“You are an unnatural growth/On a funny, sunny street”
Walls Have Ears
GOOFIN’
WITHOUT bootleggers, many important documents of rock’n’roll, from demos to pivotal live sets, might have been lost to the moment. Yet it’s also easy to see how a bootleg might cause musicians to feel aggrieved at the loss of control, at a violation of their art, and at someone else making profit from their labours.
For many artists, though, time changes everything. Take Jimmy Page, for instance: once upon a time your manager is getting heavy with people for taping your shows, and then years later you find yourself regularly trawling Japanese record shops in search of the fruits of those same tapes. So it’s been with Walls Have Ears, a live double LP that’s finally seeing an approved release from Sonic Youth 38 years after it first appeared.
It’s not quite a bootleg, being originally put together by Paul Smith of their UK label Blast First, a tireless champion of the band and the closest thing they had to a manager in those early days. He compiled the album, pressed it and released it as a surprise for the group; but it proved to be an unwelcome one, what with their third album about to emerge on SST. “I’d been over-enthusiastic, too clever for my own good,” he told Stevie Chick in the. “It hadn’t occurred to me that they would get upset.” The band got the money from the release, but felt burned by its (accidentally) underhand birth for decades. As drummer Steve Shelley tells , an official re-release on the band’s archival Goofin’ label has been on the cards for a while, but at least one member had been continually vetoing the idea.
