What Is This?
This is what used to be the alt.fan.frank-zappa bootleg FAQ. Along with other FAQs, it was posted in a plain text version on the usenet newsgroup alt.fan.frank-zappa on a monthly basis. That text version was also available on the web. Like some other FAQs, it grew beyond compute (thanks to the input of scores and scores of readers) and is now available as a series of web pages - right here. Ardent downloaders can always save each of the HTML files for an up-to-date local copy.
It's not so much a collection of frequently asked questions (and answers). It's a list of bootleg recordings of Frank Zappa on vinyl and CD. It's long, but not complete. There is only a very basic question-and-answer section about bootlegs, but there is no more frequent question than "identify boot x" and "what is on bootleg so and so" anyway. This is NOT a list of all live recordings of Zappa that circulate on tape; such a list is available elsewhere, maintained by my countryman Jon Naurin. If you want to read more about bootlegs, bootleggers, the record industry, and anomalies of law, I half recommend the book BOOTLEG by Clinton Heylin.
Instructions for Use
If you're looking for a particular bootleg, browse for it in the alphabetical index, if you know the title, or the chronology, if you for example are looking for a 1973 concert boot. If you don't find it, look harder; you and I may have the title a little bit differently. Use the search function in your browser and try to locate a key word. If you really can't find it, look among the unknown bootlegs - the ones I have very little info on. Of course, if you find it there it will not help you very much, but if you don't find it there either you could always alert me to its existence and get it listed there. (If you know a great deal about it, I suggest you tell me what you know, so we could get it listed properly.)
Disclaimer
I did not create this FAQ, or whatever it is. Other people have worked on it (Rob
Sweet, Robbert Heederik and Cory Ferber, to be precise) and I'm the one
working on it now. It is a bootleg FAQ, and as such necessarily based on hearsay, second-, third- and fourth-hand information.
Some of the sources at my disposal can not possibly have been created by humans. I have
done my best to extract information from all sources, and to check and double-check, but
half of it may be wrong anyway. Corrections are only welcome. (Rule of thumb: If I sound
like there MIGHT be an error, then I KNOW there is; if I don't, I THINK
there is.)