Last Monday night, Daptone Records in Bushwick was robbed and the details of the break-in were released shortly after in an email to friends of the studio. The email stated, in part, that "there was a lot of equipment stolen and damaged. And, no, we did not have insurance. We had been shopping around with different companies earlier this month but had not signed a check." They had been in the building for 7 years, and, despite not having an alarm system, hadn't been robbed until last week.
The NY Times now checks in on label, co-owned by Gabriel Roth, who received a Grammy for work on Amy Winehouse’s album “Back to Black." The paper gets into more details, reporting that "the lock on a gate outside the ground-floor studio was pried open and a front door window smashed. In the studio, wires had been yanked out from the mixing board and other equipment, records thrown on the floor, and a number of rare instruments, amplifiers and other pieces of equipment were missing. Upstairs in the office, computers, modems and printers had vanished." Over $20,000 lost, all in all, and more damage yet to be tabulated.
As of last Friday, the studio was back up and running, however, with loaner equipment, as well as the mixing board and eight-track reel-to-reel left behind by the thieves. And though Roth declared to the Times, “we are not taking any money or any donations or doing any benefits or fund-raisers,” there is a Save Daptone site set up and taking donations. To see the studio as it was, there's a video after the jump showing the inner-workings.
