The Smiley Smile Message Board

I always hear about the wonderful things that've been circulating in private hands for years and years and years, mainly from AGD and so on. My only question is, how do you become a part of that scene? Is it a matter of becoming trustworthy enough to be contacted by someone? Do you need to have material of your own, first? I find the entire topic very interesting.

First thing is finding someone that still has a tape player

Last time I traded tapes was the late 1980's.

Most of the tape traders have gone on to trade exclusively digital.  There are torrent sites like dimeadozen and zombtorrent that deal exclusively with bootlegs. 

Before the internet, things were flowing around differently.  People were also much nicer to one another! (via the mail, fanzines, etc).  there were a lot of really nice fans who were very generous to me as a kid.

Here's looking at you, Coach; the best there ever was.

I mean, has that sort of thing died out? I do recall trying to find things like Big Bag of Vegetables and only finding mention of it, so I guess not.

A few comments on this board have implied that trading--or more accurately, sharing--continues among the elite.  There are surely a few things that are shared among just a few that don't make it to the boots.

Just speculation, but I wouldn't be shocked if the Barnyard master take with vocals that was originally slated for the sessions disc has been shared.

Interesting....

But how does one get into "toilet trading"?

If this is what Curtis was talking about, then yeah, how it works is there is a separate tier of tracers of that artist, and you essentially require something they don't already have to obtain something of equal rarity.  So to get that Barnyard master with vocals, I might offer you my Look with vocal overdubs.  Usually super-traders are sought out by other traders, and often these super-traders do more than posting their bootlists online: they do research, leg work to track down sources of new tapes. 

I'll trade your Barnyard master with vocals for my Surf's Up Pt 2 with orchestration and worm noises.

I have TWO cassette dubbing machines..!!! :lol   :spin

i got all kinds of tape machines and all kinds of rare tapes ...

Back in the day, you didn't "get into" tape trading so much as, in time, you were deemed reliable. I'm guessing it's much the same today, with files instead of cassettes.