…ohmigosh, yeah, smuggling in the equipment, surreptitiously-recording, and cleaning up tapes afterward is a lost art in these days of ubiquitous phones and console recordings…
…i had a specially-modified trenchcoat i could break down my rig and hide parts in various seams and pockets to make it through venue-entry security patdowns, always a high-adrenaline moment!..
…mid-eighties we found a copy of the kentucky-fried movie at the local video shop to rent for a friend’s twelfth birthday party, essentially on the reputation of airplane! as none of us had seen zucker-abrahams-zucker’s first film, only heard mention via word-of-mouth…
…so we start the movie, big bowl of popcorn amongst us in front of the television with his mom and little sisters hovering back on the couch, and it’s strikingly raunchier than their better-known second film but as twelve-year-old boys we’re having a great time: then it quick-cuts to a woman sudsing-up her prodigious endowment under the shower, our eyes widen, and my friend’s mother decides that’s quite enough, stops the tape, and i’ve never since finished the film!..
…we bought our first VHS recorder in the late seventies, when very few films were released on videocassette and the MSRP for commercial films was around $360 (inflation-adusted to 2026), so everyone’s libraries pretty much comprised bootlegs and television broadcast recordings…those old tape-trading networks (which my mother called the ‘black market’) promulgated notoriously-sketchy multi-generation copies by modern standards, but the novelty of watching hollywood films at home was so profound that nobody gave much consideration to recording artifacts compromising the video quality…
…that huge expense for commercial releases essentially built the video-rental market in the early eighties (despite hollywood’s repeated attempts to quash it) and it wasn’t until the advent of ‘priced to own’ films in the late eighties (around $50 inflation-adjusted) that people began collecting legitimate commercial releases for their home libraries, creating a huge new market which transformed the film industry as profoundly as did cable television fifteen years earlier and streaming fifteen years later…
…nor are fossil fuels derived from chemoautotrophic biomes…
…a conservative party and a reactionary party…
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…just cheap dynamics and a cassette recorder, disassembled and reassembled in the field: signal’s so hot in live venues that the mic pretty much clips anyway, so i never lost too much sleep over it until cleaning things up back home with radio shack gear (when they sold respectable equipment)…