Category: News
On April 15 of this year the iconic Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris suffered a massive fire.
Imagine, if you will, if, on the same day, the Louvre, the Smithsonian, and the Library of Congress had also burned to the ground.
That might give you a slight understanding of the scope of the massive fire that Universal Music Group suffered. Eleven years ago.
An article in the New York Times on Monday (6/10), the result of years of painstaking research including internal documents from UMG, reports that the fire that occurred on June 1, 2008 was unimaginable in its scope of loss. It is estimated that that the number of destroyed master tapes range from 175,000 to half a million.
All of music suffered. "Grunge" pioneers Nirvana's Nevermind masters were lost. Classic rock acts ranging from Aerosmith to Tom Petty to Steely Dan saw their recordings burned. Legendary recordings from the likes of Benny Goodman and Ray Charles are forever gone. Most of Buddy Holly's masters went up in flames.
And, of course, country music suffered: among the destroyed masters were recordings by Patsy Cline, Merle Haggard, and Loretta Lynn.
UMG denied it was a big deal then, telling Billboard the day after the fire (6/2/08), "We had no loss, thankfully. We moved most of what was formerly stored there to our other facilities."
The New York Times article, which is detailed enough to be a Ph.D. dissertation, calls B.S. on that claim.
According to an article on the website Ultimate Classic Rock, a lot of the affected artists are calling B.S. as well. Donald Fagen, the surviving half of the creative force behind Steely Dan, said he was aware that there were "missing tapes" for years, but he had never been given a suitable explanation. R.E.M. also has been kept in the dark.
What's even sadder than the fact that these treasures are lost forever is the fact that so many people just don't understand the repercussions of the loss. Truly, there are no sufficient words to describe the magnitude of this loss.
Over recent decades the recording process has been a case of splicing. Records -- even country music recordings -- are seldom "live" in the studio. It's usually one musician at a time, playing multiple takes of the song. Slight variations in the playing can be heard by the trained (and usually the untrained) ear. From those various takes the "best" from each instrument will be selected and "mixed" together into the final product. Even "live" recordings will have multiple takes, with the best one used and the remainder filed -- not erased. It is those filed-away tracks that were destroyed. For example, Donald Fagen explained that the use of Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler on the song "Time Out of Mind" resulted in over fifty takes to get a 45-second solo that appeared on the Gaucho album.
All of those takes are GONE now. Even acts who recorded "live," with all the musicians in the studio at once, have suffered with the loss of the original recordings, which is the ONLY place the truest fidelity existed.
All of those takes are GONE now. Even acts who recorded "live," with all the musicians in the studio at once, have suffered with the loss of the original recordings, which is the ONLY place the truest fidelity existed.
If you're a fan of the Bear Family box sets you've been introduced to "alternate takes." The first one I heard was the 7th take of "You'll Meet Him in the Clouds" in the Louvin Brothers' Close Harmony box set (where you hear Ira, sounding bored, tired, annoyed, or all three, introduce the song as, "Take seven"). From there, it was nirvana (no, not the grunge band): alternate takes of songs by Jim Reeves ("Then I'll Stop Loving You" in the box set is completely different than the version that's on The Best of Jim Reeves Vol. II), Hank Thompson, the Browns (the humorous inability to get "Bye Bye Love" started, resulting in chuckles from the trio), and so many others have graced reissues over the years.
Treasures like that are GONE. FOREVER. We are left now with ONLY what has been released. NO between-take chatter. NO alternate takes of the songs. Just a first-generation copy that'll never be able to match the fidelity of the original.
Why UMG continued, this week, to claim the loss was minimal or nonexistent is beyond me. Maybe they're afraid of lawsuits from the affected artists. Maybe they're afraid of lawsuits from consumers who've been shelling out hundreds for "digitally remastered" recordings, only to realize now that they were NOT "remastered" but copied from a copy.
There should be 30 days of mourning declared. The music we have lost is beyond measure.
