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30 Killed By Death Songs

May 22nd, 2013

For Punk Rock the late 80s was an odd time. the scene had all but burned itself out and suddenly record collectors suddenly began to pay attention to the countless rare records the movement produced. Around 89 a series of bootlegs began to appear in record stores. The bootleg complications were called Killed By Death and featured recordings of the records which most of which were long out of print and expensive. Allowing a completely new group of collectors to hear parts of records they had never heard and driving the demand and prices even higher.


Over the next 15 years, the series went on to produce close to 40 complications by a number of different bootleggers and would cause the term KBD to be added to the heading of countless Ebay listing even when the record wasn't that rare to begin with. The demand also brought about the Bloodstains Bootleg series. So if you didn't have pockets full of cash, the only way you were going to hear a majority of these recordings was by buying to comps.


Most of the music then and even now was orphaned and often self produced by musicians that had not a clue of the demand for these old recordings. It's a wonder that without the bootlegs, if there any of these recordings would have seen legitimate release in the years that followed.  One of the main advantages of the digital ages is the cheapness in which CDs and now Digital files can be released. Many recordings that would have cost you a couple hundred a song can now be found on Spotify.


So for this installment I took a number of tracks off the first KBD and Bloodstains comps and added a few rare tracks that I feel should have been on at least one or two of them. In the future I plan on putting together a list of music that would have cost you at least $1000 in 1989. 

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