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Bolletino had become impatient that RCA and Columbia were not transferring their treasury of old jazz seventy-eights onto microgroove LPs. He began to do it himself in 1948, under the fictitious authority of the "British Rhythm Society."Jolly Roger appeared shortly later. By i95i Jolly Roger was publishing discs by, among many others, LouisArmstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet, Benny Goodman, Fats Waller, Artie Shaw, and Bessie Smith. By the middle of that year Jolly Roger was easily the most prominent of all the "pirate" labels. It brought to a head what had been a simmering controversy among connoisseurs about all this "bootlegging" or "piracy"- two terms that were to be distinguished from each other only at the climax of this clash.10 At its center was a magazine called Record Changer.

Record Changer was a connoisseur's journal, edited by a collector named Gordon Gullickson in the Washington, D.C. suburbs for a readership extending across the country. It consistently took the pirates' part. As long as the big companies let "classic" performances gather dust, Gullickson believed, they were "betraying a public trust." Pirates were not personally moral, Record Changer maintained, but they nevertheless performed a public service. Accordingly, it insisted that those who pirated recordings that were already commercially available-and such people did exist, as the magazine was soon informed in no uncertain terms-should desist. Others should carry on. Its larger point was that the moral identity of piracy depended on the moral economy of the music industry. That economy, Gullickson felt, was an uneasy mix of two incompatible systems, art and capitalism. In practice, the industry operated solely to maximize profits. But Record Changer insisted that record companies, whether they acknowledged it or not, had to be more than businesses. Theirs was a "moral and artistic burden," donned when they undertook to record and distribute "material that `belongs' (byvirtue of its cultural significance) to the people as a whole-or to that portion of the public that recognizes and insists upon the aesthetic importance of jazz."" Bootlegging, therefore, was only trivially a matter of individual pirates' greed. Its deeper cause was the companies' denial of their custodial responsibility. The magazine proposed the creation of an association of small recording companies-no giants admitted-to deal with issues of piracy according to this moral economy, shunning recourse to law. It was yet another in the long line of proposals for a trade civility. In late i95i, however, this was a controversial idea. A time of retrenchment was no moment to represent the pirate as "a Robin Hood of the waxworks."

The big companies were now looking far more aggressively at bootleggers. RCA Victor took the lead. It would target not only the pirate labels, it declared, but also the plants pressing their discs for them. Embarrassingly enough, however, it immediately turned out that one of the biggest factories manufacturing pirate discs was in fact RCA's own Custom Pressing plant. Worse still, it had been making records for none other than Bolletino'sJolly Roger. RecordChanger revealedwith no little schadenfreude that Bolletino had even hired RCA's plant to pirate RCA's own records. The most blatant pirate of them all had been operating in the very bowels of the "sworn enemy of disc piracy." To Gullickson this amounted to an "almost grotesque" proof of how unfit such corporations were as custodians. They clearly treated a pressing plant as a mere "robot," the sole purpose of which was to make money by manufacturing discs, content being irrelevant. The well-tempered robot obeyed, studiously ignoring questions of meaning, ethics, and even law. It did not even have enough nous to notice a pirate flag, which surely ought to have given the game away. The whole episode revealed "the wide gap that exists between `their' world and `ours,"' Record Changer concluded. If RCA really wanted