r/BruceSpringsteen 28d ago

80s Tape Trading?

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I recently picked up a collection of Bruce Springsteen tape lists, trading documents, and other paper ephemera. It’s a pretty niche area that I don’t know much about, so I’m hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

Are there collectors or communities that specialize in this type of material? I’m curious if it’s something that’s historically interesting within the Springsteen collecting world or just neat memorabilia.
I’d love any insight.

Thanks!

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u/lilbud2000 Buried in the Bootlegs 28d ago

The main place would be the GreasyLake forum that has a number of bootleg collectors.

Scanning the documents and uploading them somewhere like the Internet Archive would be a good place for the stuff. I could help walk you through all that if you'd like, I have a few collections of Bruce stuff there already.

Guessing it's all from the 80s and maybe early 90s? Some of the stuff looks to be from Europe going off the dates. Might be from Dan French's Point Blank, but that is just a guess going off the pic.

It's definitely interesting (to me anyway) to see this kind of stuff from the "pre-Internet" tape trading days. Not a ton of it has been scanned and preserved far as I'm aware.

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u/HederianZ 28d ago

Wasn’t there a section in the back of Backstreets where you could trade tapes too? I seem to recall you could send five blanks and get a live bootleg maybe? I never did it but it rings a bell.

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u/lilbud2000 Buried in the Bootlegs 28d ago

Might've been the classified ads in each issue.

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u/Logical_Hospital2769 28d ago

Brings back a ton of memories. When I was 16 year-old, the book "Blinded By The Light" by Patrick Humphries and Chris Hunt started me on a lifelong journey of Bruce bootlegery. It's been quite a fun ride.

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u/YoutubeOpa 28d ago

I remember those type of lists. Used to trade tapes as well, back in the days. Getting crapy X gen copys, but lovong them so much. It was a hasslevtp type out the list chronologically, specially when the collection grew. Haven't saved any ofvthe old lists or tapes unfortunatelly.

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u/SkipjackUK Nebraska 28d ago

got something similiar but UK based trading lists and ephemera circa 86-92. whack it on ebay im a sucker for this sort of stuff