Mark Linett interview Live@Sunset Sound

I have no way of knowing whether there is ANY truth in this statement, or whether the guy was just being a troll and trying to get everybody's hopes up in vain for his own lolz... but did anyone here watch the Mark/Warren Huart interview at Sunset with the live chat enabled at the side? It came on by default in my browser and most of it was the fairly forgettable stuff you get in live comment feeds... but, towards the end, after Mark mentioned during the interview that the final eight-track multitrack master tape for Good Vibrations was missing, this guy calling himself 'MegaBirdman2' made the following comments at around 3hrs 55mins into the stream:

and then at 3rs 59mins in, very nearly at the four hour mark, he said:

I have no idea who he's talking about (I'm based in the UK), but a quick Google revealed that there is an West Coast-based engineer called Robert Honablue, quite old now, who worked at CBS at some point and ran his own studio until recently.

Like I say, this might just be an on-line guy yanking everyone's chain on the IK live chat because, well... it's a live chat, he has a pseudonym and he *can*... but is it worth checking this GV multitrack info out any further?

Caveat emptor: the same guy, 'MegaBirdman2' seemed a bit cheesed off earlier in the live chat thread, as he felt the live giveaways IK were doing during the streamed interviews weren't very fair and he was (unfairly, it seemed to me) annoyed that he hadn't won anything. So I think he might have just been trying to stir things up a bit. If that was his aim, it didn't work, since as far as I could see no-one responded to his Good Vibrations comments at all! Which is why I've posted this... I thought everyone here would be discussing it by now, but it seems it passed unnoticed thus far. I thought 'ah, he's probably just a troll... I'll forget it too'. But then the thought grabbed me: what if it WAS true and the GV multi HAD actually survived by being taken from CBS before all the tapes there were junked? I wouldn't want that info to be missed if there's the slightest possibility it's true...?

*I'm* on the level, by the way. I'm an audio tech journalist based in the UK. I post under my real name. I interviewed Mark myself and wrote the piece in the UK recording magazine Sound On Sound in 2004 on the recording of BWPS, and also conducted a Sound On Sound video interview with Mark last year in his own studio about... well, all sorts of stuff, but mainly the back catalogue copyright retention reissues. I would love the GV multitrack to be found (wouldn't we all?).

Sadly, I can't necessarily say the same for 'MegaBirdman2'. I've no idea who he is and he might just be trying to get a rise out of people. But surely, what he says might be worth looking into?

MattB

I share AGD's scepticism. Could this guy *really* have had this piece of priceless audio history in his possession all of this time and not realised that it was missing and got in touch with anyone about it?

Then again... stranger things have happened. I'm also something of a fan of the long-running UK sci-fi series Doctor Who, and as some of you on this side of the Atlantic probably know, many of the tapes of the 1960s stories of that series are missing because the BBC here in the UK wiped the original video tapes to make new recordings over the top and save on buying expensive new tape stock, until the mid-70s when they realised that destroying their archives in this way was... a bit daft. But oftentimes the erased stories had been recorded to film before the video copies were wiped so that film copies could be sold to other TV companies abroad... and some of those 'for sale abroad' film prints *have* been recovered, thus restoring a few of the 'missing thought erased' stories to the archives. Occasionally these films have been found in the most bizarre way or odd locations, or have ended up in the hands of people who have no idea that they're sitting on what is now the only remaining copy of some stories anywhere in the world. Once they find out, on the whole these people have usually returned them to the BBC or at the very least, lent them back temporarily so the BBC can make a copy for their archives.

Occasionally, however, the psychology of the extreme collector has kicked in; it's believed that some of the last remaining film copies of some Doctor Who episodes are being held on to by arch-collectors precisely *because* they know the copies are now irreplaceable... and they get a kick out of that and will NOT give them up, because they derive pleasure from owning something unique that lots of other people want to see... but can't.

I hope that's not the case here. If *any* of the above stuff is true at all, that is! It occurs to me that surely this Robert Honablue engineer guy would ideally have had to have been working at CBS on the WEST coast in the 70s to have stood a chance of, er... *acquiring* the GV master multitrack... not in New York. But it's not impossible... and even if he was mainly based in New York, and in the *early* 1970s at that, it's not impossible that he might have had to travel to the company's LA studios now and then. And even if he left CBS in 1972... he could have swiped the GV tape (or, being charitable, have acquired it through others) before that. Such things were more easily done back then... master multitracks were seen as far less precious, were guarded far less carefully, and we know that some, at least, were swiped from the Beach Boys archive over the years. And as I understand it, CBS in Hollywood is most likely to have been where the final GV 8-track was after 1966 until it eventually disappeared, whether through being destroyed in the late 70s CBS clearout as has always been assumed in recent years, or because someone pinched it before that date (unwittingly saving it from destruction if so...!!).

But it's important not to get carried away. This might just be a load of on-line trolling...!

EDITED TO ADD:

It seems from the above link and Q&A that this Robert Honablue guy is an accomplished engineer all right. And he was around in the right time period... and was on the West Coast and still working with CBS (if not directly for them as an employee) in the late 70s, too...

So he would plausibly have been moving in the right circles to have access to the tape... or at least to know *other* people who would have had access.

None of this necessarily adds up to anything other than a load of speculation though. And as Doctor Who fans know only too well, sometimes on-line trolls construct little plausible-sounding but completely fake stories about tapes being found just to excite and then deflate on-line fans... rather like this one, in fact. It still blows my mind that anyone could want to do that just to disappoint people on-line, but it really has happened many times over the years. So the watchword with this kind of stuff should always be... don't believe it until you KNOW it's real, first-hand (and not just 'my mate says he's seen it, so it must be real', either).

It's still worthy of investigation at this stage, I reckon. I'm away from my main computer at the moment or I would already have mailed Alan or Mark myself... but I see others have done it now anyway (thanks John!), and AGD has emailed the engineer himself... so let's see if anything comes of it...?

AGD, would you let us know if you find out anything of consequence from the engineer?

Many thanks!

Matt

"That balcony's getting awful scruffy... I'll just throw some of these ol' pizza boxes out. Who wants THEM, anyway...?

It's crazy to think what priceless stuff might have got trashed like that because no-one — including Brian and the other boys at that stage! — thought it was worth keeping. Against that backdrop, it's kinda lucky that things like the Pet Sounds multis DID survive... and as much of the SMiLE multis as we ended up with.

I do! And, for my sins, I am old enough to remember a classic 1965 Dalek episode being found bricked-up in an alcove in the basement of (I think) a Mormon church in London at the turn of the 80s. No-one knew how it had got there, except there was the suggestion that the BBC used to use the space for rehearsals and possibly (highly random) storage a few years previously. But I can't remember if that whole story was found to be a lie later anyway. In the early years when Doctor Who episodes thought lost were being returned, they were often coming from ex-BBC employees who had sometimes just helped themselves to old films when they left as a keepsake (again, back then people didn't think it was necessarily bad to do that kind of thing, and the security on the films was next to non-existent, too). As with BB back catalogue, none of this archive stuff was held in any kind of regard or as really having any kind of value once it had been broadcast once, or mixed down and manufactured as records in the case of Brian's tape-based productions.

So you had slightly sheepish middle-aged BBC engineers returning films, worried they would get in trouble for something that might by then be frowned upon by their ex-employer. So they often made up tall tales about where the tapes had been 'found' to, well... cover up the fact that originally, they'd pinched them...!

It's thought all the Doctor Who episodes that might ever come back from people like that are probably now back. The last few years, the ones that have turned up have been copies that were made for overseas sales and broadcast and sent around the world. Hence the discoveries in old state broadcasting film stores in former colonies like Nigeria, Hong Kong, etc etc.

Of course, it's much harder with missing tapes like SMiLE multis, because there were usually only one copy of each of them, and none being copied and sent all around the world as with the Beeb's film reels. Which makes it even easier for the nutters who get a kick out of disappointing people on-line to string fans along. Over the years, there have been all sorts of false claims on-line that Doctor Who 'episode hunters' have found things thought lost forever... including, if I remember the story correctly, a guy who claimed he stored all the lost classic episodes he'd found under the counter in his mobile burger van. Of course there were no episodes; it was all on-line fantasy. Why do people do this kind of stuff? As Marvin the Paranoid Android said once, "Make it up? Why would I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough without inventing any more of it".

Anyway, this is why I take claims like those from 'MegaBirdman2' with a large Siberian salt mine until we get better info (if we ever do).

But the terrible thing is, there's always that spark of hope, of potential, of possibility, however slight, at the back of your mind. In this case: What if the GV multitrack was *actually* saved before the big CBS junking... and has been securely on some guy's shelf, knowingly or unknowingly, since the 70s...? And what if, at long last, he was happy to give it back...?

Like I say: best not to go there, until we know more. I've been excited and disappointed before (for another similarly disappointing BB example, think back to the auction of the Durrie Parks acetates. Even more annoyingly, they turned out to be real and have now been to all intents and purposes lost to most of us again...)