When most people drive on the Golden State Freeway, just north of Los Angeles, they worry about traffic. Michael Feinstein worries about George Gershwin, Cole Porter and a priceless musical legacy buried near the onrushing cars.
He knows that MGM officials, in a 1970 housecleaning, dumped film scores, musical manuscripts and recordings by some of America's greatest songwriters into a landfill by the freeway near Valencia. The studio wanted to cut storage costs and believed these items -- from some of Hollywood's most beloved films -- had no value.
Lost in the rubble were gems like Gene Kelly's outtake of "I've Got a Crush on You," which was cut from "An American in Paris," and the original orchestral score for Judy Garland's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" from "The Wizard of Oz," according to film historians, musical preservationists and performers familiar with the incident.
Music preservation -- An article in Thursday's Section A about an expert on the golden era of American song who seeks to preserve artifacts of that period referred to the score for Judy Garland's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" from "The Wizard of Oz." The name of the song is "Over the Rainbow."
"They destroyed unique and irreplaceable works of famous composers, arrangers and lyricists," said Feinstein, 48, an internationally known recording artist. He is also an expert on the golden era of American song, from the 1920s through the 1950s.
"The MGM story is just one example of music that's vanishing all the time," he added. "We're talking about a unique piece of our cultural history, and for me it's like a death in the family every time we learn that something else has disappeared."
Feinstein has built his career around America's classic pop songs. He has recorded more than 20 albums featuring the works of composers such as Gershwin, Porter and Irving Berlin, and he plays more than 140 dates a year, from Carnegie Hall to the Hollywood Bowl. He opened a New York cabaret, Feinstein's at the Regency, in 1999, and until recently had a similar nightclub in Los Angeles.
But Feinstein is more than an entertainer. He is also a musical detective -- a man on the prowl for original scores, recordings and sheet music at garage sales and auctions, in secondhand stores and the libraries of film and record studios.
His mission isn't simply to collect, but to preserve. And it sometimes feels like a race against time. He and like-minded preservationists on both coasts worry that hundreds of songs by some of America's most famous composers have disappeared.
Sheet music has been lost or stolen from archives across the nation. When original scores vanish, as in the MGM dump, conductors who wish to perform these classic soundtracks must re-create them, note for note, from original recordings.
