About us

I have been an Elvis fan and collector since the eighties. From the time I was a young teenager, I was fascinated by Presley’s vinyl bootlegs, their music and their presentation. The album Elvis the -Entertainer 1954–1976 on the Rooster Records label is my personal favorite, so much that in the nineties I even named my fan club after this LP.

I’m a Swiss and was born near Zurich one cold and snowy winter morn‘. The first time I came across the music of Elvis Presley was during the first year in high school when a school mate — a huge Elvis fan — invited me home to listen to Presley’s newest record Moody Blue. I was not impressed at all by the music that I heard, but by the record pressed on blue wax. A few weeks later, on August 17, 1977, he came to school in the morning, crying. Elvis died the day before. With all the news and movies about the Tupelo Mississippi Flash on TV, I became more and more fascinated, and I started to slowly like the King’s music, however, as ironic as it sounds, the songs from the seventies more than the early rocking tunes. Soon I bought my first Elvis record; the 2-album set Elvis Forever, a German hit compilation. The funny thing about it was that my mother, who always pretended she did not like Elvis, one day took the r-ecord, played it, liked it and kept it. I had to buy a second copy. Over the years I was involved with -several Swiss Elvis fan clubs and I wrote for different Elvis magazines. But most of all — thanks to my profession — I was lucky to be able to travel the world and to visit the USA dozens of times, discovering an Elvis rarity here and there, and soon my vinyl col-lection numbered around 3,500 Elvis records, a fairly good number of them bootlegs. To this very day I am a dedicated Elvis scholar, even if I stopped collecting his records and CD’s a while ago. The love for the man and his music will always be there.

I am Dutch and I am one of the five people involved in this book, particularly because I have one of the largest bootleg collections in the world. Fate had it that I already started my own work on a new Elvis bootleg book when I heard of this project. So I decided to cooperate with the four other guys in order to offer the reader a more complete, better product. I did a lot of research, particularly on matrix numbers, dates of recording sessions and takes of songs. Since 1970, I have been active in the Elvis world and I have done a lot of work for different fan clubs. These days I am designing record and CD covers and I am participating on bootleg section on the website www.elvisoncd.com.

I became an Elvis fan at an early age. Because I couldn’t afford to buy records, I had to be happy with audio cassettes. Maybe that’s the reason why I started collecting Elvis records from all over the world, especially 10-inch records.

I was born in Trieste, Italy. My story of record collecting begins in 1955 when I bought my first Mario Lanza 78 rpm record. In the following years, other artists like Frankie Laine became my -favorites until 1959 when the Elvis LP King Creole -entered my life. Today I call an impressive collection of over 10,000 Elvis records and CDs from all over the world, as well as 6,000–7,000 records from other artists, my own. Now at age 71 I am still collecting and I am very happy to have so much love for this kind of music where Elvis always was, is and will be my number one. What a great hobby!