There is an entertaining video clip of Neil Young browsing in a record store in 1972 confiscating bootleg albums of his records and giving the poor, befuddled clerk a stern talking to. Hey Neil, I just work here, dude. Talk to the owner, man. Like Bob Dylan, Neil Young is still waging war on his bootleggers by releasing unofficial recordings through his official label.
Hey Neil, come up to Ellsworth and we will gladly give you a copy of Rocky Mountain Review for your collection. It does not appear to have been officially released yet. The bootleg is a recording of a January 27, 1971 show at Macky Auditorium at the University of Colorado Boulder. There is some confusion,but it appears to be the early show. It is an acoustic set with renditions of “Ohio”, “Sugar Mountain”, “Old Man”, “Heart of Gold”, and The Needle and the Damage Done”.
The bootleg was issued by Contra Band Music as NYB1 in 1971, but this version is not the picture sleeve that is most commonly documented. This copy has handwritten titling on a plain white cover and has the look of a DIY home recording. I can’t find a picture of this particular record and it appears to be undocumented. Quite possibly, it is truly handmade, a substitute cover for a damaged picture sleeve. Contra Band Music was a Norfolk, Virigina bootleg label run by David D from 1970 to 1977, and they eventually moved to Denver, Colorado. The FBI shut them down in 1976, but they soldiered on into 1977. The label came back from the dead in 1998 to release some Rolling Stones recordings.
In 1973, the most infamous bootleg label Trade Mark of Quality reissued Rocky Mountain Review, and it has been ripped several times after that. If you are interested in the history of bootleg records get a copy of Clinton Heylin’s Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry. You might have heard of Heylin as the legendary Dylanologist. He should know about bootlegs for sure. But the best book on bootlegs is a coffee table book: A Pig’s Tale: The Underground Story of the Legendary Bootleg Record Label by Ralph Sutherland and Harold Sherrick. It is a great history with a complete discography, but this is book porn at its best with great photos of the Trade Mark of Quality’s output.
The handmade look of Rocky Mountain Review got me thinking of the underground press and zines, which have a tie to bootlegging. Fuck You Press infamously bootlegged Ezra Pound and W.H. Auden. The title of the album got me thinking of Black Mountain Review, one of the most celebrated little magazines in the history of the Mimeo Revolution. A document of an experimental college and its circle in Black Mountain, North Carolina, which inspired the founding of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, the city where Rocky Mountain Review was recorded. Boulder has a strong tie to the writers of the Beat Generation and the rest of the counterculture.
On Rocky Mountain Review, there is a particularly chatty version of “Sugar Mountain”, which brought to mind a Neil Young-inspired little magazine named after the song. The magazine features an NSFW cover photograph of poet Alice Notley and was co-edited by poets Tom Clark and Lewis Warsh in the spring of 1970. A one-shot that documents the writer’s enclave of Bolinas, California, it has the feel of a bootleg. In 1970, Angel Hair Press issued another mimeographed publication by Tom Clark, named after Neil Young, with a picture of Neil on the cover. Here is Tom Clark on Neil Young: "an assemblage-poem that was in fact more like a critical exercise. I'd extracted and thematically re-arranged seventy-five snippets of primal statement from the songs of the Canadian-born folk singer after whom the work was named—my favorite artist for a period of some months of that Bolinasian Phase of the Great Cultural Deglaciation we were all convinced was then going on." Sounds like a bootleg to me!!
If you want to hear early acoustic Neil Young from a mysterious version of the recording come pick up a copy of Rocky Mountain Review. And if nobody is interested, Neil, we know you are, so we’ll hold the record until you show up.
Suggested sites and sounds:
Neil Young is not amused: NEIL YOUNG FINDS HIS OWN BOOTLEG VINYL AT A RECORD SHOP AND STEALS IT (1972) 🤣🤣🤣
Books on bootlegs: Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry: Heylin, Clinton: 9780312142896: Amazon.com: Books; A Pig's Tale: Ralph Sutherland, Harold Sherrick, William Stout: 9781947521896: Amazon.com: Books
Neil Young by Tom Clark: Neil Young : Clark, Tom, 1941- : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Neil Young by Tom Clark: Neil Young | Tom Clark
— Lou Waxman