The Counting Crows have an open taping policy for their concerts, and recently I decided I would start collecting bootlegs. I received my first set of bootlegs in the mail today. I sent off for two, and received a third as a bonus. While I was really disappointed in the quality of my first choice, my second choice and the bonus concert were of excellent quality.

The disappointing bootleg was from their December 10, 1994 concert in Paris, France during their August and Everything After tour. I'm not sure why exactly, but the music comes out sounding very compressed or watered down. It could have been the taping position, or maybe just the conversion to digital since it was recorded nearly ten years ago. I've given it two chances, but it's hard to handle the poor quality. It's a shame too.

My second choice was from the tour for This Desert Life. The Counting Crows played to a sold out crowd June 16, 2000 at Wembley Stadium in London. There is an impressive setlist of songs from all three studio albums, as well as a cover of the song Live Forever, by Oasis played on the piano by Adam Duritz as an introduction to Long December. The recording quality is pretty good. A lot better than the other, so I'm really pleased with it.

What pleased me more was the bonus bootleg from August 19, 1994. It was another August and Everything After tour date with a few other cover songs mixed in. The concert is kind of short though. A lot shorter than the 2000 concert probably because they had a smaller body of work at the time. The sound quality is excellent though. There was a great cover version of Sordid Humor's Jumpin' Jesus. I say great not because I've heard the original version, but rather because I've heard several versions performed by the Counting Crows, and this is the best so far. I couldn't find any Sordid Humor tracks floating around the P2P servers, so that's a shame. Adam Duritz described them as a really good band from San Francisco which broke up. I also fell in love with the live version of Perfect Blue Buildings which contains the beautiful lyrics I quoted earlier today that originate partially from a Prince song.

Now that I have three bootleg's to trade, I submitted my tiny list to the Counting Crows Trader Network, and they added me this afternoon. You can see my bootlist here. When I get back to the city I'll try to branch out a little and do some real trading. Right now I'm just stuck with doing B & P trades, which humbles me a little. If I make this a hobby that I don't just place on the back burner like so many other hobbies, I should start getting a good set of bootlegs collected. I fell in love so long ago with the studio albums that the Counting Crows released, but these days I fall in love with the awesome and powerful live versions of tracks like Round Here, and Rain King. I never really appreciated their live music until I heard Across A Wire on the way out to California, and while resting at the hostel. It just sort of grew on me.