Danzig Sings Elvis

Having listened to the whole thing, I believe it deserves its own thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WmD3AOOfQo

*bookmarks thread*

I think he did this absolutely right. The production is extremely stripped-down, not in the vein of Johnny Cash's American Recordings but in the vein of the original Sun recordings (though Danzig pulls songs from Elvis's whole career, including obscure movie soundtrack numbers). One guitar, bare-bones drumming, a little piano and organ here and there. He doesn't metal it up like the version of "Trouble" he recorded in the '90s (which was great, mind you — I'm just saying, this isn't a whole album of that). Honestly, it sounds like early Cramps, or Robert Gordon, and that's a good thing. I wasn't expecting to be into this, but I am.

My biases: I love Elvis, especially the albums from 1969 until his death. I also love the Misfits, wish Samhain had production that suited the songs, and love the first four Danzig albums. I also like two of the more recent ones, Deth Red Sabaoth and Black Laden Crown, quite a bit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfQh03HRgsI

This is pretty good, thanks. Reminds me of those bluesy recent Tom Jones records you recommended, one of which has a cover of Gillian Welch’s “Elvis Presley Blues.”

how's voice holding up? i'll probably peep this later. and my opinions are almost virtually the same as unperson's on tiny elvis

Nicolas Cage?

Not bad, way better cover than some of those hard rock covers he did a few years ago.

yeah, glad it's not a buncha Elvis with shitty detuned palm muted power chords

lol

his pitch is really bad and he should not be singing this sort of music imo. I mean people should do whatever they want but lower in the register he's just pretty karaoke dude.

he does struggle a bit to hit the low notes, he is doing this frog thing that choir kids who are singing baritone but their voices haven't bottomed out yet do.

and his voice is a little reedy on the high notes.

but it's still in better shape than I thought it was at his age.

in his prime he was about 1/1000th of the singer Elvis was

he was never going to out-Elvis Elvis, he'd have been better served doing more of the rock'n rolly stuff I guess.

alright I got bored of this already.

anybody have a youtube playlist of the elvis versions? cause i don't know most of these.

in his prime he was about 1/1000th of the singer Elvis was

that's the thing about this. Elvis & Jerry Lee & all those dudes, the level of their craft is not some 'aw shucks I just showed up and sang it like I felt it' shit. even Elvis's early Sun sessions they're doing 8 or 9 takes on a song and you can listen them all and there's this church-bred consistency of attack, the freedom you get from discipline, the ability to do the same thing well over and over and get something different out of it every time. Danzig, an OK hard rock singer who has exactly two tricks (1: for the hard rock numbers, the Ian Astbury "sing an intervla on the concuding syllable of the linel, portamento quickly down to the note" special; for the ballads/intervals, the pseudo-croon), is not used to singing songs like these, songs where the melody demands a little investment in what you're doing. he is humbled and exposed when he tries to sing stuff like this, and he insults the material by drumming badly behind it but & putting the guitars through a Pod into a Mesa Mark V and just calling it a day.

i have not heard yet but i'm happy this exists.

xp So far it sounds about the same quality as the credits of Wild At Heart.

ah, you know what, if i want something done i might as well do it myself; these songs are all pretty easy to find streaming on youtube, so here's a quick playlist

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoTcUNbJmeCw1v9mW9uKDshSM1cxlufTl

Greil Marcus wrote about this album in his latest Real Life Rock Top 10 column. He agrees with me more than with JCLC, it seems.

10. Glenn Danzig, Danzig Sings Elvis (Cleopatra). Maybe not quite as far back as his punk days with the Misfits, but Glenn Danzig has threatened this record for decades. He falls short, or apart, with Sun rockabilly or well-known RCA material (“Baby Let’s Play House,” “When It Rains It Really Pours,” and “One Night”), but with his voice as full and deep as it can go, on ballads — not the ballad as Bob Dylan talked about it, but straightforward manufactured pop love songs — he inhabits levels of subtlety, doubt, certainty, and despair that Elvis didn’t allow himself.

The accompaniment is minimal, a fuzz guitar and backing vocals removed to a faraway, echoey dankness, and Danzig stills the room. “Is It So Strange” is not of this world; it seems somehow suspended between Elvis’s death and whenever the singer’s might be.

The heart of the music is in the many ballads slipped in as filler on Elvis soundtracks and throwaway albums that now live lives they never lived before, even when you could hear in Elvis’s own singing an implicit admission of how little he cared about the songs, or a listener’s apprehension of how much the songs wanted more: “Lonely Blue Boy,” “First in Line,” “Pocketful of Rainbows,” “Loving Arms,” “Young and Beautiful,” which closed Jailhouse Rock in 1957 — a song it’s hard to credit anyone would try again after the way Aaron Neville sent it to heaven in a live performance included on the bizarre 1990 tribute album The Last Temptation of Elvis: Songs from His Movies. But “Love Me,” played so slowly it’s hard to take, could be the one. The bridge — the I would beg and steal — so barely varies the song it doesn’t actually register as any kind of musical shift. The song is all on one plane, as if there is only one truth in life, as if for a moment someone glimpsed it.