Archive for June 11th, 2019

The vault, the vault, the vault is on fire…

Tuesday, June 11th, 2019

I haven’t had a chance to go through all of this yet, but it looks link worthy:

“The Day the Music Burned“, about the 2008 Universal Studios fire.

The scope of this calamity is laid out in litigation and company documents, thousands of pages of depositions and internal UMG files that I obtained while researching this article. UMG’s accounting of its losses, detailed in a March 2009 document marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” put the number of “assets destroyed” at 118,230. Randy Aronson considers that estimate low: The real number, he surmises, was “in the 175,000 range.” If you extrapolate from either figure, tallying songs on album and singles masters, the number of destroyed recordings stretches into the hundreds of thousands. In another confidential report, issued later in 2009, UMG asserted that “an estimated 500K song titles” were lost.

…

Among the incinerated Decca masters were recordings by titanic figures in American music: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland. The tape masters for Billie Holiday’s Decca catalog were most likely lost in total. The Decca masters also included recordings by such greats as Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five and Patsy Cline.

This is the kind of telling detail I look for:

There were at least a dozen fire engines ringing the vault, and as Aronson looked around he noticed one truck whose parking lights seemed to be melting.

(Hattip: Hacker News on the Twitters.)

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Obit watch: June 11, 2019.

Tuesday, June 11th, 2019

Bill Wittliff, Texas writer. Among his credits: the screenplay for “Lonesome Dove”.

Bushwick Bill, Houston area rapper with the Geto Boys. NYT. This is an odd one: there were reports on Sunday that his family was denying Bushwick Bill had passed, which may have been correct at the time, but I guess his status changed at some point during the day…

Bushwick Bill had an early brush with death in 1991. High on PCP and grain alcohol, he said, he got into an altercation with his girlfriend and was shot in the right eye, a trauma he described in harrowing detail on “Ever so Clear,” from his 1992 solo debut album “Little Big Man.”
He said in interviews that he had been pronounced dead, toe-tagged and taken to the morgue. “I was actually on the cold slab,” he said in 2014. (He told differing stories about the shooting; in some accounts his mother had shot him.)
The incident was immortalized on the album cover of “We Can’t Be Stopped,” which features a photo of Bushwick Bill taken in the hospital. Flanked by Willie D and Scarface, he is shown on a stretcher, his eye blood-red, the day before he had surgery to remove it. He later said that he had been so medicated, he didn’t know the photo was being taken, and that he didn’t see the album cover until after its release.

You’ve probably seen that cover. If not, it’s in the HouChron Warning! slide show Warning!.

Noted:

In the 1990s, he announced that he was renaming himself Dr. Wolfgang von Bushwickin the Barbarian Mother-Funk Stay High Dollar Billstir.

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