The day the music died

THIS ISSUE: 11 years ago, a fire on a movie studio backlot claimed a large chunk of America’s cultural heritage.

If you’re a music fan—and if you’re reading this, you probably are—you’ve heard this already: On 11 June, the New York Times Magazine published an investigative report about a 2008 fire that destroyed a vault at Universal Studios in Los Angeles.

Workers were repairing a roof on an oft-reused movie set, heating asphalt tiles with a blowtorch. Protocol required the repairmen to stick around for one hour until the asphalt. But before the fire was extinguished, it reached Building 6197, a “nondescript,” “hulking edifice of corrugated metal” known to Universal locals as the video vault. When Randy Aronson, the vault’s supervisor, arrived early in the morning. what he saw shocked him. The “fire was blasting out of the building as if shot from giant flamethrowers,” wrote Jody Rosen, the article’s author.