When I first started putting this site together I had to decide how to handle two different kinds of label. One was the 'vanity' kind, where major companies used labels with a distinctive design on records by favoured artists; the one used by EMI for Queen is probably the best-known example, but there were many more. The other was the 'plain' kind, where custom recording companies - SRT for example - sometimes left their own names off record labels and just put that of the artist on them, along with the titles. I decided against giving either types pages, on the grounds that if I did I would end up with dozens of single-artist pages such as 'Buzzcocks', '999', 'Sherwin Knight Junior School' and so on. I did however decide that if a record had the artist's name twice on each label, one of them in a larger font than the other, the larger one could qualify as the label name. This was intended to help me to provide some extra categorization for custom recordings, but it provided a loophole through which one or two 'vanity' labels were able to squeeze. 'Elvis' is one of them, 'X-Ray Spex' (q.v.) another. As can be seen from the scan, unlike Queen or Buzzcocks singles, the artist's name (part of it at least) appears twice, once as a logo and once in the same font as the titles. Because of that, 'Elvis' has a page here and 'Queen' hasn't. I don't suppose for a moment that 'Elvis' is treated as a distinct label anywhere else, but as I made the rule I have to stick with it. Be that as it may; RCA used the special label shown above for Elvis Presley singles from late 1978 into 1983, after which it was abandoned in favour of the common or garden RCA one. Demo copies, where there were any, were marked with a hollow central 'A' and the appropriate text (2); demos of 'It Won't Seem Like Christmas' seem to be rare, and they go for reasonably large prices. Catalogue numbers were taken from the main RCA series.
Copyright 2023 Robert Lyons.