The music business had a long and proud tradition of treating its past with contempt: Metal stampers thrown away. Acetates thrown away. Album artwork thrown away. Session reels thrown away. Multi-tracks thrown away. Tapes bulk erased and recorded over. Tapes chainsawed apart so that so that the reels could be sold to scrap metal dealers. Because, hey, nobody cares about any of this s***, right? | | | | Etta James at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Switzerland, July 1977.
(Michael Putland/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) | | | | | |  | "The music business had a long and proud tradition of treating its past with contempt: Metal stampers thrown away. Acetates thrown away. Album artwork thrown away. Session reels thrown away. Multi-tracks thrown away. Tapes bulk erased and recorded over. Tapes chainsawed apart so that so that the reels could be sold to scrap metal dealers. Because, hey, nobody cares about any of this s***, right?"
| | | | | | rantnrave:// The most remarkable thing to me about the 2008 warehouse fire that the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE has dubbed "the biggest disaster in the history of the music business," besides the apparent magnitude of the archival losses—multitrack master tapes of JOHN COLTRANE, CHUCK BERRY, ARETHA FRANKLIN, RAY CHARLES, SISTER ROSETTA THARPE, GEORGE JONES, ELTON JOHN, TUPAC, "the complete discographies of entire record labels," the original recording of ETTA JAMES' "AT LAST," so much more—is that the UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP doesn't seem to have told a lot of the artists whose work was incinerated. A sampling of reactions to JODY ROSEN's epic account of the fire on the UNIVERSAL STUDIOS backlot: The band HOLE "was not aware until this morning," a rep told PITCHFORK. REM is "trying to get good information to find out what happened and the effect on the band's music, if any." ASIA's GEOFF DOWNES: "This might explain why nobody can find the original Asia masters." KRIST NOVOSELIC on the multitracks of NIRVANA's NEVERMIND: "I think they are gone forever." Others seem to have had varying amounts of knowledge about a tragedy that's been an open secret in the music business for years. "We have been aware of 'missing' original STEELY DAN tapes for a long time now," manager IRVING AZOFF said in a statement. "We've never been given a plausible explanation. Maybe they burned up in the big fire." QUESTLOVE retweeted the Times story "for everyone asking why DO YOU WANT MORE & ILLDELPH HALFLIFE wont get reissue treatment." At one point, the ROOTS drummer wrote, someone went looking in the vaults for unreleased songs and mixes from those two '90s albums and discovered that artists filed under the letters B–F and O–S "took a hit the most." Rosen's article is a crucial and compelling read not only on the fire and its confusing aftermath, but on the primacy of analog tape, the importance of archiving musical history (and the dangers of neglecting it), the consequences of industry consolidation, and the power of one particularly large company to keep the public and even its own artists and labels in the dark about a large conflagration in the middle of Los Angeles. Rosen details a corporate effort to hide the massive losses from newspapers and trade publications across the country by, among other things, feeding them the names of "two artists nobody would recognize" as examples of the kind of material that was lost. As if that was the worst of it. And that was just the press. "It is probable," Rosen adds, "that musicians whose masters were destroyed have no idea that a vault holding UMG masters had burned down." The company declined to discuss that or much else with Rosen; hours after the story was published, UMG accused the Times of "numerous inaccuracies" and "fundamental misunderstandings." But the company did not, curiously, deny the loss of the masters of a half million songs representing large chunks of music history. It touted, instead, its commitment to preservation and its continued release of "master-quality, high-resolution, audiophile versions" of many of the recordings cited by the Times. Which is, to quote my friend BILL WERDE at SYRACUSE's BANDIER PROGRAM, a classic "non-denial denial." If the masters themselves still exist, UMG is not saying. Draw your own conclusions. For some lesser-known labels and artists, the ones whose work has been long out of print and never digitized for download and streaming platforms, that could well mean songs and albums have been lost forever. Vanished. Disappeared. Archival music producer and writer ANDY ZAX tweeted Wednesday about a1975 album by soul great CHARLES WRIGHT that's gone save for a single remaining copy on 8-track tape. For more familiar and popular artists, the music of course is and will always be easily available. More available than ever. But many of the original tapes on which it was first recorded, the first generation copies, the truest versions of what happened in studios in the 1940s or '60s or '90s, the once from which the remixes and reissues and master-quality high-res audiophile versions should come, are lost. Those songs and albums exist now as copies for which there are no originals, prints for which the templates have been destroyed... In Thursday's MusicREDEF: Reflections on music archives. In the meantime, this 2014 essay by Andy Zax is highly recommended, and frightening... And, hey, on the subject of archives: MARTIN SCORSESE's ROLLING THUNDER REVUE: A BOB DYLAN STORY drops today on NETFLIX and in a handful of theaters... And RADIOHEAD, responding to the theft and leak of 18 hours worth of OK COMPUTER era demos (and a reported demand for ransom), have gone ahead and released all of it on BANDCAMP, where it will be available for £18 for 18 days, with proceeds going to a climate-change charity. | | | - Matty Karas, curator | | | |  | Pitchfork | | When my daughter died, no song could offer solace. | | | |  | Vox | | It's not just Fyre Festival — festival season regularly overlaps with scam season, and even the best-laid plans are just betting millions of dollars on weather. | | | |  | Chicago Magazine | | For 130 years, Lyon & Healy's unassuming factory next to the L in West Town has produced ornate instruments considered the best of their kind. | | | |  | Los Angeles Times | | A journalist recounts his time embedded with Bob Dylan's infamous 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue, the subject of a new Martin Scorsese-directed film on Netflix. | | | |  | Andy Zax | | How stupidity, incompetence, obsolescence, carelessness, greed, malfeasance, lazy lawyers and a basic misunderstanding of physics are—at this very moment!—eviscerating what's left of our musical heritage. (Text as delivered at the EMP Pop Conference, Seattle, 4/27/14.) | | | |  | Variety | | Universal cited "the tens of thousands of back catalog recordings that we have already issued in recent years – including master-quality, high-resolution, audiophile versions of many recordings that the story claims were 'destroyed,'" and says "UMG invests more in music preservation and development of hi-resolution audio products than anyone else in music." | | | |  | Dazed Digital | | John Waters, Janet Mock, Billy Porter and many more pose questions to the most enigmatic pop star of our generation. | | | |  | Brooklyn Vegan | | Tyler, the Creator and Odd Future started off this decade by setting out to change the music world forever. They succeeded, and, surprisingly, matured in the process. | | | |  | The Tennessean | | The band's Trey Anastasio tells us about the epic outdoor festivals they created in the '90s — which laid the blueprint for Bonnaroo. | | | |  | Slate | | The Boss' first LP since the election takes on country and Trump country, but not Trump. | | | |  | Topic | | The Jubilee Singers were a global sensation. But an aggressive touring schedule would leave the young performers exhausted, underpaid, and in some cases, dead. | | | |  | Consequence of Sound | | As "Rolling Stone" delays their own music chart and DJ Khaled threatens to sue "Billboard," Steven Ovadia explains why it's time to get rid of music charts. | | | | | Pitchfork | | Like every frequent Prince collaborator, McCreary has great stories. | | | |  | CNN | | When Chinese music streaming company Transsnet wanted to break into the lucrative African market, they partnered with parent company, Transsion holdings, the makers of popular phone brands such as Infinix and TECNO to pre-install their Boomplay app on their handsets. | | | | | Slate | | Instead of paying a ransom, Radiohead released the music for charity. No need to call the Karma Police. | | | |  | The Ringer | | The 53-year-old singer-songwriter's music hasn't exactly mellowed with age. But on his new album, 'Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest,' he has found the perfect balance between funny and profound. | | | |  | Rolling Stone | | New originals, country-tinged covers and reworked classics highlight deceased Hall of Famer's final, as-yet-unreleased album featuring Willie Nelson, Aaron Neville and Rickie Lee Jones. | | | |  | Gay Mag | | Visual Kei then and now: grasping for the right to be irresponsible. | | | |  | Longreads | | From Bob Dylan to David Bowie to The Beatles, the legendary Beat writer's influence reached beyond literature into music in surprising ways. | | | |  | The New Yorker | | The show's format presents songwriters as tertiary to the pop stars and producers who will record the songs; everything is done in ruthless service of the star and the hit. Indeed, once an episode is over, the songwriters are whisked out of view. | | | | |  | | YouTube | | | | | | | | | | | From her 1968 album "Tell Mama." | | | | | | | | © Copyright 2019, The REDEF Group | | |
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