Rapidshare Bob Dylan Desire
This is a photo of photographer Ken Regan with Bob Dylan in the 1980's. Ken was the official Rolling Thunder tour photographer and took the cover of Desire. In this photo, visitors are looking down at Plymouth Rock in 1976. I'm a fan of Johnny Cash as well as Dylan, and have wanted Nashville Skyline for ages. Thank you *so* much!
I started this blog (well the first incarnation of this blog which originally was on Blogger.com) back on May 29, 2004. Its initially purpose was to journal the 10 months my wife and are were spending in Strasbourg, France. I wanted a way to both store my experiences their for posterity and share them with my friends and family. At first I was writing breathlessly about my experiences in a foreign country, amazed and excited about every little new things. But as these things happen the new and exciting slowly became old and familiar. Updating steam extracting packages. I wrote less and less about my French experiences and began writing movie, music and book reviews. When we moved back to the states I kept that aspect of the blog up and The Midnight Cafe became less a journal and more of a pop culture site.
It didn’t take long for me to start writing about bootlegs. At first I was reviewing them and then I started actually posting the music. It was very trial and error in those days as I was still figuring out the best way to upload the shows and make them readily available to my readers.
For a time I was writing about pop culture, sharing interesting things I found on the Internet and posting bootlegs. But more and more the bootlegs began taking over and eventually The Midnight Cafe became the bootleg blog you all know and (hopefully) love. The very first bootleg I ever posted was a show featuring Jim James, Conor Oberst and m. Sadly I no longer have that show (lost in one of many hard drive failures since then) but you can see that early post. It should be noted that the free music I mention in that post isn’t bootlegs but rather studio MP3s I had been writing about (and sharing) at the time. That first bootleg was posted in October of 2008. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of me posting bootlegs to this blog I thought I’d highlight the ten most popular bootlegs I’ve ever posted.
The plan is to do one each month. I’d like to repost the shows and maybe talk about them and my blog a little.
Since I missed January I’ll try to post two in February and then if everything goes smoothly I’ll count town one show each month until we get to October and celebrate the most popular bootleg I’ve ever shared. I’ll be using the WordPress counter, sorting by number of views over the entire history of the blog. As mentioned this blog started on Blogger, migrated to a free WordPress site then spent many years on my own paid for space (though using the WordPress platform) and then a few years back I loaded everything back onto the free WordPress site. My guess is that this has royally screwed up the counter, but its all I got. Interestingly (and this may point directly to how screwed up the counter is) none of the top ten posts have been accessed more than a few thousand times. Truth is I’ve never been a really huge site in terms of hit count. I average somewhere between 1000-1500 unique visitors a day.