{"id":329970,"date":"2025-12-05T18:54:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T18:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/329970\/"},"modified":"2025-12-05T18:54:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-05T18:54:08","slug":"pink-floyds-wish-you-were-here-box-shines-light-on-a-bootleg-icon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/329970\/","title":{"rendered":"Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here’ Box Shines Light on a Bootleg Icon"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhen Pink Floyd<\/a>\u2018s Wish You Were Here tour touched down at the Los Angeles Sports Arena for a run of five shows in April 1975, chaos erupted outside the venue each night thanks to the heavy-handed tactics of the LAPD. A front-page article in the April 26, 1975, issue of the Los Angeles Times reveals that 350 fans were arrested at the first three shows. \u201cPolice said 85 percent of the arrests were for possessions of marijuana,\u201d reads the article. \u201cOther arrests were made for possession of dangerous drugs, liquor-related offenses, ticket scalping, and interfering with an officer during the course of an arrest. Most of the arrests involved juveniles under the age of 18.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the midst of all this chaos, few took notice of Jim Reinstein pushing his buddy Mike Millard up to the entrance of the arena in a wheelchair. \u201cThe sheriff at the time was a total redneck, totally anti-hippie,\u201d Reinstein says today. \u201cThere was this gauntlet of security, and there were guys that got busted with two joints. But we got in.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOnce they entered the main concourse, Reinstein wheeled Millard into a bathroom stall, where he removed a phone book-sized Nakamichi 550 tape recorder he hid beneath his wheelchair seat, along with batteries and a pair of AKG 451E microphones he stashed in a bag under a stack of clothes. \u201cHe would say, \u2018Hey, I get digestive problems, and I need a change of clothes,’\u201d says Reinstein. \u201cHe had a pair of boxer shorts on top, and then security wouldn\u2019t look past that once they saw it was underwear.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIt wasn\u2019t a completely ethical scheme considering Millard didn\u2019t actually need a wheelchair, and they were in gross violation of venue policy (not to mention the law) by sneaking in a recorder to tape the show. But Millard and Reinstein pulled off a historic feat that night by creating, by far, the most pristine recording of any show on Pink Floyd\u2019s 29-date Wish You Were Here tour. The tape has been cherished by Floyd fans for decades, and Sony \u2014 who bought the band\u2019s catalog in 2024 \u2014 is including it on the upcoming Wish You Were Here 50th anniversary box set. (In a stunning lack of forward vision, Pink Floyd didn\u2019t properly record any shows on the Wish You Were Here or The Dark Side of the Moon tours.)<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tTragically, Millard died by suicide in 1994, and he didn\u2019t live to witness his ascent to a Mount Rushmore figure in the world of concept taping: Along with the Floyd recordings, he taped roughly 350 other shows around Los Angeles between 1973 and the early 1990s. \u201cHe would be ecstatic,\u201d says Reinstein. \u201cIt gives his work a stamp of approval. It\u2019s no longer a bootleg. It\u2019s legitimate.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tWHEN REINSTEIN FIRST LAID EYES on Millard, he was tying microphones to a rail at the Long Beach Arena. It was March 19, 1974, and they\u2019d both arrived early to see Yes on the Tales From Topographic Oceans tour. \u201cI was really into photography and sound,\u201d he says. \u201cSo I was like, \u2018I got to talk to this guy.\u2019 It turned out he lived in Fullerton at his mom\u2019s house. I was in Placentia at the time, which is like five miles away. And he had a buddy with him filming the show in 8-millimeter. We met up afterwards at Mike\u2019s rumpus room, the three of us, and synced up the footage to the recording. We became fast friends doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tThey couldn\u2019t have been in a better time and place. L.A. was the epicenter of the rock universe in America, and it was a peak moment for groups like Genesis, Yes, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd that they both revered. Every single major touring act came through town at least once per tour, often playing multiple shows. Millard and Reinstein spent every dime they had on tickets, and they refused to experience each concert only a single time.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThey wanted to bring that show home in the same way that if your parents went to Hawaii in the 1980s, they brought slides back and leis and whatever,\u201d says Erik Flannigan, a writer and musical archivist who wrote the notes in the Wish You Were Here box set. \u201cFor these guys, this was their vacation. That was their thing they wanted to reexperience. Mike was like, \u2018How can I take that to the highest level? How can I make the highest quality recordings of these things that I love?’\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the early days, it was easy since venues like the Long Beach Arena didn\u2019t flinch when Millard walked in with mics and a TC-153SD portable cassette recorder. But once record stores started selling bootlegs<\/a> pressed onto vinyl by shady underground labels \u2014 a practice Millard abhorred \u2014 venue staff started to hunt for tapers, especially at the Forum and the L.A. Sports Arena, where many of their favorite bands played.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJim Reinstein<\/p>\n

\n\tNo band was more anti-bootleg than Led Zeppelin. Manager Peter Grant and his minions would scan the crowd looking for tapers. Violators would be ejected, and not always in gentle ways. And so when Zeppelin came to the Forum in March 1975, Millard got creative. \u201cMike dug his dad\u2019s wheelchair out of his garage,\u201d says Millard. \u201cWe stuffed the recorder into the seat cushion. And in the bathroom of the arena, I\u2019d wire him from head to toe, with two microphones sticking out of his hat. The wires went down his shirt, through his pants, down to his boots.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen they arrived at their row, Millard would gingerly stand up, fold the wheelchair, and slowly walk to his seat, pretending he had mobility issues. At this point, the recorder was in a large yellow bag he placed at his feet. It was then just a matter of connecting the wires, hitting record, keeping the mics hidden in his hat, and hoping security didn\u2019t notice the ends sticking out. \u201cAt the beginning of the night, he would say to nearby fans, \u2018Here\u2019s my name and number. If you\u2019re quiet, I\u2019ll give you a copy of the recording.’\u201d says Reinstein. \u201cAnd out of over 350 shows, I think only one person did that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tAt the Zeppelin show, Millard dared to do this from the very front row. \u201cYou look off to the side, and here\u2019s Peter Grant, this big, hulking menace,\u201d says Reinstein. \u201cWe knew if we were caught, we\u2019d be beaten to a pulp.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThey landed in the front row since tickets were distributed back then through a mail-in system that they figured out how to game. \u201cMail-in was code for total corruption,\u201d says Reinstein with a laugh. \u201cWe knew a guy at Al Brooks [ticket company] who worked out of the Roosevelt Hotel in downtown L.A. They\u2019d have seats in every section. We\u2019d have our choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter testing multiple spots, they determined the best spot for recording was about five rows back. \u201cWe became very picky,\u201d says Reinstein. \u201cTo us, the 10th row was way back. But we sat in the 16th row for Pink Floyd because we heard that they were using quadrophonic sound at the show. They had a stack of PA speakers in each corner, so we wanted to sit a little back and hopefully pick up more of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter a few glorious years of utilizing the wheelchair system, venues finally caught onto their act and flagged their gear at the door. Fortunately, a handful of security guards were willing to open up a side door and let them in \u2014 for the right price. \u201cWe just bribed them,\u201d says Reinstein. \u201cThat got us in, but we still couldn\u2019t get caught during the show.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJim Reinstein<\/p>\n

\n\tThey also feared getting caught leaving the venue. To avoid that, Millard would subtly pass the tape into Reinstein\u2019s hand the moment the show ended. \u201cAs soon as the lights came back up, I would go one way, he would go another way,\u201d says Reinstein. \u201cI was an expert at going through the crowd and making my way to the car.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIt meant the tape would get out of the house even if Millard was caught with the recording gear. \u201cYou get a rush out of it,\u201d says Reinstein. \u201cAnd our reward at the end was a chest in the back of his car with Heinekens on ice. So, we would get to the car, plug in the headphones, crack open a couple of beers, listen to the show, and go, \u2018Cheers. We did it.’\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tUnlike most tapers of his era, Millard had no interest in profiting from his recordings. This was purely a hobby. And when making copies for friends, he\u2019d insert a brief audio drop at a set point that he\u2019d carefully log in his records. It meant that if one of his tapes wound up as the source of a commercial bootleg, he\u2019d know exactly who leaked it.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhat often goes lost is that Mike had an eclectic taste in music,\u201d says Flannigan. \u201cYes, he made great tapes of Led Zeppelin. But he also made great tapes of Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, Joni Mitchell, and the Pretenders. He\u2019s famous for the big hard-rock shows, but the most exceptional tape I\u2019ve heard of is is a Chick Corea tape. Also, people wonder why he didn\u2019t tape Pink Floyd in 1980 or Anaheim Stadium in 1977. Why didn\u2019t he tape the Stones in 1981? It\u2019s because he couldn\u2019t get the seats he wanted. If he couldn\u2019t get the seat, he wouldn\u2019t do it. It makes his hit rate extremely high.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe details remain a little blurry today, but Millard took a five-year break after getting busted by security in 1983. By the time he started taping again in 1988, Reinstein had moved on with his life. \u201cI had to give up the rock and roll lifestyle, because it\u2019s not \u2026 to give you the G-rated version, I just had to get out of that or else I\u2019d be dead in a few years,\u201d he says. \u201cI got married in 1986. Mike came to the wedding, and he sometimes came over to a barbecue or whatever at my house. But we stopped seeing shows together.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor the entire time that Reinstein knew him, Millard worked in the audio\/visual department at Mount San Antonio College. \u201cI remember him saying once that if things didn\u2019t work out with his job that he\u2019d rather kill himself than live on the street,\u201d says Reinstein. \u201cI just dismissed it at the time, but I guess in hindsight that was always an option for him.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBy 1994, Millard was battling depression, self-medicating with cocaine, and trying to get back to work after living off disability for a period. \u201cHe was in a lot of duress,\u201d says Reinstein. \u201cI guess his boss didn\u2019t like him. He actually tried suicide a few months before, and he wasn\u2019t successful.\u201d Later that year, he died by jumping off a building.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFor years, Millard\u2019s tape archive sat in a closet at his mother\u2019s house, gathering dust. The vast majority of it had never been heard by anyone outside of his very tiny circle of friends. \u201cI\u2019d go over for dinner sometimes, but I didn\u2019t want to ask her about them even through, in a sense, those tapes were half mine since we were 50-50 partners,\u201d Reinstein says. \u201cAnd I took photos at the shows and would give him whatever he wanted. But our mutual friend befriended his mom, and she gave him the tapes. We\u2019ve released about 250 of them on [BitTorrent sites] Dimeadozen and Trader\u2019s Den, even though some were so old they had to pull the spool out and reshell them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOnce they started to spread through the BitTorrent community and eventually make their way to YouTube, Mike \u201cThe Mic\u201d Millard tapes become shorthand for supreme high quality. \u00a0And as always, nobody made a dime from them. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tIt may be hard to imagine that a cassette recorded by a fan with microphones sticking out of his hat is better than anything in the Pink Floyd vault from 1975. But the band simply didn\u2019t see the value in recording shows back then. \u201cRecording multitrack in the Seventies was an onerous, heavy, expensive, complicated thing to do,\u201d says Flannigan. \u201cYou had to have a mobile truck because you needed not one, but two multitrack decks. If you only had one and you\u2019re flipping the reel, you\u2019re missing some of the show. So, having two 16-track decks, the power it took to do that, the temperature control, all these other things \u2026 It\u2019s a lot of money for someone to spend without necessarily knowing what you were ever going to do with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was much cheaper and easier to create a mono or two-track soundboard recording from the venue\u2019s mixing console. \u201cIt feels like just common sense to us that every artist would have someone record every show at least as a soundboard,\u201d says Flannigan. \u201cBut, again, to what end? And most of the soundboard recordings that exist came from then. It\u2019s the sound engineers who kept them, not the band.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tA great audience tape is usually superior to a standard soundboard since it captures the sound of the room. That\u2019s what Porcupine Tree\u2019s Steve Wilson \u2014 who enjoys a very successful side career as an audio remixer of classic albums<\/a> \u2014 discovered when he was given Millard\u2019s tape to remix for the Wish You Were Here set.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou still have all the hallmarks of a bootleg,\u201d says Wilson. \u201cThere\u2019s the ambience of the room, very little separation, and all that stuff. But it\u2019s of exceptional high quality for a bootleg. He really, really took his work seriously. We\u2019re very lucky to have it, and I really did what I could in terms of restoring.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMy job was really to listen to all the\u00a0digital versions that had been made from his original cassette tape over the 50 years,\u00a0compile a master take, and then to try and add some extra fairy dust on top,\u201d he adds. \u201cMy job wasn\u2019t to try and make it sound like anything other than what it was, which is a bootleg. But just to try and increase the stereo separation a bit, try to get a bit more tone in it, and try to even out some of the uglier frequencies that were there because of the sound of the auditorium on the night. And just to try to do my best to present a definitive version of this original cassette tape that\u2019s been around for 50 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tFlannigan has been enthralled by Millard\u2019s story for years, and even used a vintage Nakamichi 550 tape recorder to record a show by the National in 2019 that the band officially released on cassette. He paired it with the mini-documentary Juicy Sonic Magic: The Mike Millard Method. Going forward, he hopes to make a proper documentary that tells Millard\u2019s entire life story. \u201cI\u2019ve interviewed all but one person I\u2019ve found that knew Mike directly and was involved in what he was doing,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s some pretty amazing stories there.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe groundswell of interest in Millard has been enormously vindicating for Reinstein. He just wishes his friend was still here to experience it. \u201cIf Mike would have known that we\u2019re talking about him now,\u201d says Reinstein, \u201cobviously, he\u2019d still be alive.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Pink Floyd\u2018s Wish You Were Here tour touched down at the Los Angeles Sports Arena for a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":329971,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,184661,134,136,82890],"class_list":{"0":"post-329970","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-bootlegs","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-pink-floyd"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329970\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/329971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}