BOOTLEGS AND SHOELEGS

If 'bootlegs' are illicit recordings usually of a low calibre simply because they were done independently of the record company by someone in the audience or whatever using a hidden microphone, then one could infer that recordings made officially, whether live or in the studio, were 'shoelegs' by comparison, since less crude and correspondingly more refined, standing higher in the social scale than those who normally wear boots or make what are called 'bootleg' recordings.

But even if such a term implies a boot-like lowness and/or crudity compared to professionally-made recordings, it could be argued that all so-called heavy metal recordings are effectively bootleg whether official or unofficial, since how can anything so heavy and 'low', in the sense of weighted down, be equated with 'shoelegs'?

I am of course being facetious, but then why should one always believe that professional recordings are 'shoeleg', or something of the sort, just because illicit ones are 'bootleg'? I am confident there are occasions when such descriptions could be comfortably reversed, so to speak.