The world’s best “Mastering” “Engineer”

From a recent New York Times article about a company that recovers missing master tapes:


In late 2020, Brian Kehew was working at the venerable Hollywood studio Sunset Sound when the owner asked him to help identify some tapes the Who had left behind. It was not an unusual request for Kehew, who has done tape transfers and mixes on hundreds of archival recording projects over the last 30 years, and serves as a tech and sometime backing musician for the band. He expected to find some overdubs or a safety copy of a master, nothing particularly important.

When he got his hands on the reels, he was shocked: The studio was sitting on all the original two-inch multitracks of the group’s 1975 album, “The Who by Numbers,” as well as previously unreleased songs from those sessions.

“I immediately contacted Pete Townshend, and we arranged to send the tapes back to England,” Kehew said. “The band had been looking for the tapes for years, but this was one place they hadn’t thought to check.”

For Kehew, the recovery of the Who recordings underscored the fact that significant tapes “might be sitting in someone’s attic or barn or basement” and not where they belong, in a record company vault or an artist’s archive. “The obstacle to getting these tapes back in the right hands has always been the time and effort involved,” he said. “But what if there was a facile way to connect everyone that doesn’t involve a lot of hassle or red tape?”

The answer may be Master Tape Rescue, a company recently started by Kehew and his partner, Danny White, a fellow music industry veteran. The company acts as an archival matchmaking service of sorts, cataloging recordings from studios or private collections and then vetting and connecting rights holders with tape holders.

Over the past six months, as Kehew, 59, and White, 57, have canvassed the vaults of various studios and other holdings, they have discovered a wealth of fascinating material: previously unreleased Jimi Hendrix jam sessions, unknown Billie Holiday tapes, a trove of historic Chicago blues material, a large collection of professional concert recordings from artists including David Bowie, R.E.M. and Iggy Pop. “And it feels like that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” White said.

It was another historic discovery that brought White into the project. In the late 2000s, he backed the Buddy Holly guitarist Tommy Allsup on tour. In 2009, inspired by the experience, he wrote a young adult novel, “The Last Rock and Roll Show,” about a pair of kids who discover lost Holly recordings. Life would imitate art when White was hired by the estate of a former Holly producer to assess its tape archive — and discovered more than 20 first-generation masters by the “Peggy Sue” singer.

Holly’s catalog was among the recordings reported to have been destroyed in the 2008 Universal Studios fire, which came to wide public knowledge in 2019. The find was major, showing that not everything was lost in the blaze. “It’s not all of Buddy’s masters,” White said, “but it’s a big chunk of his catalog, which is significant given the circumstances. And this was all sitting in a closet for years.”


Someone should send these fellas a tip about where to find the rest of Buddy's tapes..

It’s a shame STeVE wasn’t destroyed in the Universal fire.

I’m certain that Brian K knows about Steve’s tape collection. I read that as a total troll on sTeVe

Andy Zax’s reference to him that - while he doesn’t name him by name - everyone knows *who* he’s referring to is the greatest Hoofman mic drop of them all.

"We got it"..

Who are "we"? I see Stan Ricker working while two doofs are standing around with their hands in their pockets.

Also, the drug-addled douche never misses an opportunity to bash Rudy Van Gelder.