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EIN – It’s great to meet you and the concept of your book sounds fascinating, as the bootleg world is something that many fans are very interested in but know little of. EIN – What was the core moment that changed you to becoming a hardcore Elvis fan? Vic - I was 12 in 1956 when "Heartbreak Hotel" hit the airwaves and it was simply the best thing I had ever heard. I bought my first and, for a long time, only album—we just bought 45s then—and played it more times than I can count. This kid had something special, I thought. I had not seen him, knew nothing about his gyrations on stage (had only head a smattering of news and that would have been on stations that played Elvis so I doubt it was negative) and was completely unaware of anything else he had ever done. But that voice just plain mesmerized; he imparted a genuine feeling into the songs that was unlike anything I had heard before. I was completely hooked on group sounds (once called R&B and later to be know as doo–wop) and there were but a couple individual vocalists that I cared for. The crooners left me flat (Bennett, Sinatra, Como, et al) and few groups named their lead singer (an exception being Lee Andrew & the Hearts and can he ever sing!). Chuck Berry was cool, Bo Diddley was different, but for me it was that group sound until Elvis came along. The beginning of this thing called rock ‘n’ roll brought forth a wealth of new material and one whole boatload of crap. The weekly top 40 consisted of about ten tunes that I liked and a ton of pap that passed for rock but was quite lame. Sure, Guy Mitchell’s "Singing the Blues" and Buddy Knox’s "Party Doll" were catchy little ditties, but the kind that one grew tired of quickly. Gogi Grant did one of my all–time favorites "The Wayward Wind" in 1956 but that could hardly be called a rock song. Elvis was the real thing, and when he slowed it down a bit I still loved to hear him sing. Even "Old Shep", and they don’t get any slower and cornier than that one, had me enthralled as I conjured up mental pictures of this dog dragging a young boy to safety and saving him from drowning and I could see those trembling hands picking up the gun and those dog’s sad eyes… No one, just plain no one, had ever affected me like this before. I was an individualist and DID NOT like pop songs just because my peers did. The stuff that I played and collected my friends never heard of and I wowed them at parties with my latest finds. Sure, they knew "Tonite Tonite" by the Mello Kings but I came up with "Sassafras" by the same group. Same for things like "Lily Maybelle" by The Valentines; we were rocking to "Little Darling" by the Gladiolas before the Diamonds covered it for white radio. I had 45s that just plain made you want to get up and dance and one that were for those mellow, somber moods and perfect for slow dancing. Then came Elvis. My greatest find just happened to be one that the whole country, then the whole world found about at the same time. I know this: I rejected a number of hits and hit singers simply because they were so popular—and they faded away as quickly as they came so I was justified. If Elvis had not been something special I would have turned my back on him just because everyone else was so busy hyping him. But it was the voice, that incredible voice that could just plain stop you dead in your tracks be it "First In Line" or "Ready Teddy" and just tell me who in the heck there was that could sing two such dissimilar songs and have them both be equally appealing? Better yet, find me an album from those days by any male vocalist that had the variety of songs that appeared on Elvis’ first two albums. Small wonder that his Christmas album and first gospel album were stunning. This kid could just plain flat out sing better than anyone I had ever heard. Ricky Nelson had a great career and many hits; Bobby Darin was terrific; but as I like to say—when you think baseball there is Babe Ruth and everyone else; when you think Rock ‘n’ Roll there is Elvis and everyone else (and to all you Beatles fans out there they are as great as Elvis in their own right and equally as important to rock but they happened to come AFTER Elvis and he was there firstest with the mostest). The fact that Elvis could live that one down is fuel for an article or two; I bet it pleased many a parent while kids like me squirmed and wanted to turn the TV off because our idol, our figurehead, our justification for this "new" music that was completely our own and did not belong to our parents, was being ridiculed. Ycchhhh! But then, that’s television, and don’t get me started there. FYI, a long–term recently concluded POSITIVELY proved that children who watch TV more than two hours a day suffer a loss of five IQ points PER TELEVISION in the household in three years. So does every other family member. Dumb–de–dumb–dumb.
EIN - How many different Elvis bootleg organizations operated when you were involved? What were the main organizations and in which countries were they based? Vic - Other organizations? Hardly. We had all the unreleased material. Nothing left for anyone else. However, a couple horrible sounding items did come out when we were making ours. EIN – Didn’t you feel that the illegality was dangerous - and that you could have easily ended up in jail? EIN – I remember independent record stores even carried bootlegs in those days. They were often expensive and some (not yours!!) were poorly pressed, but boy were they exciting! At what point did the first clampdown happen and why? EIN – A question everyone asks us. Where did you manage to get all these tapes from? Did you get into the RCA vaults yourself? Vic - Oh, the stories I could tell. And will. I swear they are all true. I couldn’t make stuff like this up if I was Stephen King - and no, I do not want to be a smarmy little creep that can write real well - and I think that when you read the book, which will detail just how the material for each of our records was unearthed, you’ll have to agree that the muses were busy as ever and their looms were smoking. It got to the point where I just plain wondered if I was somehow preordained to find all this stuff and if I was on some kind of mission to bring this material out of hiding for the enjoyment of Elvis fans. As stupid as that sounds, and I assure you I am not vain nor do I consider myself anyone special, it got to be a little bit eerie more than once.
EIN - Legend has it that as part of a clean out in the 1960s, RCA dumped much of Elvis' movie recording sessions. A bright janitor found the discarded tapes and they eventually wound up being released as bootlegs. What can you tell us about this? Vic – You'll love the story even though as Tom Petty said, "the waiting is the hardest part". EIN: "Black Thursday" (14 august 1980) is a day few fans will know about. What can you tell us about it and were you in Memphis when the FBI swooped? Vic – Have not a clue. I suggest you ask Paul Dowling about that. I assume you are referring to a "raid" on a show in Memphis but I know nothing of it and we were active then. EIN - Why didn't the cops just turn up at your PO Box and arrest you? EIN - On 30 November 1982 you were indicted along with Paul Dowling, Alan (Ace) Anderson and Richard Minor. What were the specific charges and what was the outcome? Vic - I will go into detail regarding that in the final part of the book. Suffice to say, the guys in the white hats won and the good guys lost. EIN - Is it true the authorities had earlier in 1982 confiscated 100,000 bootleg albums and several master tapes from the home of Richard Minor and his father? Vic - News to me, I was busy with my record store at that time. Again that may be a question that Paul could answer. EIN - Were the seized product all Elvis related? If not, what other artists were involved? Vic - Could not have been. Richard had "redone" some of the awful Elvis boots from days gone by--the ones with plain white covers and a xeroxed sheet of paper under the shrink wrap and no label. He also had some repro sun 45s to my knowledge but Richard also had a few hundred thousand legitimate old 45s he bought from a fellow in Roanoke (I was with him when he made the purchase -- some 250,000 45s but not much good stuff). He would have had a small supply of ours, but Richard never bought from us in huge quantity. EIN - The Elvis bootleg market waxes and wanes. In your opinion what is its future? Can the days of an Elvis bootleg selling 10,000 ever be matched or is it more likely the current state of play with 500 to 1,000 pressings will be the norm? Vic - What's left to boot? Give me a week's worth of tapes of Elvis in a little club in Memphis in 1954-55 and I’ll crank up the presses all over again and make the billboard charts. EIN – So can you believe that thirty years later the Elvis Bootleg industry still exists?
EIN - Wasn't hauling around all that vinyl both heavy and difficult to distribute on the black market? Vic - There were a few things on our boots that have yet to be put on FTD for some reason. Has the "laughing" version of "A Dog’s Life" appeared? How about the "sleep of wink" version of "If You Think I Don’t Need You"? Also, I had a couple tapes of Elvis in concert that may not have been released. One had a great version of "Kentucky Rain" that is distinguished from others in that the ending is completely different. For the very last word Elvis pauses a second and then "shouts" out RAIN and holds the note a la "Hurt". Also, I know that there is color footage of all the Hayride shows, yes I said ALL of them. The sound, on a different reel, is missing at this time. So all we have is tons of silent footage and it is a shame to think that the effort has not been made to locate and match the reels. Could you stand 78 shows, 156 songs, in living color from those days? No? Sorry, didn’t mean to bore you. I guess it would get repetitious since Elvis sang "That’s All Right" about 50 times. I didn’t mean to go on about a little thing like that. Hey, what was I thinking? Elvis fans have enough already. Why would they want to hear him when he was unpolished and raw and all he did was make girls hysterical? I’m sorry I brought this up. We have all those ‘70s concerts with those great jumpsuits to watch, who cares about a young kid that hasn’t even made a name for himself and doesn’t even have a contract with a major label? (EIN Note: The 'A Dog's Life' laughing outtakes officially first appeared on the 1980 Silver box-set and more recently on the FTD of 'Paradise Hawaiian Style')
EIN – What about any exciting new video footage? Have you seen the Pied Piper film? Which, come to think of it, is the price I should have demanded for sitting down and typing until my fingers are numb. Criminy, Piers, you’d think after all these years I would have smartened up and learned to be a selfish, greedy pig instead of trying to be nice to people. When will I ever learn? (and other questions from "Blowing in the Wind") EIN – Talking of Dylan, other companies actually release outtake material to the general public – ie. Bob Dylan’s "Bootleg" series. Do you think that RCA missed their chance to do this by pumping out too much Elvis product year after year and thus saturating the market? Vic - Yeah, it was all Paul’s fault. I should have know better than to get mixed up with a lowlife, womanizing, rowdy, boisterous, blowhard like him in the first place. Actually, I am totally innocent of all charges, have never done a thing wrong in my entire life, and this whole business of me being involved with Elvis bootlegs is just a lie told by that Dowling guy that I happened to trade a record with once. Just once. I didn’t even know he was using my name. I never knew about those records. How could anyone believe I could ever do something like that? I never heard of this Edelweis fellow. I’m a Slim Whitman fan. And if you read this far then you’ll find all those answers in the book. EIN – Were there other cases of people backstabbing their colleagues? Was it a dangerous position to get yourself in? Vic - I think back–stabbing started with some guy named Cain and has not lost a bit of popularity in the intervening years. Such is the way of the world. As far as dangerous: dangerous is when you’re in a rice paddy up to your neck in mud and the leeches are nibbling at you all over and those little splashes in the water around you are being made by bullets and you’re trying to shoot back and duck at the same time only when you duck your head goes under water. After that, my friend, not much you will experience in life goes under the heading "dangerous position".
EIN – When can we expect it to be released? This is not something I would do for extra money, I’d just like to see the most devoted fans get something maybe a little extra special. Ideally, I would like to sell the autographed copies with the supplement for the same price as the book but it all depends on demand and how much a photo supplement costs. I’ll foot the bill for the supplement if it costs less than the difference between my wholesale price for the book and the retail price. And I expect it will.
EIN – Of all the people in the Elvis World who was the most interesting person you have met? Vic - The most interesting person I ever met in the Elvis world was, and still is, Paul Dowling. The best friend I ever made, thanks to Elvis, is Glen Johnson. The most egotistical jerk with absolutely nothing to offer prize gets awarded to Charlie Hodge who happens to be a nice guy but needed to talk about something else. The prettiest girl I ever saw was at an Elvis convention and when I referred to her as the "one that put all those boats in the water" she beamed without having to think about it which told me she was not just another pretty face. The nicest people I ever met were the Elvis fans who just seem to be a happy bunch. EIN - Did you ever meet Elvis?! Vic – Six times. Vic - What sounds exciting? Oh, the fact I saw Elvis six times? Sure was. But I would have traded them all and a hundred more for a seat in NBC’s studio four the evening of June 27, 1968. EIN - Thanks so much, it is a truly fascinating world and I'm glad that you are not looking over your shoulder anymore. Thanks for the interview and thanks for all the great boots!! Vic - You’re welcome for the interview, the boots were my pleasure, and stop walking behind me, I’m trying to look back there!
Interview by Piers Beagley & Nigel Patterson Click here to comment on this article
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