Uri Geller-Nobody's Child Acetate/Ernst's response

[jacob]

Articles by Uri Geller
Elvis sounded like no-one else on Earth
THE voice is unmistakable. Elvis sounded like no-one else on Earth, even when he was a hill-billy teenager who had scraped together a few dimes to cut a pop disc.
The battered record that lies on my desk right now could be the most important slice of rock history ever unearthed — a recording of Nobody’s Child, credited on its typewritten label to Elvis Presley, probably recorded in a booth at Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee, in late 1953 or early 1954 — long before he became The King.
It’s raw, moving, fascinating and shocking.
Over a tight blues backing, Elvis strums guitar and sings in a rich baritone, breaking into an eerie bluegrass yodel on the chorus.
No-one has ever heard Presley sing this way on disc. No-one who hears it now can be in any doubt that this is the real Elvis.
In my family room, I have a statue of Elvis, carved from wood.
I have always been a great fan of the King, and mourned him deeply when he died in 1977.
I remember how awestruck I had been to meet him, near Las Vegas, in 1975. At that time, he was probably the most famous man in the universe.
He heard I was in Los Angeles, on a shopping trip from Mexico, and he asked me to pay court.
I drove from LA to Las Vegas, where he was performing, and then an hour further into the desert.
We reached an aluminium Airstream trailer, and a man stepped out in a plain white suit. No rhinestones, no pearls. Just a belt buckle as big as a licence plate.
He gave me a spoon, and asked me to bend it and, when I did, the god-like reserve fell away.
He could not believe his own eyes. I held the spoon at the base with my fingertips, stroked the middle three times, and held it out to Elvis.
As he took it, the metal curled.
I was brimming with energy, despite a roasting drive, because I was standing next to a living god and talking to him as an equal.
The spoon bent upwards, and Elvis poured out stories to me like I was his confessor.
He told me of his mother, whose love had meant more to him than anything.
He was at Graceland, his mansion, when the phone rang at 3.30am — “I knew what it was before I answered the telephone,” he told me.
His mother had died, on August 13, 1958.
In 1985, the King’s first-ever recording, My Happiness, turned up in the attic of a high school buddy named Ed Leek.
The Los Angeles Times called it “as noteworthy in the pop world as the unveiling of an early, recently- discovered Van Gogh painting would be to the art community”.
My disc, Nobody’s Child, is something even more than this.
The recording session itself had been vaguely mentioned in rumour, but the survival of the song itself was unimaginable.
And my own discovery of it was just as incredible.
Early last year, I was writing a novel, published on the internet, called Nobody’s Child.
A dear friend in Canada, Jan Marsh, alerted me that an Elvis disc by that name was up for auction on eBay, the “junk shop” of the worldwide web.
I bid $1000 for it, never thinking for an instant that this record could be the only copy of the song.
Nobody’s Child is a country standard, written in 1948 and recorded by The Beatles (with singer Tony Sheridan) before Beatlemania.
George Harrison covered it, too, with his supergroup, The Travelling Wilburys, to raise funds for Romanian orphans.
When the package arrived, it was immediately clear that something was badly wrong.
The disc, mounted in a metal showcase, had been bent double. The frame had shattered. The record was destroyed.
Furious, I rang the vendor on the other side of the Atlantic — he swore, of course, that it had left him in perfect condition.
I phoned the police and the Post Office, who were civil but unhelpful, since the package had come from abroad.
All of them joked politely that I was Uri Geller, and the package was bent, and well, you know . . .
I kept the ruined disc in its box, and Jan persuaded me to attempt a repair.
She knew a recording technician whose speciality, when he worked for a secret government agency, was piecing together fragments of sound.
His $1250 bill would be more than I had paid for the disc in the first place, and I was almost convinced by now that I had been scammed — the record would contain some worthless scrap of song that bore no relation to Elvis, and the disc had been bent so that the fraud would never be found out. So I thought.
But there was something convincing about the label — registered to the Acuff Rose company, just as other early Elvis cuts were, and with the track listing typed on an old upright typewriter.
Jan checked with Ernst Jorgensen, a producer and catalogue expert, who wrote Elvis Presley: A Life In Music, The Complete Recording Sessions.
He noted, “Sam Phillips ran a record label called Sun at 706 Union Street in Memphis.
“The little studio also had a service facility where anyone off the street could make a two-sided acetate record for $8.25.
“There were other, cheaper, less professional places to make recordings around town, places other young musicians used, but Elvis chose Sun.”
Add to this the mystery of why Sam Phillips gave Elvis a second chance for a real record contract, months after the boy paid to make his first disc, My Happiness, and the rumours of a mystery recording that had excited Sam’s interest . . . and I had to take the risk.
I could not throw away Nobody’s Child, however damaged.
When the repaired disc came back to me, I realised instantly that this was no scam.
What I had bought, and resurrected, was an unknown sliver of genius.
The disc had come from the estate of Mary Jarvis in Nashville.
Mary’s late husband Felton was, for many years, Elvis’s producer at RCA records. The disc had hung on his office wall in Nashville.
I have no explanation for how it came to be so badly damaged, but there is little doubt that the person who sold it to me had no conception of what he was letting go.
Even though Elvis is dead, I do not believe that death is the end. The King’s spirit is still around us.
The fantastic odyssey of this disc, from its recording almost half a century ago, through its near obliteration, and its eventual safe arrival in my hands, is too strange to be a string of coincidences.
I can only feel that Elvis truly means me to have this recording.
He died in 1977. I saw the photographs, and I accept he is dead.
The “god” part of him is immortal — Elvis will always be The King. But the human part died. I am 99 per cent convinced of that . . . 99 per cent. Just one per cent doubt.

This article is from Uri's column in the Weekly News

[Johnny2523]

shortly sayd uri is not goin to share it. or it may not even exist and he just writing bullocks

[JimmyCool]

"BROKEN TREASURE"

The story is, Elvis recorded "Nobody's Child" ( a real tear-jerker) for the Diskins as a special gift sometime in the 60s.
The acetate 'popped up' after their death, and landed in the hands of RCA.. According to Ernst the acetate ended up in pieces when sent from place A to place B... ( sigh).




The machine at Radio Recorders, Hollywood, responsible for cutting countless acetates featuring Elvis' voice...

[jacob]

Articles by Uri Geller
Elvis sounded like no-one else on Earth
THE voice is unmistakable. Elvis sounded like no-one else on Earth, even when he was a hill-billy teenager who had scraped together a few dimes to cut a pop disc.
The battered record that lies on my desk right now could be the most important slice of rock history ever unearthed — a recording of Nobody’s Child, credited on its typewritten label to Elvis Presley, probably recorded in a booth at Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee, in late 1953 or early 1954 — long before he became The King.
It’s raw, moving, fascinating and shocking.
Over a tight blues backing, Elvis strums guitar and sings in a rich baritone, breaking into an eerie bluegrass yodel on the chorus.
No-one has ever heard Presley sing this way on disc. No-one who hears it now can be in any doubt that this is the real Elvis.
In my family room, I have a statue of Elvis, carved from wood.
I have always been a great fan of the King, and mourned him deeply when he died in 1977.
I remember how awestruck I had been to meet him, near Las Vegas, in 1975. At that time, he was probably the most famous man in the universe.
He heard I was in Los Angeles, on a shopping trip from Mexico, and he asked me to pay court.
I drove from LA to Las Vegas, where he was performing, and then an hour further into the desert.
We reached an aluminium Airstream trailer, and a man stepped out in a plain white suit. No rhinestones, no pearls. Just a belt buckle as big as a licence plate.
He gave me a spoon, and asked me to bend it and, when I did, the god-like reserve fell away.
He could not believe his own eyes. I held the spoon at the base with my fingertips, stroked the middle three times, and held it out to Elvis.
As he took it, the metal curled.
I was brimming with energy, despite a roasting drive, because I was standing next to a living god and talking to him as an equal.
The spoon bent upwards, and Elvis poured out stories to me like I was his confessor.
He told me of his mother, whose love had meant more to him than anything.
He was at Graceland, his mansion, when the phone rang at 3.30am — “I knew what it was before I answered the telephone,” he told me.
His mother had died, on August 13, 1958.
In 1985, the King’s first-ever recording, My Happiness, turned up in the attic of a high school buddy named Ed Leek.
The Los Angeles Times called it “as noteworthy in the pop world as the unveiling of an early, recently- discovered Van Gogh painting would be to the art community”.
My disc, Nobody’s Child, is something even more than this.
The recording session itself had been vaguely mentioned in rumour, but the survival of the song itself was unimaginable.
And my own discovery of it was just as incredible.
Early last year, I was writing a novel, published on the internet, called Nobody’s Child.
A dear friend in Canada, Jan Marsh, alerted me that an Elvis disc by that name was up for auction on eBay, the “junk shop” of the worldwide web.
I bid $1000 for it, never thinking for an instant that this record could be the only copy of the song.
Nobody’s Child is a country standard, written in 1948 and recorded by The Beatles (with singer Tony Sheridan) before Beatlemania.
George Harrison covered it, too, with his supergroup, The Travelling Wilburys, to raise funds for Romanian orphans.
When the package arrived, it was immediately clear that something was badly wrong.
The disc, mounted in a metal showcase, had been bent double. The frame had shattered. The record was destroyed.
Furious, I rang the vendor on the other side of the Atlantic — he swore, of course, that it had left him in perfect condition.
I phoned the police and the Post Office, who were civil but unhelpful, since the package had come from abroad.
All of them joked politely that I was Uri Geller, and the package was bent, and well, you know . . .
I kept the ruined disc in its box, and Jan persuaded me to attempt a repair.
She knew a recording technician whose speciality, when he worked for a secret government agency, was piecing together fragments of sound.
His $1250 bill would be more than I had paid for the disc in the first place, and I was almost convinced by now that I had been scammed — the record would contain some worthless scrap of song that bore no relation to Elvis, and the disc had been bent so that the fraud would never be found out. So I thought.
But there was something convincing about the label — registered to the Acuff Rose company, just as other early Elvis cuts were, and with the track listing typed on an old upright typewriter.
Jan checked with Ernst Jorgensen, a producer and catalogue expert, who wrote Elvis Presley: A Life In Music, The Complete Recording Sessions.
He noted, “Sam Phillips ran a record label called Sun at 706 Union Street in Memphis.
“The little studio also had a service facility where anyone off the street could make a two-sided acetate record for $8.25.
“There were other, cheaper, less professional places to make recordings around town, places other young musicians used, but Elvis chose Sun.”
Add to this the mystery of why Sam Phillips gave Elvis a second chance for a real record contract, months after the boy paid to make his first disc, My Happiness, and the rumours of a mystery recording that had excited Sam’s interest . . . and I had to take the risk.
I could not throw away Nobody’s Child, however damaged.
When the repaired disc came back to me, I realised instantly that this was no scam.
What I had bought, and resurrected, was an unknown sliver of genius.
The disc had come from the estate of Mary Jarvis in Nashville.
Mary’s late husband Felton was, for many years, Elvis’s producer at RCA records. The disc had hung on his office wall in Nashville.
I have no explanation for how it came to be so badly damaged, but there is little doubt that the person who sold it to me had no conception of what he was letting go.
Even though Elvis is dead, I do not believe that death is the end. The King’s spirit is still around us.
The fantastic odyssey of this disc, from its recording almost half a century ago, through its near obliteration, and its eventual safe arrival in my hands, is too strange to be a string of coincidences.
I can only feel that Elvis truly means me to have this recording.
He died in 1977. I saw the photographs, and I accept he is dead.
The “god” part of him is immortal — Elvis will always be The King. But the human part died. I am 99 per cent convinced of that . . . 99 per cent. Just one per cent doubt.

This article is from Uri's column in the Weekly News

From the highlighted sentence the repair was successful,so what happened to the disk? Is it something that he wants people to know he has but will not share or is he making it up? I'm curious to know.

[Lisa Rose]

Interesting story, never heard about this recording! Uri is a good guy, his story sounds credible to me.

[keninlincs]

I dont believe a word Uri Geller says, didnt before this story came out and still dont

[zolderopruiming1]

He obviously did not use Paypal and buyer protection!
Did I tell you guys ever about the time Elvis visited me and we jammed together? I taped it but the tape is no longer playable.

[mysterytrainrideson]

Uri, is full of utter sh*t. Here is a guy who bends spoons for a living...it obviously ain't well paid, otherwise he wouldn't be making up total bullsh*t to make himself some publicity and a bit of money. The way he describes this "Nobody's Child" acetate he has, it's so obviously made up. So Uri, if you expect us to believe this bullsh*t, your wrong. Go and get a life!!!!

[joshferrell]

I dont believe a word Uri Geller says, didnt before this story came out and still dont

well he said he saw the photos (plural) of Elvis dead,the only photo i'm aware of is the casket photo,so that is kind of strange he said that,unless he's talking about how he saw the two casket photos which are slightly different from another,but I find it hard to believe he's seen death photos of him..

[RonBaker2003]

It's a dreadful song, but it would be interesting to hear Elvis' take on it. If they can repair an acetate bit by bit like they did for "Boy from Tupelo" maybe they can repair this one. Technology advances.

[JimmyCool]

I dont believe a word Uri Geller says, didnt before this story came out and still dont

well he said he saw the photos (plural) of Elvis dead,the only photo i'm aware of is the casket photo,so that is kind of strange he said that,unless he's talking about how he saw the two casket photos which are slightly different from another,but I find it hard to believe he's seen death photos of him..

There are at least 3 casket photos taken.

[drjohncarpenter]

Never trust a faux spoon-bender.

[darling]

Never trust a faux spoon-bender.

Wise words.

(Except, of course, technically he really does bend the spoons. With his hands. When he thinks nobody is looking.)

[jacob]

The acetate does exist(Or a picture of it does! lol) but did he actually buy it? I can't see why he would lie about that,I'm just curious about him saying that he had it repaired and then he realised that he hadn't been scammed.To me that makes me assume he heard what was on the disk?
Wasn't he something to do with the buying of the Audubon Drive home only for the seller to sell it to someone else? Wasn't he going to sue the owner?

[TheMaskedClown]

Never trust a faux spoon-bender.

LOL!!!

Uris story seems far fetched to me.

[dannyboy1]

If he has anything it is probably the Billy Fury recording of the song.

To someone without a finely tuned Elvis ear, it could be mistaken for Elvis.

Either that or Uri, like his spiritualist namesake Larry, is also good at bending the truth.

[dennyelvis]

If he has anything it is probably the Billy Fury recording of the song.

To someone without a finely tuned Elvis ear, it could be mistaken for Elvis.

Either that or Uri, like his spiritualist namesake Larry, is also good at bending the truth.

Thats more like it, always remember when "tapes" of Elvis dueting with JLL turned up, it was of course Orion !

[jacob]

I sent a email to Uri through his website,here's his, albiet,short reply!

Yes and it is Elvis.
------Original Message------
From: Jacob
To: Uri Geller
Subject: Elvis Presley-Nobody's Child Acetate
Sent: Sep 9, 2012 08:11

Hi Uri,
I was reading the article about you buying the Elvis Presley acetate "Nobody's Child" .You said you were going to have it repaired.Did you do this and does it play and was it Elvis Presley?
Thank you for your time,
Jacob[/color]
Please visit my website at http://www.urigeller.com
I wish you plenty of good health, happiness and peace of mind. Be positive, optimistic and believe in yourself. Follow me on Twitter: gelleruri and on Facebook.
Much energy and love
Uri

[luckyjackson1]

It's hard to believe Elvis would have sung this song. It just doesn't fit, it's just not right. Don't ask me why, I just feel that way.

[jacob]

I emailed Uri again (Through his website) and asked if he had any plans to have it released,his reply was "Don't know yet"
I heard Elvis recorded this for Tom Diskin as a anniversary present for him and his wife,when I looked up details of Diskin it said he got married after Elvis died, to a French Elvis fan, so it couldn't have been for him.
Since then it has been stated that it came from Felton's wife Mary Jenkin's,so perhaps it was a gift for them instead?
If you look on Kieth Flynn's excellent site it's documented on there,I also think there's a picture of the acetate.

[KiwiAlan]

Impossible for an acetate to break up into many pieces.

They are made of plastic coated aluminium

[jacob]

According to Ernst it did break into pieces.I wonder how many more un-known songs there are out there on acetate?
Such a shame the Colonel didn't let RCA build Elvis his own studio like they wanted to!

[KiwiAlan]

According to Ernst it did break into pieces.I wonder how many more un-known songs there are out there on acetate?
Such a shame the Colonel didn't let RCA build Elvis his own studio like they wanted to!

If Ernst said that he could only be talking about a regular disc.


You can bend an acetate but it can't be smashed into pieces.

[ColinB]

I dont believe a word Uri Geller says, didnt before this story came out and still dont

Amen.

img003.jpg

[keninlincs]

I dont believe a word Uri Geller says, didnt before this story came out and still dont

Amen.

img003.jpg

Good one, Colin