In contrast to most of todays artists Elvis recorded the majority of his tracks live in the studio. He performed the songs with his band over and over again until they sounded the way he imagined them. Later the harmony vocals as well as horns, strings and other fancy stuff was added. But the core of the songs still was done live in the studio. This procedure lead to a lot of outtakes. Because Elvis and his crew worked out a lot of the arrangements on the fly, some of these outtakes sound vastly different to the released versions. In other cases the differences are very slight. There are also many false starts and aborted performances. Because the aim was the master (the released version), all these outtakes were regarded to be nothing but trash. I am pretty sure, that Elvis would have laughed his head off, if he'd learned, that his followers are spending money on stuff like that.

RCA started to release these outtakes in 1974 on an album called "A Legendary Performer - Volume 1". This series lasted until the 1980s, of course outtakes were also used on later releases. In 1999 BMG (who had purchased RCA) established a collector's label called Follow That Dream Records and released various compilations of outtakes. Their special editions of classic Presley albums also included outtakes of the accordant songs. When Sony Music Entertainment took over, they continued the label. At the end of the 2010s they started to release complete sessions. These boxed sets included all available takes in chronological order, so we can retrace the well known performances from the first walkthrough to the final product.

In the next few months I will expand this section of my website. Just tap on the covers to get to the accordant reviews.