During a certain phase of my life, it was my one mission to record every musical TV or Cable show I could get my hands on. MTV, VH1, Austin City Limits and Lenno or Letterman, anything. I stayed up late, got up early and stalked shows for any band or show that might be available on the stations I got at the time. I would stay up with my finger on the record button waiting for Red Hot Chili Peppers to perform on Letterman until my finger cramped.

In retrospect, I was clearly out of my mind. It wasridiculous. First of all, the quality of the tapes I used was crap, and the shows I recorded were certainly available in other formats and at high quality, even the talk show appearances. Also, I rarely, sometimes never watched these shows again. I became infatuated with the hunt for the recordings more than I enjoyed the recordings. To this day, with a few exceptions… if I were offered a DVD of a live show of a band, or a live CD, I would pick the CD every time.

There were some good ones that I captured. In particular the Live Aid shows, which I later copied to cassette and added to my bootleg collection, and Stevie Ray Vaughn at El Mocambo.

Also this:

This was a Clapton concert that was on VH1. This show was single handedly responsible for my “Clapton” phase. I loved and was actually amazed by this show. I want to say that this was from his “Behind The Sun” phase. I bet there are some folks out there that will recognize his “outfit” and be able to pin it down to a tour. I was one of those people in yesteryears. After watching this I went on to discovered all phases of Clapton’s career. Yardbirds, Cream, and his solo stuff. That was at least a positive of the hours wasted on all of these tapes. None of them are very watchable these days grainy and with poor sound. At some point I was proud of them.

I had to set up a TV and VCR in the basement as I was cleaning to rewind, play and determine if the tape was an old TV show (like Oprah or sitcoms) tape, a dubbed family video cam recording, or, my music bootlegs. TV tapes and music bootlegs hit the garbage barrel. It was a long process.

I came across the Clapton tape and had to watch for a while. It’s a grainy but good show.

Damn, that guy can play.