“But when a record became a hit, neither the Memphis pressing plant (Plastic Products on Chelsea Ave.) nor the local distributor (Music Sales, also on Chelsea) had the capacity to merchandise and distribute satisfactorily outside of the South. Those pressings always have the so-called push marks. Why is that? Well, the scarcity of the majority of the pre-Elvis Sun 45s makes it difficult to verify, but my theory, based on some of Sam Phillips’s correspondence with the companies that made the stampers, is that the releases that were anticipated to only have limited commercial success were done in small quantities-often in increments of 500-locally in Memphis. “Now, when one checks the early Sun 45 rpm releases one by one,” Boija continues, “it is easy to note that many-but not all-have push marks. You can see them quite clearly on one of the preserved stampers for Elvis’s debut, Sun 209, which Joseph Pirzada in the U.K. “To the best of my understanding,” says Boija, “the push marks stem from the so-called stampers, the metal plates used when manufacturing the records. “Sun Records,” says Braitman, “obviously used the method of aligning the stamper over three pins, which, on the final vinyl result, looks like ‘push mark’ impressions.” In other words, the impression was made while the disc was still warm, transferred from the stamper to the vinyl.Ĭonfirming this view of events is John Boija, whose website chronicling the details of the 45s, 78s, and LPs recorded at Sun was recently added to our Hall of Fame.
Braitman, who gave us a fascinating interview about the British Invasion last summer, pointed me to a site called WorldLingo and this description of record manufacturing: “Each stamper was next centre punched methods used included aligning the final locked groove over three pins or tapping the edge while rotating under the punch until the grooves could be seen (through a microscope) to move constantly towards the centre.” One of the terms that kept popping up in the descriptions written about the King’s 45 rpm singles was “push marks.” I could see them beneath the label (look for the circular indentations to the left of the word “That’s” in the photo above-left, and to the right of the word “Kentucky” in the photo above-right), but it took a while to find an authoritative source to explain how they got there. In the course of writing about Elvis Presley memorabilia the other day, I found myself spending a lot of time looking at Elvis Presley records, particularly the 45s and 78s he cut at Sun Records for Sam Phillips.