50 neal umphred fans can’t be wrong (wiki woes 2)

Es­ti­mated reading time is 8 min­utes.

THIS IS A FOLLOW-UP TO MY ARTICLE50,000,000 Wikipedia Con­trib­u­tors Can’t Be Wrong (Hah!)” posted ear­lier here on A Touch Of Gold. That piece ad­dressed Wikipedia’s poorly written entry ti­tled “50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong” and its many er­rors and mis­con­cep­tions. (The start of my Wiki woes.) If this topic in­ter­ests you, then you should cer­tainly read that ar­ticle be­fore reading this.

Here I present the ar­ticle (i.e., my rewrite of the orig­inal Wikipedia ar­ticle) as it briefly ap­peared with all of my cor­rec­tions, ad­di­tions, and rewrites.

I use the term “briefly” be­cause, after only a few days things changed.

Sur­prise! Surprise!

 

Hello and wel­come to Wikipedia! Al­ways re­member to pro­vide a re­li­able source for any ma­te­rial that is likely to be chal­lenged, or it may be removed.

 

Sev­eral of my cor­rec­tions have al­ready been un-corrected!

Sev­eral of my ad­di­tions have al­ready been subtracted!

Sev­eral of the in­cor­rect en­tries have al­ready been restored!

And not just by one Wiki con­trib­utor or ed­itor, but by sev­eral! 1

As someone once fa­mous once said, “So it goes . . .”

 

ElvisGold2b_1957_photo_blue

ElvisGold2b_1957_photo_pink

The first known use of one of the gold suit photos in a com­mer­cial ca­pacity was this photo from Elvis Presley En­ter­prise, the au­tho­rized pur­veyors of Elvis nov­el­ties. This was is­sued in early 1957 and came with two dif­ferent bor­ders, pink and blue. Nonethe­less, the gold suit re­mains as­so­ci­ated with the re­lease of ELVIS’ GOLD RECORDS VOL. 2 in 1959. 2

I’m playing for keeps (wiki woes)

But first things first: after my editing was com­pleted, a mes­sage was posted on my Talk Page (a Wiki con­trib­utor user site) on Wikipedia:

“Hello, Nealumphred, and wel­come to Wikipedia!

Thank you for your contributions.

I hope you like the place and de­cide to stay.

Un­for­tu­nately, one or more of your re­cent edits has not con­formed to Wikipedia’s ver­i­fi­a­bility policy, and has been or will be re­moved.”

That’s the first four sen­tences; there is more, which I ad­dress below. But first, here is the (former) new entry for ELVIS’ GOLD RECORDS, VOL. 2 as it ex­isted on April 15, 2016, and shall for­ever exist here on A Touch Of Gold.

 

ElvisGold2b_ATOG1

ElvisGold2b_ATOG2

ElvisGold2b_ATOG3x

The second use of the gold suit photos was for the first volume of the A TOUCH OF GOLD extended-play al­bums. Volume 1 was is­sued in April 1959, number two fol­lowed in Sep­tember, and the third and final volume was re­leased in Feb­ruary 1960. Note that the sales of each volume di­min­ished, with the third volume selling less than half of the first. Con­se­quently, Volume 3 is al­ways the most valu­able of the three re­gard­less of the label vari­a­tion. 3

My Wikipedia entry (wiki woes 2)

For those readers fa­miliar with the look of Wikipedia en­tries, note that I use to my own styl­istic choices in cer­tain type­set­ting (e.g., ital­i­cizing song ti­tles in­stead of placing them be­tween quo­ta­tion marks) and punc­tu­a­tion. I did use a san serif type­face for readability.

Also, as I ap­pre­ciate con­ti­nuity, I left as much of the orig­inal ar­ticle in­tact as I could—so this is not how I would have written this ar­ticle for A Touch Of Gold!

50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong

ELVIS’ GOLD RECORDS, VOL. 2 is the ninth album by Elvis Presley, is­sued by RCA Victor in No­vember 1959. It is a com­pi­la­tion of hit sin­gles re­leased in 1958 and 1959 by Presley, from recording ses­sions going back as far as Feb­ruary 1957.

The title of this album is ELVIS’ GOLD RECORDS VOLUME 2, but it ap­pears on the orig­inal record’s la­bels as ELVIS’ GOLD RECORDS, VOL. 2 with a comma and an ab­bre­vi­a­tion of “Volume.” But on the jacket, it ap­pears as ELVIS’ GOLD RECORDS – VOLUME 2 with an en-dash and the full spelling of “Volume.”

But “50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong” does not ap­pear on the la­bels of any of the orig­inal records, and it is the title of the records—not the jacket—that is usu­ally given pref­er­ence when con­flicting ti­tles ap­pear on albums.

There­fore, the phrase “50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong” on the front cover of was not part of the orig­inal title of the album: it was a bit of boasting—a form of advertising.

Or it was from 1959 through 1961: be­gin­ning no later than 1962, RCA Victor added “50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong” to the la­bels of the mono records and to the newly re­leased “elec­tron­i­cally re­processed stereo” records.

It re­mained there for sev­eral years, but by 1968, “50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong” was re­moved from the la­bels and was not found on any records for years.

And then it was added (again), this time to the CD re­leases of this album, where it has stayed.

 

ElvisGold2b 1960 Uruguay

This is the cover for the album as it was orig­i­nally is­sued in Uruguay prob­ably in 1960. The text in the upper left corner reads, “The Gold Records of Presley.” Strictly trans­lated, the test in the center reads, “100,000,000 of Ad­mirers They Cannot Be Wrong,” but col­lo­qui­ally it’s “100,000,000 Fans Can’t Be Wrong.” The amount of fans has dou­bled and “Elvis” is not a part of the phrase, bol­stering the ar­gu­ment that the state­ment is a blurb, not the title!

ELVIS’ GOLD RECORDS, VOL. 2 peaked at number 31 on the Bill­board Top Pop Al­bums chart. It was cer­ti­fied by the Recording In­dustry As­so­ci­a­tion of America (RIAA) for a Gold Record Award (based on $1,000,000 in whole­sale sales) on No­vember 1, 1966. It was cer­ti­fied for a Plat­inum Record Award for sales of one mil­lion copies in the US on March 27, 1992.

The album con­sists of both sides of five sin­gles re­leased during 1958 and 1959. Two sides made number 1 on the Bill­board Hot 100, and six others reached the Top 10. In the 1950s, a Gold Record awarded to a single re­quired cer­ti­fied sales of one mil­lion copies in the United States. This is dif­ferent from the de­f­i­n­i­tion in use since the 1990s when a Gold Record for a single was re­duced to sales of 500,000 units.

The orig­inal com­pact disc was is­sued as PCD1-2075 in “elec­tron­i­cally re­processed” (or “fake”) stereo and “50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong” was again part of the title! This disc was quickly with­drawn; it is now very rare and very valuable.

In 1985, it was reis­sued on com­pact disc as PCD1-5197, this time in “dig­i­tally re­stored” mono­phonic. That is, the mono sound was achieved by a com­pli­cated system of elim­i­nating ex­tra­neous “noise” from the fake stereo master tapes. This was nec­es­sary, as RCA had “mis­laid” the mono tapes. Even­tu­ally, clean mono tapes were lo­cated and the orig­inal mono sound was re­stored to later CDs.

 

ElvisGold2b_FTDa_600

ElvisGold2b_FTDc_600

The Follow That Dream ver­sion of ELVIS’ GOLD RECORDS, VOL. 2 from 2007 is a double-CD that has the orig­inal ten tracks from the LP plus forty-one bonus tracks! These are mostly al­ter­na­tive takes but it also in­cludes the en­tire con­tents of the spoken-word EP album ELVIS SAILS from 1958. 4

The July 15, 1997 reissue dou­bles the number of tracks to 20, adding one A-side (Hard Headed Woman) and one B-side (Playing For Keeps), along with tracks from top-selling EPs (e.g., Peace In The Valley). Sev­eral of those EP tracks were hit sin­gles in other coun­tries, no­tably the UK (i.e., Santa Bring My Baby Back To Me). The bonus tracks are in­ter­spersed within the orig­inal tracks, with the run­ning order to the album sub­stan­tially altered.

The CD was later reis­sued without the bonus tracks and the orig­inal run­ning order restored.

The uni­fied Bill­board Hot 100 sin­gles chart was not cre­ated until Au­gust 1958. Chart po­si­tions for records (below) prior to this date were taken from the mag­a­zine’s Best Sellers in Stores chart. In some cases, the early mea­sure­ment of suc­cess of rock and roll records also came from the Most Played on Juke­boxes chart. Chart po­si­tions (below) for the bonus tracks on the CDs were taken from the peak po­si­tion that the EP album achieved on Bill­board’s then ex­tant EP chart (1957-1960).

That is how the in­tro­duc­tory por­tion and the Con­tent sec­tion looked (past tense) after my changes. I did nothing to the Homage sec­tion, and I didn’t even at­tempt to ad­dress the con­fusing Track Listing section!

 

ElvisGold2b_1961_handbill_600

The gold suit photos were pulled out again in 1961 to call at­ten­tion to Elvis’s first live on-stage per­for­mance in al­most four years! This was in Hawaii to raise money to raise the USS Ari­zona from the floor of Pearl Harbor, where it had been lying since De­cember 7, 1941.

50 Neal fans can’t be wrong

Um, here I men­tion that I am the au­thor of two books and dozens of ar­ti­cles about Elvis Presley records and that most people who know any­thing about col­lecting Elvis records would con­sider me a “re­li­able source” . . .

I had in­tended to end this ar­ticle with a final sec­tion of a 300 words and thereby bring to a con­clu­sion my ad­dressing the Wikipedia issue re­garding  ELVIS’ GOLD RECORDS, VOL. 2 but then I re­ceived the latest email from The Round Place In The Middle called “Di­a­monds in the Shade” and that sent me to YouTube to listen to the Spin­ners’ We’ll Have It Made and It’s A Shame while I went to Wikipedia to look up Stevie Wonder where I came across an­other fal­la­cious state­ment and after a few more Spin­ners’ songs I was lis­tening to Barry McGuire and I don’t get the pro­gres­sion from one to the other ei­ther and that sent me back to Wikipedia to look up Eve Of De­struc­tion where there was yet an­other fac­tual boner and so I de­cided to stretch this thing out to three ar­ti­cles built around the one Elvis album and so here I will say, “To be continued.”

 

Elvis_Live_57_GoldSuit_900

FEA­TURED IMAGE: The photo at the top of this page is from a per­for­mance early in 1957, when Elvis wore the full gold suit on stage. Frankly, it looks rather clownish. He quickly re­placed the pants with a pair of sleek black slacks, which set off the gold jacket in a more el­e­gant manner.

 

Elvis 1957 goldsuit standup 1000

POST­SCRIP­TU­ALLY, I want to point out that many of the im­ages of Elvis in his gold suit in this ar­ticle and others can be found on the amazing Elvis – Echoes Of The Past web­site in an ar­ticle ti­tled “A Touch of Gold Lamé (Elvis and Nudie Cohn)” by Bob Pakes. The folks at the site are working on a gallery of im­ages of Elvis in the suit on the road and on stage in 1957!

 


FOOT­NOTES:

1   But each in­cor­rect state­ment is prop­erly sourced—even if the source was in­cor­rect or the Wiki con­trib­utor didn’t un­der­stand the data in the source.

2   Many of the il­lus­tra­tions in this ar­ticle are of items re­garded as mem­o­ra­bilia, of which I am not an ex­pert. So not only do I not have any “sug­gested NM values” for these items, I have to say they are very dif­fi­cult to re­search. Un­less such items are as­so­ci­ated with an RCA Victor record, there is little doc­u­men­ta­tion of sales online.

3   For more on these EPs, refer to “The Avid Record Collector’s Price Guide To A Touch Of Gold Al­bums.”

4   Keep in mind that the text in san serif type and in jus­ti­fied para­graphs rep­re­sent the ar­ticle as I write i. It ap­peared on Wikipedia for a few days this way but then the al­ter­ations began. So both this text and the im­ages used as il­lus­tra­tions will not be found on Wikipedia at this time.

 

Elvis_caricature_57_Tonio

I thought I’d end this on an up­beat note: here is a won­derful car­i­ca­ture of Elvis in his gold suit by Tonio. It is from “Elvis’ Golden Car­i­ca­tures Volume 3 (Rockin’ the ’50s),” a col­lec­tion of car­i­ca­tures of Mr. Presley here on A Touch Of Gold.

 

4 thoughts on “50 neal umphred fans can’t be wrong (wiki woes 2)”

  1. i’m one of the record collectors/dealers who con­sider you a “re­li­able source”. 

    here’s a trivia ques­tion for you neal -- what other pop singer wore the gold suit in the early 1960s?

    Reply
  2. i’m one of the record collectors/dealers who con­sider you a “re­li­able source”.

    trivia ques­tion -- what other pop star wore the gold suit in the early 1960s?

    Reply

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