Elvis Presley: Classic Or Dud?

just dropping in to say that those Guralnick books are essential reading

^

Springsteen was a bit of a mixed bag – his comments about the creation and performance were generally really insightful but the ones about Elvis’s artistry were often a bit much...

This is why he didn't want Elvis to perform across the border---Parker couldn't go with him, couldn't extend the reins much:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/colonel-parker-managed-elvis-career-but-was-he-a-killer-on-the-lam-108042206/

Thats is the most complete version I've come across.

Petty and Bruce were just distracting

(a 50/50 split!)

Louis Armstrong had the same deal with his manager, Joe Glaser. Ostensibly, at least in the beginning, it was accepted by Armstrong, as Glaser kept gangsters at bay. I don't know how Armstrong felt about the percentage in later years, and Glaser, not unlike Parker, pushed Armstrong into situations he was decidedly against, and which made lots of money ("Hello, Dolly!" most notoriously).

Without looking at his catalogue to check for sure, it’s infuriating to think that Elvis never covered Bob Dylan, the Beatles, or did a record of (non-religious) standards because of Colonel Tom Parker.

It’s also a little stunning that his whole career more or less mined the same early R&B, gospel and country influences he loved as a kid. One of the reasons I was never really a fan was that once you got past 1965 it all seemed so backwards looking. Now it looks more to me like stunted growth – again, thanks to Colonel.

For a guy who was a “searcher,” Elvis sure spent a lot of his career wandering around his manse doing very little searching. Odd.

Elvis did a few Dylan's--"Tomorrow Is Long Time has been kicking around ILX as of late. And iirc, he covered "Something" live.

...but yeah, lots of blown opportunities to be sure.

"I need a drink of water. My mouth feels like Bob Dylan spent the night in it."

About all I can add to this is banal and you've probably heard it a million times. But I feel like I've lived it, so indulge me. that Elvis epitomizes the Memphis approach to everything. The casual psychodrama of Memphis. The sublime and insane assurance that you are right and the rest of the world is wrong. The will to make a joke out of the most serious things and something serious out of the most inane shit. I don't really trust anyone who's a pop intellectual who has to slot Elvis into some scheme of "he blew it" or "he wasn't an idealist." Like I would say about Dean Martin, whom I think Elvis was the spiritual brother to, Nothing Matters. Except money, creature comforts, blowing the whole fucking thing off and being glad you can afford to do it. I don't ever listen to Elvis Presley; once in a while I do screen his greatest work, Clambake, the kind of dada I can relate to. I also sometimes listen to "Kentucky Rain" or "True Love Travels on a Gravel Road," and his Dylan cover is really good. I plan on never listening to the guy again as long as I live. I don't believe in him and I think the Guralnick approach, fine as Guralnick is, as good a man as he apparently is and humane, is beside the point when it comes to Elvis. I think anyone who's ever spent time in Memphis, I lived there for almost a decade, gets this pretty much immediately. He's a copy of a copy of a copy and yet real, and he's a joke. Which is how the city is, it might as well not even exist. But Dean Martin! He's great in Rio Bravo, and he's also just as inauthentic as Elvis but somehow far more real. Elvis never got close to the scene in that film in which Dean, drunk for a year, starts to fish around in the spittoon for the silver dollar piece, and Wayne kicks him away. But Dean never sang a musical-comedy number, one of the worst songs ever written, while riding a motorcycle thru Florida with a bad Jerry Reed lookalike. That's my two cents on Elvis.

xps Elvis also covered "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright"

great post edd

Elvis did "Get Back" live

He definitely had a great understanding of hearing a song and knowing it could be an Elvis song

So then by your lights, edd, Alex Chilton is some sort of Elvis through the cracked looking glass filled with Brandy or something

I usually think of myself as a "Sun Sessions, Suspicious Minds, and a couple of other songs" type of Elvis fan, but last night for no particular reason other than the topic of Elvis somehow came up and I was trying to explain to my 6-year old who he was, I decided to put on "Golden Records" for the first time in a couple of years, and I'll be durned if those hammy, hokey songs didn't all sound pretty great. Those ham-fisted arrangements might not win points for authenticity or sublety, but no matter how hard he drives his thoroughbred of a voice, Elvis never really sounds like he's breaking a sweat selling the shit out of those tongue-in-cheek Lieber/Stoller lyrics.

Honestly another thing that I really got out of the doc was how *beautiful* he was especially young Elvis, what an amazing creature you couldn't not be drawn to him

otm

and weirdly childlike
like him & Priscilla holding hands in divorce court

I heard a cheap cover of “always on my mind” and yeah it’s a willie song but I couldn’t help but think of the EP version and how emotionally pregnant it is

I think if I'd lived in Memphis for a decade, I might not ever want to listen to him again either, much less read books about him. But considering how carefully contrived his approach was, from intuition and in-accrual of method, referencing once again The Complete Sun Sessions and studio bootlegs, plus night after night on stage, in quite a range of settings and situations, and considering how interested he got in other performers bouncing his signature sounds back at him----on The Million Dollar Quartet, he keeps trying to tell his hopped-up colleagues about seeing that fella with Ward and the Dominoes (he means Jackie Wilson, Billy Ward's lead singer at that point), in Vegas, doing an Elvis song, singing "tellyphone"--E is fascinated by this detail; did he not know he was singing "tellyphone'?---considering how often he later fell back on self-imitation, and how known the stylistic elements were even at best, it's amazing how many tracks still work---mainly because he found his way back to material that worked for him and his audience, no matter how sappy etc. some of it might be otherwise---I don't particularly give a shit about "Bridge Over Troubled Water" or "How Great Thou Art" or even (gasp!) "Tomorrow Is A Long Time" as sung by anybody else.
(Speaking of Dylan, Presley's jam or vamp on "Don't Think Twice," which I've found on the 'Tube in 5 and 12 minute clips, is just repeating the same words and vocal efx forever, a big bad jokey waste that takes us back to Edd's take.)

"in-accrual"? Ah meant plain "accrual," like.

The song that affects me most is American Trilogy - i guess the Hawaii version. So hush, little baby, don’t you cry / you know your daddy’s born to die ... his truth is marching on... dudes got death on his mind, right?

all my trials lord, soon be over ...

elvis did "hey jude" too

So then by your lights, edd, Alex Chilton is some sort of Elvis through the cracked looking glass filled with Brandy or something
Yeah, filled with a girl named Brandy. Fundamentally Elvis and Chilton are coming from the same place. An attitude toward pop itself, toward seriousness of all kinds. Furry Lewis did it perhaps better than either of them. Stay out of tune, stay aloof from the real world while bemoaning your shitty place in it--Furry swept the street, Elvis drove a truck and hated it, Alex reveled in how it feels to lose your job and be on the bottom. All very Memphis attitudes. I like to exaggerate and I'm definitely doing that in that post above. I do appreciate Elvis, but he's just so hard to listen to now, he's a failed god wandering among this detritus he helped create, and that's not something impressionable young people are good at dealing with, and that's why people like simple rock 'n' roll so much.

There’s a clip of him playing with Lady Madonna on the 70s box.

And, I'd add, I like to exaggerate because that's what rock 'n' roll requires. As Elvis did so well and Alex Chilton, perhaps the most recognizable Memphian after Elvis, tried hard to negate by turning the personal into ugliness you could enjoy. Dickinson also understood this principle, as did Rufus Thomas when he wore short pants, acted like a piece of fried chicken on two legs, and so forth. Tall tales and exaggerated bathos and pathos, perhaps. I wonder what The Searcher's conclusions are about Elvis.

I’d like to add that his closing performance of “If I Can Dream” from the ‘68 Comeback Special suggests that Elvis also seemed to leave a career of being the world’s greatest soul singer on the table. Holy shit, what a performance.

The '70s box has a brief informal rehearsal of "I Shall Be Released." It ends with Elvis just saying, "Dylan." It's a shame it never got a proper arrangement or recording -- I could see it benefiting from an overblown horns-and-strings arrangement.

ha, I have that "Dylan...." echoing away in a mix I made from the period.

I'm sure this has been posted a million times here (and by me, too) but I don't see it in this thread (and haven't seen the doc yet, if it's included)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmLOt9mRD18

To say that Elvis was more expressive than his contemporaries or that there was a yearning in his voice isn't really enough. I know it's common knowledge but all the spending and gift-giving, his jealousy and possessiveness of friends and lovers, the hyperactivity and almost constant joking and punning you hear in-studio, and of course the drugs—all of it was maintained to keep a profound pain at bay. That's what I hear even in some of his goofiest stuff and what for me elevates him as an interpreter and performer—a need to go down into what is painful about music, to locate what hurts in a song and stay there and suffer it, maybe in the hope the pain will abate when it's over.

I haven't seen this yet but I look forward to watching it. In the meantime, re: Bruce and Petty, I find it fascinating that such different people could be equally impacted by Elvis. On one hand you've got Bruce, who is clearly indebted as a musician/ performer. But then Petty, there is virtually no overt Elvis influence, at least not to my eyes and ears. It's like when Ozzy cites the Beatles as his favorite band. We're so used to acts sounding like the Beatles that it's easy to forget the band's impact was so huge that one needn't sound like the Beatles - or even make music at all - to have been influenced by the Beatles. Same with Elvis. (And Dylan, and Bowie, Madonna, Prince, and a few others). It's a pervasive, epochal, elementally cultural impact.

Lemmy was mad for the Beatles, Elvis, all that. It’s more the age group that is the tell rather than their personal musical style

I'd guess class and obviously race played a role, too.

Also who the hell else was on then?

Lemmy was mad for the Beatles, Elvis, all that. It’s more the age group that is the tell rather than their personal musical style

But remember, Lemmy saw the Beatles play in Hamburg, and said they were basically a speed-freak punk band at that point.

much like Christian Nolan digging Stanley Kubrick while not making Kubrickian movies, people can be hugely influenced by a singular artist while taking that energy into entirely new directions

Christopher Nolan even

But also: it’s not quite the same thing but I have 2 friends, one my age and one 10 yrs younger. We were talking abt Michael Jackson & she just didnt get our love for him bcz by the time she was old enough to know about his music he was full tilt boogie weird.
If you werent there when the wave hit, it’s hard to explain what that feeling was like & how that joy compounds over time & carries you through the weirdness

When I went to see a tribute band play Michael Jackson, the crowd responded proportionally by age/generation depending on whether the music was Motown, Off the Wall, Thriller or Bad.

But much more than, say, someone like Kubrick, Elvis (like the Beatles) demarcated a clear cultural before/after.

Esp. for people in palookaville, I imagine. Did anyone look at (insert pre-Elvis musical star here) and think, that could be me? That is my way out of middle of nowhere poverty?

When I went to see a tribute band play Michael Jackson, the crowd responded proportionally by age/generation depending on whether the music was Motown, Off the Wall, Thriller or Bad.

when i was in full Thriller mania, learning to moonwalk etc, a younger friend of my parents said, you know how you feel about Michael Jackson? that's how i felt about Michael Jackson when i was your age

The way he says “Dylan” in the take above, it’s an incantation.

Did anyone look at (insert pre-Elvis musical star here) and think, that could be me? That is my way out of middle of nowhere poverty?

Hank Williams? i think the lack of grooming and willingness to not shy away from southernness & stereotypes about hillbillies was pretty unique and somewhat democratizing.

however im not sure if there was even a pre-Elvis music industry marketing infrastructure to support a popular idea of music as a ticket to riches. like that way of thinking was probably true for Hollywood (and to that effect Elvis is a bit old school by also being a film star) but i dunno.

also this was an era before LP as album & recorded music automated most things, i'd imagine there were lots more opportunities for working musicians. perhaps it was more of a legit career path back then than the "you'll never make it as a giant star" all-or-nothing sort of success chasing we have now.

that unchained melody clip just left me speechless....six weeks before he died...jesus, he's just giving everything to get through it

Hank Williams? i think the lack of grooming and willingness to not shy away from southernness & stereotypes about hillbillies was pretty unique and somewhat democratizing.

There's a great book about the history of country music (and "country music") called Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class; definitely worth checking out.

Is there any documentary that covers the more tawdry aspects of his celebrity – ie, the karate/friend peanut butter and banana sandwiches/super young girlfriends, etc. I appreciate that this doc tried to focus on his artistry as it can be lost among that stuff. But I realize I don’t really know much about it and my sense is that it’s not exactly irrelevant.

peanut butter and banana sandwiches are very good and not tawdry