Posthumous Presley Researchers Found Unreleased Songs From The King And Put Them Together On A Four-Cd Set

Researchers have unlocked a vault of unreleased material - in one case quite literally - that they hope will do for Elvis Presley’s posthumous career what the “Anthology” sets did for the Beatles.

RCA is preparing a four-CD, 100-song Presley set for release this summer that will contain 77 performances that have never been released publicly.

The package, called “Elvis Presley Platinum: A Life in Music,” is part of a blitz of activity that will coincide with the 20th anniversary of Presley’s death in August.

“We have not really traced his whole career in one box set,” said Michael Omansky, RCA’s vice president for strategic marketing. “We wanted to come up with a product that would appeal to the fan base and also appeal to the casual record buyer.”

The record company said the project was in the works before Capitol released the three Beatles “Anthology” albums over the last year and a half. “But it did motivate us,” Omansky said.

Those Beatles albums proved there was a hunger for outtakes and unheard performances by seminal artists who won’t be heard from again. RCA did some real detective work for the first time to unearth new Presley material.

One of the more intriguing finds came when two researchers were looking through the office of Vernon Presley, the singer’s late dad. They were seeking documents to trace some of Elvis’ early performances.

They found a locked file cabinet, the key long since lost. After making a new key to open it, Graceland archivist Greg Howell and Presley researcher Ernst Jorgensen found about 40 tapes.

Most of it was junk: Elvis’ personal music collection and test tapes from aspiring singers that had long since been tossed aside. But there were a handful of private Presley performances nobody knew he had recorded, including Elvis singing Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” in a deep, bass voice.

That’s on the box set, along with a recently discovered 1953 recording of “I’ll Never Stand in Your Way” made by an unknown Presley in a Memphis studio where he had paid for the time himself, Jorgensen said.

Presley lore had the singer entering a studio once before his professional career began to make a record for his mother’s birthday. This second performance indicates there was another motivation, he said.

“I’m not going to believe that this had anything to do with his mother’s birthday,” Jorgensen said. “He went into a recording studio hoping that someone would discover him.”

The box set will also include a handful of songs Presley recorded casually with his friends, once in Germany when he was in the Army and the other time at his California house in 1966.

Most of the other previously unreleased performances are studio outtakes or from rehearsals before concerts. There are four songs of Presley and his band rehearsing in the dressing room before his 1968 “comeback” television special.

When no quality outtakes were found, RCA included previously released performances that it considered essential to his career, Omansky said. Organizers wanted a complete picture of his most important music.

The record company has been stockpiling some of the Presley material for several years, said Jorgensen, who helped compile the box.

“Some are not more than 6 months old,” he said, a reference to RCA’s ownership of the material. “Others we had for a while and didn’t have a place to put them. We assemble all the time and we’re still doing that. We’re not giving you all that we have.”

Included is a live rendition of “My Way,” sung at a performance in Michigan less than four months before Presley died.

The project ends with a taped snippet of Presley speaking before the Jaycees in 1971 when he was honored as a “promising young man.” He recites a poem that said, “without a song, a man hasn’t got a friend.”

“In a way, I think that sums up Elvis’ whole approach to making music,” Jorgensen said. “He never wanted to comment about politics or anything else. He just wanted to sing the songs.”

The company’s Elvis activity this year also includes release of a live album of an afternoon performance at New York’s Madison Square Garden in 1972 (the nighttime show that day has already been released). Five new CDs of movie soundtracks will be put out on disc, and Presley’s five “greatest hits” discs will be released with some modifications.

RCA has aggressively marketed Presley’s catalog since his death, including separate box sets covering his career in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.

“We believe there will be more publicity on Elvis Presley during this period than there has been since his death,” Omansky said.