In the late Eighties, Ernst Jorgensen, then an executive at a BMG affiliate in Denmark, raised an impertinent question in an international meeting. “How come we treat the Elvis Presley catalog so poorly?” The response from the U.S. label chief running the meeting was immediate: “If you’re so smart, why don’t you do it?”
Jorgensen has been in charge of Presley reissues ever since, from the groundbreaking 1992 collection The King of Rock N’ Roll — The Complete 50s Masters to the just-released box set Memphis, which gathers recordings from the Tennessee city that the star called home for most of his life. And when the technology’s ready, Jorgensen is hoping for an ambitious, AI-fueled reworking of Presley’s 1950s masterpieces, starting with his epochal recordings at Sun Studios between 1954 and 1956.
Presley’s Sun Studios sessions, with guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, were recorded live to single-track mono tape by label owner Sam Phillips, which means any real remixes of the songs have always been impossible. But AI demixing technology — which allows instruments to be separated from a single track — keeps advancing. Jorgensen recently asked Emile de la Rey, who worked on the sound for Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary, to do a test remix of “Good Rockin’ Tonight” using Jackson’s proprietary AI technology. The results, “a perfect separation of instruments” along with the removal of tape hiss, were far superior to any more widely available machine-learning methods, so Jorgensen is waiting for access to that level of technology. Once he’s got it, he says, “I’d like to do everything from the Fifties. Because even the Sun recordings, they are very simple. There’s an acoustic and electric and a slap bass. But when you open that up, it’s still like a new revelation. It’s not like it becomes thin and you think, ‘Oh, is that all there is?’”
Jorgensen has spent decades hunting down and digitizing Presley’s master tapes, but some have eluded him. He’s had to use second-generation or worse sources for a few of the Sun songs that the label never sent to RCA, including “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and even worse, the outtakes from those sessions are gone forever. “There’s a tape called ‘”That’s All Right” and One Other Selection,’ but it doesn’t say what the selection is, and the tape was destroyed,” he says. There are also missing tracks from Presley’s RCA-era recordings later that decade: “Some president of RCA Records in 1959 came up with a brilliant idea to save some money in the warehousing bit of the company. So they dumped about 10,000 or 20,000 tapes, including outtakes of Elvis’s sessions.”
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No AI was used on the Memphis box set, but it does include remixed versions of classic tracks — “In the Ghetto,” “Suspicious Minds,” and “Kentucky Rain” among them — with overdubs stripped out by producer/engineer Matt Ross-Spang. “Those are some of the greatest musicians of all time, backing up Elvis,” Ross-Spang says. “And you get to hear all the little nuances, and you really get to hear Elvis’ voice and know that’s pretty much what it sounded like in the room while it’s being recorded.” Ross-Spang used analog equipment as much as possible in his Memphis-based Southern Grooves Studio, including an actual, physical echo chamber for vocal treatment.
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Ross-Spang also remixed live recordings from Memphis in the Seventies, which posed some technical challenges. “It can be tough when Elvis is going around and singing and he’s by the drums,” he says. “So then the vocal mic is all drums. And then he goes over to the crowd and you hear girls screaming. But all that to me is more excitement.”
The final section of the Memphis set includes selections from the so-called Jungle Room Sessions in 1976, Presley’s final recordings. Though they were laid down by a declining Presley the year before his death, there are a surprising number of highlights, including an emotive, if over-sung, take on “Danny Boy.” “They show a more focused Elvis than people think,” Ross-Spang says. “You can hear how engaged and driven he was during those recordings.”