This week, The New York Times Magazine published an in-depth account of a 2008 fire on the Universal
Studios Hollywood backlot that hadn’t previously been
understood as the cultural calamity that it truly was. Thousands of masters
of recordings by artists ranging from Al Jolson to Yoko Ono, Patsy Cline to
Tupac Shakur, had been incinerated.
As Jody Rosen, a contributing writer to the
magazine, put it in the piece: “Had a loss of comparable magnitude to the
Universal fire occurred at a different cultural institution — say, the
Metropolitan Museum of Art — there might have been wider awareness of the
event, perhaps some form of accountability.”
I asked Jody to tell us a little more about how the story came
together:
The Universal fire was dramatic event, a story of flames
consuming buildings, of precious artifacts going up in smoke, of historical
loss on a vast scale. But the story first came to my attention in the most
banal form imaginable: in the dry bureaucratese of legal documents and
company reports.
About five years ago, I obtained a bunch of paperwork related
to the fire. It took me some time to orient myself and begin to wrap my head
around what those documents were saying. It took me even longer to find
people who knew about the fire and the master recordings that were destroyed
in it — and it took longer still to persuade those people to speak to me,
both on and off the record.
[Here are the top takeaways from the piece.]
It was really those interviews that parted the mists for me.
My sources helped me understand that the destruction of the Universal Music
Group vault was a major cultural catastrophe, and they helped me to place
that disaster in a larger frame, to understand the huge challenge of
archiving and preserving the physical relics of recorded sound in the age of
streaming media.
One of the people who agreed to speak on the record was Randy
Aronson, who worked as UMG’s director of vault operations for years, both
before and after the fire. Mr. Aronson was — still is — very emotional about
the fire and the huge toll it took. He told me: “The way I felt in the months
after the fire — the only thing I can compare it to is when my mother passed
away.”
[Here’s what artists like Questlove and R.E.M. had to say about
the losses.]
The first time I visited Mr. Aronson at his home near Los
Angeles, we sat together and I showed him some of the documents I’d gotten.
One of these was an internal UMG report that included a huge list of
recording artists, page after page famous musicians, alphabetized by first
names.
I went through the list with Mr. Aronson: “John Lee Hooker,
did he have recordings in the vault?” “Yes.” “Joni Mitchell, did she have
recordings in the vault?” “Yes.” “Judy Garland, did she have tapes in the
vault?” “Yes.” I remember kind of staggering out of Mr. Aronson’s house that
day, getting into my rental car and driving back to L.A. in a daze.
