Originally Posted by
GuitarGeek
Which is why it's kind of astonishing some of the stuff that did survive, like the 1961 Village Vanguard tapes, or the outtakes from the Africa/Brass sessions.
I see parallel here to the TV and film industry. You guys know one of my favorite shows is Doctor Who. And I've bemoaned the fact that, like most BBC shows from before the 1980's, there's a lot of gaps in the show during the 60's, as many tapes were erased. Nobody saw home video or the "rerun" market (in the UK, reruns were practically unheard of prior to the 1980's) being what it ended up being.
But you know what did survive? The very first episode of the series, The Unearthly Child was shot twice. The first one was deemed "not quite right", so the production team were ordered to take a second pass at it. The first version was never broadcast (at least not until decades later, anyway), and by all rights should be one of the things that was tossed out by the BBC overlords. But it wasn't. It survived, somehow, and was issued on DVD.
And for you Trevor Rabin supporters, I read once that his first band Rabbit appeared on South African TV regularly during the mid 70's (apparently, they were huge in their homeland), but almost none of that's survived.
I also recall that Johnny Carson was known to occasionally complain about NBC erasing the 60's and early 70's episodes of his show.
Then there's all the films that are "lost", for various reasons. I've read about film restoration people walking into vaults in Hollywood, pulling film cans off the shelves, opening them, and finding nothing but dust. I also read about how one film distributor melted down some of the films they had in their possession for the silver content in the celluloid (I think it was silver, I might have the wrong precious metal).
Then you've got things like Nosferatu, all prints of which were supposed to be destroyed on order from Madame Stoker's lawyers. Also, movies that were the director most definitely didn't have "final cut", and as such, the film was hacked by studio idiots who were convinced they knew better, and now the director's cut no longer exists. Greater films than The Blues Brothers were molested in this fashion, but it's always gonna bug me that I'm never gonna see John Landis' original vision for that picture (the DVD edition has some footage they were able to salvage from an intermediate print of the film, but apparently there's more stuff that's still missing).
And in the audio commentary on The Kids Are Alright, Jeff Stein talks about how much of a pain in the ass it was just finding the reels of The Who performing at Woodstock that he wanted to use in his film. He said the Warners vaults didn't have any proper logs or anything, so they literally had to go through reel after reel, and physically looking at the first frames of each reel, hoping to find something that looked like it might be The Who. So even when something does exist, good luck actually finding it.
And who knows about all the stuff the Nazis, Soviets, etc destroyed or molested during their respective reigns of terror.
So besides even catastrophes of the kind discussed in the article in the OP, just dumb ass shortsightedness was enough to be lethal towards anything produced in the world of music, television or film.
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