Me and Joan Deary and Elvis Bootlegs
My meeting with Ms. Deary, challenging her statements, and becoming phone-pals
ELVIS FAN CONVENTIONS were a happening thing around the country for years after Presley’s death in 1977. I attended one in San Jose in 1980. It was around the time of the release of the special 25th anniversary boxed set in August — maybe before, maybe after. Meeting Joan Deary, the producer in charge of Elvis reissues, was a highpoint of the con for me.
I had not met Ms. Deary and was looking forward to speaking with her — although not in the manner she might have welcomed had she known me. I was hugely disappointed with the aforementioned boxed set ELVIS ARON PRESLEY and I intended to address its shortcomings with her.
Joan Deary worked her way up from secretary in 1955 to being in charge of Elvis Presley’s reissues in 1973.
At this time, Deary was one of the most important people in the world to Elvis fans, especially those fans who bought new releases in hopes of hearing previously unreleased gems. In 1973, after RCA Victor purchased Elvis Presley’s catalog of recordings from 1954 through 1972, she was put in charge of that catalog.
Deary had been involved with Elvis’ career in one way or another for a long time. In 1955, she became Steve Sholes’ secretary. Sholes was the Director of Specialty Singles, in charge of the company’s singles for country music, race music (which would become the more polite rhythm & blues later), gospel music, and children’s records.
She worked her way from there.
A legendary performer sings for children
In 1972, Joan Deary became the assistant to RCA Victor vice president Harry Jenkins. Presley’s regular producer, Felton Jarvis, was laid up and Jenkins and Deary stepped in and took over a new project. And it was a big project: they supervised the recording of both of Elvis’ performances at Madison Square Garden on June 10, 1972.
The evening show was mastered, pressed, and released within a week as ELVIS AS RECORDED AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN. It was an immediate hit and became the first Elvis album to be certified for an RIAA Gold Record Award in two years.
When RCA Victor purchased Presley’s entire catalog of recordings in 1973, Deary was put in charge of packaging that material into new albums. Her first offering was 1974’s ELVIS — A LEGENDARY PERFORMER VOLUME 1, an album that was an artistic, historical, and commercial success.
Unfortunately, many of the “new” albums that followed weren’t remotely comparable (except for the other Legendary Performer albums).
Meeting Joan Deary
So, Deary was the guest of honor at the Elvis get-together in San Jose in August 1980. She held an impromptu speech in the middle of the dealer’s room where she proved to be intelligent, articulate, and funny. I didn’t know anything about her except that I was impressed and pleased by the Legendary Performer series of albums but not with some of her other projects, including the 25th-anniversary box.
She spoke about several topics, all from the point of view of RCA Victor. She said — and I am doing this from recall so it’s not a quotation — “With ELVIS ARON PRESLEY, we have released everything we have by Elvis. There is nothing left in the RCA vaults.”
Several of us looked at each other with expressions of confusion and even anger — we knew this wasn’t even close to being true.
I walked over to a table selling Presley bootleg albums and asked the dealer if I could borrow a few LPs for a few minutes.
I walked back to the group surrounding Deary, raised my voice, and asked, “Ms. Deary, what about these?”
And I held up five albums.
What about these?
The albums I held up for Ms. Deary to see were The Burbank Sessions and the three volumes of The Rockin’ Rebel series. The Burbank Sessions were a pair of two-record sets containing the four shows Presley performed at the NBC-TV soundstage in Burbank, California, in June 1968. Portions of these performances were to be included in the Elvis television special broadcast later in the year.
The Rockin’ Rebel albums compiled outtakes, live performances on stage and television, and interviews from 1954–1957. None of these tracks had ever been released by RCA Victor (although they would eventually find release years later.)
I did not get the standard negative industry response that I expected. She just smiled and said, “Oh, we don’t have the rights to those recordings.”
“Well,” I asked, “who does?”
She pointed at the two Burbank albums and said, “NBC owns the rights to those.”
“Well, they’re not doing NBC any good,” I responded. “They can’t release them on record and they can’t use them for anything else. So why doesn’t RCA just get the rights from them?”
“Oh,” Deary replied, “we don’t have the budget for that.”
“Aha!” I thought.
Aha! I thought
So that’s what it was all about! RCA did not have any more unreleased Presley material in their vaults because they wouldn’t spend any money to acquire new stuff. The corporate overlords and decision-makers were not prepared to spend another cent acquiring the hundreds of amazing recordings owned by NBC-TV, various movie production companies, and — the biggest treasure trove of unreleased Elvis of all — the tapes belonging to wiley ol’ Colonel Parker.
Given that the company sold tens of millions of units of Presley platters in the three years since he died, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
But then, what did I know? I was just a fan who bought a lot of records.
Call me
As Ms. Deary was leaving the San Jose Elvis Convention back in 1980, she walked over to my table and handed me her business card. “Call me,” she said, “and we can talk some more.”
I did and we talked about bootlegs in general (she approved of many of them), what the numbers in the trail-off vinyl of ’50s singles meant (the demand for Presley singles was so huge so fast that the normal stamper number protocols were ignored), how many copies of the colored vinyl promo 45s from the ’80s were manufactured (far more than stated in the boolschidt in the price guides of the time), and more.
But that’s another story for another time . . .
Postscript
Years later — after Joan Deary had retired in 1987 — RCA acquired the rights to most of this material. All of it has been released on RCA records and/or compact discs.
The statements in quotation marks above between Ms. Deary and myself are taken from memory. While they accurately represent the essence of what we said, they should not be considered quotations.
For more background information on Joan Deary, check out “Joan Deary and Elvis Presley.”
Finally, this article was originally published on my blog Elvis — A Touch Of Gold as “About Meeting Joan Deary for the First Time.” That article is the same but features a few different photos of albums with new captions. You can read it here: https://www.elvis-atouchofgold.com/meeting-joan-deary/
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