Guitarist Peter Green's legacy there for all to hear at last
Live recordings of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, featuring guitarist who replaced Eric Clapton in the band, have been released in album form
Jazz, blues and rock fans have collected bootlegs - also called "recordings of indeterminate origin" (ROIO) - for decades. They are often notable for poor to dreadful sound, but they sometimes capture performances of exceptional quality, even if in lo-fi audio.
These unauthorised recordings used to be fairly difficult to find, but countless numbers can now be easily downloaded and in many cases are posted on YouTube. It has also become common for record companies and the artists to issue these recordings officially, recognising that they are in circulation anyway and that a chance to turn a profit is being lost.
Probably the most successful archival issue programme of this kind has been Columbia's "The Bootleg Series" of Bob Dylan recordings - now on its 11th volume, The Basement Tapes, culled from arguably the most famous bootleg trove in rock. That series began in 1991 with the Volumes 1-3 boxed set.
A pioneer in the "official bootleg" area was John Mayall, who for his 1968 Diary of a Band albums (Volumes 1 and 2 were released separately) gave Decca Records concert tapes he had made of the version of the Bluesbreakers featuring guitarist Mick Taylor. That incarnation of the band is fairly well documented, but the shorter period between Eric Clapton's tenure and Taylor's, during which Peter Green was a member, is less so.
Just one album, 1967's A Hard Road, features Green all the way through, although he turns up on assorted singles and in cameo guest roles on other Mayall releases. Green left the band that same year, followed shortly by long-serving Mayall bassist John McVie, to form what was originally called Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac.
To hear how the Green-era Bluesbreakers sounded live, listeners had to trawl the internet for bootleg recordings with all but unlistenably poor sound. Now, however, Forty Below Records has released John Mayall's Bluesbreakers - Live in 1967 (Never Before Heard Live Performances), featuring Mayall on vocals, keyboards and harmonica, Green playing lead guitar, McVie on bass and Mick Fleetwood on drums.