When Pink Floyd‘s Wish You Were Here tour touched down at the Los Angeles Sports Arena for a run of five shows in April 1975, chaos erupted outside the venue each night thanks to the heavy-handed tactics of the LAPD. A front-page article in the April 26, 1975, issue of the Los Angeles Times reveals that 350 fans were arrested at the first three shows. “Police said 85% of the arrests were for possessions of marijuana,” reads the article. “Other arrests were made for possession of dangerous drugs, liquor-related offenses, ticket scalping, and interfering with an officer during the course of an arrest. Most of the arrests involved juveniles under the age of 18.”
In the midst of all this chaos, few took notice of Jim Reinstein pushing his buddy Mike Millard up to the entrance of the arena in a wheelchair. “The sheriff at the time was a total redneck, totally anti-hippie,” Reinstein says today. “There was this gauntlet of security, and there were guys that got busted with two joints. But we got in.”
Once they entered the main concourse, Reinstein wheeled Millard into a bathroom stall where he removed a phonebook-sized Nakamichi 550 tape recorder he hid beneath his wheelchair seat, along with batteries and a pair of AKG 451E microphones he stashed in a bag under a stack of clothes. “He would say, ‘Hey, I get digestive problems, and I need a change of clothes,’” says Reinstein. “He had a pair of boxer shorts on top, and then security wouldn’t look past that once they saw it was underwear.”
It wasn’t a completely ethical scheme considering Millard didn’t actually need a wheelchair, and they were in gross violation of venue policy (not to mention the law) by sneaking in a recorder to tape the show. But Millard and Reinstein pulled off a historic feat that night by creating, by far, the most pristine recording of any show on Pink Floyd’s 29-date Wish You Were Here tour. The tape has been cherished by Floyd fans for decades, and Sony — who bought the band’s catalog in 2024 — is including it on the upcoming Wish You Were Here 50th anniversary box set. (In a stunning lack of forward vision, Pink Floyd didn’t properly record any shows on the Wish You Were Here or Dark Side of the Moon tours.)
Tragically, Millard died by suicide in 1994, and didn’t live to witness his ascent to a Mount Rushmore figure in the world of concept taping: along with the Floyd recordings, he taped roughly 350 other shows around Los Angeles between 1973 and the early 1990s. “He would be ecstatic,” says Reinstein. “It gives his work a stamp of approval. It’s no longer a bootleg. It’s legitimate.”
WHEN REINSTEIN FIRST LAID EYES on Millard, he was tying microphones to a rail at the Long Beach Arena. It was March 19, 1974, and they’d both arrived early to see Yes on the Tales From Topographic Oceans tour. “I was really into photography and sound,” he says. “So I was like, ‘I got to talk to this guy.’ It turned out he lived in Fullerton at his mom’s house. I was in Placentia at the time, which is like five miles away. And he had a buddy with him filming the show in 8-millimeter. We met up afterwards at Mike’s rumpus room, the three of us, and synced up the footage to the recording. We became fast friends doing that.”
They couldn’t have been in a better time and place. L.A. was the epicenter of the rock universe in America, and it was a peak moment for groups like Genesis, Yes, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd that they both revered. Every single major touring act came through town at least once per tour, often playing multiple shows. Millard and Reinstein spent every dime they had on tickets, and they refused to experience each concert only a single time.
“They wanted to bring that show home in the same way that if your parents went to Hawaii in the 1980s, they brought slides back and leis and whatever,” says Erik Flannigan, a writer and musical archivist who wrote the notes in the Wish You Were Here box set. “For these guys, this was their vacation. That was their thing they wanted to re-experience. Mike was like, ‘How can I take that to the highest level? How can I make the highest quality recordings of these things that I love?’”
In the early days, it was easy since venues like the Long Beach Arena didn’t flinch when Millard walked in with mics and a TC-153SD portable cassette recorder. But once record stores started selling bootlegs pressed onto vinyl by shady underground labels — a practice Millard abhorred — venue staff started to hunt for tapers, especially at the Forum and the L.A. Sports Arena, where many of their favorite bands played.
Jim Reinstein
No band was more anti-bootleg than Led Zeppelin. Manager Peter Grant and his minions would scan the crowd looking for tapers. Violators would be ejected, and not always in gentle ways. And so when Zeppelin came to the Forum in March 1975, Millard got creative. “Mike dug his dad’s wheelchair out of his garage,” says Millard. “We stuffed the recorder into the seat cushion. And in the bathroom of the arena, I’d wire him from head-to-toe, with two microphones sticking out of his hat. The wires went down his shirt, through his pants, down to his boots.”
When they arrived at their row, Millard would gingerly stand up, fold the wheelchair, and slowly walk to his seat, pretending he had mobility issues. At this point, the recorder was in a large yellow bag he placed at his feet. It was then just a matter of connecting the wires, hitting record, keeping the mics hidden in his hat, and hoping security didn’t notice the ends sticking out. “At the beginning of the night, he would say to nearby fans, ‘Here’s my name and number. If you’re quiet, I’ll give you a copy of the recording.’” says Reinstein. “And out of over 350 shows, I think only one person did that.”
At the Zeppelin show, Millard dared to do this from the very front row. “You look off to the side, and here’s Peter Grant, this big hulking menace,” says Reinstein. “We knew if we were caught, we’d be beaten to a pulp.”
They landed in the front row since tickets were distributed back then through a mail-in system that they figured out how to game. “Mail-in was code for total corruption,” says Reinstein with a laugh. “We knew a guy at Al Brooks [ticket company] who worked out of the Roosevelt Hotel in downtown L.A. They’d have seats in every section. We’d have our choice.”
After testing multiple spots, they determined the best spot for recording was about five rows back. “We became very picky,” says Reinstein. “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.”
After a few glorious years of utilizing the wheelchair system, venues finally caught onto their act and flagged their gear at the door. Fortunately, a handful of security guards were willing to open up a side door and let them in — for the right price. “We just bribed them,” says Reinstein. “That got us in, but we still couldn’t get caught during the show.”
Jim Reinstein
They also feared getting caught leaving the venue. To avoid that, Millard would subtly pass the tape into Reinstein’s hand the moment the show ended. “As soon as the lights came back up, I would go one way, he would go another way,” says Reinstein. “I was an expert at going through the crowd and making my way to the car.”
It meant the tape would get out of the house even if Millard was caught with the recording gear. “You get a rush out of it,” says Reinstein. “And our reward at the end was a chest in the back of his car with Heinekens on ice. So, we would get to the car, plug in the headphones, crack open a couple of beers, listen to the show, and go, ‘Cheers. We did it.’”
Unlike most tapers of his era, Millard had no interest in profiting from his recordings. This was purely a hobby. And when making copies for friends, he’d insert a brief audio-drop at a set point that he’d carefully log in his records. It meant that if one of his tapes wound up as the source of a commercial bootleg, he’d know exactly who leaked it.
“What often goes lost is that Mike had an eclectic taste in music,” says Flannigan. “Yes, he made great tapes of Led Zeppelin. But he also made great tapes of Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, Joni Mitchell, and the Pretenders. He’s famous for the big hard-rock shows, but the most exceptional tape I’ve heard of is is a Chick Corea tape. Also, people wonder why he didn’t tape Pink Floyd in 1980 or Anaheim Stadium in 1977. Why didn’t he tape the Stones in 1981? It’s because he couldn’t get the seats he wanted. If he couldn’t get the seat, he wouldn’t do it. It makes his hit rate extremely high.”
The details remain a little blurry today, but Millard took a five-year break after getting busted by security in 1983. By the time he started taping again in 1988, Reinstein had moved on with his life. “I had to give up the rock and roll lifestyle, because it’s not…to give you the G-rated version, I just had to get out of that or else I’d be dead in a few years,” he says. “I got married in 1986. Mike came to the wedding, and he sometimes came over to a barbecue or whatever at my house. But we stopped seeing shows together.”
For the entire time that Reinstein knew him, Millard worked in the audio/visual department at Mt. San Antonio College. “I remember him saying once that if things didn’t work out with his job that he’d rather kill himself than live on the street,” says Reinstein. “I just dismissed it at the time, but I guess in hindsight that was always an option for him.”
By 1994, Millard was battling depressing, self-medicating with cocaine, and trying to get back to work after living off disability for a period. “He was in a lot of duress,” says Reinstein. “I guess his boss didn’t like him. He actually tried suicide a few months before and he wasn’t successful.” Later that year, he died by jumping off a building.
For years, the Millard’s tape archive sat in a closet at his mother’s house, gathering dust. The vast majority of it had never been heard by anyone outside of his very tiny circle of friends. “I’d go over for dinner sometimes, but I didn’t want to ask her about them even through, in a sense, those tapes were half-mine since we were 50-50 partners,” Reinstein says. “And I took photos at the shows and would give him whatever he wanted. But our mutual friend befriended his mom and she gave him the tapes. We’ve released about 250 of them on [BitTorrent sites] Dimeadozen and Trader’s Den, even though some were so old they had to pull the spool out and re-shell them.”
Once they started to spread through the BitTorrent community and eventually make their way to YouTube, Mike “The Mic” Millard tapes become shorthand for supreme high quality. And as always, nobody made a dime from them.
It may be hard to imagine that a cassette recorded by a fan with microphones sticking out of his hat is better than anything in the Pink Floyd vault from 1975. But the band simply didn’t see the value in recording shows back then. “Recording multi-track in the Seventies was a onerous, heavy, expensive, complicated thing to do,” says Flannigan. “You had to have a mobile truck because you needed not one, but two multi-track decks. If you only had one and you’re flipping the reel, you’re missing some of the show. So, having two 16-track decks, the power it took to do that, the temperature control, all these other things… It’s a lot of money for someone to spend without necessarily knowing what you were ever going to do with it.”
It was much cheaper and easier to create a mono or two-track soundboard recording from the venue’s mixing console. “It feels like just common sense to us that every artist would have someone record every show at least as a soundboard,” says Flannigan. “But, again, to what end? And most of the soundboard recordings that exist came from then. It’s the sound engineers who kept them, not the band.”
A great audience tape is usually superior to a standard soundboard since it captures the sound of the room. That’s what Porcupine Tree’s Steve Wilson — who enjoys a very successful side career as an audio remixer of classic albums — discovered when he was given Millard’s tape to remix for the Wish You Were Here set.
“You still have all the hallmarks of a bootleg,” says Wilson. “There’s the ambience of the room, very little separation, and all that stuff. But it’s of exceptional high quality for a bootleg. He really, really took his work seriously. We’re very lucky to have it, and I really did what I could in terms of restoring.”
“My job was really to listen to all the digital versions that had been made from his original cassette tape over the 50 years, compile a master take, and then to try and add some extra fairy dust on top,” he adds. “My job wasn’t to try and make it sound like anything other than what it was, which is a bootleg. But just to try and increase the stereo separation a bit, try to get a bit more tone in it, and try to even out some of the uglier frequencies that were there because of the sound of the auditorium on the night. And just to try to do my best to present a definitive version of this original cassette tape that’s been around for 50 years.”
Flannigan has been enthralled by Millard’s story for years, and even used a vintage Nakamichi 550 tape recorder to record a show by the National in 2019 that the band officially released on cassette. He paired it with the mini-documentary Juicy Sonic Magic: The Mike Millard Method. Going forward, he hopes to make a proper documentary that tells Millard’s entire life story. “I’ve interviewed all but one person I’ve found that knew Mike directly and was involved in what he was doing,” he says. “There’s some pretty amazing stories there.”
The groundswell of interest in Millard has been enormously vindicating for Reinstein. He just wishes his friend was still here to experience it. “If Mike would have known that we’re talking about him now,” says Reinstein, “obviously, he’d still be alive.”
