priced bootleg titles. Thanks to the vagaries created by loopholes in international copyright law, it seems that live music from the 1970s – particularly FM radio broadcasts – are fair game for release on CD by dodgy European labels.

Bootleg zazu