A remarkable cover of the Dutch religious magazine 'VolZin' this time: Elvis graces the front page with a 1973 Aloha shot. The cover story "Elvis, forgive us" by Rev. Fred Omvlee talks about the similarities between Elvis and religion.
Ernst Jørgensen Speaks
1) March 15 – reel 1. Included takes 1-10 of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”
2) May 16 – reel 2. Would have included “ on A Snowy Christmas Night” and the first 6 takes of “Winter Wonderland”
3) May 16 - reel 4. Would have included “The First Noel” and “The Wonderful World Of Christmas”
An explanation why this tape may have been re-used or dumped, could be that Elvis may not have participated in the sessions and only overdubbed his voice. There would be no reason to keep the instrumental outtakes once the masters had been identified.
4) May 17 - reel 3. This would most likely have included “Lead Me, Guide Me
5) May 17 - reel 4 This reel exist, but the only things left is some scattered (unexciting) talk. Most of the tape has been cut from the reel.
This is about the time when the accident of Elvis kicking a gun through the front of Chip Young’s guitar.
It’s also where we believed that “Lady Madonna” was lifted from.
6) May 19- reel 4 – This is where outtakes of “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen”, if any, would have been sitting. It’s also where the story of Ivory Joe Hunter’s “This Old Word Is Might Lonesome” fits. Both Hunter’s widow, and his song publisher, claims that Elvis recorded this song along with the other piano songs. However, they may just have been told that he was planning to record this, and as so often, Elvis changed his mind.
7) May 20 – reel 2 This is the reel that would have included the last takes of “I’m Leavin’” and the outtakes of “We Can Make The Morning”
8) June 10 – reel 2. If anything was recorded on this tape, maybe it suggests that Elvis went back to “My Way,” or that nothing was recorded, but they had just marked the tape box, before they realized that Elvis wasn’t going to record any more that night.
There was confusion on several errors on the September 2010 Follow That Dream releases. Producer Ernst Jorgensen commented on these questions on the FECC Forum.
I would like to address some of the issues in Daryl’s thoughtful posts.
Let’s start with a riddle: How many FTD proofreaders does it take to get the booklet information correct?
This should be good fun for the often-cynical wit of this board
First my apology for the typo. “Don’t Think Twice” take 2 was recorded on May 17 – NOT March 17. It was recorded just before Elvis started recording “Help Me Make It Through The Night”.
When some say they knew of this recording, I’m confused. We only found it about a year ago, filed as a copy of take 1 and removed from it’s original real (in 1985). I suspect that the confusion comes from the old BEHIND CLOSED DOORS bootleg, because nobody has played this particular tape since the 80s.
The number confusion on “My Way” and “I’ll Be Home On Christmas Day” is again a question of “you live and you learn”. The RCA recording page has “Christmas” as APA4 1296, but the original master real had “My Way” as 1296 and “Christmas” as 1297 (as written in the 70s box booklet). We only tracked down the session tape about 10 years ago (it had been stolen), and on that reel the confusion is explained as you can see that the engineer changed the numbers after the event, probably indicating that Elvis and/or Felton decided that “My Way” wasn’t worthy of release. The recording order is “My Way” and then “Christmas”. The story of Elvis leaving during the recording of “My Way” then becomes confusing. Maybe he returned, or maybe the story is only half remembered.
The master number WPA5 2570 has nothing to do with this. It was a number assigned to the edit of “Running Scared/Tomorrow Never Comes”. This was at the time when the master serial number system was about to be abandoned, but we still used it for filing information.
A question about the master take number of “Padre” highlights another identification issue. Originally we believed that the master was the take AFTER the last take on the session reels. In some cases there were no slates (take numbers) on the master take reel, and if there wasn’t a take number as the last thing on the session reel, we just assumed that the master number would just be the next one up. In the early days these numbers were applied almost religiously, but on the 71 Nashville sessions it wasn’t always quite as accurate (Chips Moman hardly used slates at all in 1969). As we started to re-examine the tapes, we could see that there were more splices than could be accounted for on several of these 71 tapes, meaning that things had been cut from the session reels. We still don’t know all the answers to this, but in the case of “Padre”, it turns out that they have taken take 8 out of the reel, and consequently that is the master. However, the ending of take 11 has been cut out as well, indicating that they have spliced that ending on to take 8, supposedly because the ending of take 8 was not as good.
This brings us to another issue – the many missing 1971 tapes. When Elvis died all the session tapes were in our Nashville vault, but when those tapes where eventually moved to New York at my request, several were missing. Here they are listed:
1) March 15 – reel 1. Included takes 1-10 of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”
2) May 16 – reel 2. Would have included “ on A Snowy Christmas Night” and the first 6 takes of “Winter Wonderland”
3) May 16 - reel 4. Would have included “The First Noel” and “The Wonderful World Of Christmas”
An explanation why this tape may have been re-used or dumped, could be that Elvis may not have participated in the sessions and only overdubbed his voice. There would be no reason to keep the instrumental outtakes once the masters had been identified.
4) May 17 - reel 3. This would most likely have included “Lead Me, Guide Me
5) May 17 - reel 4 This reel exist, but the only things left is some scattered (unexciting) talk. Most of the tape has been cut from the reel.
This is about the time when the accident of Elvis kicking a gun through the front of Chip Young’s guitar.
It’s also where we believed that “Lady Madonna” was lifted from.
6) May 19- reel 4 – This is where outtakes of “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen”, if any, would have been sitting. It’s also where the story of Ivory Joe Hunter’s “This Old Word Is Might Lonesome” fits. Both Hunter’s widow, and his song publisher, claims that Elvis recorded this song along with the other piano songs. However, they may just have been told that he was planning to record this, and as so often, Elvis changed his mind.
7) May 20 – reel 2 This is the reel that would have included the last takes of “I’m Leavin’” and the outtakes of “We Can Make The Morning”
8) June 10 – reel 2. If anything was recorded on this tape, maybe it suggests that Elvis went back to “My Way,” or that nothing was recorded, but they had just marked the tape box, before they realized that Elvis wasn’t going to record any more that night.
We know that Felton Jarvis went through all the tapes after Elvis’ death, and from the examples of “Lady Madonna” and “It’s Diff’rent Now (Stax ’73)”, we know that he would lift out pieces he thought could be used. From the infamous dirty version of “Hurt”, we also know that Felton was sensitive to the issue of rough language (he asked his wife to burn the tape-and she did), so he may possibly have cut such stuff out, or re-used the tapes for other sessions if what was on the tapes was not appropriate. We know of one example of an Elvis tape being used for a Willie Nelson session. I firmly believe that Felton would have NEVER recorded over something of reel value –he was one of Elvis’ biggest fans.
This obviously leaves hope for dreamers like me, and yet it seems unlikely that these tapes still exist. When material like “Don’t Think Twice” take 2 turns up, even though they may only be outtakes, it’s truly exciting – certainly to me, but I’m curious to read what people think about the Elvis (Fool) album, because in spite of the rarity value of “Twice”, I don’t think that this cut is the most important achievement of this FTD classic album release.
Over to you
Sincerely
Ernst
p.s. One answer to the riddle: “I don’t know, it hasn’t happened yet”
(Source: Elvis Matters / FECC)
(Source: Elvis Matters / FECC)