Elvis Presley - The Albums and Singles Thread pt2 The Sixties

I don't think there's any evidence the speeding up of some tracks is an error, is there? In the case of the title song it certainly isn't. Most likely just bad judgment. I agree the mixing is pretty bad, though it gets much worse on the next soundtrack.

For my money, Cross My Heart and Hope to Die is easily the best song on the record. Nice work by Floyd Cramer on there.

 

It is in the movie but only for a few seconds.

 

Once again you and I are in synch here as this is my favorite song as well and I was just about to mention how much I like Floyd's bluesy piano runs on it. For a minute, I thought that it sounded like something Charlie Rich might play himself, if he had played piano on the session. Terrific!

 

That makes sense.
Cheers mate

 

Well, I would think the speeding of tracks above the speed they were recorded in is an error almost by definition. I don't know what type of evidence there would be, other than the audio evidence?

 

The most likely scenario is that the tracks were intentionally sped up because someone thought they sounded better that way. If it was done deliberately, it's not an error. We could call it an error in judgment, but that's not the same thing.

The fact that Elvis was clearly aware of the speeding up (since he lip synced to several of the sped up tracks) yet didn't have it corrected is evidence it was not an error. Beyond that, it's an unlikely such a thing would happen by mistake... that a professional cutting engineer could somehow manage to play back the masters of several songs at a significantly wrong speed.

 

That is the most likely scenario, but we can't forget the Miles Davis - Kind Of Blue stupidity where 1 side of the album was at the wrong speed for about fifty years lol

 

The Doors’ debut and the Stones’ Beggars Banquet were reportedly pressed at slightly wrong (slow?) speeds as well. I think the new Dylan More Blood, More Tracks set confirms that some of the takes from those sessions were slightly sped up in hopes of making the masters more exciting or commercial.

 

Wiki indicates it's a mastering error, and sites Ernst's A Life In Music as the source:

Girl Happy (soundtrack) - Wikipedia

1. ^ Jorgensen, op. cit., p. 166.

I agree with Ernst and think it's an error (how would speeding it and a few of the other tracks help LP sales), and that Elvis either didn't notice (was probably too focused on acting/being in front of the camera) or thought they were speeding the songs up for the movie / not the LP. But this kind of stuff is probably lost to the ages so all we can do is speculate, one way or the other.

 

Did they correct the FTD?
Are they considering a corrected FTD?

 

I have no idea one way or another, but what does seem strange is that the speeds are (so far as folks are saying) all different increments ... I could totally understand a tape being wrong (evenly wrong across it) because somebody did the transfer incorrectly for any number of studio reasons....
The only way I could see different speeds for different songs would be an intentional decision ... unless there was some bizarre anomaly where the tape machine was adjusting each time is was started or stopped.

 

The masters aren't speed corrected on the FTD and there are no outtakes of the speeded up songs except for the title track.

 

Looking at Keith Flynn's site, several songs were recorded on June 15, 1964, including at least two that I feel are the wrong speed - Girl Happy and Wolf Call. I wonder if something wasn't calibrated correctly at Radio Recorders that day? Likewise, on Keith's site there's pictures of many acetates from the Girl Happy sessions and - oddly - many have the RPM listed as 80- RPM. Puzzling!

http://www.keithflynn.com/recording-sessions/640615.html

 

Hmmm, I'm guessing the tapes are gone then. You'd think they would have had a disc two with the corrections, even if they wanted to stay authentic to the release with the main disc.

 

Ernst does not say it was an error. He merely notes that the title song "was sped up 8% for this release" offering no opinion on whether this was intentional or erroneous. He says nothing about the speed of the other songs.

The wiki article actually cites Elvis: An Illustrated Recorded by Carr and Farren (1982) as its source for the claim that the speed issues are "a mastering error." I have not read that book, but Carr and Farren were critics, not researchers. I have read Carr's The Beatles: An Illustrated Record and it has many fact errors, so even if they do make that claim I wouldn't give it much stock absent evidence.

People have mentioned Kind of Blue and Beggar's Banquet. In both of those cases, the master tape was played back at the wrong speed when production masters were prepared, resulting in the production masters being slightly off-speed (I think in both cases, the speed issue was 1% or less). In the case of Girl Happy, the speed alterations appear on the master mixes themselves, meaning the speeding up was done during the final mixing rather than during the production master stage. It's much less likely a playback error would happen at that stage. The speed differences are not subtle, either... in the case of the title song we're talking 8%, a very noticeable speed up. Also, it isn't a case of there being one consistent speed issue, which might be plausible as an error. Rather, some of the tracks are correct speed, while the ones that are off-speed all seem to be at different rates. That would mean that it would not be just one error, but several different errors that happened independently of each other. What are the odds that the person mixing would make a bunch of variable errors in tape playback on this one album, when they never had any problems before or after? That seems implausible.

Intentionally speeding up a track to make it more "energetic" is not that unusual. The Beatles did it a few times. Two tracks on the first Flying Burrito Brothers album were intentionally sped up. As noted, Blood on the Tracks has some examples.

To me it seems much more plausible that this was done intentionally than it does that somehow the mixing engineer made multiple playback errors while mixing the tracks, resulting in very significant and obvious speed issues, and nobody (including Elvis) noticed or asked for correction.

 

As noted, there is no solid evidence the speeding up was a mistake, and the most likely scenario is that it was intentional. The goal of the FTDs anyway is to present the albums as originally released.

Exactly. If all the songs were off-speed at the same rate, the notion of error might be more plausible. But instead, we have some that are correct speed and others that are off-speed at different rates. Meaning if it was an error, it was multiple errors happening over different days, which is far less plausible.

 

Well, from the outtakes we know that Girl Happy was recorded at the correct speed, so a problem with recording on that particular day couldn't be the cause. The speeding up was done at the mixing stage.

 

I'm still convinced that something funny was going on at that June 15th overdub session. Whatever the cause, it can't be a coincidence that all of the tracks that were recorded that day sound more natural when you slow them down.

Also, from what I can tell, Girl Happy had actually been recorded a few days earlier; however, some studio trickery was applied to it on the 15th. So it's not quite analogous. Who knows; maybe the decision to speed up the title track came about because the machines were running slow on that day. ("Hey, these playbacks sound more exciting than they did when we cut them...maybe we should try speeding up some of the other stuff we have in the can?")

 

Who knows? I guess that could very well be the case. But even if the speeding up of some tracks originated as an accident, I can't believe it would have gone unnoticed. As you said, at some point they would have had to decide "this was a fortuitous accident" and that they should retain the sped-up versions.

And as noted, tape error could not explain the title song. The only thing done to the title track on the 15th was the splicing together of the master (from work parts recorded at previous sessions). So there would have been no way they could have accidentally sped up that song on that day. Had to be deliberate.

 

And why would acetates have been cut at roughly 2.5% fast, especially if that was on top of an already sped-up (intentional or not) recording?

 

Do The Clam

Written By :
Ben Weisman, Dolores Fuller & Sid Wayne

Recorded :
Radio Recorders, Hollywood, June 10-12 and 15, 1964: June 15, 1964. take 2

B-side "You'll Be Gone"
Released 1965
Format 45 7" vinyl record
Recorded 1965
Genre Pop, rock and roll
Length 3:17
Label RCA Victor
Songwriter(s) Sid Wayne
Ben Weisman
Dolores Fuller
It was released worldwide as a single by RCA Victor,[1] reaching no. 21 on Billboard in the United States, no. 15 on the Record World chart, no. 16 in Canada and the American Cashbox charts, and no. 19 in the UK.[2][3][4] It was very successful in Australia, where it reached no. 4 on the charts.[5] It has appeared on six compilation albums of Elvis Presley's recordings.

Co-writer Dolores Fuller was a songwriter and actress who had played the role as the title character's girlfriend in Ed Wood's 1953 surrealist film, Glen or Glenda.

The song was copyrighted on February 4, 1965 and published by Gladys Music, Inc.[6]

The B side of the 1965 single release was "You'll Be Gone", written by Red West, Elvis Presley, and Charlie Hodge in 1962. The B side reached no. 121 on Billboard and no. 35 on the Canadian charts. Both songs were on the Girl Happysoundtrack album."You'll Be Gone" was an attempt to create the same kind of song as Begin the Beguine after Elvis Presley's Management Team failed to obtain the rights to cover the song. "You'll Be Gone" is one of the songs for which Elvis Presley got a co-writer credit. Another Elvis Presley composition is "That's Someone You Never Forget", written with Red West in 1961.
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Bongos can be a somewhat dubious instrument in rock music ... but when the song is a bit doughy as well it doesn't help. I find it bizarre when listening to this album that this track was chosen for a single. For me it is easily one of the worst tracks on the soundtrack. The rhythm of the song seems to change without rhyme nor reason and not in a clever way like Devil In Disguise, it just seems like musical disorganisation .... The song is listenable, but it is not good.

 

Puppet On A String
Written By :
Roy C. Bennett & Sid Tepper

Recorded :
Radio Recorders, Hollywood, June 10-12 and 15, 1964: June 10, 1964. take 11

B-side "Wooden Heart"
Released 1965
Format 7" 45 vinyl Gold Standard series[citation needed]
Recorded June 16, 1964[1]
Genre Rock and roll, pop
Length 2:39
Label RCA Victor
Songwriter(s) Roy C. Bennett, Sid Tepper[1][2][3]
Elvis Presley recorded the vocals for "Puppet on a String" along with other tracks on June 16, 1964 (over a backing track that was recorded earlier) during a recording session at Radio Recorders in Culver City outside of Los Angeles.[1]

The song was published by Elvis Presley's publishing company Gladys Music, Inc.

Released in the United States in 1965 as a single with the 1960 recording from the film G.I. Blues, "Wooden Heart", on the B-side,[6] "Puppet on a String" reached number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week of December 25, 1965, where it would stay for two weeks.[7][2][4] (The other single from the same movie, "Do the Clam", was released earlier in the same year and reached number 21.)[4] The single peaked at number 13 on the Record World chart.

In Canada, the single reached number 3 in a 10 week chart run, entering the chart in November, 1965.[8]

The single was certified Gold in the U.S. by the RIAA in March, 1992.
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This track is a pretty decent love song, that gets us back to this being an Elvis album, not whatever the Clam was about. We have that nice honky tonk piano, putting little fills in to colour the song. Elvis moves into his crooning mode and sells the song ... and frankly, for us guys, we know that girls certainly have the power to turn us into dopey puppets very easily

 

Puppet On A String is by FAR a better choice for a single than Do The Clam. This is the second time Wooden Heart ends up on a single. At least its theme matches the A side this time.

 

They did remaster and reissue the FTD in 2010, but it was only because they found better tapes for the masters (same ones used on remasters done since) and to correct You'll Be Gone because they used the wrong take on the original FTD pressing. Wrong speed is unaltered.

They'll probably cover Girl Happy on the new Sessions series, although it remains to be seen if they've been able to recover the 3-tracks for the masters (which would not only be unedited in some cases but would not suffer from the speed issues). Barring that, they'd need to speed correct the original stereo masters and if possible/necessary use acetate sources for the unedited masters. Most of the outtakes are still in the vaults.

 

I like Puppet On A String as well and it makes a pretty nice double sided single matched up with Wooden Heart, which certainly is not everybody's cup of tea, but I think Elvis's voice is really beautiful on both songs. Floyd's piano and The Jordaniares are a welcome touch as usual on the A side of the single.