David Peck has strong opinions about music DVDs, and he's not afraid to share them. As founder/president of San Diego-based Reelin' In The Years Productions, Peck oversees the world's largest music footage archive of more than 10,000 hours of performances spanning the past 70 years. Beyond his business interests, however, Peck also is a fan who fiercely believes that music is not getting the respect from DVD producers it deserves.

"Most music DVDs are put out with very little love," Peck argues, noting that most producers do little more than "throw whatever they have on their shelves" on DVD without any regard for the customers to whom they will market their products. "Listen, I'm a fan. When we [at RITY] do something, I'm doing it [to include] what I would want as a fan. I want liner notes, I want context.

"I just bought Saturday Night Live: 25 Years of Music , and there's nothing," Peck continues. (The five-disc set, released August 5, features the "best" live musical performances and comedy sketches in the show's history.) "The liner notes [consist of] three paragraphs, and there are no photographs. There should be a book that goes with this thing! To me, it's really offensive. It's not that hard. If you push hard enough [as a producer] and want it done, you can get it done."

By "it," Peck means a high-quality product that people will talk about and remember for years to come. Take, for example, The American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1966 Volumes One and Two —the veritable labor of love that Peck's company co-produced with Experience Hendrix, which oversees the estate of the late Jimi Hendrix. "In our case, we have a 24-page booklet of liner notes. We have a forward by [former Rolling Stones bassist] Bill Wyman. We wrote producers' notes. We found a woman who had taken photographs from all of these tours.

"It can't always be done this way, mind you," he continues. "But in this case, [the content] deserved the respect. Our goal really is not to just provide the material—which, in this case, is a real treat in and of itself—but to make people feel a sense of ‘wow' when they buy it. No one cares if it has French subtitles. I want the goodies. Give me context!

"The worst music DVD in the history of music DVDs, the least respect shown to something that should have been respected," Peck argues, is Ed Sullivan's Rock ‘N' Roll Classics , a nine-volume set containing 144 performances from the show's 23-year history. "This was the most significant show in the history of music on television, and [producer Rhino Home Video] didn't even have the courtesy" to discuss that history, Peck laments. "There's not one bit of liner notes, not one photo, misspellings everywhere. I look at things like that, and I just can't have it. We're hoping that other labels and companies will see what we've done with AFBF and think, ‘Maybe this is the way to do a music DVD.' If you spend just an extra 15 or 20 cents per disc, that's really all it adds up to at the end of the day.

"I'm not saying that all releases are bad," Peck adds. "But instead of thinking, ‘Let's get it out there because it's hot,' we should be thinking, ‘Let's get something out there that's classy.'"

Blues Fans Strike Gold
Released August 26 and available for purchase separately or in a special collector's pine box combining two DVDs and an audio CD, the AFBF set features nearly three hours of rare video footage of blues legends performing alone and in tandem at the American Folk Blues Festivals held throughout western Europe every fall from 1962 to 1970. Promoted by German blues enthusiasts Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau, the event—as noted in the set's liner notes—featured "the cream of American blues musicians... [and presented] blues culture and blues musicians from the twin vantage points of regional and historical breadth and depth.

"As a consequence," the notes continue, "the festivals played a significant role in introducing both the blues, in general, and a number of blues musicians, in particular, to European audiences. Just as importantly, the festivals served as a catalyst in jump-starting what was, in 1962, a very embryonic rhythm and blues scene in London."

"This was simply the most significant group of blues artists ever assembled," Peck explains. "These tours really pushed along the British R&B scene, which sent the music back to America." The historical and musical significance of these festivals is so enormous, Peck says, that including the story of their impetus and impact was imperative. As he and co-producer Jon Kanis write in their producers' notes: "How ironic that it took the vision of two German men and a German television station to record and preserve the very culture that we, as a nation, had very little respect and appreciation for at its time. To witness these musicians performing together in the spirit of family, cooperation, and camaraderie is an inspiration to us."

The heart and soul of the set, of course, is the newly rediscovered video footage that preserved these landmark performances. Originally shot on two-inch PAL black-and-white videotape on the soundstages of Südwestfunk, a German television station located in Baden-Baden, the footage remained in storage for nearly 40 years before Peck's music archival company was able to obtain the rights to rebroadcast it. (Today, RITY exclusively holds the rights to the music footage contained within 45 television stations in Europe and Australia—performances that, Peck notes, were likely only broadcast once or twice in their country of origin.) Artists featured in the 36 previously unseen, live-in-studio performances that comprise volumes one and two include Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Willie Dixon, Sonny Boy Williamson, T-Bone Walker, Memphis Slim, and Big Mama Thornton. (Volume three is slated for release next spring.)

Another highlight of the set, says Peck, is the inclusion of never-before-seen photographs of the artists taken during the television tapings. Shot by Stephanie Wiesand, a now-91-year-old German blues and jazz enthusiast who still lives in Baden-Baden, the photos included in the set are part of a 500-shot catalog that RITY now represents.

"This project is really the first one in which we had full range as a producer," Peck says proudly. "We really called the shots, and our vision drove it. The covers, for example, we completely conceptualized. We picked out the guitars [featured in the liner notes and menus], we organized the photo shoots." Production itself was handled by the Hip-O Records division of Universal Music Enterprises, the Santa Monica, California-based catalog group for Universal Music.

"David and Experience Hendrix found this footage and came to us with it," recalls Jeff Fura, a DVD producer with Hip-O Records. "We had worked with Experience Hendrix in the past on other projects. Eddie Kramer, the personal mastering engineer for Jimi Hendrix, had remastered the audio and made it sound great. The video footage just looked absolutely phenomenal. They didn't even have to do much to it. Once they finished working with the audio and video, they sent it to us. My job was to create the menu screens, quality-control the footage and audio, and make sure that everything worked together."

According to Fura, the menus were created in Adobe After Effects; the DVD itself was authored in Spruce Maestro 2.9 and encoded using Spruce's MPX-3000.

2003: The Year of the Blues

The August 26 release of the AFBF set was prescient in this, the U.S. Senate-proclaimed "Year of the Blues," because it preceded the fall PBS broadcast of Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues , a set of seven 90-minute blues documentary films directed by Scorsese and other Hollywood directors. (Companion products developed by Universal Music Enterprises and Sony Music include a five-CD boxed set; a 21-track, single-CD compilation; seven individual soundtrack CDs; and 12 individual artist collections. HarperCollins also published a 288-page companion book.)

"With the Martin Scorsese blues campaign going on, we really wanted to make sure AFBF was in the marketplace first," says Fura. "It took UME about two weeks to really crank it out, but it was important to do that so that we could hit first."

Equally important, says Fura, is relying on the demand such footage will elicit among blues fans. "Blues enthusiasts from around the world will find out about this footage and want it," he says. "It's going to be a word-of-mouth, long-term release—not a ‘what's hot now' product," he continues, by virtue of the fact that the footage is "unique and so rare. It was unknown to the world that this even existed, and it brings something really special to the marketplace."

"I am so proud of this package," adds Peck. "The blues releases out there now aren't done with as much love, and the footage from this era that was previously available is not the highest quality. Our efforts may be serving a niche market, but they're deserved."

(Experience Hendrix LLC, www.jimi-hendrix.com . Hip-O Records, www.hip-o.com . Reelin' In The Years Productions LLC, www.reelinintheyears.com. Universal Music Enterprises, www.universalmusicenterprises.com .)