August 13 - King Of iTunes

In celebration of Elvis Week, numerous key titles in the Elvis Presley catalog have been mastered for iTunes and are available at iTunes.com/Elvis.  The iTunes roll-out coincides with Presley being honored as Artist Of The Month for August, 2013 by Legacy Recordings, a division of Sony Music Entertainment.  

The Elvis Presley albums mastered for iTunes ensure the delivery of the music to listeners with increased audio fidelity, more closely replicating what the artists, recording engineers, and producers intended.  The Complete 50s Albums Collection brings together nine original albums from the 1950s including:  Elvis Presley  (his RCA debut album, released 1956), Elvis (second album, 1956), Loving You (film sound¬track, 1957), Elvis’ Christmas Album (1957), Elvis’ Golden Records (1958), King Creole (film sound¬track, 1958), For LP Fans Only (1959), A Date With Elvis (1959), and 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong: Elvis’ Gold Records, Volume 2 (1959).  Also included are this month's brand-new "Elvis At Stax" collection (available as a three-volume set or a single Highlights selection) as well as the popular The Essential Elvis Presley collection.   

This is the first time that Legacy Recordings and iTunes have collaborated on music releases coinciding with Elvis Week.  The official Elvis At Stax Listening Party will take place at the Stax Museum in Memphis today with a YouTube Live stream of the Q & A session. The Q & A session will be attended by famed Nashville musician/producer Norbert Putnam (who originally played on the December sessions at Stax), as well as reissue co-producer Ernst Mikael Jørgensen, the respected director of RCA’s Presley catalog for over two decades, and the author of the critical research guide, Elvis Presley: A Life In Music (St. Martin’s Press, 1998).  "Elvis At Stax" will also be one of the topics discussed at “Conversations On Elvis,” a Q & A session hosted by Elvis aficionado Tom Brown.  
  
Released to critical claim on August 6 by RCA/Legacy, the "Elvis At Stax" physical box set marks the first time that the last major studio sessions in Elvis Presley’s career have been gathered together in one comprehensive package.  The 3-CD box set is a 40th anniversary chronicle of the dozen nights that Presley spent at Stax Recording Studios in his hometown of Memphis in July and December 1973. The proof of Presley’s energy and dynamism at Stax is evident in the six consecutive singles that the sessions produced, all of which skirted the Top 40 from 1973 to 1975.  In effect, they rivaled some of the hottest streaks that Presley had charted a decade earlier. The Stax singles still resonate today:

• “Raised On Rock” b/w “For Ol’ Time Sake” (Hot 100 #41, country #42)
• “I’ve Got A Thing About You Baby” b/w “Take Good Care Of Her” (Hot 100 #39, country #4)
• “Promised Land” b/w “It’s Midnight” (Hot 100 #14, country #9)
• “If You Talk In Your Sleep” b/w “Help Me” (Hot 100 #17, country #6)
• “My Boy” b/w “Thinking About You” (Hot 100 #20, country #14)
• “Mr. Songman” (B-side of “T-R-O-U-B-L-E,” Hot 100 #35, country #11)

Jørgensen, who co-produced the box set alongside Legacy A&R producer Rob Santos, was long concerned with doing justice to the Stax sessions, and presenting them as a unified whole.  As with most of Presley's studio work in his second decade as a recording artist, the Stax tracks were scattered onto LPs and intermingled with material recorded in Nashville and Hollywood.  The bulk of the Stax cuts showed up on the LPs Raised On Rock/For Ol’ Times Sake (1973), Good Times (1974), and Promised Land (1975).  Many of the outtakes heard on Elvis At Stax originated on the CD-era reissues of those three albums on Jørgensen’s and co-director Roger Semon's own label, Follow That Dream (FTD) Records.

The material that Elvis Presley recorded at Stax in 1973 is compartmentalized on "Elvis At Stax" as follows:

• Disc 1:  The R&B and Country Sessions – The Outtakes: 17 tracks
• Disc 2:  Part 1 – The Pop Sessions – The Outtakes: 10 tracks
• Disc 2:  Part 2 – The July 1973 Masters: four single sides and six album tracks, and
• Disc 3:  The December 1973 Masters: seven single sides and 11 album tracks.

Legacy’s prestigious Artist Of The Month program was launched in 2013 and has honored such iconic artists as Janis Joplin, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, and others.  The Artist Of The Month program provides fresh perspectives on musical legends whose sounds continue to affect people's lives.  The program enables new fans and deep aficionados the opportunity to focus on an essential figure in pop music history, whose principal catalog is a cornerstone of the Sony Music archives.

Humes High Marker

Here is the all new State Marker to honour Humes High School, the Alma Mater of Elvis Presley. This morning, Memphis time, George Klein (left) and Red West (right) were on hand to unveil the new marker in front of Elvis's former high school Humes High. Interesting to know is that the manager of the school wants to reopen one of the buildings on the property and turn it into a new Elvis at Humes Museum by 2014!

Elvis first attended Humes in 1948 and would get to graduate from Humes High School in 1953. It was while at Humes that Elvis got his first taste of fame. He won the senior class talent show and his slicked back hair and unusual style of dress were tolerated by his. 

Primo Elvis

Elvis Presley is featured on the cover of this week's Primo TV-guide magazine in Belgium. The magazine features 4 pages on Elvis Presley.

(Source: iTunes / EPE / ElvisMAtters / Elvis Express / UEPS)