There has been quite a bit of trash talk lately about tape hoarding, its that same issue that comes up every single tour. I don’t really find fault with tape hoarding, in that usually what is considered tape hoarding is a big distortion of what is really going on. Contrary to what many people think, I actually worked quite hard in the Cure trading world to eliminate the dreaded “Rare Swop” tape…The legacy of the “Rare Swop” has been around since the early days of bootlegging, most notably in the Led Zeppelin world I have been told many of the old d5 recordings done by guys sneaking in on wheel chairs with tons of equipment. They use to take “solos” out of 40 minute songs intentionally and release incomplete versions of shows only to turn around years later and release the “missing 15 minutes”. In Cure world the plague seemed to start in France in the late 80s when everyone who traded them had basically caught up with all the released shows, so they either faked, or legitimately found dreadful copies of shows and put them out as “rare swop only”. Trust me, none of the “rare swop” shows ever sounded good at all, and probably explained why they didn’t get out, people were embarrassed to say they recorded them. I have always felt like if your are trying to keep an audience recording as a rare swop, that’s basically ridiculous. I attacked the problem by simply having 2 Cure lists on my web sight, with instructions simply stating that if you want to trade , and you send me a list with even one “rare swop” item on it, then you must pick from my rare swop list, which was essentially 80% rare swop. If people took the rare swop off, they could pick from my list which had every audience show I ever had from the band on it..This worked pretty well and started breaking down the “rare swop” barrier in Cure trading world.
“Now this guy is a real moron” – Perry Farrell 1990 Hollywood Palladium
The rare swop guy is basically an antagonist, he wants people to laud him and adore him by putting these things on his list, but he is never going to truly get the rare swop item, simply because usually when he gets one, he is back on the horse blasting out to 70 people he has a rare swop item..Not exactly what you call low key. If I had something like that, you think I want to put it in the hands of that guy, hell no. Stuff like that is better yet never getting on a list, because it’s a no win situation, because there are only 2 things that can happen..First being you piss a bunch of people off, second being who is going to send something to “rare swop” list guy because by nature of his existence, he is just going to move something as soon as he can for another “rare swop”..Its like the guy who has a mistress, divorces his wife, marries the mistress..why the hell is the woman going to think that she is any better than the first wife in couple years (oh I never loved her, but I reaalllly love you) . Then the entire “rare swop” thing breaks down as all these guys crack and you have15 guys emailing lists with the same shows as “Rare Swop”..If its on 15 lists , it isn’t rare swop anymore. While this guy is technically considered a “hoarder”, nothing is further from the truth, he wants to trade so damn bad he can’t shut up.
Every tour the same thing happens, I have seen it time and time again. During a tour, people are in such a fit to get the new shows RIGHT AWAY that when the older traders are trading, and there lists are an open field to choose from, the newbie skips picking up a gem, and instead opts for an average version of a new show just to get it right away and jam it on his list. This doesn’t always happen, but again on this tour it did quite a bit, people wrote me saying they really wanted to trade for awhile, and they had something I wanted to pick up from this tour finally, but then they would request a new show back..They skipped over Denver 87 board DAT, stockholm 92 board dat, great 87 upgrades, 83 masters, all to get a core sounds buffalo or something like that. That’s all fine but then many of these traders would get frusturated later on when they had finished elevation (like I had at that point) and wanted the old stuff. The thing about this group is 90% of them disappear by next tour anyway, the ones always in a hurry to get something..They will be onto Baseball Cards, Huddy Buddies, Bobble Heads, Collectible China, something else by the time we get U2 2004 Tour. I know when I started collecting in the 80s, people would not even return my letters till the 3rd tour and I had hung around and been in the scene awhile(this was back in the horse and buggy days when we actually printed out lists and sent them in the mail) ..Problem is there is a big group of us that are done for awhile, and only something interesting will probably cause us to engage in a trade..This would be a new upgrade, or something that genuinely is a new item out there that we want. This does not define us as tape hoarders, were just out of the game for now.
Being out of the game for awhile should not be faulted, there was a pretty hard working group that actually started at it back in 98, digging stuff up, preserving it, really isolating a great deal of good stuff. We all traded with each other, as we were all enhancing each others collections and there was a great deal of good work done in that period. For many in that group, Elevation was the end of the road, not the beginning, as we had wrapped up the preservation projects and wanted to finish up a long run with the current tour. 50% of these people will still trade for something that is a unearthed audience master, the other 50% are so burned out they will just pick it up in a couple years when there ready again.
Some of the people are in law school, some are working very professional careers that don’t allow much free time (and what there is they choose to spend with wife or kids). There time is very valuable, so if your writing them and you cant offer something to make there time worthwhile (a trade) there probably going to walk away from it. There will be the occasional altruistic thing done when the time is there, but that’s the exception not the norm. For the 90% of you that dissapear in the next 18 months (hell we got a star wars movie coming up ,that should suck some of you away) and we cant fulfill your urge to have 800 u2 masters in that time sorry about that. For the 10% of you that stick around, who continue to slowly expand your collections, you will start to “get” this..For the other 10%, continue to collect with patience, most importantly think outside the box, look for better ways to tape, use some imagination. Always be thinking about how you can enhance the taping community. (I am taking about better ways to TAPE, not to distribute). Then 5-10 years from now you will probably understand our train of thought.
There is as many people that think the way I do about trading as there is who call us hoarders, difference is we don’t spend time bumping around the internet complaining about it. I guess were the silent masses. And bashing us really does not seem like a real good long term plan to aquire shows, we remember names, and the shows have to come from somewhere.