Bob Dylan bootleg recordings

Bob Dylan bootleg recordings are unreleased performances by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, that have been circulated throughout the public without undergoing an official, sanctioned release. It is commonly misconceived that bootlegs are only restricted to audio, but bootleg video performances, such as Dylan's 1966 film Eat the Document, which remains officially unreleased, are considered to be bootlegs. Dylan is generally considered to be the most bootlegged artist in rock history, rivaled only by the Grateful Dead.

Due to his constant touring between 1988–present, and the fact that almost every show has been recorded, many of Dylan's illicit recordings come from the Never Ending Tour. However, early taped performances by friends dating from the late 1950s, concerts, Newport Folk Festival shows, demo tapes, and studio outtakes provide a wide range of unreleased material to be bootlegged.

The first ever popular rock bootleg to appear on the black market was Dylan's Great White Wonder, a double album first coming to underground record stores in mid-1969, through a young bootleg label, "Trademark of Quality" (TMQ). It contained a variety of material: several tracks coming from a hotel rehearsal in December 1961 (recorded by then-girlfriend Bonnie Beecher), Witmark publishing demos, an interview with Pete Seeger, studio outtakes from the Highway 61 Revisited sessions, songs recorded with The Band in the summer of 1967 in (which would become known as The Basement Tapes), and one live performance from a 1969 broadcast of The Johnny Cash Show. As people began to buy the record, duplicates began to appear that were released by other young bootleg labels. These re-releases usually switched track listings, or just took a single record of the two, and released it under a different name. Generally, the quality of the recordings degenerated between different releases, because the songs were being copied from the same source many times over.

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