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Showing Original Post only (View all)The Day the Music Burned, an Incredible Loss [View all]
Last edited Wed Jun 12, 2019, 10:11 AM - Edit history (1)
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-recordings.html?module=inline&fbclid=IwAR1g3irXw16SCzKW9qzgH5_GkjiGnfDmEwGShrK5WNYw1TY0MFP47So4pysIt was the biggest disaster in the history of the music business and almost nobody knew. This is the story of the 2008 Universal fire.
By Jody Rosen
June 11, 2019
1. The Vault Is on Fire
The fire that swept across the backlot of Universal Studios Hollywood on Sunday, June 1, 2008, began early that morning, in New England.
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The archive in Building 6197 was UMGs main West Coast storehouse of masters, the original recordings from which all subsequent copies are derived. A master is a one-of-a-kind artifact, the irreplaceable primary source of a piece of recorded music. According to UMG documents, the vault held analog tape masters dating back as far as the late 1940s, as well as digital masters of more recent vintage. It held multitrack recordings, the raw recorded materials each part still isolated, the drums and keyboards and strings on separate but adjacent areas of tape from which mixed or flat analog masters are usually assembled. And it held session masters, recordings that were never commercially released.
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Among the incinerated Decca masters were recordings by titanic figures in American music: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland. The tape masters for Billie Holidays Decca catalog were most likely lost in total. The Decca masters also included recordings by such greats as Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five and Patsy Cline.
Berrys Chess masters and multitrack masters, a body of work that constitutes Berrys greatest recordings. The destroyed Chess masters encompassed nearly everything else recorded for the label and its subsidiaries, including most of the Chess output of Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Willie Dixon, Bo Diddley, Etta James, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy and Little Walter. Also very likely lost were master tapes of the first commercially released material by Aretha Franklin, recorded when she was a young teenager performing in the church services of her father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, who made dozens of albums for Chess and its sublabels.
Virtually all of Buddy Hollys masters were lost in the fire. Most of John Coltranes Impulse masters were lost, as were masters for treasured Impulse releases by Ellington, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders and other jazz greats. Also apparently destroyed were the masters for dozens of canonical hit singles, including Bill Haley and His Comets Rock Around the Clock, Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats Rocket 88, Bo Diddleys Bo Diddley/Im A Man, Etta Jamess At Last, the Kingsmens Louie Louie and the Impressions People Get Ready.
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