The Day the Music Died Recklessly?

Remember, remember the 5th of November?!

I saw the above news story about Sheryl Crow losing her master tapes in a fire on June 1st, 2008, but Sheryl only finding out about it this year -

Sheryl Crow: Universal Studios fire destroyed all my master tapes

I was taken aback when I heard this sad news, as I met Sheryl in 2018 and a lot of Sheryl's songs are in my iTunes playlist and make up the soundtracks of many a long car ride on my life journeys between towns -

Bluesfest Easter Sunday 2018: A Fool's Journey with Something to Crow About?

Sheryl Crow signing my CD in 2018

Reading that old post today in hindsight is kind of eerily prophetic, because I kept running into a fire fighter on the day.

I had never heard about this 2008 fire in LA, so I did a search and found out it was Bryan Adams who first raised the alarm when he was trying to find the masters of his 'Reckless' album that was released on November 5th, 1984.

Bizarrely enough, I found out his follow up album was titled
'Into the Fire'.

Here Are Hundreds More Artists Whose Tapes Were Destroyed in the UMG Fire

"In 2013, Bryan Adams, the Canadian singer-songwriter, found himself facing a mystery.

Twenty-nine years earlier, in 1984, Adams reached pop-rock superstardom with the release of his fourth LP, “Reckless,” which topped the Billboard 200 album chart and sold an estimated 12 million copies worldwide.

Now, with the album’s 30th anniversary approaching, Adams was attempting to put together a commemorative reissue.

He reached out to Universal Music Group (UMG), the world’s largest record company, which controls the catalog of dozens of subsidiaries, including A&M, the label that put out “Reckless” and eight other Adams studio albums.
“I contacted the archive dept of Universal Music,” Adams told me in an email last week.

Adams was seeking “the master mixes/artwork/photos/video/film . . . anything,” he wrote.

Almost nothing could be turned up by the record company."

I also noticed that Bryan had uploaded his song 'Into the Fire' to You Tube on October 31st, 2008, which was the same year the fire had burnt up his masters.

"On June 12, the day after the Times article was published online, the singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow tweeted: “shame on those involved in the coverup.

Massive fire at UMG 11 years ago, and we’re just hearing about this now??”

Geoffrey Downes, the keyboardist for the English prog-rock group Asia, also reacted on Twitter. “This might explain why nobody can find the original Asia album masters,” he wrote.

“Very sad, and UMG have kept it quiet for more than 10 years.” 

Crow released eight studio albums for A&M; Asia recorded four for Geffen.

Both received A ratings in UMG’s Project Phoenix documents."

"Another leading ’90s band that appears in the documents is Counting Crows, which recorded several albums for Geffen.

In a 2016 interview in Diffuser, a music website, the lead singer, Adam Duritz, said that Geffen had “lost the master tapes” for “Recovering the Satellites,” the band’s platinum-selling 1996 release.

“Geffen, because they’re a record company, it’s their sovereign right to lose everything,” he said. Duritz could not be reached for comment.

It is unclear how he learned about the lost masters or if he was told that the tapes might have been lost in a fire."

I Read the News Today ... Oh, Boy! Sad, but Synchy News on So Many Levels to Me

Counting Crows signing my CDs in 2015

You don't know what you got till after it's long gone, maybe? 

Oh, and Bryan GUY Adams turns 60 this year on Guy Fawkes Night.