A novel way to profit from something that would, in all likelihood, be useless in a few years:
washingtonpost.com
Elvis Fans All Shook Up Over Plan to Sell Bits of Reel
By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 27, 2004; Page C01
NEW YORK -- At 11 a.m. today, in a midtown Manhattan music studio, a handful of record industry veterans will huddle around a reel of tape they say is an original master from the historic 1954 recording debut of Elvis Presley. Then, after a brief introduction, the tape will be chopped to pieces.
Thousands of pieces, if all goes as planned. The owner of this tape intends to dice it into two-inch bits, which will then be mounted on framed plaques and sold to fans for $495 apiece. It's being billed as a chance for Elvis lovers to own a sliver of one of the most famous moments in pop history -- the songs recorded in Memphis's Sun Studio by Presley under the eye of producer Sam Phillips. The Sun sessions are widely considered the birth of rock.
"Exactly how many we make is function of how many pieces of tape will withstand cutting," says Michael Esposito, president of Master Tape Collection, based in Bloomfield, N.J. "The song 'That's Alright, Mama' runs 2:20, and the tape runs at 15 inches per second, so that piece of tape alone could allow us to produce 800 to 900 plaques."
Spluttering fans, take note: Esposito says he has made top-quality digital copies of the music on the tape. And he claims that the reel is deteriorating so quickly, it will be unplayable in a matter of years. But the project has, nonetheless, earned him a legion of new enemies. Message boards on Presley fan sites have been filled with slashing posts by collectors who consider Master Tape's cut-and-mount concept an outrage.
"Next they'll be selling little bits of the Mona Lisa," huffed someone identified as Greg on the elvis-collectors.com message board, "or maybe a slice of the U.S. Constitution or the dead sea scrolls."
"If this is real, I'm pretty sure that God made a commandment against doing this kind of thing!!" fumed "elvis fan" on the same page.
If this is real. The leading authority on Elvis's recording career has serious doubts. Actually, that's putting it charitably. Ernst Jorgensen, the author of "Elvis Day by Day" and the man who oversees the CD repackaging of Presley's back catalogue for RCA, the King's label, heard the tape when Esposito tried to sell it to RCA a few years ago. He passed, convinced that he was listening to a copy of a master tape that RCA already owns.
"We [RCA] have the original and Sam had only one tape machine, and he certainly didn't have the money to run two tapes at the same time," he said. "And there's nothing new on the tape they have. About 95 percent of it has already been released in the marketplace, and the rest will eventually be released in the coming years."
There are also questions raised by the physical appearance of the tape and the box it came in, Jorgensen says. The tape that he saw has telltale markings of assorted edits, suggesting it's a patchwork of tapes strung together, he says. As damning evidence, Esposito's tape contains songs spanning the entire 16-month period of the Sun sessions. All the other masters feature just a few days' or weeks' worth of material, Jorgensen and other Presley experts maintain. Jorgensen believes that what Esposito has comes from what he called a "safety copy" of songs from "Golden Celebration," a 1984 reissue. "It's also in poor taste," Jorgensen added. "Inherent in everything Elvis is greed. It will haunt him forever."
Esposito is convinced, however, that what he has is the genuine article, and he offered a 10-page "forensic report" that he says settles nearly every question of the tape's provenance. Though the story includes what it calls "a mystery," it won over Elvis Presley's estate, which sold Master Tape a license allowing the company to use Presley's image to market its plaques. (They will be available online at elvismastertape.com).
"We're not making any judgments about [the tape]," said Todd Morgan, a spokesman for the estate, Elvis Presley Enterprises. But he later added: "All we can go by is the research they presented, and it's convincing."
Also in Esposito's corner is the man he hired to authenticate the tape, Tony Bongiovi, a producer with 50 gold and platinum albums to his credit. On Friday, Bongiovi sat in Nola Studios, where today's news conference is scheduled, and offered a listen. On the tape, a take of "When It Rains, It Really Pours" breaks down and you can hear Presley, guitarist Scotty Moore and Phillips trying to figure out what went wrong.
"What happened?" Presley asks.
"Try it one more time," Phillips says from his control booth. "And Scotty, don't make it too damn complicated in the middle there."
Phillips offers more directions, then Elvis chimes in again, addressing either Moore or bass player Bill Black:
"Hey, you know when you first hit bah-dah-dah . . . ya old boom, boom, boom, you just hold that till you get the change." And a moment later: "All right, let's hit it."
Bongiovi stops the tape before the band tries "When It Rains" again. A small man with a booming voice, he's overjoyed about eavesdropping on rock's prince as he fumbles toward his throne.
"Here's Sam Phillips talking to Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley!" he shouts.
Bongiovi says he spent 20 hours authenticating the tape, aided by sound engineer and owner of Nola, Jim Czak. What Bongiovi found compelling was evidence that he was listening to "unprocessed sound."
"Generally, when a master tape comes out of a studio, there might be too much bass or too much treble," he said. "It goes to a mastering engineer, who then takes that and smooths all that out so that it can be put on a vinyl record. Well, the tape we have, nothing's been corrected. There's hum on it. Hasn't been touched."
An element of the unknown shrouds any account of the Sun session masters, which yielded a batch of world-changing tracks, including "Good Rockin' Tonight" and "Mystery Train." Presley was an 18-year-old truck driver when he began the recordings in July 1954, and a year later he had enough momentum to catch the attention of RCA, which paid $35,000 to Phillips to buy out Elvis's contract.
That sale included all of Phillips's master tapes. He delivered 15, and RCA turned them into cash right away. Before the label released its own string of hits with Presley, starting with "Heartbreak Hotel," it rereleased his Sun material, which, with the added heft of a national publicity campaign, rose higher than they had the first time around.
According to Jorgensen, RCA then stashed the masters in a warehouse in Indianapolis, near the company's manufacturing plant. About nine of those tapes were destroyed in 1959 when someone in upper management decided to save money on storage costs by tossing out thousands of reels. They had copies, after all. Who cared?
"I talked to some of the men who were at the plant back then," Jorgensen says. "I wanted to cry when they told me about it. I couldn't bring myself to ask how they destroyed them."
Negligence and luck saved the surviving six, which either were mislabeled in Indianapolis or kept in a Nashville storage facility that was spared an austerity program. Those six are kept in a climate-controlled vault built into a mountain in Pennsylvania.
Esposito doesn't claim to have one of the nine reels that were presumed to be destroyed. Instead, he believes he owns a tape that Phillips didn't hand over to RCA, and which somehow wound up in a warehouse along with a huge cache -- between 400 and 500 tapes -- that includes the work of other Sun stars, including Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins. Nobody knows how that trove got to the warehouse, he says, but it was uncovered in 1992 when it was purchased by a couple at auction -- sold off because the owner of the storage bin hadn't paid the rent. Esposito won't say how much he spent for the tapes, which he purchased through a middleman, but calls it "a substantial sum of money."
The Master Tape forensic report states that Esposito called Phillips in July 2002 and told him what the tape looked like. The color ("chocolate brown") and the brand (Scotch) matched Phillips's memory of it, the report says. But Phillips never heard or saw the tape because of his hectic travel schedule, the report says, and last year he died.
Real or not, the tape will test the legendary ardor of Presley fans. Esposito didn't take pre-orders, so he has no sense of demand.
But Elvis isn't the first 20th-century legend who has been shredded for dollars.
Last summer, one of Babe Ruth's jerseys was snipped into one-inch square swatches and sold in trading-card packs, which infuriated more than a few baseball fans.
Esposito says that tires from NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon have been sold, too.
"And Jeff Gordon will be racing for years," he says.
His tape, he says, will disintegrate in five to10 years, and that's if nobody plays it. Either he could preserve it by freezing it and stashing it in a hole or he could sell it off, two inches at a time, in what he believes are handsomely crafted frames.
"It's not just a piece of tape," he says of the plaques, which include a photo of Elvis and the image of a reel-to-reel machine. "It's a beautiful piece of art." |
