Chicago had Mrs. O’Leary’s cow. L.A. – and music – had the careless welder. On this day in 2008, a lot of history went up in flames, which we only found out about in the last couple of years. The Universal Music Fire burned a dozen years back.
Universal of course is a gigantic, almost “universal” entertainment company. You see their logo at the start of movies, but in the past few decades they’ve expanded and branched out into almost every other sector of entertainment including TV, theme parks… and music.Universal Music is the world’s largest “record” company, having vacuumed up a litany of smaller companies through the ’90s and 2000s including MCA, Geffen and A&M.
They have a huge lot in Los Angeles County that contains sets for all sorts of movies and TV shows. And, until 12 years back, a non-descript 22 000 square-foot metal warehouse. Here they stored all sorts of archival movie reels, and as it turned out thousands upon thousands of music master tapes from their various labels. They stored the originals from companies dating back to WWII on metal shelving 18 feet high.
Around 4:40 in the morning a dozen years back, a security guard noticed flames shooting up into the sky on the lot. He checked and found a building on an old movie lot (“New England Town”, a street designed to look like a quaint Vermont town center) on fire. Workmen had been repairing the roof of it that night, using torches to heat tar. They stopped around 3 AM, figured all was safe by 4, when they left. But it wasn’t. A hotspot flared up and caught the roof, and gusty winds quickly spread it down the “Street” and into “Manhattan” – a New York set. By the time firemen arrived,dozens of buildings were ablaze. By one point in the morning, over 500 firefighters were attacking the blaze but winds and low water pressure were helping the fire win. Two helicopters were brought in to water bomb the site, which helped. By the time a rep of Universal Music was able to get on site and near the warehouse, the metal building was an inferno. One fire truck parked outside it had the plastic warning lights on it melt! By the end of the day, they couldn’t entirely shut down the fire in it and brought in bulldozers to destroy the remaining framework – and anything that hadn’t melted inside already, By the time it was contained early on the 2nd, several full acres of buildings were in ruins and 17 people were injured (none fatally at least.) And according to Universal at the time, though some originals of TV shows like I Love Lucy and The Office might have burned, but there was little mention of any music and their reports that even did touch that subject said “in no case was the the destroyed material the only copy.”
A confidential corporate memo said otherwise. They admitted “118 230 documents” were destroyed. Insider Randy Aronson would later say it was about 175 000 music masters, covering over half a million songs. The masters, as NBC clearly suggest are the “audio equivalent of the original negative to a photo.” They were the best quality, originals of the music as it was recorded, pre-mixing. Thus, if it was a 16-track recording, there’d be all 16 separate tracks – say guitar, drums, piano, backing vocals, lead vocals, cowbells , etc – individually as well as in most cases the mix used for the record release. This of course was important, since if a record or CD had good music but didn’t sound “right”, the artist or producer could go back, use the originals and re-mix it to get the sound just perfect. This became especially important when transferring to new media… making LPs available on CD, then as downloadable mp3s and on and on. As The Beatles have shown with updated releases of their albums, the mix is very important in making new releases of their old material that sound as good as possible. This sort of remixing isn’t going to be possible in the future for the 118 000 to 175 000 albums that were burned.
The artists who saw all, or part of their catalog destroyed is as vast as music itself and includes old labels like Chess and Decca as well as the more modern rock era ones. The list of artists effected number into the thousands and include a cornucopia of tastes and genres from Dizzy Gillespie and Muddy Waters to Aretha Franklin and the Four Tops to Elton and the Eagles to Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails. Krist Novoselic of Nirvana says “I think they (the original tapes of Nevermind) are gone forever,” while a representative for Steely Dan said “ we have been aware of ‘missing’ originals of Steely Dan tapes for a long time. We’ve never been given a plausible explanation.” Until the full details of the fire came to light.
It’s perhaps not directly Universal Music’s fault but it surely shows the value of making many backup copies of anything important and not having all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. As NBC – a division of Universal – put it, it was “the musical equivalent of the Library of Congress”. On May 31, 2008 it was. 48 hours later, it was a huge smoldering pile of ash.