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Post by Vale on Jan 9, 2024 5:59:17 GMT -5
Hi everyone, I recently read in a previous post about listing all Beach Boys missing master tapes; I think this would be a great idea and I would love if this thread will be considered as a repository.
Obviously, I ask for help from all historians and all those who have informations about it, so feel free to list here.
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Post by Mopp on Jan 9, 2024 8:44:37 GMT -5
I think the first would be the main Smile multi-track tape, including Cabin Essence, Child Is Father of the Man, Wonderful, the first version of Vega-Tables, and of course Good Vibrations.
On the same note, the My Only Sunshine multi-track. That one isn't really missing though. We know where it went. It just so happens that it went to a shredder.
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petsite
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Post by petsite on Jan 9, 2024 10:22:26 GMT -5
We can break it down to two groups. One can be final released masters. The other is session tapes, mix downs etc. Here are examples of what I mean.
Masters: Wouldn't It Be Nice. Removed from the master for Pet Sounds, put on a singles reel, and misfiled after that.
Pet Sounds master: Used for the first release of Pet Sounds on CD, then it went MIA. The U-1630 digital copy made from that master was found before the 40th anniversary release in 2006 and was used for that release.
Others: This will be a LONG list if we do it right.
Good Vibrations: 8-Track master, presumably cut up with hundreds of other tapes when CBS converted their recording studios into TV news studios back in the 1970s. The Byrds also lost a lot of their masters.
Heroes And Villains: Cantina version. Version first released back in 1990 comes from a damaged copy tape.
Wonderful: SMiLE version. First released on the 1993 box from safety copy made by a engineer back in the 1970s.
The 20/20 multi-track of Cabinessence. Don't know if this was found after 1993, but they were looking for it when the box came out back then and could not find it.
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Post by Mopp on Jan 9, 2024 10:28:17 GMT -5
Good Vibrations: 8-Track master, presumably cut up with hundreds of other tapes when CBS converted their recording studios into TV news studios back in the 1970s. The Byrds also lost a lot of their masters.
I don't know why that still gets repeated. It's impossible that the GV multitrack was left at Columbia. That reel has a ton of songs on it. They had to have had it in 1968 when they finished Cabin Essence. As Will C said on another thread |
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Post by jay on Jan 9, 2024 12:10:23 GMT -5
This is the kind of thread I've been wanting! I'd also love a thread of live tapes that were known to exist and now either no longer do or are lost.
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Post by WillJC on Jan 9, 2024 12:48:00 GMT -5
Good Vibrations: 8-Track master, presumably cut up with hundreds of other tapes when CBS converted their recording studios into TV news studios back in the 1970s. The Byrds also lost a lot of their masters.
I don't know why that still gets repeated. It's impossible that the GV multitrack was left at Columbia. That reel has a ton of songs on it. They had to have had it in 1968 when they finished Cabin Essence. As Will C said on another thread Yep, that reel definitely wasn't left behind at Columbia. It later took trips to Brian's house and Heider's (Heroes and Villains), Capitol (Cabin Essence), and Brian was playing it for visitors in the 1970s. There are parts on the extant partial safety copy from those post-1966 sessions. |
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Post by Vale on Jan 9, 2024 14:37:58 GMT -5
I don't know why that still gets repeated. It's impossible that the GV multitrack was left at Columbia. That reel has a ton of songs on it. They had to have had it in 1968 when they finished Cabin Essence. As Will C said on another thread Yep, that reel definitely wasn't left behind at Columbia. It later took trips to Brian's house and Heider's (Heroes and Villains), Capitol (Cabin Essence), and Brian was playing it for visitors in the 1970s. There are parts on the extant partial safety copy from those post-1966 sessions. I found this old thread on the Hoffman board, dated 2005: forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/missing-66-67-smile-tapes.56327/ |
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Post by Vale on Jan 9, 2024 14:43:25 GMT -5
This is the kind of thread I've been wanting! I'd also love a thread of live tapes that were known to exist and now either no longer do or are lost. Exactly! My dream is that somebody reading this list says "Hey wait a minute I have some old BB reels in my garage... let's bring them to daylight"... I'm a dreamer I know |
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Post by bessieboporbach on Jan 9, 2024 14:56:21 GMT -5
Good Vibrations: 8-Track master, presumably cut up with hundreds of other tapes when CBS converted their recording studios into TV news studios back in the 1970s. The Byrds also lost a lot of their masters. Petsite, I am not questioning your expertise, but I am confused by this reference to missing (or lost) Byrds masters. I'm not aware of there being any significant gaps in the Byrds tape library, besides "Milestones" which was lent out to the producers of the 1967 Songmakers TV special and never returned. There are reams of 8-track tapes, some of which have leaked out on bootlegs (the Journals CD sets), others of which were used by Bob Irwin and Vic Anesini to mix outtake material in the '90s. There are the 3-track reduction masters, used by Irwin and Anesini for some of the '90s CDs. And there are the album masters in mono and stereo, all of which are (as far as I know) still extant although apparently some of the stereo ones are worn out enough to be considered unusable. Even the single mixes still existed at least as recently as 1982 when Columbia released the second volume of the Original Singles set, with its longer version of "You Ain't Going Nowhere." So what, exactly, was "lost" or "presumably cut up"? |
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petsite
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Post by petsite on Jan 9, 2024 17:13:01 GMT -5
This was posted on the old SMiLE shop board back in the day from someone in the know.
It wasn't just 1/4" reels of stuff by unknown artists that no one has ever even heard of before, that were being dumped! Have you ever heard of an LA band known as THE BYRDS? Over 12 hours of original 1/2" 3 track session tapes from January 1965 through May 1966 were trashed in the late 1980's. When I spoke with both Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark in mid 1989, both had said things to indeed claim that these things were NOT "junk"! First Roger said to me, "We have been looking for those!". Then Gene on the other hand said, "those are probably worth something!" My ex-wife ended up stealing most of those original 3 track reels from my tape vault along with alot of other stuff that CBS no longer wanted to waste storage space on! But even after that happened and word of those missing session tapes got out (or actually "IN" I guess!) to CBS, they continued to throw away even more tape. In fact it wasn't until SONY stepped in a few years later that things that went to the trash were finally being defaced beyond use!
Because of the way in which Brian worked, recording a backing track at say, Western and moving to Columbia for the vocals, perhaps weeks or even months later. It's not going to take a Rocket Scientist to figure out what could have happened to tapes used at Columbia Studios. I have left 2" session tapes at studios that have been around forever and then never seen them again.
I should also make point here that 2" tape is ALOT more expensive than 1/4" or 1/2". I was rarely offered much scrapped 2" tape in those days. I remember a 2" of Michael Jackson drum tracks that I passed on! Who would have wanted to pay $200.00 for something like that?
That is the main reason so much 2" tape got bulked and reused on some other sessions more than just once. In fact the only tapes I still have are the ones I took home with me! The fact that there wasn't much use for 1/2" tape after the late 1960's, might explain why there was so much of it still round until the late 1980's, When TASCAM (TEAC) introduced a new 1/2" 8-track semi-pro machine with DBX Type II, that was affordable enough for home studios, there was suddenly machine commonly available for all those 1/2" tapes! Those original mid 1960's 1/2" reels play back really nice on one of those little machines!
We also know that CBS had stored the 8-Track masters from SUMMER DAYS including CALIFORNIA GIRLS. It wasn't until Mark was working on the 93 box and requested the CBS LP masters that CBS sent him these 8-Track masters as well. They had been stored by CBS for (at the time) 28 years.
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petsite
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Post by petsite on Jan 9, 2024 17:46:52 GMT -5
Also, back in 1994, Mark told Lee the following in an interview for ESQ:
And like on "Good Vibrations", all the original recording sessions are there, but there's almost nothing with a vocal on it. I know that record had to have been done to an eight-track; that was certainly a period when Brian was using eight-track already. The final eight-track, and for that matter, the final assembled track which was on four-track, isn't there. The cut on the box is taken from an eight-track copy - somebody made an eight-track copy of a lot of things at some point, and that's where that is drawn from. But the tape isn't even labeled, I mean I went through it and made a label for it, because it's got a bunch of stuff on it, and there's no indication when it was made, or by whom or where. But thank goodness it exists.
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Post by bessieboporbach on Jan 9, 2024 19:13:17 GMT -5
This was posted on the old SMiLE shop board back in the day from someone in the know.
It wasn't just 1/4" reels of stuff by unknown artists that no one has ever even heard of before, that were being dumped! Have you ever heard of an LA band known as THE BYRDS? Over 12 hours of original 1/2" 3 track session tapes from January 1965 through May 1966 were trashed in the late 1980's. When I spoke with both Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark in mid 1989, both had said things to indeed claim that these things were NOT "junk"! First Roger said to me, "We have been looking for those!". Then Gene on the other hand said, "those are probably worth something!" My ex-wife ended up stealing most of those original 3 track reels from my tape vault along with alot of other stuff that CBS no longer wanted to waste storage space on! But even after that happened and word of those missing session tapes got out (or actually "IN" I guess!) to CBS, they continued to throw away even more tape. In fact it wasn't until SONY stepped in a few years later that things that went to the trash were finally being defaced beyond use!
Because of the way in which Brian worked, recording a backing track at say, Western and moving to Columbia for the vocals, perhaps weeks or even months later. It's not going to take a Rocket Scientist to figure out what could have happened to tapes used at Columbia Studios. I have left 2" session tapes at studios that have been around forever and then never seen them again.
I should also make point here that 2" tape is ALOT more expensive than 1/4" or 1/2". I was rarely offered much scrapped 2" tape in those days. I remember a 2" of Michael Jackson drum tracks that I passed on! Who would have wanted to pay $200.00 for something like that?
That is the main reason so much 2" tape got bulked and reused on some other sessions more than just once. In fact the only tapes I still have are the ones I took home with me! The fact that there wasn't much use for 1/2" tape after the late 1960's, might explain why there was so much of it still round until the late 1980's, When TASCAM (TEAC) introduced a new 1/2" 8-track semi-pro machine with DBX Type II, that was affordable enough for home studios, there was suddenly machine commonly available for all those 1/2" tapes! Those original mid 1960's 1/2" reels play back really nice on one of those little machines!
We also know that CBS had stored the 8-Track masters from SUMMER DAYS including CALIFORNIA GIRLS. It wasn't until Mark was working on the 93 box and requested the CBS LP masters that CBS sent him these 8-Track masters as well. They had been stored by CBS for (at the time) 28 years.
OK, re:the Byrds, he's talking about the stuff that ended up on the Journals bootleg set. That's how it got out, someone apparently absconded with those tapes. I guess they were stolen from that guy personally, however he came to possess them. But they weren't masters, they were the session tapes, and not all of them from that period, just some of them -- mostly from '65, plus the "5D" sessions from '66. Those tapes are the only source of the aborted "Flower Bomb Song." I won't bore everyone with the details but, just based on what Bob Irwin has had access to for his remixes from the late '80s through the mid-2000s, the only stuff he HASN'T been able to work on is the stuff that was on Journals. So clearly all the masters (except "Milestones"), and the vast majority of the multis even, are still present and accounted for, just not the things on Journals. To me that doesn't suggest a deliberate or consistent policy on CBS's part of discarding or destroying tape. If anything, CBS is one of the absolute best labels/studios of that period for hanging onto every scrap of tape, even for artists signed to other labels. For example, John Coltrane's complete Sun Ship session was found in the 2000s just because CBS happened to have it. (A huge amount of his other session tapes and masters from that period were either trashed by ABC in the '70s or burnt up at Universal in 2008.) |
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petsite
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Post by petsite on Jan 9, 2024 19:17:32 GMT -5
Thanks for the info. I just knew that some tapes were tossed out. I know people probably lifted some tapes, but there is a history of record companies not really giving a crap about masters. Heck, when Universal was bought by a liquor company, they couldn't give a rat's ass about the masters.
Oh, don't get me started on the 2008 fire. I could rail for days. Thank goodness Capitol knew where to keep their Beatles / Beach Boys masters (zoom in, the guy to right is holding the sub-master for ABBEY ROAD).
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petsite
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Post by petsite on Jan 12, 2024 3:03:31 GMT -5
Forgot he mentions the master for Good Vibrations here. Que'd up.
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Post by Vale on Jan 12, 2024 3:44:44 GMT -5
Forgot he mentions the master for Good Vibrations here. Que'd up.
I consider this video such a milestone, you know... |
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