Classic Vinyl Bootleg Revisited: FOLLOW THAT DREAM 3LP (Part 4 of 4)

Two matrix codes on
the Disc 1 deadwax.

This concludes a short series of blog posts on one of a few classic vinyl bootlegs from the 1981 European leg of THE RIVER tour. It has long been said that, like the sister release TEARDROPS ON THE CITY, the original audience recordings no longer exist that were used for making this bootleg. This makes it distinguish from almost all of the other vinyl underground releases whose source recordings have been successfully digitized and circulated. So, collectors of live recordings and bootleg maniacs still highly value the original pressing of this old vinyl stuff.

An excerpt from "Stockholm 81 - Revisited", an essay by Drutten and Gena (2002), which mentions the loss of master concert recordings (taken from the booklet accompanying the vinyl-sourced remastered CD-R release by the Piggham Records).

Classic Vinyl Bootleg Revisited: FOLLOW THAT DREAM 3LP (Part 3 of 4)

The triumph success of BORN IN THE USA has not only delivered the plethora of new live bootlegs mainly from the 1984-85 world tour, but also brought back the past recordings of previously bootlegged live concerts. Such revival issues include FOLLOW THAT DREAM, TEARDROPS ON THE CITY, and BORN TO BE THE BOSS, the famous THE RIVER tour bootleg trio from Sweden originally released in the early 1980s. I remember these re-releases hit the Japanese market around summer 1987 (see the last post for a scan of a mail-order catalog issued by a Japanese bootleg retailer). The bootleggers reproduced the original LPs, including cover arts and record labels, fairly well when compared with rather crummy earlier reproductions that appeared soon following the original releases (again, see the last post).       

The artist's name is removed from all six side labels on the three discs of the 1987
re-release (right). There is, I guess, the possibility that bootleggers might have
modified the labels intentionally to differentiate the two editions, because except
for the labels, the reissue faithfully reproduces the original artwork and design.

As a result, bootleg collectors and auction sellers often refer mistakenly to these three 1987 re-releases as the originals. That said, several distinct differences exist between the original and the faithful reissues. The subsequent sections explain what I have noticed by closely examining my copies of the two editions of FOLLOW THAT DREAM, just like I did before for TEARDROPS, a companion release to this.