To obliquely tie two recent threads together, someone mentioned Richard Thompson
as an older performer who can still reliably and non-embarrassingly rock out when the
time is right. All true, but in the context of the ARSClist digest I was reading I 
remembered an interview I read with Richard once, where the subject of unauthorized
concert recordings came up. (This was a while back, probably before RT started 
releasing a large number of professionally done concert recordings to fans through
his website).  He'd said he'd never made any efforts to stop fan trading of concert tapes
and professed himself confused/bemused at the notion that anyone would want to listen
to or collect warts and all mid-fi front of the house recordings of his concerts. But he also
said that in a way he could sympathize, because if given the opportunity he would like 
to hear every note Bix Beiderbecke ever played. The fan's and musician's perspectives
in one!

Anyway, if anyone is interested in bootlegging in the rock era, let me recommend Clinton
Heylin's book Bootleg, first issued in the late 1990s and updated in the early 2000s to 
include the early days of MP3 trading. One of the principal bootleggers of the day wrote
a long series of posts on the Record Collector's Guild website a few years ago which 
make fascinating reading, as well - they're still available and the thread starts here:

<http://www.recordcollectorsguild.org/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=23532>