More News Coming Soon! Watch for our new weekly news roundup section, "Recorded Highlights & Action Replays", your column for catching up on all the scuttlebutt making the rounds...coming Sundays starting June 6th, only here at HotWacks On-line!

As we predicted, the presses are rolling again after the summer slump in bootleg land. I can count almost 100 new releases for the next month and that's just the ones I've been pre-informed about. Some highlights:

News: Little to report other than some new titles about to hit the bootleg bins. From Hot Stuff we've been told a Cramps DVD will be ready soon. Crazy Bad Cramps features the band giving a free concert at a northern California mental health facility (quite a spectacle to say the least). Included are some Cramps videos that no one's seen for years. Also from Hot Stuff are some Fleetwood Mac Rumors outakes, a Patti Smith anthology box set and a possible resurrection of the old Springsteen Tendolar title All Those Years with upgraded sound as newly found, better source tapes for most of the content have surfaced over the years. The folks at Tambourine Man in Asia have released some non-Dylan titles (we're not sure of the label name yet) that include two Springsteen shows (Philadelphia 8/9/03 and Giants Stadium 7/15/03) plus a Stones title (Rotterdam 8/15/2003). Scorpio and their related labels mention 2 new Stones DVD's of early material mostly culled from unseen TV appearances in Europe, a smashing soundboard of Fleetwood Mac from their earliest days in 1968, the long awaited Stones Down the Road Apiece, a Van Morrison from '73 along with a barrage of others including a Springsteen follow up to their big hit Night for the Vietnam Veteran (this one's staying a secret I guess). Clash experts Snotty Snail expect to release soon some new titles including Swindon '77, Cardiff '77, and Sheffield '77 along with a 101r's show (early, early Clash) and a DVD featuring Strummer solo.

Although summer has not seen a lot of new releases, there have been some notably great ones (see Hot Wacks reviews). It seems that labels are concentrating a little more on quality instead of quantity. With Japanese mass production almost at a standstill the few remaining labels have attempted (with success) at producing some decent titles of mostly newly found shows. Production in Japan (as elsewhere in the world) is always somewhat slower in the summer so when the colder wind starts blowing I'm sure there will be more to spin when the few remaining labels hit full production. I think we can assume to that the labels who did dig their heads into the ground will no doubt resurface as new labels. American CD and CD-R labels also seem to be working a little harder at decent releases. It's been hard to find anything really bad to say about anything lately (really bad anyway!).

It's been a typical bootleg summer with fewer new releases than the colder parts of the year. Basically nothing is coming from Japan and few from elsewhere. We hope you are not discouraged by the lesser amount of entries in Hot Wacks Online during June but we should be making up for that in the next couple of months as lots or new titles are slated for release. Here's a sampling of what's to come: