He’s one of the most prolific and acclaimed musicians in recent decades, but Beck now fears some of his unreleased material is lost forever due to the infamous Universal warehouse fire.
Back in June, a story emerged outlining that a 2008 fire in Universal Studios’ Hollywood location was far more devastating than the initial reports of just a few film prints being lost.
As it turned out, more than 500,000 irreplaceable master tapes from artists like Nirvana, Aretha Franklin, Chuck Berry, Captain Beefheart, Sammy Davis Jr., Steely Dan, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe – just to name a few – had been lost.
“A master is the truest capture of a piece of recorded music,” Adam Block, the former president of Legacy Recordings, told the New York Times. “Sonically, masters can be stunning in their capturing of an event in time. Every copy thereafter is a sonic step away.”
While this revelation had undoubtedly shocked fans, some have wondered why it was that the news of the fire’s devastating impact had been covered up for 11 years, especially considering that initial reports indicated there had been “no loss”.
However, while a spokesperson explained there is no definitive lost of what has been lost, they noted that only a handful of masters had been destroyed, explaining that the “Times report is not a reliable source for what was lost and as a result it has created significant confusion.”
Despite this, iconic musician Beck has now thrown his hat in the ring, explaining that he fears some of his unreleased material has been lost forever.
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Check out ‘Where It’s At’ by Beck:
Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald recently, Beck explained that his management “still won’t tell me what was lost”, stating he assumes it’s because “they can’t bear to break the news.”
Explaining further, Beck notes that he’s only released about 10% of his recorded music, noting that there are alternate versions and unreleased material he feels is no longer with us.
“Like an album like Sea Change, there are completely different versions of songs and then there’s probably another 10 to 20 songs that aren’t on the record that [were] in progress; things that I thought I would finish later,” he explained. “It wasn’t that they were bad songs, they just didn’t fit the mood of the album.
“In 2001, I went into Sunset Sound [in Los Angeles] and I recorded 25 Hank Williams songs for a double album, just solo. I wanted to celebrate that influence in my music and explore it, and I don’t have a copy of that; it’s on a master tape, so that’s probably gone.
“I went to Nashville on tour for two days and cut a country album that never got released. I have rock albums I did in the 1990s, before I did Odelay, I went and tried to make an indie-rock album, so there’s an album that sounds like a Pavement, Sebadoh kind of thing.
“There’s a [Jon Spencer] Blues Explosion album I did in ’95 where I cut about 10 songs with them in New York City that’s never been released,” he concluded. “But I don’t know [whether it’s gone], nobody’s telling us anything. We didn’t hear about it until the last year.”
Expanding on the news further, Beck explained that the storage methods of the Universal Studios warehouse was poor at best, with only the big-name artists receiving proper archival storage.
“There’s a lot of neglect of masters. It’s a big problem,” he stated. “And guess what, I’ve been in a room where they’ve put on an original Frank Sinatra three-track from the ’50s and it sounds fucking phenomenal, whereas the vinyl version you have sounds tinny, old.
“It doesn’t have a fraction of the information that’s on those tapes. All this stuff should be remixed and remastered and re-released … There’s troves of great music in these archives, treasures that are not being tended to.”
Beck recently released his latest album, Hyperspace. Check out our interview with the prolific rocker here.
Check out Beck’s ‘Uneventful Days’:
