The Memphis Recording Service released three new titles on their MRS Camden budget label; the 3-CD-set 'The Complete 1950's Live Recordings', the 2-CD-set 'Elvis On Television 1956 - 1960' and the single CD-set 'One Night In Pearl Harbor'.
The releases on this specific new label are scaled-down budget version of the previous, priced for the mainstream market. At the same time however, some of the CD’s include newly sourced audio upgrades.
Design
All sets come as slimmed-down editions of the original box-sets released between 2012 and 2016, reminiscent the French V.P.I. CD editions of their vinyl titles. The 2, 6 and 8-panel gatefold sleeves come with appealing and recognizable designs which will stand out in record shops.
The silver discs are housed in the gatefold, together with colorful booklets featuring many images, line-notes and album details. The booklets are a bit hard to get out, but I applaud the MRS Camden label that they did include these booklets in budget releases like this series.
The original titles were released as: 'Such A Night In Pearl Harbor' in 2012 with an 100-page booklet, 'Elvis On Television 1956- 1960' in 2016 with an 172-page hardcover book and 'The Complete 1950's Live Recordings' in 2016 with an 100-page booklet. Being budget re-issues, you can't compare the original and new versions of these titles as the format is different.
Audio-wise there are not many changes in content either, but there are some improvements in audio-quality. The Sinatra Show stands out here, as the label was granted permission to use the recently re-discovered (2021) acetates which were remastered once more for this release. The 'Such a Night' set features the 'USS Arizona Radio Appeal' while 'One Night in Pearl Harbor' contains the press conference.
The releases on this specific new label are scaled-down budget version of the previous, priced for the mainstream market. At the same time however, some of the CD’s include newly sourced audio upgrades.
Design
All sets come as slimmed-down editions of the original box-sets released between 2012 and 2016, reminiscent the French V.P.I. CD editions of their vinyl titles. The 2, 6 and 8-panel gatefold sleeves come with appealing and recognizable designs which will stand out in record shops.
The original titles were released as: 'Such A Night In Pearl Harbor' in 2012 with an 100-page booklet, 'Elvis On Television 1956- 1960' in 2016 with an 172-page hardcover book and 'The Complete 1950's Live Recordings' in 2016 with an 100-page booklet. Being budget re-issues, you can't compare the original and new versions of these titles as the format is different.
Audio-wise there are not many changes in content either, but there are some improvements in audio-quality. The Sinatra Show stands out here, as the label was granted permission to use the recently re-discovered (2021) acetates which were remastered once more for this release. The 'Such a Night' set features the 'USS Arizona Radio Appeal' while 'One Night in Pearl Harbor' contains the press conference.
And for those expecting newly created stereo mixes - the main selling point from the Memphis Recording Service - perhaps a disappointment, these releases come with the original sound.
Content - One Night In Pearl Harbor
On March 25, 1961, the 26-year-old Presley took the stage at the Bloch Arena in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, packed with 4,000 frenzied, screaming fans. He performed 16 songs, opening with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, ‘All Shook Up’, ‘I Need Your Love Tonight’, ‘Don’t Be Cruel’, even throwing in a recent gospel like ‘Swing Down Sweet Chariot’. He ended the show with a rousing performance of ‘Hound Dog’ included an iconic slide across the stage on his knees.
Content - One Night In Pearl Harbor
On March 25, 1961, the 26-year-old Presley took the stage at the Bloch Arena in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, packed with 4,000 frenzied, screaming fans. He performed 16 songs, opening with ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, ‘All Shook Up’, ‘I Need Your Love Tonight’, ‘Don’t Be Cruel’, even throwing in a recent gospel like ‘Swing Down Sweet Chariot’. He ended the show with a rousing performance of ‘Hound Dog’ included an iconic slide across the stage on his knees.
You can hear Elvis hadn’t performed live for a while as he and the band, which included some of the studio musicians he had recently worked with like Bobby Moore, Hank Garland and Floyd Cramer hang loosely together, but somehow it works. The addition of Boots Randolph to the original band is great, he really contributes to the original sound we know from the singles, adding the necessary raw blues element to a song as ‘Reconsider Baby’.
The beauty of this concert is that we get “the best of Elvis” as he performed them in the first years of his career. The performances still have that 50’s live sound including girls screaming at every wiggle our man makes on stage. Remember, this was only his third show since 1957.
The next time we heard these songs live was during the stand-up and sit-down section from ’68 Comeback TV Special, there the fifties still shined through. A year later, with the return to a real stage, Elvis had reworked the arrangements completely and performed a tight and well-rehearsed show with a completely new band and orchestra. So here we get a - still - relaxed Elvis performing live on stage like he had been doing the better half of the fifties. The performances are much closer to the versions he recorded.
Added to the concert are the press-conference and Awards ceremony at the Hawaiian Village Hotel from March 25, 1961.
Looking back from 2023, this concert marked the end of an era, and I’m glad this recording survived and is presented in the best way possible on this CD.
Content – The Complete 1950’s Live Recordings
On 4 discs we follow the rise to fame from that wild Memphis kid with a big beat to the King of Rock and Roll who shook up the music worldwide. From his October 1954 appearance on the Louisiana Hayride - where he made a primarily country orientated audience raise their eyebrows as they watched the artist on stage and the impact he had on their good children - to a first encounter with a Vegas audience at the New Frontier hotel to the rocker who crossed the border to create a frenzy in Ottawa and Vancouver Canada.
The first CD covers the touring years 1954 and 1955 with performances at the Hayride in Louisiana and Houston and Gladewater in Texas. We get all performances that survived on tape, acetate and wire-recordings, containing concerts, advertisements, interviews and sometimes just snippets. In between the songs Elvis recorded for SUN and RCA, we also get one-offs which he only performed live like ‘Little Mama’, ‘Tweedle Dee’ and Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybelline’.
New to the previous outing of this set is a 2023 remaster of the ‘I Forgot To Remember To Forget’ wire-recording, and it sounds really great.
On the second disc we get Elvis’ reality check at the New Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas. Not everyone was waiting for his music, and they let him know how they thought. Overall the performances are more tame - or should I say polished - than the ones on the first disc or his rockin’ performance in Little Rock just 10 days later. He is much more relaxed and connected with his audience, just listen to him shredding ‘Long Tall Sally’ over the airwaves! He’s all out of breath announcing ‘I Was The One’. But it is not just Elvis, DJ Fontana does a fantastic Ronnie Tutt break avant-la-lettre on ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ before they close the show with a dirty rockin’ ‘Hound Dog’, leaving the Robinson Auditorium in a blaze.
But for a new artist skyrocketing to the Rock of Eternity, it is good to land every now and then. And this first Vegas stint did bring him something good, it was here that he picked up ‘Hound Dog’ as performed by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys at the Silver Queen Bar in the Sands Hotel.
The disc closes with the Afternoon Show from the 1956 Mississippi-Alabama Fairground in his birth town Tupelo. We all know this show, and it must have been very special for the Presley family to make a return like this after having left the city trying their luck for a better in Memphis. Likewise for the folks in Tupelo, the American Dream can be real!
Thanks to the Memphis Recording Service release of ‘Tupelo’s Own’ DVD we all have a clear picture of this concert which always is a pleasure to listen to. After ‘I Want You, I Need You, I Love You’ he asks the fans in front to sit down so the people in the back seats can enjoy the show too, but that’s pointless, he gets them on their feet with the opening notes of ‘I Got A Woman’! ‘Don’t be Cruel’ slows things down a little, but with “one of the most beautiful love songs ever written”, Ready Teddy’ the chaos is back! He repeats this with ‘Love Me Tender’ and ‘Hound Dog’. You hear Elvis playing with his audience. The (shy) boy that performed on the Hayride 2 years earlier had matured and taken his place on stage!
The disc is filled with 3 concerts, recorded just 5 months apart, so there is some repetition in the songs and performances. But listening to these 3 concerts, you also hear him adapt his style to the audience in front of him. It is great to be able to listen to these concerts through the radio recordings that survived.
The set closes with a third disc containing the Tupelo Evening Show performance, his last Hayride performance from December 15, 1956 and the surviving snippets from his 2 tours abroad in Canada from April and August 1957.
The Tupelo Evening Show sounds a little better than the Afternoon Show - Elvis still has to do a lot of crowd control so the crowd in the back can enjoy the show too - the setlist is pretty much the same with ‘Baby Let’s Play House’ as the rockin’ differentiator. A great performance with Scotty Moore adding the characteristic guitar over Bill Black’s bassline, and lead-up to ‘Hound Dog’.
Three months later Elvis returned to Louisiana for his final appearance at the Hayride. Where he started a s shy boy, he returned two years later as the King of Rock and Roll. And you can hear it, he is in control of the show, the musicians and of course the audience!
Listening to these performances in a row, you hear the artist and music mature with his first national No. 1 hit and full album under his belt. Songs like ‘Tweedle Dee’ and ‘That’s All Right’ disappear while ‘Heartbreak Hotel”, ‘A Big Hunk O’Love’, ‘Love Me Tender’ and ‘Love Me’ appear. You hear that the quality of the compositions improved too.
With the latter two songs he finally became the ballad singer he always wanted to be. But the crowd wants to see the rocker, so those songs remain the backbone of the setlist. One of the highlights is ‘I Got A Woman’ with DJ shooting a “tommy gun” with his drums! Never noticed that this clearly.
Unfortunately we only have fragments of the Canadian performances, as recorded for the radio. Listening to the screaming audience, it must have been an provocative and earthshattering event. Reading news-reports in Paul Belard’s 2023 book ‘Elvis - April 4th to 30th, June 1957’ it was, including Elvis clashing with some of the males in the audience and the Catholic Church!
Elvis responds very mature to the situation. In an interview on a question on people saying his performances are vulgar, saying nobody is perfect, there was only one perfect man, and that was Jesus Christ, and people did not like him, they killed him.
Content - Elvis On Television
The beauty of this concert is that we get “the best of Elvis” as he performed them in the first years of his career. The performances still have that 50’s live sound including girls screaming at every wiggle our man makes on stage. Remember, this was only his third show since 1957.
The next time we heard these songs live was during the stand-up and sit-down section from ’68 Comeback TV Special, there the fifties still shined through. A year later, with the return to a real stage, Elvis had reworked the arrangements completely and performed a tight and well-rehearsed show with a completely new band and orchestra. So here we get a - still - relaxed Elvis performing live on stage like he had been doing the better half of the fifties. The performances are much closer to the versions he recorded.
Added to the concert are the press-conference and Awards ceremony at the Hawaiian Village Hotel from March 25, 1961.
Looking back from 2023, this concert marked the end of an era, and I’m glad this recording survived and is presented in the best way possible on this CD.
Content – The Complete 1950’s Live Recordings
On 4 discs we follow the rise to fame from that wild Memphis kid with a big beat to the King of Rock and Roll who shook up the music worldwide. From his October 1954 appearance on the Louisiana Hayride - where he made a primarily country orientated audience raise their eyebrows as they watched the artist on stage and the impact he had on their good children - to a first encounter with a Vegas audience at the New Frontier hotel to the rocker who crossed the border to create a frenzy in Ottawa and Vancouver Canada.
The first CD covers the touring years 1954 and 1955 with performances at the Hayride in Louisiana and Houston and Gladewater in Texas. We get all performances that survived on tape, acetate and wire-recordings, containing concerts, advertisements, interviews and sometimes just snippets. In between the songs Elvis recorded for SUN and RCA, we also get one-offs which he only performed live like ‘Little Mama’, ‘Tweedle Dee’ and Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybelline’. New to the previous outing of this set is a 2023 remaster of the ‘I Forgot To Remember To Forget’ wire-recording, and it sounds really great.
On the second disc we get Elvis’ reality check at the New Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas. Not everyone was waiting for his music, and they let him know how they thought. Overall the performances are more tame - or should I say polished - than the ones on the first disc or his rockin’ performance in Little Rock just 10 days later. He is much more relaxed and connected with his audience, just listen to him shredding ‘Long Tall Sally’ over the airwaves! He’s all out of breath announcing ‘I Was The One’. But it is not just Elvis, DJ Fontana does a fantastic Ronnie Tutt break avant-la-lettre on ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ before they close the show with a dirty rockin’ ‘Hound Dog’, leaving the Robinson Auditorium in a blaze.
But for a new artist skyrocketing to the Rock of Eternity, it is good to land every now and then. And this first Vegas stint did bring him something good, it was here that he picked up ‘Hound Dog’ as performed by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys at the Silver Queen Bar in the Sands Hotel.
The disc closes with the Afternoon Show from the 1956 Mississippi-Alabama Fairground in his birth town Tupelo. We all know this show, and it must have been very special for the Presley family to make a return like this after having left the city trying their luck for a better in Memphis. Likewise for the folks in Tupelo, the American Dream can be real!
Thanks to the Memphis Recording Service release of ‘Tupelo’s Own’ DVD we all have a clear picture of this concert which always is a pleasure to listen to. After ‘I Want You, I Need You, I Love You’ he asks the fans in front to sit down so the people in the back seats can enjoy the show too, but that’s pointless, he gets them on their feet with the opening notes of ‘I Got A Woman’! ‘Don’t be Cruel’ slows things down a little, but with “one of the most beautiful love songs ever written”, Ready Teddy’ the chaos is back! He repeats this with ‘Love Me Tender’ and ‘Hound Dog’. You hear Elvis playing with his audience. The (shy) boy that performed on the Hayride 2 years earlier had matured and taken his place on stage!
The disc is filled with 3 concerts, recorded just 5 months apart, so there is some repetition in the songs and performances. But listening to these 3 concerts, you also hear him adapt his style to the audience in front of him. It is great to be able to listen to these concerts through the radio recordings that survived.
The set closes with a third disc containing the Tupelo Evening Show performance, his last Hayride performance from December 15, 1956 and the surviving snippets from his 2 tours abroad in Canada from April and August 1957.
The Tupelo Evening Show sounds a little better than the Afternoon Show - Elvis still has to do a lot of crowd control so the crowd in the back can enjoy the show too - the setlist is pretty much the same with ‘Baby Let’s Play House’ as the rockin’ differentiator. A great performance with Scotty Moore adding the characteristic guitar over Bill Black’s bassline, and lead-up to ‘Hound Dog’.
Three months later Elvis returned to Louisiana for his final appearance at the Hayride. Where he started a s shy boy, he returned two years later as the King of Rock and Roll. And you can hear it, he is in control of the show, the musicians and of course the audience!
Listening to these performances in a row, you hear the artist and music mature with his first national No. 1 hit and full album under his belt. Songs like ‘Tweedle Dee’ and ‘That’s All Right’ disappear while ‘Heartbreak Hotel”, ‘A Big Hunk O’Love’, ‘Love Me Tender’ and ‘Love Me’ appear. You hear that the quality of the compositions improved too.
With the latter two songs he finally became the ballad singer he always wanted to be. But the crowd wants to see the rocker, so those songs remain the backbone of the setlist. One of the highlights is ‘I Got A Woman’ with DJ shooting a “tommy gun” with his drums! Never noticed that this clearly.
Unfortunately we only have fragments of the Canadian performances, as recorded for the radio. Listening to the screaming audience, it must have been an provocative and earthshattering event. Reading news-reports in Paul Belard’s 2023 book ‘Elvis - April 4th to 30th, June 1957’ it was, including Elvis clashing with some of the males in the audience and the Catholic Church!
Elvis responds very mature to the situation. In an interview on a question on people saying his performances are vulgar, saying nobody is perfect, there was only one perfect man, and that was Jesus Christ, and people did not like him, they killed him.
Content - Elvis On Television
Looking at the dates listed for the content of these 2 CDs, we see that the Colonel and RCA really used television to launch their new star. Elvis reaches out to audiences at home almost every month between January 1956 and January 1957. After that - new reels like his Army introduction and everything that followed after that excluded - it takes 3 years before Elvis’ returns on TV at Frank Sinatra’s Timex Show. But there too he takes center stage as the latter show is built around is return home from serving his country abroad and his return to performing music.
Elvis’ television appearances have been covered extensively the Boxcar beautiful ‘Elvis On Television 1956 - 1960’ book from 2016, for which I consider this the soundtrack album. Also interesting is Paul Belard’s new book ‘Elvis January 6, 1957 - The Third Ed Sullivan Show’ which is featured in CD 2.
Elvis’ television appearances have been covered extensively the Boxcar beautiful ‘Elvis On Television 1956 - 1960’ book from 2016, for which I consider this the soundtrack album. Also interesting is Paul Belard’s new book ‘Elvis January 6, 1957 - The Third Ed Sullivan Show’ which is featured in CD 2.
Listening to the performances, you hear Elvis getting more used and more comfortable with the TV medium and famous hosts. Where the January 1956 performance of ‘Shake Rattle and Roll’ sounds “safe-for-TV”, the rendition of ‘Baby let’s Play House’ a month later has some more spirit, especially during the instrumental break, going a little wilder on “Tutti Frutti’ in March and going all out on his ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ at the ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ in March 1956. Moving from the Dorsey brothers to Uncle Milton on the USS Hancock. Elvis plays along with Milton Berle in a tasteless sketch in which Milton plays Elvis’ twin brother … or wouldn’t Elvis have informed him about his still born brother and play along professionally? He does need to sell some records!
As an artist you see Elvis getting more confident as his performances keep getting stronger and stronger, really rockin’ TV-sets at home. Just listen to ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘I Want You I Need You, I Love You’ from the second appearance on this show on June 5th 1956.
The appearance on Wink Martindale’s ‘Top ten Dance Party’ is primarily talking, but it completed the historical overview. The same goes for Hy Gardner calling Elvis on CD 2, it takes the pace out of the album, but belongs at that spot from an historical perspective.
Listening to ‘I Want You, I Need You, I love You’ and ‘Hound Dog’ by the “new Elvis Presley” a month later on the Steve Allen show a month later is uneasy, knowing Elvis hated it, although he did cash in on the show with a picture of him singing to that basset hound on the cover of the single … It would be the last appearance on this show.
The second disc continues with Elvis’ performances from the September and October 1956 and January 1957 on the Ed Sullivan Show. These are all enjoyable renditions of his early classics for an enthusiastic crowd. It shows he had built his name and taken his place on stage performing his songs as he wanted to.
The set closes with Frank Sinatra’s ‘Welcome Home Elvis’ TV Show as recorded on March 26, 1960 and aired May 12th. This is where the re-issue is an improvement over the previous release of this titles as it uses an improved audio source, recently rediscovered acetates featuring the audio of the show that originally belonged to Sammy Davis Jr. who made an appearance on this show. These were first released by the Memphis Mansion in 2021.
I can’t really compare the audio quality on these songs one-on-one to a CD, as I only own the vinyl edition of the Memphis Mansion set. Vinyl releases are mastered differently and usually sound little louder than a CD release of the same material.
According to the engineer who originally worked on the Memphis Mansion release, Anthony Stuchbury, the audio on this new outing "shines", but part of Elvis' finger clicks on 'Stuck On You' are less audible than on the Memphis Mansion release. Knowing Stuchbury's standards, this must be the best set available regarding the audio quality.
I like that we only get Elvis’ performances, as those really stand out from the other segments of the show. This better quality may be a good reason to buy this ‘Elvis On Television’ set. Listening to the set, with the visuals from the TV-show in mind, you hear that the new generation takes over definitely.
Frank Sinatra may have owned the forties and early fifties, but from there Elvis took over, and after returning from the Army, he took over definitively moving away from the screaming rockers to a more mature sound. Listen to the ‘Witchcraft / Love Me Tender’ duet and Elvis’ solid performances of ‘Fame and Fortune’ and ‘Stuck on You’. Move over Frank!
Conclusion
With the previous book / CD editions of these titles no longer (widely) available, these coherent and complete sets fill a nice gap in keeping Elvis’ musical heritage available online and physically in shops around Europe (and several other places around the world) at a budget price.
But that budget price does not mean you get a budget release, as these three sets are very complete and nicely packaged with an appealing design and interesting booklets.
If you already own the originals and you are happy with the audio-quality of the Sinatra Show performances, you don't need to upgrade, if you missed out on the original editions, these are good editions to pick up.
(Associate links)