Editing Atlantic Records (section)

===Long Branch warehouse fire===

A fire destroyed most of Atlantic's tape archive in the early morning of February 8, 1978. It had been stored in a non-air-conditioned warehouse in [[Long Branch, New Jersey]].<ref name="holland"/><ref>{{cite news |last1=Brenoff |first1=Ann |title=Fire ruins Vogel building |url=http://www.digifind-it.com/redbank/_1960-1979/1978/1978-02-08.pdf |work=The Daily Register |date=February 8, 1978 |location=Shrewsbury, New Jersey |pages=1, 3 |access-date=July 4, 2019 |archive-date=July 3, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190703232334/http://www.digifind-it.com/redbank/_1960-1979/1978/1978-02-08.pdf |url-status=dead }}</ref><ref>{{cite news |last1=Williams |first1=Robert J. |title=Suspect Blaze Wrecks Shut Four-Story Store |url=https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/144098141/ |url-access=subscription|access-date=July 4, 2019 |work=Asbury Park Press |date=February 8, 1978 |location=Asbury Park, New Jersey |pages=A1,A3}}</ref>  The four-story warehouse, located at 199 Broadway, was the former location of Vogel's Department Store, before it closed down in March 1975. The building was purchased less than a week earlier and had been scheduled to reopen as a Nadler's Furniture Center, in an effort to revitalize the downtown area.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Goldstein |first1=Robin |title=Nadler Furniture to open in the old Vogel building |url=http://209.212.22.88/DATA/RBR/1970-1979/1978/1978.02.02.pdf |work=The Daily Register |date=February 2, 1978 |location=Shrewsbury, New Jersey |page=1 |access-date=July 4, 2019 |archive-date=July 4, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190704003928/http://209.212.22.88/DATA/RBR/1970-1979/1978/1978.02.02.pdf |url-status=dead }}</ref>

The building was owned by the family of Sheldon Vogel, the chief financial officer of Atlantic at the time. He had recommended moving the company's multitracks and unreleased recordings to the building after Ertegun had complained about the aforementioned tapes taking up too much space in the company's Manhattan offices in New York.<ref>{{cite news |last1=Rosen |first1=Jody |title=The Day the Music Burned |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-recordings.html |access-date=July 3, 2019 |work=The New York Times |date=June 11, 2019}}</ref>

Although master tapes of the material in Atlantic's released back catalog survived due to being stored in New York, the fire destroyed or damaged an estimated 5,000–6,000 reels of tape, including virtually all of the company's unreleased master tapes, alternative takes, rehearsal tapes and session multi-tracks recorded between 1948 and 1969. Atlantic was one of the first labels to record in stereo; many of the tapes that were lost were stereo 'alternates' recorded in the late 1940s and 1950s (which Atlantic routinely taped simultaneously with the mono versions until the 1960s) as well as almost all of the 8-track multitrack masters recorded by Tom Dowd in the 1950s and 1960s. According to ''Billboard'' journalist Bill Holland, news of the fire was kept quiet, and one Atlantic staffer who spoke to Holland reported that he did not find out about it until a year later. Reissue producers and archivists subsequently located some tapes that were at first presumed 'lost', but which had survived because they had evidently been removed from the New Jersey archive years earlier and not returned. During the compilation of the Rhino-Atlantic [[John Coltrane]] boxed set, producer [[Joel Dorn]] located supposedly destroyed outtakes from Coltrane's seminal 1959 album ''[[Giant Steps]]'', plus other tapes including [[Bobby Darin]]'s original Atco demo of "[[Dream Lover]]" (with [[Fred Neil]] playing guitar). Atlantic archivists have since rediscovered other 'lost' material including unreleased masters, alternative takes and rehearsal tapes by Ray Charles, [[Vann "Piano Man" Walls]], [[Ornette Coleman]], [[Lennie Tristano]] and [[Lee Konitz]].<ref name=holland>{{cite magazine |author=Bill Holland |title=Labels Strive To Rectify Past Archival Problems |magazine=Billboard |date=July 12, 1997 |url=http://www.billholland.net/words/Labels%20Strive%20to%20Rectify%20Past%20Archival%20Problems.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180327060124/http://www.billholland.net/words/Labels%20Strive%20to%20Rectify%20Past%20Archival%20Problems.pdf |archive-date=March 27, 2018 |url-status = usurped}}</ref>