The King is dead. Long live The King.

The King is dead. Long live The King.





Elvis is back. As if he ever went away

Ernst Jorgensen is calling from a farmhouse an hour outside Copenhagen to talk about his passion. For the past two decades he has been curator of the Elvis Presley vault – no simple task at first after decades of exploiting the recordings. He helped get the vault organized and worked with RCA Records to do releases that make sense.

So what’s the sense in the latest – “Elvis 75: Good Rockin’ Tonight,” 100 Elvis cuts on a four-disc box set?

Click through as Jorgensen explains all.

Elvis' music on this box has been remastered yet again. Could a casual fan tell the difference?

“If you had the ideal way to listen to this you’d have it in the recording studio with the actual analog tape playing back on the machine it was recorded on and the speakers it was recorded on. This is the constant struggle for us, to get closer and closer to that. With the new technology we can transfer the tape with a higher resolution. We can work with it in 24-bit, 32-bit environment, and make sure we get as close to the exact sound as the analog tape. … We’ve taken every one of Elvis’ 711 masters and tried to do a better job on them. On some the improvement will be more important than on others. It all depends on how well we did before. It’s interesting to do it. It’s a joy to do it. I think that most people, unless they sit there and A/B it versus what they had before, they’re just gonna say ‘Wow, this sounds great.’”


What’s the purpose in putting out all this music again?

“We’re a little bit on a mission. We always try to see if we can get new devotees for our little project, get people to look beyond the 30 number-one hits. This box set is really what that’s all about. Maybe it’s even more about that than it is about getting a better sound. … it gives us the opportunity to put a package out that’s tempting because it has all the hits. And then fans go in … and find all these songs that are nowhere near as famous but that we think are aesthetically just as important and see if we can get people excited about the Elvis they didn’t know.”


What songs in particular?

“Some of Elvis’ best-known songs in America like ‘Love Me Tender,’ ‘Hound Dog,’ ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ – they’ve sold 40 million copies in the U.S. Haven’t you then covered everything? But if you look at his Sun recordings, to many people … those are some of the greatest of his recordings. Sales figures on those titles are like three, four, five million. There’s plenty of room for our mission to get more people to look beyond the hits.”


That’s true. Some people know “My Baby Left Me” only through the Creedence Clearwater Revival version, not Elvis’.


“Yep. That’s a very good example. If you listen to ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ that was the fist hit on RCA, that’s about the most unusual hit you could ever imagine – a slow, bluesy song with a morbid theme. That became a hit. Who could have expected that? But during the same week he recorded ‘My Baby Left Me’ and ‘One-Sided Love Affair.’ This is the kick I get from it – to choose 100 songs where 30 or 40 of them are already major hits. You have to choose ‘Lawdy Miss Clawdy’ or ‘Shake Rattle and Roll’ – the idea of having people listening to songs they don’t know that well….that’s the fun part of it.”





Session sheet for “My Baby Left Me”


What's the state of the Elvis tape vault – is it Beatles-neat or a total mess?

“It was somewhere in the middle when I started, but pretty good today. We’d had a lot of tapes that developed legs and walked away from our various premises. We’ve gotten them back. We found out where they disappeared, and let them know they needed to come back. By 2001, 2002 we had all the masters that could be found in our vaults. But it was a long, long process of detective work. We had to go back and find out when tapes got lost, who was around in those days, what studios were used, then start hunting down people.”




Jorgensen in the vault, 1989





The vault cleaned up.


What's the condition of the tapes? How are they holding up?

“There’s a problem with tapes in the mid to late ‘70s. I think Ampex tapes were one of the brands that were really, really bad. We realized very early on – that’s not what was missing in our vaults. The tapes that disappeared seemed to be the historically more interesting tapes like the master of ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ We made safeties back then. I don’t think that our ‘70s tapes are as bad as the average. Some of our multi-tracks need baking every time we play them. In general we’re doing well with the Elvis tapes. There was a tendency earlier on in the early days of CDs where people put whatever master was there that included a certain track instead of going back and finding the originals. There was a sloppiness during a decade or two where business didn’t prioritize catalog releases. They didn’t go that extra mile to find the generation before."

What's missing?

"Some of the Sun masters don’t exist and seem to have never existed. When RCA took over Sun we got tapes from Sam Phillips but there were at least four songs where we never got a tape. What we put out on record in the ‘50s was taken from 45s and 78s. I love Sam Phillips, I think he’s a genius, but he was a mess with his tapes! Tape was expensive. They recorded over it because money was scarce at the time. By the mid-‘50s RCA was a major record company and they had procedures on how to do things that ensured it was done properly. What happened later was the tapes were not controlled well enough and were allowed to leave the house.”


Are you still finding Elvis rarities?

“If we had today to find anything, then he can be the private recording Elvis. I dream here, but, if someone would say they would have the cassette for two or three from the Louisiana Hayride of the performances Elvis with the return in the ’55 which would be miraculous. This could happen in main. They are not any sessions from positions RCA there, where we do not have cassettes or masters. I do not see ever we would find anything on this level. Ten or 15 years ago, if you would find thin recordings by the artist as Elvis or Beatles, then the feeling this would had gone out in the centres of money transfer when. Today, if we would find, two people of songs Elvis would not hear earlier this would not be.”
Why?“Because this was made so many times. We found so many the thin releases which this is as the logician 'wolf of The shout' . Is gonna really is the world go mad hearing Elvis ‘Rock sing All around Clock’ in Louisianie Hayride in 1955?”
To he reminds me ugh Jimi Hendrix the estate, where many trashy releases went his death but this these days is controlled better.
“This is the very good point. When I entered in late ‘80s, there was the investigation of the market done in THE RCA which was the pretty thing of the hip to do in ‘80s. They went out and defined this, which the customer Elvis was – woman between 35 and 55, home hostess, she took the marriage to the physical worker, living on the noon, not to pay prone more than $8 for the thing Elvis. One of the first things which we made he was the gathering of the box named ‘The of The king Rock ‘n’ Roll’ and sold this for $80 dollars which 10 times were to what the investigation of the market said we should what do. And this sold 400,000 boxes in America. One thing which we learnt from this was the perception Elvis likes he is completely bad.”
2009/12/12 Mark C. Brown -Reverb - The MSN music blog / www.epgold.com