Recently Andy McKaie of Universal complained about this site's section on recommendations:
The Starter's Collection (What you must have).
I welcome critical comments, especially from Andy - because I hope he welcomes mine as well. He had two things to note: my recommendations being outdated and my selection of the most important Berry CDs being illegal.
On the first topic, Andy was completely correct. I had not updated this section since 2001! Shame on me. Since then there have been several and very good compilations of Berry's work. So if my intention is to present a Starter's Collection to a fresh Berry collector, I have to present CDs which are relevant and currently on sale. Agreed!
On the second topic I disagree with Andy. He complained that the two most important compilations I recommended were not from Universal/MCA, but from UK's Charly Records. Andy insists that Charly never had the rights to produce these CDs (
which was decided in court). So he says these were essentially bootlegs and I should not recommend bootlegs. Yes and no.
Yes, I shall not encourage you to produce or to buy bootlegged records. I create copyrighted material for a living and therefore I am very strict against bootlegging, may it be software, records, or copyrighted text such as this. Where this site shows or describes bootlegs, this is purely for documenting purposes. It is nowhere that you will find recommendations or even purchase information for unofficial releases here. The descriptions are for the collector only, showing that these items exist, usually because the legal copyright owners failed to produce the material in appropriate form.
Having said that, let's continue with No: In contrast to Andy's statements, in my opinion the Charly records and CDs are not bootlegs. I do not know about Charly themselves, although I think they were under the impression to own the needed licenses. Otherwise they would not have spend such an amount of work into creating very nice and expensive CD sets. In any case I am 100% certain that record sellers as well as buyers were confident that they traded legitimate releases back then. I know I was. These items have been legally sold and can be so re-sold today. And for items such as the
Bio album, the Charly CD sets are still the only way to purchase CD versions of these songs in a legally correct way. So until Universal re-releases these, I will continue to recommend getting the Charly CDs, even though this is next to impossible nowadays.
In any case I have reworked the
The Starter's Collection (What you must have). Enjoy and feel free to comment!