Classic Vinyl Bootleg Revisited: FIRE ON THE FINGERTIPS

“If they kept sales charts on bootlegs, FIRE ON THE FINGERTIPS and E TICKET [sic] would both easily be best sellers: They are the two records almost every collector will have.” [excerpted from a short article entitled “The essential bootleg album guide,” featured in the fanzine Backstreets no.6 (May 1983)].

How many different pressings are these 8 copies grouped into?
How many are red-colored, black or heavy vinyls?

As this quote exemplifies, these two vinyl LPs are a twin peak of Springsteen's early studio bootlegs: they are housed in well-done jackets using now-classic photos of the DARKNESS era and with excellent sound quality originated from low generation tapes of studio recording and a demo acetate disc. Content-wise, I prefer FIRE ON THE FINGERTIPS to “E” TICKET because the album was full of the materials that were unreleased back then, rather than consisting of mostly alternate takes of released songs. Piracy activity increases in proportion to the popularity and demand of a given title, whether it is official or bootleg, and this fantastic bootleg was no exception. Over the years, various forms of reproduction have appeared, from straightforward copies to completely different packages of the original LP.

My vinyl bootleg references in
book form (mainly used for
titles from pre-BITUSA era)

Before the internet was widely available as a common tool for information gathering, I used to refer to Blinded By The Light (by Patrick Humphries and Chris Hunt,1985) as a main reference for bootleg LPs. This book summarizes a fairly comprehensive list of almost all the vinyl Brucelegs available back then (up to 1984), and therein found on FIRE ON THE FINGERTIPS (U.K. 4) is the description that “First pressing on red vinyl, later copies on black or grey vinyl.” So, I had long believed that the originals were red vinyls, which later turned out probably not to be when more information became available and was assumed to be trustworthy. For example, The Bruce Springsteen Bootleg Bible vol. 1, (by Tony Montana, 1985) classifies this bootleg into four releases as below, based on the matrix number / number of disc / country of origin / sleeve / vinyl (with my annotations in parentheses).

• Release A:  (no info or no number) / 1 LP / U.K. / Black and red cover / heavy vinyl
• Release B:  UK-4 / 1 LP / U.S. / Black and red cover / red vinyl
• Release C:  UK-4 / 1 LP / U.S. / Black and red cover / red vinyl
• Release D:  HR-1-33 (or HR133) /1 LP / (no info) / Black and red insert / various color vinyl 

Most other bootleg guides (including sort of) that have been published thereafter seem to cite the above information for describing this particular bootleg LP. To mention but an example, you can see essentially the same information in the first volume of the Wanted magazine (by Jan Rodenrijs, 1994), a now-defunct, excellent bootleg CD guide that also includes the up-to-date listing of almost all vinyl Brucelegs (note: this speculation may be wrong if the information originally came from Hot Wacks, any issues of which I have never read because I am not interested in any bootleg by other artists). Lately, more information, including several pirated copies, has become available online, the most detailed at brucespringsteen.it.

A famous 6-track acetate from
Intersong Music with hand-written
mistake THE "EAST" ST. BAND

The source of this bootleg LP is undoubtedly a famous 12" acetate (or tapes thereof) with six tracks, all of which were then-unreleased (four songs from the recording sessions of the second album THE WILD, THE INNOCENT & THE E STREET SHUFFLE, and two live performances). Having cut a deal with Adrian Rudge, a British producer who ran a publishing company called Intersong Music in the U.K., Mike Appel, the former Springsteen manager, tried to get English and European performers to cover his songs back in 1974. So, it is generally believed that this LP, unlike many American bootlegs around that time, has a U.K. origin (Release A; the first non-US Bruceleg?). Soon after this release, a few independent bootleggers in the U.S. seem to have pressed their own versions as listed above (Releases B, C, and possibly D). However, the details have still remained elusive. Although I do not know about this title as much as I know about “E” TICKET, I'll post what I guess from comparing several copies of my own, as shown above.  — To be continued.