A fire on the Universal Studios lot in 2008 that was initially reported to have only reached shooting sets and a VHS storage facility did, in fact, destroy a warehouse that was home to thousands upon thousands of master recordings by artists of the modern age (post-1940), many of which were also destroyed in the fire.
What made this news so noteworthy as of yesterday was the fact that Universal covered up this fact for over ten years.
When you think about the loss of such master recordings (mostly analog tapes that contain the actual track-by-track performances for each song on a given project), it is not that far removed from the loss of an original painting by Van Gogh.
If such a painting was lost, it is true that we still have the many faithful digital copies that are used to reproduce such cultural artifacts for books and posters, but the brush strokes, the subtle transitions of color, and the texture of the canvas itself are forever lost.
In the case of such analog master recordings, the raw, unadulterated performances that one can always return to in order to savor the isolated vocal performance of an Ella Fitzgerald or the orchestral swirl from a "A Day In The Life" will always be superior to any safety or back-up analog copies that might remain.
Once a master tape is destroyed, there is literally nothing to go back to for absolute, accurate reference and you're essentially left with the aural equivalent of second or third-generation photocopies.
Since much of the industry's revenue these days comes from re-issuing material culled from such masters, the ability to remaster a project from the original master tapes is thereby impossible.
Is this really that big of a deal?
Maybe the person cranking out spreadsheets in their cubicle all day while listening to "Sunny 101" fails to see the importance of such master tapes, but the artist whose soul went into those recordings probably gives quite the shit.
I, myself, am but a wee indie artist, but I still have every master tape I have ever recorded and go to great lengths to store them and transport them to every new location I move into.
Why?
Damn, that's another great question, for which I have no easy answer, except to say that the amount of money, time, heart, soul, blood, sweet, and tears that went into each project prevents me from viewing such tapes as disposable, even after I have painstakingly transferred every single track on every single song on every single tape to digital format.
Imagine how valuable they'd be to me if my albums had actually sold as well as, say, Asia's first album.
In light of yesterday's news, more than a few well-known artists took to Twitter to voice their displeasure, including Asia's own Geoff Downes, who claimed that Universal has been unable to locate the original masters to the band's multi-platinum debut album, thereby making any such attempts to release a faithful remaster of the project impossible now.
How could this have been avoided, you ask?
Great question.
The hardest truth to face in all of this is that labels like Chess, A&M and I.R.S. could have chosen to NOT sell out for millions to their corporate overlords, who, in many cases, were foreign companies with no respect or appreciation for American culture.
Sadly, I have seen first-hand how such companies regard the artifacts of America's modern-day popular culture.
During my days in L.A., one of my projects as a long-term temp employee for a major film studio included overseeing the disposing of old metal film canisters. As my team began collecting the canisters, we noticed that there were still film rolls inside featuring legendary films from the 40's through the early 60's.
My first thought was that there must be some sort of horrible, ghastly mistake, but when I voiced my concerns to my immediate supervisor, I was "casually" reassigned to a different project the next day.
Now imagine that somewhere within the ginormous eco-system of companies like Universal, with sprawling facilities all over L.A. and surrounding areas, that something like that goes on every day, unbeknownst to the artists whose work is being destroyed and who'd be rightly offended if they knew.
Maybe tomorrow, some ambitious intern decides to impress their boss by chucking out all those cartons of original shooting scripts with some guy by the name of Orson Welles' handwritten notes to make room for a new Keurig.
Also, we need to consider that when a Japanese company swoops in and buys out one American institution after another, like CBS Records, they have no fucking intention of preserving our culture or the integrity of each master tape in their possession.
In fact, it can be argued that buying up our cultural institutions one-by-one and systematically allowing valuable artifacts of our cultural heritage to be destroyed is one way to defeat your enemy.
Thing is, we are complicit in our own cultural destruction by carrying out such duties as employees or overlooking such practices as shareholders of such publicly-traded companies.
Yes, my friends, merger-mania is ultimately to blame for the destruction of these irreplaceable masters so, as easy as it is to blame Universal for letting it happen on their watch, those labels who carelessly and, quite frankly, stupidly sold out to foreign conglomerates for a fast buck due, in most cases, to their own mismanagement, are just as much to blame for this senseless and catastrophic loss of art as Universal is for covering it up.
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universal clusterfuck