Having incorporated elements of Sun Studio, Phillips Recording Service, and Ardent Studios into the design of his own Southern Grooves studio, Matt Ross-Spang has an ear for history, so it’s no wonder that he’s become the go-to guy for mixing Elvis Presley. It started with his 2016 mixes of outtakes from Presley’s 1976 recordings at Graceland, and others followed, but his mixes on 2020’s From Elvis in Nashville compilation, stripping overdubs away from the raw tracks Presley recorded during marathon sessions in June of 1970, were Ross-Spang’s greatest feat, yielding such jaw-dropping tracks as the hard-choogling “Patch It Up.”
Now, following a brief similar to that of the Nashville album, Ross-Spang has outdone himself on a new box set dropping just as Elvis Week commences this Friday, August 9th. With a nod to last month’s 70th anniversary of Presley’s first recordings for Sun Records, Sony Music/Legacy Recordings will release Memphis, a set of five CDs and/or two LPs produced by Ernst Jørgensen, collecting everything Presley recorded in his adopted hometown.
Naturally, that includes Presley’s initial work with Sun Records’ Sam Phillips, though those foundational recordings were not tampered with (nor could they have been, not being multitracks), only given a thorough restoration and remastering. After the Sun era, there were three other distinct moments when Presley cut records in Memphis: in 1969 at American Sound Studio, in 1973 at Stax Records, and in 1976 during remote recording sessions the King set up in his own Jungle Room at Graceland. Also included is a live recording of Presley and his touring band at the Mid-South Coliseum in 1974. All of those recordings get the Ross-Spang treatment.
Working from digital copies of the original multitrack tapes offered him a glimpse into the recording techniques of a bygone age. “I was really excited to work on the Stax and American stuff simply because I’m a Memphis history nut,” he says, “and to get to hear those multitracks was really exciting. Working with Chips Moman at American, Elvis had a new band, a new producer, a new studio — everything was new. And yet Chips didn’t have nice technologies like RCA [in Nashville]. He committed all that music to four tracks, typically. And oftentimes he recorded the [reverb] chamber right onto the track. Or put the bass and the acoustic guitar on the same track. So it was really cool for me to open that up and see how much commitment he had, the vision he had from the beginning.”
Those American recordings yielded hits like “In the Ghetto” and “Suspicious Minds,” but the familiar versions, exploding with those distinctive string arrangements, are only hinted at here. The Memphis tracks reveal what preceded those orchestral flourishes: The sure-footed, house band Moman had assembled, aka The Memphis Boys, both soulful and rocking, playing their hearts out while the voice of Elvis rang out in the room. As Robert Gordon writes in the extensive liner notes, the new mixes put us “standing next to Elvis inside the recording studio, us and the basic band, hearing what he’s hearing.”
Moreover, it’s a master class in minimalist songcraft, as one hears guitarist Reggie Young weave his lines in with those of keyboardists Bobby Woods and Bobby Emmons, the latter’s organ parts suggesting an orchestra, yet molded out of rawer sounds. Here and there are occasional overdubs, as in the remarkable “Don’t Cry, Daddy,” where Presley harmonizes with himself. As Ross-Spang explains, “We left in some of the overdubs that they did on the spot there [at American], but we didn’t use things that they went back to Nashville to do.”
Ross-Spang didn’t have to mix these tracks entirely on his own. “It was really fun to get to work with Robert Gordon on this. I was sending him mixes and he was sending me notes back. And then producer Rob Santos and Ernst. Sometimes I can treat a mix too technically and not emotionally, but Ernst would give me very nontypical, emotional mix notes.” As the singer’s raw emotion explodes from the speakers, Memphis reveals Elvis to be one of the premier soul artists of his time.
