It’s 26 April 1975, and Pink Floyd are in the midst of a five-night run at Los Angeles Sports Arena.
Floyd are the hottest ticket in town right now, with their set promising new songs from new album Wish You Were Here, the eagerly anticipated follow-up to their era-defining 1973 album The Dark Side Of The Moon.
The mood is heady and, is to be expected, security is tight, with the LAPD cracking down on marijuana possession and ticket scalping. Most aspiring bootleggers would take one look at the police presence at the venue, consider the sheer size and weight of the equipment they’d need to sneak in, and then decide against trying to record the show.
But one concert goer – Mike ‘The Mic’ Millard, a 23-year-old audio/visual technician at a local college – was made of sterner stuff. Anticipating the heightened security at the show, Millard used a method that he’d first tried at the previous month’s Led Zeppelin show at the LA Forum.
He dusted off an old wheelchair from his father’s garage and concealed a Nakamichi 550 tape recorder – roughly the size and weight of an old VCR – beneath the seat. He then buried two AKG 451E microphones, wires and batteries at the bottom of a bag of clothes and convinced a pal, Jim Reinstein, to wheel him into the show, bag on lap. If security questioned him, Millard would tell them he had a sensitive stomach and he needed a change of clothes.
The scheme worked like a dream and, as fans poured into the arena, finding their seats and seeking out refreshments, Millard was in a bathroom stall, having the microphones fitted into his hat by Reinstein, who then fed wires from the mics beneath Millard’s clothing, all the way down to his boots. The two men found their seats, where Miller attached the wires to the tape recorder, which was hidden in a bag at his feet and pressed record.
While his methods were underhand and potentially disadvantaged fans who had genuine disabilities, at least Millard wasn’t looking to profit from his tapes. Millard was vehemently against the sale of the bootlegs he made and went to great lengths to insert markers into the tapes he made friends – short audio drops – so that he’d know exactly who was responsible, should the recordings end up circulating on the black market.
What’s more, Millard’s tapes were of such high quality that, when it comes to the shows he recorded between 1973 and ’94 – reckoned to number over 300, covering artists including Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones – he was effectively preserving them for future generations. This is particularly true of the Pink Floyd show, given that the band, bafflingly, failed to record any of the US leg of the Wish You Were Here tour professionally.
Millard and Reinstein went to painstaking lengths to ensure that the recording was as good as possible, testing the best position for recording and ensuring they had the best possible seats. ‘We became very picky,’ Reinstein told Rolling Stone. ‘To us, the 10th row was way back. But we sat in the 16th row for Pink Floyd because we heard that they were using quadrophonic sound at the show. They had a stack of PA speakers in each corner, so we wanted to sit a little back and hopefully pick up more of that.’
They took the same care with all of their recordings and when the wheelchair ruse eventually got found out, the enterprising bootleggers found security guards happy to take a bribe to let them in venues. Millard’s luck ran out though and in 1983 he was busted, at which point Reinstein opted out. Following a five-year break, Millard returned to taping, though he was not as prolific as that golden spell of the mid-’70s.
Tragically, Millard died by suicide in 1994. Eventually, with the permission of his friend’s mother, Reinstein began to digitise his recordings and put them on not-for-profit torrent sites. Soon, word spread of the sonic excellence of these audience recordings, not least the Floyd bootleg. When the band were putting together an anniversary edition of Wish You Were Here, they called upon remixer extraordinaire Steven Wilson to work on Millard’s tape for official release.
‘It’s of exceptional high quality for a bootleg,’ Wilson told Rolling Stone. ‘He really, really took his work seriously. We’re very lucky to have it.’ Wilson’s remix was officially released on the Blu-Ray of the Wish You Were Here 50th anniversary deluxe edition and, in April 2026, will make it on to vinyl, as a 4LP set for Record Store Day. And we all have Mike ‘The Mic’ Millard to thank for that.
Five other legendary bootlegs
1. The Beach Boys, SMiLE
When Brian Wilson abandoned his ambitious ‘teenage symphony to God’ SMiLE in 1967, the sprawling and incomplete album took on a mythic quality. Excerpts found their way on to a succession of Beach Boys albums, but it wasn’t till the early ’80s that tapes of the sessions ended up in the hands of bootleggers and SMiLE found its way on to the black market.
As additional sessions leaked, more comprehensive versions came out, notably the Unsurpassed Masters set in the late ’90s. In 2004, Wilson and his touring band revisited the sessions for the Brian Wilson Presents Smile album and shows and in 2011, the five-disc box set The Smile Sessions gave the fullest picture to date, but for many fans, the bootlegs remain indispensable.
2. Bob Dylan: Great White Wonder
The most bootlegged artist of all time? Dylan is certainly up there. But this under-the-counter release was the one that really set the ball rolling. Great White Wonder appeared in 1969 and gave fans 24 tracks taken from various sources, including – most excitingly at the time – seven tracks recorded with The Band in the summer of 1967 from sessions which would become known as The Basement Tapes.
These songs – including ‘I Shall Be Released’, ‘Tears Of Rage’, ‘The Mighty Quinn’ and ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ – leaked thanks to acetates circulated among artists by Dylan’s publishing company. In 1975, The Band revisited the sessions and released the 2LP set The Basement Tapes, featuring overdubs and additional songs, but fans were better served by the 2001 bootleg set A Tree With Roots and the official 2014 release The Basement Tapes Complete.
3. Kate Bush, Cathy’s Home Demos
Alternatively known, with slightly different tracklistings, by titles including Alone At My Piano and Shrubberies, this collection presents demos recorded by Kate Bush at home before signing her first record contract. Singing and accompanying herself on piano, Bush performs early and still-unreleased songs such as ‘Something Like A Song’, ‘Rinfy The Gypsy’ and ‘Dali’, as well as material she’d later release on The Kick Inside. Given Bush’s reluctance to open her vaults, these bootlegs remain the best way of fans hearing her earliest work.
4. The Clash, Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg
In January 1981, Clash guitarist Mick Jones put together Rat Control From Fort Bragg, a 15-track double-album culled from recent sessions in London and New York. Their fifth album seemingly in the bag, the group embarked upon a tour of Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong and Thailand. By the time they’d returned they’d decided that the album should be a single LP and entrusted the task of remixing the material to veteran producer Glyn Johns.
The result was the 12-track Combat Rock, which became the band’s biggest album to date and even featured a couple of bona fide hits in ‘Should I Stay Or Should I Go’ and ‘Rock The Casbah’. But for fans who wanted more, a bootleg of Jones’ original mixes soon found its way into circulation.
5. Prince, The Black Album
According to legend, Prince recorded the filthy funk of The Black Album as a response to critics who deemed his landmark 1987 double-album Sign ‘O’ The Times too poppy. The album, otherwise known as ‘The Funk Bible’, was set for release on 22 November '87, but days before it was due to hit shelves, Prince had a change of heart after ‘a spiritual epiphany’ and demanded it was pulled from the release schedule.
At this point, 500,000 copies which had been pressed and were ready for distribution had to be destroyed, though a handful of copies survived, along with the promos that had already been sent out. Soon after, bootlegs were flooding the market and, in November 1994, the album was eventually given an official release.
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