This is a very shortened/edited version of a lengthy 2003 Washington Post feature, archived on WaPo but copied in full at:
http://www.elvisnews.com/...hunter/664
http://www.elvis.com.au/p...ter.shtml
The Elvis Hunter - On the Trail of the King
A native-born Dane who lives on a farm outside Copenhagen, Jorgensen has covered thousands of miles and burned tankloads of gas tracking down every imaginable detail of Presley's career, from the minutiae of recording sessions to the set lists of tours. He's unearthed lost songs and interviewed hundreds of Presley's engineers, producers and backup musicians. He's bought master tapes that were stolen from record-label vaults and ransomed for small fortunes.
Elvis-hunting has been his full-time job since the early '90s, when he began a massive repackaging of Presley's music for BMG, the German conglomerate that owns the RCA label and, therefore, Elvis's catalogue. At least once a year the company releases an album or a multi-CD box set compiled by Jorgensen in collaboration with a Brit named Roger Semon.
So far, it's worked. All told, the pair have helped move more than a half-billion dollars worth of CDs.
It turns out that Presley's audience is broader and more eager to buy and rebuy his songs than anyone had imagined. That includes his label, which for many years treated its most famous artist as little more than a paycheck in a gaudy cape.
"Elvis was really almost forgotten," says Mike Omansky, a former vice president at RCA. "It was recognized that if you put out an Elvis release you'd make some money, but there was no effort to match the quality of product with Presley's artistry."
Jorgensen changed that. He did it largely by treating Presley's life and work with a seriousness that nobody in the early '90s thought it warranted.
Before Ernst Jorgensen became the in-house Presley expert at BMG, the company's market research suggested that the typical Elvis fan fit a very narrow profile. She was a woman between 35 and 55 years old; she was white and Southern and married to a blue-collar worker; and she would never, under any circumstances, pay more than $10 for a Presley album.
This blinkered view of the King's appeal was inevitable, given the way his legacy was then marketed. Starting in the late '70s, Elvis albums were lobbed haphazardly into record stores, one after another. Some lacked a coherent theme ("Elvis Sings for Children and Grownups Too!"), others had a theme and an uneven song list, and many were hobbled by inferior recordings.
The strategy -- if you could call it that -- reflected the get-it-now style of Presley's manager, Col. Tom Parker, a former carny who emphasized cash flow over quality from the start of Elvis's career. When Presley died in 1977, the Colonel retained a strong hand in the way his only client was packaged, and that approach took on a momentum of its own after Parker passed away. To RCA, Presley was an afterthought, a valuable if neglected annuity and a low priority compared with the new acts then being pushed.
"After he died, all you saw of Elvis for 15 years was the bloated Elvis on the front of the National Enquirer," he says. "The erratic behavior at the end of Presley's life had overshadowed one of the most important talents in this country. Nobody could hear the music anymore for all the nonsense."
Presley's estate had to be coaxed on board -- but the repackaging began in 1992 with the release of a five-disc box called "The Complete 50's Masters." It offered 140 songs, lots of photos and retailed for the seemingly outrageous sum of $79. With trepidation, the label ordered an initial run of 20,000 copies.
Four hundred thousand units later, the set has gone double-platinum. "Masters" earned a fortune, but as important, it provoked a second look at Presley himself. Rolling Stone gave the box five stars and declared it "monumental." "Presley the singer emerges as a workhorse, a student -- finally, unarguably, an artist," the magazine wrote. "Masters" was snapped up by a whole new audience, including young men and, to the great astonishment of BMG, New Yorkers.
"Ernst's approach has radically altered the context in which Elvis's music was perceived," says Peter Guralnick. "He assigned to Elvis's music the dignity and the ambition that it embodied, and he did it in a systematic way, in a way that reclaimed a life's work. It's hard to overestimate the value of that."
"I come from a school system where you're taught constantly to find out, to research," Jorgensen says. "But there was no factual information about Elvis anywhere. In the middle of the '60s, RCA would suddenly release something from the late '50s and all you knew was that it didn't sound like anything Elvis had done recently. But that was it."
For Jorgensen, the appeal of this work, aside from the salary and the chance to exalt a singer he considers the colossus of pop, is the sleuthing. A fan of detective novels, he studies Presley's past the way a private eye studies murders. He spent weeks pinpointing the evening that Presley's pink and white Cadillac caught fire in 1955 -- someone forgot to release the hand brake -- and now he dates shows based on what Elvis drove to the concert.
"If it's a pink and white Cadillac, it's before June 7. If it's a Ford Crown Victoria, the show was after June 7," Jorgensen says. "And if it's a pink and black Cadillac, it's after July 10."
The field trip to Covington starts in the morning at the headquarters of Elvis Presley Enterprises.
Jorgensen has spent countless hours in this office and at Graceland, but his relationship with this corporation is complicated. In 1973, Col. Parker and Presley struck one of the worst deals in rock history, selling to RCA the rights to everything Elvis had recorded to that point for less than $11 million. At the same time, EPE owns the rights to Presley's image, not to mention millions of Elvis-related documents. It's hard to sell the music without the image, or the image without the music. Like it or not, neither company can do business without the other.
A young lady named Angie Marchese escorts Jorgensen to a cluttered office in the back of the building. Marchese has brought along a file of photocopied letters sent to and from Bob Neal, Presley's first manager.
When Marchese leaves, so will the file. Nobody gets alone time with Elvis documents, not even Jorgensen. The reams of pages -- correspondence, notes and the entire written record of Presley's career -- are worth big money to unscrupulous collectors. BMG has the same security-first attitude these days about Presley's recordings, which are stored in a guarded facility under a mountain in Pennsylvania.
For years after he'd taken over the Elvis portfolio for BMG, he was bloodhounding for master tapes and acetates that had vanished from RCA, either stolen or misplaced through neglect. When he finally tracked down a tape, it was usually in the hands of someone who bought it from someone, who found it at a flea market -- or at least that was the story.
"Nobody ever confessed to a crime, but I suspect that often these were inside jobs," Jorgensen says. "I imagine there were people at RCA contacted by collectors and paid to, you know, put the box of tapes at a certain place in a parking garage at a certain time."
Reclaiming this bounty led to some B-movie moments that in hindsight seem almost comical. In 1999, Jorgensen arranged a meeting in the lobby of the Hotel Nikko at Beverly Hills with a go-between sent by a jittery anonymous seller who'd acquired, somehow, about 25 tapes, including the original master of "Heartbreak Hotel," as well as outtakes of "It's Now or Never." Jorgensen showed up with $10,000 in cash -- an additional $40,000 in cash for other songs would follow -- and bought the tapes back. Many of the songs wound up on the box set, "Today, Tomorrow and Forever." This seller's recording of "Heartbreak Hotel" appears on "30 #1 Hits."
"I never learned the seller's name", Jørgensen says, shaking his head in amusement. "I guess he was nervous that the FBI would grab him. So I was in this hotel on La Cienega Boulevard with a bag of cash, meeting a middleman. I didn't eat the night before, because I was too nervous to leave the room with that much money".
On the phone Wednesday, he said he was negotiating for a newly surfaced recording of Presley singing at an Alabama radio station in 1955. The tape sounds promising, and you can tell from Jorgensen's voice that he can't wait to get his hands on it.
"It depends on the price, and the quality of the recordings," he says. "But we're hopeful that we can acquire it."
New topic
Printable
Report post to moderator
If they had a Elvis Soundtrack boxset I'd get that in a second. There are some gems on those soundtracks. 
And hey, there is a deal at PopMarket, the set is only $599.99 from them!
