Straight Boots

You know how much I know about the pressing for the Straight Ahead record? Nothing really. I know that it was released as a 12 inch on I Risk Records back in 1987, and that it has probably been bootlegged a half a dozen times, but that's about it. I was checking out Brian Murphy's recent eBay listings and I spotted a Straight Ahead bootleg, or "fan pressing" as he referred to it. I figured that I didn't own ANY pressings of this record, so I figured that I'd throw a low offer on it and see what happened. To my surprise, I won. More to my surprise, there were songs on this record that I had never heard before! I thought that I had downloaded all the Straight Ahead songs at one point, yet three of the songs on this record were new to me.

This 7 inch pressing is on orange vinyl, and comes with a nicely designed and quality sleeve. Brian's auction mentioned that he has also seen this pressed on purple vinyl.

A couple of days later, I came across another 7 inch boot for Straight Ahead. I figured that if I could pick it up a decent price, it would be kind of cool to see how the two of them compared. I not only won it, but it ended with the exact same price as the orange copy.

This pressing was on black vinyl, and the sleeve was not as well put together. Seriously, this one looked like the cut and paste bootleg sleeve that you would expect. This pressing also included the songs that Straight Ahead had released on the End The Warzone compilation on Side B. Interestingly enough, I bought the End The Warzone comp on a 7 inch boot back in the early 90's...before I was seriously collecting records, and before I really had any idea what a bootleg was. Yeah, bootlegs probably aren't all that impressive, but I'm happy to finally have a version (or two!) of this record in my collection.