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.

First, the most obvious difference is observed in the custom labels on the vinyl discs. Although the 1987 release comes with black labels which are also used for the first pressing as described in the bootleg section of the Blinded By The Light book, the artist name is missing on all the six side labels of the re-release. In addition, it seems to me that these labels are slightly more contrasted between black and white colors (i.e., denser black and brighter white) compared to the labels on the first pressing. It is of note that no such differences are seen in TEARDROPS LPs where the record labels of the 1987 version are indistinguishable from those of the original pressing.

Left: Outer side of the first press (left) and 1987 reissue (right) gate-fold sleeves. Right: Close-up images of the album cover lettering. Note the inferior printing quality on the reissue sleeve (lower) compared with the original (upper).

Second, I recognize the following differences with respect to the full-color gate-fold sleeve. While the two editions share the same sleeve design, the color tone is slightly brighter in both the outer and inner pictures of the 1987 edition. Furthermore, a close examination revealed that the border around the edge of the album title/artist lettering is apparently blurred and fuzzy on the sleeve of the re-release. So, the printing quality of the 1987 cover artwork is somewhat inferior to that of the first pressing, which most probably resulted from photocopy reproduction from the original sleeve rather than using original fine prints. This case is the same as that for the previously reported TEARDROPS.

Left: Inner side of the first press (upper) and 1987 reissue (lower) gate-fold sleeves. The color tone difference is much more noticeable compared to the outer sleeve. Right: Close-up images of the center folded portion. Note an apparent convex (凸) shaped along the fold line on the original sleeve (lower) which is rather flat on the reissue cover (upper).

The visual difference is more obvious in the inner side of the sleeve artwork. As mentioned above, the 1987 sleeve features a brighter photo image of the stage shot (probably due to reproduction of the original); however, compared with the original, it takes on deeper black gloss on the background of the track list space on the left. A minor but interesting fact is that the original double sleeve gets more nicely folded than the reissue cover — check the convexed (凸) fold line on the center of the sleeve — a result of careful work in sleeve production. Again, these differences are commonly found in the two versions of TEARDROPS. The next and final post on this topic will examine and compare the differences in vinyl discs.
— To be continued.