When Pawelski talks about vaults of recordings, I imagine vast underground facilities filled with miles of mechanized shelving. I picture endless rows of master tapes in cardboard boxes marked with barcodes and serial numbers. There are places like that. Universal Music Group keeps some of its masters at Iron Mountain, a 1.7-million-square-foot storage facility deep within an abandoned limestone mine in western Pennsylvania. But the tapes that interest Pawelski aren’t always so well preserved. Some were never logged by the studio or sent to a music publisher. Others were tossed out or misfiled. “A lot of these projects don’t exist if I don’t find them,” Pawelski says.
The Stax masters were recorded on professional audiotape, but the demos came in every condition and format: cassette tapes, studio tapes, quarter-inch home recordings. When Stax went bankrupt, in 1975, its catalogue was chopped apart. Atlantic Records owned all the master recordings made before 1968. The rest were sold to Fantasy Records and later to Concord Music Group. But the demos were scattered across the country. A few ended up in Iron Mountain and places like it. (“There are salt mines everywhere,” Pawelski says.) Some survived only on cassettes that were passed around Memphis for years. Most of the rest were owned by Rondor Music International, a publisher in L.A, but they’d been transferred to digital audiotape. Their original sources were destroyed. Worse, the digital tapes were a hodgepodge of recordings from various artists—everything from Broadway show tunes to songs by the Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento. To sift out the Stax material, Pawelski would have to listen to every tape from start to finish. There were thirteen hundred tapes in all—nearly two thousand hours of music.
“Some projects, I just roll over and I’ve got a record,” Pawelski told me. “But the Stax one was pretty epic.” For the next fifteen years, whenever she was on a plane, train, or road trip, she would listen to a tape or two between stops. When she was home, she would play them while she was working. “It’s got to be horrible to live with me,” she says. “I’d be sitting at the dining-room table and Audrey would be grooving in the kitchen, making dinner, but she never got to hear a full song. As soon as I knew what a track was, I’d go on to the next, until I got to ‘Holy moly, listen to this!’ ”