sharke
Remember bootleg cassettes? The guys on the street selling them, with poorly photocopied covers. Sounded as if someone had recorded them on a Sony Walkman in their jacket pocket. But it was EXCITING to get one of your favorite band. I think I still have some AC/DC bootlegs from back in the day, some Metallica too.
What they revealed, however, is that most live gigs were pretty poor compared to the "official" live releases, in terms of playing. I remember listening to some of those Angus Young and Kirk Hammett guitar solos and wincing.
Man! First real show I saw was Metallica on the Puppets tour, in a small town east of Quebec. There were only a few hundreds of us in the arena. I was 14 and at that time I lived and breathed Metallica. And I remember, a few months later, getting a copy of such a bootleg for that exact show through a friend - so a copy of a copy of a copy... Must have sounded like crap, but I still listened to that tape regularly.
At that time,
anything we could put on hands on was welcome - heck, even when the first official VHS was released, it featured fan-made footage for a large part, but we just couldn't get enough. I don't know how often I've watched Cliff 'Em All.
That being said, I never liked Hammett. His playing gives me tooth aches. Actually, maybe the poor sound quality on those bootlegs made it less painful. ;)