I sequenced the songs and took the tapes to Marjorie Tahaney of RCA Records to be mastered and custom-pressed. The first test pressings arrived the following February. Not knowing any better, I had trusted the prestigious RCA to get it right. But the sound was a mess, thin, with very low level, the music barely audible above the surface noise. RCA, wearing its cloak of corporate infallibility, insisted that the pressings matched the level of their calibration disc. "No," argued I, and borrowing a friend's car, drove five hours through a bitter winter night to RCA's studios in New York to supervise another transfer. This time I brought a Scott pre-amplifier, which had a wide variety of equalization, compression, and companding controls, and inserted it into the recording chain between the tape recorder output and the mastering amplifier to achieve a warmer, fuller sound. It worked....

October 10, 1950 is the date on which Elektra became real for me. School had started in late September. I was in my junior year, slogging through the middle of the Hundred Great Books and simultaneously looking for a label name. I recalled a Greek demi-goddess, one of the Pleiades, who presided over the artistic muses. Electra. Electra with a C struck me as too soft. I had always admired the use of Ks as brackets in the Kodak trademark; I liked their solid bite. So I chose a Germanic form and substituted K for C. Much better. Unable to afford special graphics, much less a logo, I turned two Ms on their side to create a distinctive E for the label and the jacket logo.

Records have "ARC" scratched in dead wax followed by ....