ICE Magazine Daily Digest

Here is ICE Magazine Daily Digest from Friday, June 4 from publisher Pete Howard as posted on the FECC messageboard. It contains more information on "Elvis At Sun":

Happy Friday to all! In the current issue of ICE, we have a long article on BMG Heritage’s upcoming Elvis Presley titles: a single CD called Elvis at Sun and two multi-disc DVD sets, Elvis: ’68 Comeback Special - Deluxe Edition DVD and Elvis, Aloha from Hawaii - Deluxe Edition DVD.

In the article, we interviewed both Ernst Mikael Jorgensen, who produced the new Sun disc, and Todd Morgan of Elvis Presley Enterprises, who worked on the two DVD sets. In both cases, they had much more to say than we had room to print, so we’ll make up for that here in the next few days. Today we have Jorgensen talking about Elvis at Sun, and next week we’ll have overflow from Todd Morgan’s interview about the DVDs. In all cases, none of these quotes made it into the ICE article.

Some consumers might wonder, "Why another Sun Records collection?" when RCA released a definitive two-CD set in 1999 called Sunrise. In addition to the upgrade in sonics that’s discussed in the June ICE, Jorgensen explains, "Ever since we put out Sunrise,

I’ve had regrets in that maybe it was an in-between solution. Obviously, it had the masters, but it had outtakes and some extremely hard-to-listen-to rarities in it [from the Louisiana Hayride]. This time we’re making that easy-to-listen-to, enjoyable, single CD. It was simple: use Sun logos, pictures that fit, liner notes that connect, and a wonderful forward by Knox Phillips, Sam’s son, about what it was like to be nine-year-old kid when this happened."

Being a veteran of this war, Jorgensen is sensitive to consumers’ complaints that record companies are always upgrading their CDs now - sometimes with minimal results. "It’s one thing to sit here and say, ‘This is great and going to sound so much better,’" he tells ICE. "We all know the rhetoric of that, and we’ve been saying that for years, and we will keep saying that. But on this, I think it’s important. Because some of it, I think, will actually change the perception of what a Sun record sounded like - for the better."

Hard as it is to believe, RCA is still finding newer and better master tapes for Elvis material now 50 years old. Between that and dubbing from a few mint Sun records themselves, Jorgensen believes this new collection will be worth the re-investment for consumers who really love the material.

"You might ask, ‘How the hell did these tapes [get lost]?" he says with a laugh. "We all know that Elvis has left the building, but did his tapes have to do so as well? It’s a combination of sources that actually went astray and, in other instances, when we dubbed from records, it was a question of going through so many Sun 45s and 78s until we found something better than what we already had.

"It’s going to be total fun for nutters, at least… and I think we’ve made a very decent record for more regular people."