Elvis Presley: Classic Or Dud?

That's really good, both as a survey of his career and as a memory of August 1977. Thanks!

I guess you didn't get to see Geraldo Rivera in a white TCB In A Flash jumpsuit on that side of the pond during that fateful August way back when.

typically excellent piece from marcello -- espec. nice to see someone taking elvis's 'lost' early '60s years (after the army but before the comeback) seriously.

Agreed. Although I think "Stuck on You" is a little better than he credits.

Yeah, that was nice. Never really noticed all the stalkerish/rapey lyrics in his tunes but y'know, he was the King

In 1977 there were 170 Elvis impersonators. By 2002 there were 85,000. At that rate of growth, by 2019 a third of the world's population will be Elvis impersonators

http://www.moma.org/collection_images/resized/162/w500h420/CRI_151162.jpg

when i visited Tupelo, loved the sign on the church opposite the birthplace: "COME INSIDE AND MEET THE REAL KING!"

ha.

during a drunken session last week i ordered the legacy editions of the kings debut, and 'elvis is back' each of which is backed with another album, plus a lot of extra tracks.

Buying this tomorrow.

bought Elvis in Memphis recently, partly because of this or another ILM thread and ugh really not feelin it. Should've gone w/Sun Sessions.

That live set looks amazing. Can't wait to hear your thoughts on it.

i love 'from elvis in memphis' -- it's prob the one i'd take to a desert island -- but yeah 'elvis at sun' is the one even elvis-haters ought to love.

i have the 'elvis stage' 2 cd legacy edition, so thinking i dont need the new live set ..

or do i ?

I believe it is a different band, different setting, different year. So yes? I think?

The On Stage set (which I might pick up this week) is Las Vegas 1970, this one is NYC 1972. Basically the same band (James Burton, John Wilkinson Jerry Scheff and most importantly Ronnie Tutt on drums—on the MSG set the dude is practically playing blast beats on some of the rockabilly numbers) but a lot of different material. I think you need both.

ok.
i'm convinced.
on stage is totally brilliant ..
the band are beyond good ...
i've played this and the legacy editions all weekend and loved every minute.
guess this new set has to be added to the archive.

I threw on 30 #1's for the hell of it last night driving home. I've listened to Elvis, especially hits, for most of my life, and in my head there was always the memory of this big sound that went with 'All Shook Up'...but I realized it's all Elvis! I mean that song is just handclaps and a faint piano! (or that's what it sounds like). The way he performs it, it's almost acappella. I dunno why but that blew me away.

Watched this Roy Orbison and His Friends tv concert video a week or two ago and was happy to realize that the house band was basically Elvis's TCB band from the Vegas period.

Cool interview with Steve Binder about the 68 Comeback special

http://www.elvis.com.au/presley/interview_steve_binder.shtml#sthash.ZZ30qGFA.dpbs

Q : Was there a mix-up of tickets where no one showed up and you had to get people from Bob's Big Boy?

A : The incident with the tickets was --- I went to Colonel Parker and when I was told it was okay to do this and I decided we'd have two audiences and we were inviting 250, 300 people to come to each one of these sessions. And so I had NBC guest relations print up the Elvis Presley tickets. And believe me, we could've sold those tickets for $1000 apiece or something, even in those days. I mean, to see Elvis Presley for an hour or two, you know, improvisationally singing and talking and everything was just unheard of. And so I went to the Colonel and I said 'How many tickets do you want for your friends or your family or RCA or whatever?' And he said, 'Bindel, said you don't understand how the Colonel works'. He said, 'I don't want any tickets. But, if you want all of Elvis fans with the bouffant hairdos and all the screaming and yelling and everything from Memphis,' he said, 'I want all the tickets. And if you give me all the tickets, that means all of 'em. You can't have any, NBC can't have any, Singer can't have 'em, nobody gets 'em'.

So I went to NBC and I went to Bob Finkel, and I went to the sponsors and I said 'This is the deal. And for me there's no contest, let's give 'em to the Colonel and let's get this, cull this audience'. Not taking into consideration that my real feelings were, in all honesty, is I didn't trust what the Colonel said. I mean, I just didn't feel 100 percent confident when he said he was gonna do something it was really gonna happen. And I usually try and protect my backside all the time by anticipating whether things are gonna happen. In this case I didn't. I convinced everybody to give the Colonel all of the tickets for both shows, which I did. He got out his briefcase and all the tickets went into the briefcase. And I'm expecting these airplanes to fly in from Memphis, and all these screaming women coming out and all the Elvis hard core fans and so forth.

And about two days after the tickets were given to the Colonel, the guard at NBC while I was driving out one evening, said 'Hey Steve, do you need any tickets for Elvis?' And I said 'What are you talking about?' And there on his desk in the guard booth was a stack of Elvis Presley tickets. That was my first indication we're in trouble in River City, you know, we're in deep trouble if this doesn't come off. So the next morning I got there extra specially early, expecting to see the Johnny Carson, Jay Leno fans lined up outside of NBC but, you know, tenfold. I just expected there'd be fans taking over all of Burbank wanting to see Elvis Presley. There was nobody and I drove into the gate and we're gettin ready to organize the staff and the stage to shoot this sequence and all of a sudden the head of the guest relations comes to me and said 'Steve we're in big trouble'. There's just a few people standing outside. Those tickets weren't distributed. They didn't go to anybody. So we panicked. I mean, we called some friends of ours at some local radio stations and asked them to promote it on the air. We sent somebody over to Bob's Big Boy to ask customers eating hamburgers and malts to come over to see Elvis Presley and we somehow pulled together with enough people at NBC who were there, calling their friends and families and what have you to get these audiences in there.

Wow

what i love about the colonel is he was actually a pretty shitty businessman -- like outright incompetent -- who managed to fool everyone into thinking that he was this slick master operator just by acting like everyone's cartoon image of what a slick, devious businessman was like.

yeah Charlie Louvin's descriptions of him in his book give the impression that he wasn't much more than a legitimized carny

Motherfucker took an insane percentage, and his renegotiations with RCA were so inept that not only did Elvis lose out on millions, but the Colonel himself did too.

Also, wasn't it some shadiness with Parker that was the reason Elvis never played outside the US?

Parker was an illegal alien, and could have been denied reentry in the States if Elvis had travelled overseas.

^ bingo

albert goldman's 'elvis' actually has a lot of great, fascinating stuff about parker in it, espec his shady background and total mismanagement of elvis's finances.

man on stage is fucking great, huh

I gotta get that. His 70s band(s) were insane.

albert goldman's 'elvis' actually has a lot of great, fascinating stuff about parker in it, espec his shady background and total mismanagement of elvis's finances.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Thursday, April 25, 2013 12:47 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'd heard that about the Goldman book, but because it's Goldman, stayed away. May check it out.

It's one thing for a manager to screw their artist and make millions doing it; but from what I've read, Parker screwed himself out of millions, possibly hundreds of millions. That's kind of amazing in its way.

man on stage is fucking great, huh

oh yes ...

Yeah, I love this period of Elvis. I had a bootleg cassette copy of his Vegas 72 opening night in college and it was one of my favorite things. I mean, there's nothing he can't sing, nothing the band can't play, it's just awesome to hear him kill every single song.

That's The Way It Was band is killer

er That's the Way IT IS

that is

#waltercronkite

#rundmc

I bought that 2CD Madison Square Garden '72 set when it came out last year, and that band fucking tears it up. The drummer, Ronnie Tutt, in particular, is amazing.

Crazy - after Elvis's death, Ronnie Tutt joined the Jerry Garcia Band, and is now Neil Diamond's drummer!

wow, I didn't know that

A bunch of the TCB guys backed Gram Parsons on his solo joints, but you knew that already.

Crazy - after Elvis's death, Ronnie Tutt joined the Jerry Garcia Band, and is now Neil Diamond's drummer!

― 誤訳侮辱, Thursday, April 25, 2013 2:39 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Weird, I didn't know that either! Kinda almost makes me wanna go see Neil Diamond. Almost.

Ron, Jerry Scheff and James Burton were also on Elvis Costello's King of America. Scheff was in EC's touring band for a while, dunno if any other TCBers were.

Kinda almost makes me wanna go see Neil Diamond. Almost.

That urge came over me for a second, too. Then I remembered the Neil Diamond songs I know and changed my mind.

I like how effortlessly Elvis can hit all the low notes in Sweet Caroline that Neil struggles with

what i love about the colonel is he was actually a pretty shitty businessman -- like outright incompetent -- who managed to fool everyone into thinking that he was this slick master operator just by acting like everyone's cartoon image of what a slick, devious businessman was like.

been reading a bio on Colonel Parker, he's from my hometown, anyway if you've seen Mae Wests I'm No Angel, the Colonel is like Big Bill and Slick combined. he's a sheister, a sideshow man.

in the thirties the Colonel was working for some kind of local animal rescue organisation (!) in Florida, at some point he thought he figured he could sell people gravestones for their animals (it worked) then he figured maybe sell 'em flowers as well (like the Colonel would provide flowers on the pet graves for all times) now the real Colonel thing isn't that, it's that he actually went to some florist and said 'say can I pick up your unsold flowers in the evenings'. 'Yeah sure, glad to get rid of 'em', and the Colonel put those on the pets graves. When people remarked "hey those flowers are sloppy" the replied: 'you should've seen 'em yesterday, they were marvellous"

i was in a very depleted fopp today when this full on version of 'suspicious minds' came on.
massive band sound and thumping instruments etc.

sounded ace, and made me think damn, i love this.

it was only as the track progressed i thought i need this version as its not the same as the epic live/studio versions i have.
turned out it was from that 'viva elvis' show ..

of course this being ilm we have to hate such projects, but fuck it, the song is strong enough to withstand such a makeover
- especially as the vocals were original.

nothing though beats the full 7 minute 'on stage' version (same goes for 'polk salad annie', 'proud mary' etc ... )

otm

"Polk Salad Annie" is the Mount Rushmore of Vegas-era Elvis.

really enjoying this revive, also taking notes on records to look up, thanks y'all. I've only read the Guralnick books, and I have the two old RCA #1 box sets, but I have a vivid memory of hearing a killer live recording around 15 years ago and I bet one of these is it.

I got caught up last night in watching EAP videos from the 70s on YouTube. Every damn song he sang, he just completely owned. Watch his version of Bridge Over Troubled Water. Dude was as high as the UP Building, but it didn't stop him from greatness.

Man, even something as outdated and cheesy as the American Trilogy, when he gets to that part of "Hush, little girl and don't you cry..." My heart melts.

I dunno if it was in the Binder interview or somewhere else I read it, but after the 68 comeback special, he enjoyed the experience so much he said to that he wouldn't ever sing a song he didnt believe in or work with musicians he didn't like, because the whole movie experience had sucked the soul out of him creatively. I think that's why, right up until shit really hit the fan performance-wise & he was visibly deteriorating, that he could still be so affecting. For me, his power as a singer was in his ability to convey a full range of emotion, not just the big ones but the subtle ones inbetween...and when he felt it, you felt it.

Listening to the 30 #1's compilation as an album the other day, I really noticed the hollowness in those midperiod songs...it *sounds* like Elvis, and I enjoy some of those songs a lot, but they don't feel like Elvis, in that ~hits you in the feels~ way that characterizes him for me.