[Photo of Harry Weinger, vice president of Universal Music Group's catalog division, looks through original Motown master tapes at the company's vault in New York, by Romain Blanquart for the Detroit Free Press]
From The Detroit Free Press: It’s a plain little room. The size of a small garage, maybe. For Detroit, this is a very important 150 square feet. Housed here, on the fifth floor of an office building 500 miles from West Grand Boulevard, are the most valuable raw materials in the city’s cultural history.
This is Universal Music’s Motown vault, and these are Motown’s original session tapes: the reels that rolled in the studio at West Grand, capturing what would become some of the most beloved sounds in popular music. These tapes are the sacred texts of Detroit music, and this is their sanctuary.
Read the rest of the story here.
Related:
April 18th, 2009 at 3:46 am
The footage at the start looks like a tape that was stored tails out and being slowly spooled for playback.
The reels on that Studer were turning the direction for playback despite what the footage implies.