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Re: [ARSCLIST] Request for info: Columbia Studio/Warehouse Fire
Michael Fitzgerald wrote:
>This sounds like confusion with the Atlantic Records warehouse fire
>in 1978...
>...http://www.billholland.net/words/vault.html
Phil Ramone told me about excitedly taking the first CD of something he had produced home only to discover it was a sonic disaster that had obviously not been made from his master mix tape. He followed up and learned what had happened.
Apparently when CBS was liquidated for its real estate holdings in a hostile takeover, the tape vault in New Jersey had been among the very first properties sold. The assets were all packed off to Iron Mountain, a private storage archive. When Columbia began their first CD reissue project, they learned that Iron Mountain couldn't locate their tapes immediately. With looming deadlines, they had turned to their foreign licensees. Figuring that if Columbia couldn't find their own tapes, the foreign labels refused to send anything better than a copy of the EQ. tape copies they had originally been sent.
As a result, virtually all of the first generation of Columbia CD reissues were transferred from third and forth generation copies of the masters.
The Motown story is a bit better although it was warped quite a bit in that Billboard article. (We always recorded on virgin tape. Some early 3-track backing track false starts got recycled for what we called DM versions which were meant as a guide so an engineer could recreate a first generation mix in case the master got lost or damaged.)
Berry Gordy learned the value of an archive early on. Motown was primarily an artist management company and music publisher. (We became a record company only as a result of some very bad experiences with record companies!) An early policy was to keep the entire catalog in print so that if a radio station requested a fresh copy, they could always be accommodated and the publishing division and songwriters could earn more airplay income.
At one point we ran out of both pressings and mental parts for an early recording. A frantic search for the master tape revealed that it had been one of a number that had been destroyed by water damage in Smokey Robinson's basement. We cut a new master from a pressing but that was the beginning of setting up a very comprehensive tape library.
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Bob Olhsson Audio Mastery, Nashville TN
Mastering, Audio for Picture, Mix Evaluation and Quality Control
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