Rare AND well done!

Hi, and welcome to my new blog -- my first ever music sharing site! I've been collecting music for decades, and now own at least 5,000 each of LPs and CDs. And I have an external hard drive just bursting with bootlegs I've acquired online in the last three years or so.

In browsing for stuff online, I'm sure you know, you see the same recordings show up over and over again on multiple blogs and sites. Not that that's a bad thing, since it gives more people a better chance to stumble across a great recording. But at the same time, there are a few albums or shows that you search for forever and never find, and others that require so much searching ingenuity and luck on your part that you don't think anyone else could ever find 'em. There are albums that you (well, I) would gladly pay for if they were in print or affordable, but whose used copies sell for dozens or hundreds of dollars on Amazon and eBay. And you might also have a few old cassettes with rare boots you've never gotten around to digitizing and sharing, or videotapes with rare TV appearances that haven't yet been seen on YouTube; I sure do.

So I'm going to post some rare stuff here which I have, but haven't seen widely available online, and some rare stuff I've found online that isn't out there to be found too easily. I hope it finds an appreciate audience. Comments are always welcome, but I know I've downloaded from plenty of blogs that I never bothered to comment on, so I'll forgive you if you don't!

[A note to anyone who may get upset if I re-post files or album rips you've done and originally posted: Seriously? Give me a break. You're helping yourself to the labor and artistry of countless musicians, engineers, producers, etc. without remunerating them, and now you're going to turn around and act all proprietary about what you've copied? Sorry, but that is such a height of hypocrisy it's dizzying to look down from. I'll give credit where I'm able to sources where I found something, but if it was originally "yours", I hope you'll kindly allow it to be shared again -- that's why it's called "sharing". And the same goes for telling me not to convert your precious FLAC files to mp3. This music is not your property. If it's anyone's, it's the artist's and THEY probably wouldn't even want you to convert it into FLAC files in the first place! This is not to say I don't greatly appreciate those whose efforts have enabled the sharing of so much great music. You just have to know when to let it go.]

OK, now that that's out of the way, let's open up the vault and dig in to... The Rare Stuff!