Right now my head is filled with thoughts about the economic crisis in the United States and the upcoming election for President. The former head of Goldman Sachs demanding $700 billion, without having to tell anyone what he does with it and which pushes the US debt to over 11 trillion dollars, financed in large part by China. Elected and appointed representatives caught completely off guard by something that didn’t just happen over night. Sarah Palin, the biggest and least funny joke of the year. John McCain, a millionaire who doesn’t even know how many houses he owns, calls Barack Obama, who was raised on food stamps, an elitist and 40% of the electorate says “Yeah!” How can a poor man stand such times and live?

Half of my time is spent obsessively watching and reading the news and the other half is spent trying not to think about it. What distractions are there to help maintain some grasp on sanity? Yeah, okay, massive quantities of alcohol is the most obvious answer, but I’m not much of a drinker. Another valid answer would be women, but I now find myself in a long distance relationship, which among other things is yet another reason to stay out of bars.

So that leaves me with my usual movies, TV and music. But most of the movies this past summer were utter crap and aside from Mad Men, there’s been little to watch on TV that doesn’t show complete contempt for the audience. It’s been a slow summer for new releases, which is why my recent columns have tended to focus in on older artists and reissues, and this one will be more of the same.

Back in May, I wrote about the “deluxe” edition reissues of classic (and some not-so-classic) albums and noted at the time that these expanded editions haven’t been released for certain artists, such as the Beatles, because their back catalog continues to sell so well that they don’t need to do anything to goose sales along.

Of course that’s not entirely true, and if any collectors read that column, they were probably shaking their heads and asking, “What about bootlegs? What about Purple Chick?” They’re right of course.

Bootleg albums – specifically unauthorized releases of otherwise unreleased material (as opposed to pirate albums which are merely copies of regular releases) – have been around probably as long as the recording industry itself. The bootleg “industry” mostly floated along under the radar until 1969, when a label called TMQ (or “Trademark of Quality”) released a two LP set by Bob Dylan called The Great White Wonder.

Since then, there have been thousands of bootlegs released first on vinyl and then on compact disc. Everything from concerts and radio broadcasts to an incredible variety of studio outtakes and alternate mixes. And while some artists enforce a zero tolerance policy against bootleggers, others (most famously the Grateful Dead) have simply shrugged their shoulders and gone along with it, usually when it was done on a not-for-profit basis. These artists understand that the people who buy or trade for this stuff are their biggest fans and don’t want to alienate their base (with the famous exception of Metallica). The Internet has made distribution of this music possible on a wider scale than the men behind the TMQ label could have ever envisioned. If the genie was out of the bottle with Great White Wonder, Bit Torrent smashed the bottle once and for all. The combination of Google, Bit Torrent and Usenet puts these recordings within reach of the entire globe. Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but I have over 125 gigabytes of Bruce Springsteen concert MP3s.

The Beatles are not merely the best selling group of all time; they are probably the most bootlegged group. This situation may be exacerbated by the fact that the people who own the Beatles’ back catalog have left us with official CDs that sound like shit and a few rarities collections that represent barely a drop in the bucket. Everything is available on bootleg. Everything. You want to hear The Quarrymen in 1957, recorded on the fateful day that John Lennon met Paul McCartney? It’s out there. The audition tapes for Decca? Of course. How about all of the Beatles appearances on BBC radio as opposed to just the officially released two discs of excerpts? There’s a twelve disc set out there. What about the hundreds of hours of sessions and rehearsals for Let It Be? It’s all there.

Sure, there’s an element of trainspotting in all of this. Does anyone really need to have 5 different takes of the Beatles’ counting down the intro to Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand, the German language version of I Wanna Hold Your Hand?

Still, there are dozens of gems to be found in the Beatles’ bootleg catalog and if you’re trying to choose, the place to start and probably finish is with a label called Purple Chick.

Purple Chick has released so-called “Deluxe Editions” of all of the official Beatles albums. The early albums have been redone as three disc sets – one disc contains the mono version, one disc stereo and the third disc consists of various studio bits and pieces. They bring together all the songs from all the different international editions of the albums as well as singles and B-sides. And they sound great, possibly better than the official releases.

The Deluxe Sgt. Pepper is actually a six disc set, with four discs that contain alternate versions and isolated tracks that show step by step how the album was constructed. Similarly, the Purple Chick version of the White Album contains six discs of every possible version of those songs and another six discs of fragments, alternate takes and studio chatter. Purple Chick hasn’t stopped there; there are a total of 20 releases that document the Beatles’ career from start to finish. There’s a lifetime of listening here.

Naturally the Beatles aren’t the only performers to be on the receiving end of such slavish devotion. Pink Floyd fans have put together a 17 disc collection of rarities, A Tree Full of Secrets. The Japanese are famously obsessive about western music and have put together several amazing boxed sets of Led Zeppelin outtakes, including an 11 disc set of rarities from the Antrabata label and a further 12 disc set of “Ultimate Studio Sessions.”

Oops, just saw on the news that John McCain has announced he’s suspending his campaign in order to fix the economy, something that he hasn’t managed to do so far in two and a half decades in Congress. I think he’s really staying home to listen to Bob Dylan’s 1965 Revisited, a 14 disc set of studio outtakes and several live shows from what is arguably Dylan’s most musically significant year. And while they listen to Dylan running through Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright in his London hotel room, perhaps John will look at Larry and say, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”