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Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Elvis on tape - part one

This week me and my wife have been unpacking box after box with stuff after the move to our new hometown Gothenburg. Not very surprisingly a lot of the boxes contained Elvis stuff such as CD's, books and DVD's. But also my collection of Elvis cassette tapes that I haven’t looked at for years.

As I reacquainted myself with some of the tapes this evening, carefully stored away in plastic racks labeled for example "studio," "live," "bootlegs," and "soundtracks," I remembered how much they meant to me some 20 years ago.

Then, I recorded all my LP's on tape, carefully writing the titles of the songs on the covers. But I also loved creating my own selections and giving them cool names, like The Later Studiowork, The Lost Moviesongs and my all time favorite Elvis Rockin' The 70's.

It took some work to make these tapes, let me tell you. First I had to select the songs, write them down and then find which LP’s they were on.

After that the "recording session" started: the LP was put on the turntable, the cassette inserted and "play," "record" and "pause" pressed down. Then the pick-up was lowered, the pause-button released and after the song ended "pause" was pressed again and the process started all over for the next song.

All very time-consuming, but nothing compared to the effort I put into the manufacturing of the covers. Some of them I drawed myself, and looking at them today they aren't half bad. Maybe I should've studied art instead of journalism. But then I would've never had the opportunity to make radio programs about Elvis Presley, although that's another story.

All in all, I have about 360 cassette tapes in my possession, but they aren't just LP's I've recorded or collections I've created. Over 200 of them are so called live tapes, each containing an audience recording of an Elvis concert. More of that later...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

HAHA I used to do the same thing years ago.