The Undertaker (in defense of looser, jam-based grooves)

When I first heard Prince had retired, before the name change, before the Hits/B-Sides box set...I was sad because the O(+> album was epic in scope, and I wanted more impeccably arranged, flawlessly executed ensemble studio magic like that.

The first bootleg I ever heard was The Black Album. It was underwhelming, but that's another story. I'll tell you about the guy who dubbed it off and mailed it to me, and where we met.

But the first bootleg I became attached to was The Undertaker. And it wasn't love-at-first-sight. It took a while for me to appreciate it, at first blush we hardly got along.

It was an official live performance sold mainly on Laserdiscs in Japan. It started on VHS "official bootlegs" that I've been told several times were only sold if you asked for them, and then for $50 or $100 each at the NPG store in Uptown.

I've heard hints those tapes started out okay, but that they soon had to give refunds because a clueless tech dubbed copies from copies, reducing the quality of the tapes they tried to sell.

Eventually, after what was becoming an obligatory forced wait, it was issued by Warner Bros.

In Japan. Not here. I don't think there was any way to get it in the U.S. like we had been able to do for the Hits VHS and the Gett Off video maxi-single.

http://www.discogs.com/Prince-The-Undertaker/master/388667

I finally hunted down a copy eventually because I'm like that. But it's not like anybody made it easy.

To begin with I had it dubbed on a tape. Probably a year later I bought a halfway decent CD bootleg with excellent packaging at a record convention in like Edina or someplace near there. In a hotel ballroom.

Finally I did the whole thing again, first getting a tape, then a CDR dub of a far superior version to the first one, from a different bootleg called Past, Present, Future II. I'm sure somebody has remastered it since then, don't go chase down silvers for hundreds of dollars!

These days there are bootleg labels selling "brand-new" plastic wrapped proper pressed CDs sourced from mp3s that they got out of the same zipfile you did. So the time has come when silver CDs are no promise of superior quality, if they ever were to begin with.

Prices for just about anything with his name on it have exploded since April. I know I should not be surprised but I still am. Why charge $700 for the SOTT sheet music songbook?

Books I might have found for a quarter at a garage sale in February are now fetching prices in the hundreds of dollars on amazon and other places. Not just ebay.

The performance on the Undertaker disc is a long, spawling, live jam. It is funky, it is guitar-centered, and it is far from the studio mastery we'd come to expect.

I remember being initially off-put by The Undertaker. I didn't like it because it wasn't tidy and neat and overdubbed and studio quality like the majority of Prince's work I'd grown up appreciating.

This was different. This was raw. This was still officially being sold as a Prince project, but it was really his first post-Prince project. He kept true to the idea that Prince had retired from studio recording by making it a live recording made "directly to DAT" as the jacket says.

There are rehearsals and live performances shared here and there online. You know where to look.

I just keep coming back to the raw, garage-band style shredding of The Undertaker. It is an endless source of inspiration. I can go back to it over and over again and see/hear something new every time.

I really hope that somehow the officially released video projects under whatever name he was using at the time, eventually see remastering and re-release. They didn't get their due the first time, being only sold in some countries.

There's a worldwide audience deeply thirsting for these things. We aren't going anywhere...

I never understood why we could have hundreds of Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin bootlegs out there in the wild world, but we were supposed to pay no attention to the mindblowing, life-affirming, endlessly inspiring library of performances across the spectrum of Prince's live-on-stage career.

If there's any justice in the world, we won't have to hide from our own shadows to continue collecting new live recordings in constant fear of being sued out of existence like during the dark period when PFU duked it out with PRN Enterprises.

There's an official song called F.U.N.K. that is sometimes subtitled PFUnk. I remember thinking at the time that the attitude of the song might as well describe the title as an acronym. PFU are nitwits and know-it-alls?

Prince Fans United know nothing? PFU are numbskulls and kiss-asses? That seemed to be the strange animosity between a brief period of Prince suing fan websites out of existence nearly 10 years ago now. Toward the end of that funk workout of a track, he says in that lazy Camille voice "I love all o' y'all; (but) don't y'all bother me no mo'!"

Now we're in an unfortunate shadow where it seems like websites are disappearing just like youtube videos. There are news stories about new crackdowns on "rampant bootlegging" and they better be talking about the freaks selling "unauthorized live recordings" on amazon and not those of us sharing freely without desire to profit.

I really, really hope the big bad wolf who hates the internet is dead and we can all appreciate this art together, somehow, someday...