Sneaking A Tape Recorder into concerts in the 70s-90s

Beat you to it by moments.

 

no one ever snuck in a wollensak lol

 

Sync!

 

Are you sure? Many shows were taped in the pre cassette days by folks with reel to reel machines.

 

Probably the most famous/infamous concert ever recorded with a reel to reel recorder.

 

seconds, probably!

 

"The New York Rock Festival", Singer Bowl, Flushing Meadows Park, New York City, New York, USA
Friday 23 August 1968
*
1 Are you experienced
*
2 Fire
*
3 Red house (cut at 0.49 & 8.56)
*
4 I don't live today
****
5 Like a rolling stone
*
6 Foxy lady
*
7 Purple haze
*
8 Hey Joe
*
9 Wild thing / Star spangled banner

Lineage: 56min, R, Audience, Master (cassette) > DAT > Cdr > Soundstudio > Shorten > SHN > Cdr
Recorded by Howard Fields on a 3M / Wollensak portable cassette deck. (STG bit torrent).

 

Exhibit One: Zappa and the LA Orchestra live in 1970. Frank was not allowed to tape it, so as he said 'all that exists is a tape that someone a hole in teh audience made'.
Yea, Frank and without him, there's be no record of te show at all.

 

Recorded a lot back in the early 90s on DAT, usually when it was allowed. I few places I set up a mic stand and no one complained. Others I had the bands permission. Only try at stealth was Starship at the Count Basie in 1992. Surprised I got the stuff in, recorded from the balcony. Didn’t really enjoy the experience of sneaking around and didn’t enjoy the show as much either. Recording was not that great and later I found out a soundboard tape was in circulation.

 

If there’s any one sentence that is guaranteed not to win me over as a fan, it’s this. It makes Roger Waters seem pleasant.

 

Took a crappy Yorx cassette recorder to Boston playing at Brooklyn College 11/4/78. I had it in the seat next to me where my friend was supposed to sit but backed out last minute. Unfortunately it sounds awful.

 

i meant inside their pants

 

I snuck a mini-DV camera into a KISS show in 1998. I borrowed it, so didn’t have much time to familiarize myself with its features, so it’s a so-so to poor recording, but it’s kinda neat to look at now and then.

 

Wait, are you saying you helped Mike Millard tape that show?? If so, need details. That's one of my favorite ever audience recordings.

 

of course i'm not "sure" lol. i'm "here" aren't i?

wollensak reel to reels were not small. so i got hung up on the concept of "sneak".

 

“We thought you were our friends”

 

I had a buddy back in the day who used his girlfriend to bring in gear. She wore a dress, and had a rope tied around her waste with the gear hanging between her legs.

 

Mike Millard and Dan Lampinski were the gold standard in audience taping in the 1970s but if you ask me, the people behind the bootleg company Crystal Cat have made some of the greatest audience tapes ever beginning in 1992.

 

Ah no. I just enjoy his work and this thread made me bust it out because it's a good'un.

I remember paying $25 for a CD of part one back in the day with a bunch of generations on it. The good old days. Now a first gen copy floats in my personal cloud ready to be called upon when needed.

 

I used to stealth tape shows. It used to really stress me out but I gradually realized nobody is paying attention or cares. I’d pin the mics to the bill of my ball-cap and the wires down my back to the preamp in my back pocket and recorder on my belt or front pocket.
The best “pulls” came from club shows or in the pit in arena shows. Recording from the seats in arenas never sounded that good.
The main issue was that my wife hated it because we weren’t allowed to talk. Obviously crowd noise is part of the deal but when you or the person right next to you talks or sings along it ruins it.
I’ve never shared anything publicly beyond giving a copy to the people I went with and on a few occasions mailing a copy to the band themselves.
It was a fun hobby for a while but I haven’t done it in years.

 

Yes, I taped a bunch of shows in the 1990s to cassette and DAT -- mostly indie bands, and almost always with permission. The majority of what I recorded is out there.

 

"His now legendary rig, AKG 451 microphones and Nakamichi 550 cassette deck, was purchased in early 1975 for the express purpose of recording the upcoming Zeppelin shows at the Long Beach Arena and The Forum. Mike wanted to upgrade his gear to get the best possible results. Did he ever. He tested out his new rig at a March 5, 1975 show by Rod Stewart and Faces at the Forum, six days prior to Zeppelin’s first SoCal date in Long Beach. The new equipment passed with flying colors"

Here’s what Jim R recalled about the first Led Zeppelin ’75 Long Beach show:

I attended the Led Zeppelin concert with Mike Millard on March 11th, 1975. It was at the Long Beach Arena.

This was the beginning of the wheelchair era, which itself had two phases. Initially, a friend of ours named Mike L (who was partially paralyzed) offered to bring in Mike's equipment using his personal wheelchair. Mike L got the gear in for this show but was extremely late the following night (3/12) which explains why Mike only got a partial recording of the second Long Beach show. More on that when we post the 3/12 recording. By the time Zep was back in LA for the start of the Forum run on March 24, Millard had gotten his own chair and I pushed him in. "If you want a job done right, you do it yourself.”

We sat in Riser Section 20, Row B. One row up off the floor and even with about the 10th row of the floor. Definitely a PA recording.

During the show, you can hear Plant comment, “I see the front row is filling up slowly... bloody Atlantic Records.” It was opening night in the LA area, and because this was a highly anticipated show, the music industry had numerous ticket holds. Limited inventory due to those holds likely explains why Mike and I sat in the Risers. We had much better seats for the other nights; 5th row on the floor was our "worst" seat.

On March 10, the night before Long Beach, Mike and I actually drove down to San Diego and timed that show for tape flips to make sure we didn’t miss a note in Long Beach. Which begs the question, why didn’t we record the first San Diego show? The answer is the San Diego show was general admission in a venue that was already acoustically challenged. Mike only wanted to record from his preferred locations, which is why we went to such lengths to get the seats he desired for Long Beach and Inglewood. Hard as it is to believe now, if Millard couldn’t record from the location he wanted, he would stand down, preferring no tape at all to a recording not up to his high standards.

Speaking of questions, we have seen a few message board posts inquiring if Mike ever met any rock stars. The answer is yes. Here's one of those stories.

Between the Long Beach and Forum shows there was a 12-day gap where the band performed in Seattle, Vancouver and a second San Diego concert (bizarrely there was no Bay Area stop on the ’75 tour). LA was their hub for all the West Coast dates. Knowing this, we checked the tour schedule, and on an off night took a drive to the Continental Riot House in Hollywood (Riot instead of Hyatt, as Plant had renamed it). As luck would have it, three of the four members of the group were in the lobby: Plant, Bonham and Jones. Page was presumably up in his room.

I brought along printed photos from the Long Beach 3/12 show where I shot from the 3rd row. Mike and I got autographs from all three guys, who were cordial and liked the pictures. Bonham was especially boisterous and fun. We then followed them to the Rainbow Room where we watched them eat hamburgers.

Led Zeppelin was still near their peak for these '75 shows. An electric buzz in the building. Awesome shows every night. Mike and I attended all seven Long Beach, LA Forum and San Diego performances. We couldn't get enough Zep. But it still bugged Mike for years that he didn’t record the full 3/12 show.

 

My life has been enriched by this information.

 

From mid-1981 to the US Festival in 1983, I used to sneak in and record shows strictly for my own enjoyment.

I used an AIWA stereo tape deck which was a walkman-type cessette/am/fm deck with a pair of sugarcube sized square mics. The deck was pretty easy to smuggle into shows and I'd just go into a restroom once I was in the venue and quickly set myself up. I would usually wear a baseball type hat with the mics clipped on either side just above ear level, run the mic lines under my shirt to the tape deck clipped on my belt with a couple spare tapes and batteries in my pockets. It was very difficult to spot unless you were just a few feet from me. Once I was set up, it didn't get in my way of enjoying a show and all I had to do was reach down on my belt and flip or switch out a tape when needed. The quality was decent but not spectacular but as a memento of whatever show I was recording, it was good enough, especially listening on headphones.

I recorded some pretty epic shows during this 2+ year span. One show was Bruce Springsteen's 8/20/81 Vietnam Vets show at the LA Sports Arena. Problem was, I had 2nd row floor seats right on the isle near center stage directly in Springsteen's line of sight and got increasingly nervous as the show progressed that I'd get busted. During the mid-show break I dismantled my rig and better enjoyed the rest of the show. Unfortunately, my room mate (who originally hooked me up with my ticket) later swiped many of my tapes when he moved out of our condo.

The last show I taped was most of the "Heavy Metal Day" at the US Festival in 1983. After that weekend, my little AIWA started to crap out and I lost interest in recording shows. Here is a sample of Van Halen's set I recorded that's dubbed onto the oft-bootlegged video. You can hear my friends and I drunkenly commenting about the show in the background....

 

I got interested in taping shows around 1997 by hearing good audience recordings like Led Zeppelin 6/21/77. I was 15. Little did I know at the time, it wasn't very easy.

Fast forward, my parents had 7th row tickets for the family to see the Rolling Stones in Charlotte, NC on the No Security tour. I was going to tape it.

I first bought a used Sony WM-DC6 cassette recorder and decided it was too bulky to sneak in (they are worth a lot now and I regret selling it). I finally settled on a Mini Disc recorder, the Sony MZ-R3 and a powered mono microphone I'd put in my hat. It actually worked really well, and I got a nice recording of the Stones that nobody has ever heard aside from my family.

It turned out so well, I thought I'd get a stereo pair of Audio Technica microphones and really knock the next one out of the park. Unfortunately, the first one was lightning in a bottle I guess, because it was a bunch of bass overloaded junk after that, and then cell phones and everything took over.

I do still enjoy listening to my recording of Metallica at the Rockingham, NC dragway 2000 because of how intense the Ecstasy of Gold -> Creeping Death is with the sound of the crowd compressing to the stage, and the thunderstorm and saturation of my microphones with water during Fade to Black (the Mini Disc recorder survived and I still have it). Memories.