The last interview ELLIOT ROBERTS gave, as it turned out, wasn't about the artist he spent most of his life managing, or any of his artists. It was, rather, a lament on behalf of all artists whose masters were lost in the infamous fire at a UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP vault. “It’s a crime that [the original masters of] BILLIE HOLIDAY or BUDDY HOLLY or all those artists of the ’40s and ’50s are gone,” Roberts told the LOS ANGELES TIMES two weeks ago. He complained that labels were too cheap to spend the money to properly back up their analog masters. "You can yell, you can jump up and down, you can look to insurance, you can sue," he told the newspaper, "but if you lose a master, you’re [sunk]." On Friday, Roberts, a tireless artist advocate who broke into management with JONI MITCHELL and went on to manage many others including BOB DYLAN and TOM PETTY, but who was best known for his nearly lifelong relationship with NEIL YOUNG, died at 76. A cause of death has yet to be reported. "He was there for me and protected my music with a fierceness," Young wrote on Saturday. It's fitting that Roberts went to the grave protecting all music with the same fierceness, while still sounding like he was speaking on Young's behalf. There's hardly any major artist who's spent as much time preaching the gospel of pristine sound as Young. If the Times had called him two weeks ago, he might have said the same thing Roberts did, word-for-word. That's the bond Roberts had with his clients. "Follow the vision of the artist, because that's who has the vision," he told WARREN ZANES a year ago in a long interview that could serve as a master class in music management. "If you start screwing around with it because you think you're smarter than your artist, which is never the case, you'll f*** it up." He was a creative and business partner with Young on a number of projects including his films, his BRIDGE SCHOOL benefits and PONO. He was beloved throughout the industry for his ethics and his joie de vivre (or, as the NEW YORK TIMES put it in its obit, he "took part in the rock ′n’ roll lifestyle of his clients"). As a bonus, as another client, DAVID CROSBY, once said, "he is, in his managerial capacity, capable of lying straight-faced to anyone, anytime, ever." Or perhaps that's not a bonus, just part of those ethics. A rock legend either way. RIP... A good number of artists, producers and songs have been credited with inventing rock and roll. Almost all are objectively wrong—like most music, rock wasn't invented so much as organically generated somewhere along a neverending continuum—and subjectively plausible. “There was nothing else like it at the time," PONDEROSA STOMP founder IRA PADNOS says of "THE FAT MAN," the 1949 collaboration between FATS DOMINO, who died in 2017, and producer/arranger/co-writer DAVE BARTHOLOMEW, who died Sunday at age 100. "He put a heavy backbeat behind an old blues tune, and it became rock and roll.” Domino was the man in the foreground. Bartholomew, of whom Padnos was speaking, spent most of his career in the background while creating some of the greatest mid-century R&B and rock and roll to emerge from New Orleans, which is to say, some of the greatest, period. Bartholomew and Domino were as inseparable as, say, Roberts and Young, but in a different way. Bartholomew, the more urbane and musically educated of the two, "tried to burnish Domino’s music, by, for instance, imposing a structure on his songs by giving each a beginning, a middle and an end," the NEW ORLEANS TIMES-PICAYUNE recalls. "Fats," New Orleans radio DJ GWEN THOMPKINS tells the newspaper, "didn't seem to care about that." I believe it goes without saying, but just in case: There is no rock and roll without both of those things... The estates of TUPAC SHAKUR, TOM PETTY and SOUNDGARDEN are among the plaintiffs in a $100 million plus class-action suit against UMG, the first legal fallout from recent revelations about the 2008 Universal vault fire... CARDI B and the late NIPSEY HUSSLE were among the major winners at Sunday's BET AWARDS... TWITTER has peaked and it will be all downhill from here: Being Beyoncé’s assistant for the day: DONT GET FIRED THREAD... Under the terms of new COPYRIGHT ROYALTY BOARD rates for songwriters, Spotify says it "overpaid most publishers in 2018" and will deduct those overpayments from 2019 royalties. DAVID ISRAELITE, chairman of the NATIONAL MUSIC PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION, called the announcement "hypocritical," noting that Spotify is currently appealing those CRB rates... RIP also: KELLY JAY and DENNIS FARNON.