Which albums are stored in Iron Mountain, the world’s most secure vault?
It’s easy to take for granted just how fragile and temperamental our film and music heritage really is.
In 1937, a 20th Century Fox film-storage facility in New Jersey’s Little Ferry caught fire due to the spontaneous combustion of nitrate film archives from the flammable gases naturally emitted by the decaying reels, killing one person and resulting in the loss of much of Fox Film Corporation’s silent films from before 1932.
Years later, lessons seemingly weren’t learned as the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio’s Vault 7 was struck by an electrical short in 1965, igniting the stored nitrate reels and again claiming a life while destroying everything in the storage. To the devastation of horror fans, the Lon Chaney silent features A Blind Bargain and London After Midnight were lost forever.
The film and music world is still tethered to the physical archives of old analogue tapes and celluloid film. After years of subpar generation loss—the degradation of fidelity when media is transferred or copied to new mediums as technology evolves—the remastering boom of the last decade or so has demanded access to the source recordings to amplify the sonic character of our favourite albums and present the films we love in that beautiful 4K picture.
The preciousness of such archives was once again made painfully apparent in 2008 when the music industry was struck with one of its worst accidents since the days of the nitrate explosions. Using a blowtorch to warm asphalt shingles on Universal Studios Hollywood’s backlot roofing, a worker had accidentally allowed a fire to sweep across three acres of the property, damaging the King Kong Encounter attraction and an estimated 50,000 archived digital video and film copies, including the original recordings of some of the biggest-selling artists of all time under Universal Music Group’s corporate umbrella.
Universal executives were upfront about what had been damaged but maintained that nothing was irreplaceable, citing duplicates and back-ups elsewhere. This was disputed by The New York Times Magazine journalist Jody Rosen, who posited as many as 175,000 items damaged or even destroyed, from old master albums, phonograph discs, acetate pressings, and reams of indexing information. While stressing that the volume of unreleased studio material is duplicated and backed up elsewhere, UMG knew it needed to take no further chances.
Forged deep within a limestone quarry in Pennsylvania’s Boyers village is the Iron Mountain storage facility. Conceived by mushroom farmer Herman Knaust as a means to protect information in the event of a nuclear attack, the storage services company grew to a global enterprise offering the world’s most high-profile clients the security of robust preservation of sensitive materials and essential archives. Utilising their flagship storage in Boyers, UMG transported voluminous amounts of its master tape back catalogue to the high security facility, safe in the knowledge of Iron Mountain’s climate-controlled environments and patrolling armed guards.
So, which albums are stored in Iron Mountain?
The mountain contained some of the biggest names in popular music. As revealed by Tracking Angle’s exploration of the site, Don Henley’s Geffen tapes are buried deep within Iron Mountain’s vault, as are the legendary jazz label Blue Note Records’ various masters.
Later, some Muddy Waters was discovered before Ella Fitzgerald could be marvelled over, and even a Chuck Berry mono master was brought out for a look. Gleefully rifling through the catalogue like one flips through the vinyl at a record store, Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and Buddy Holly were excavated like buried treasure, all with their boxes scribbled on by the production team and affixed with studio notes as early as the 1950s.
Later, they found boxes of Richard Thompson literally sat next to The Carpenters, the latter above Luther Vandross. Densely packed together were The Jesus Lizard, Eddie Kramer’s production work, and The Dandy Warhols, all spotted as the Tracking Angle team were casually perusing the vast library.
It’s an astonishing insight into Iron Mountain’s measures to protect the UMG collection, pulling no stops in their heritage preservation after the traumatic 2008 fire accident. Deep within the limestone vaults lie the artistic and cultural offerings that tomorrow will inherit, such a gravitas and responsibility that thankfully doesn’t seem lost on the Universal honchos.
