ELP: The Manticore Vaults--Opinions?

This may be old news around here, but I've never heard this set. It looks interesting, but the alternate title "Official Bootleg" puts me off a bit. Sounds like an excuse for more bad recordings.

If anyone has heard this, I'd appreciate your thoughts.

 

I like the recordings... but the sound is bad... very bad bootleg quality! I bought the 6 CD set, but I have never heard the extended live version of Take A Peble, incl. the Country shuffle.

 

ELP Bootleg Box 1

I bought the box hoping that they would use master tape sources for this bootlegged shows. Unfortunately all we got were official releases of already crappy unofficial bootlegs which I had passed on years before. It is similar in concept to the Door's Boot Yet Butt concept and Zappa's boot series. . . While I appreciate the "joke" I think theses artists missed the point. People buy bootlegs because it's all they can get, but if they could have "better sound" they would buy that. I do not understand their strategy of releasing bootleg crap officially. . . I guess ELP believe that they might as well make money off the boots, but most of the shows they released had been circulating as boots for years, so why would anyone bother, except an idiot like me who believed their vendor when they said they were "vault sourced" tapes. ELP must have great soundboards in their vaults. . . Why not just release those?

Pearl Jam, Experience Hendrix and the Allman Brothers have it right. Go to the source. Release those.

Neil

 

The Dead, The Allman Brothers and (more recently) Pearl Jam and Peter Gabriel have released their soundboard recordings and offered them for sale. Some are very good.

Some artists never thought to do it - or were openly opposed to it (to prevent bootlegging from within the organization). I would guess that ELP doesn't have a significant amount of professional (multi-track) or semi-professional (soundboards) that would allow a multi-disc set of significant quality. They could always run through the unused material from the concerts already released on the existing live albums, but that would probably just result in live versions of previously released material that was passed over for better versions.