Elvis Documentary 'The Searcher' Coming From HBO

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by artfromtex, Nov 16, 2016.

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  1. kingofthejungle

    kingofthejungle Forum Resident

    Location:
    Jonesboro,AR USA
    Well, they chose to use the 68 Special - an earlier attempt at telling Elvis's story creatively - as a framing device for the entire narrative. I liked the choice because it presents Elvis's entire career as a continuum, which is important to understanding his later work. It's certainly a better approach than the mere dismissal it usually receives.

    And in the case of Tomorrow is a Long Time. It comes early chronologically, sure. But what better song to illustrate the mystery and myth of Elvis's search. And it puts Dylan's lyric in a new context - you hear "if tomorrow wasn't such a long time, then lonesome would mean nothing to me at all" in close proximity to images of the highly segregated south. It's suggesting that if social progress had been further along, if learning from black culture had been more acceptable, perhaps Elvis wouldn't have had to be such an outsider.

    You may not have a taste for Springsteen's poetic flair, but he's never far from the mark. Elvis may not have thought while constructing his touring band that he was making a cross-section of the American musical experience, but in effect, that's exactly what he did. He had a rock rhythm section, a country pianist, a rockabilly lead guitarist, a girl soul group, a white gospel group and a big orchestra all up there at once. I found Springsteen's language to be very apt and insightful. Elvis may not have intended to make himself a vessel for the entirety of the American experience, but that's exactly what he became - a totem of a nation's possibilities and excesses, its idealism and its compromises.
     
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  2. kingofthejungle

    kingofthejungle Forum Resident

    Location:
    Jonesboro,AR USA
    I'd also like to add that while The Beatles Anthology is great and epic and definitive and all that, that I find myself returning more often to documentaries that are a little more expressionistic and interpretive - like Scorsese's No Direction Home or this film. The latter films are approached by their makers as artworks in their own right, and reward revisiting more than the standard documentary.
     
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  3. Champagne Boot

    Champagne Boot Ain't nothin' gonna break my stride

    Location:
    Michigan
    More extensive thoughts later once I can both backread the thread and process, but my immediate impression.

    100% nailed the ending. The entire theme of the second part was getting at the central paradox of Elvis' career: How could someone so talented who worked so hard to synthesize his artistic vision and hone his craft, be an active party to his own mismanagement to the extent that he never reached his creative potential? How did Elvis Presley become, well, Elvis?

    "If I Can Dream" is the perfect distillation: A great song that came out of Elvis' creative energy, a song he deeply believed in, a song he delivered with conviction on the biggest stage, totally unrestrained. What could have been if he'd been able to do that more often?
     
  4. BeatleJWOL

    BeatleJWOL Senior Member

    This one broke me, y'all. Real tears. Mostly because I relate so strongly with Elvis losing his mother, but also just the last third of the film, putting the decline in focus.

    I think people talking about chronology and rarity and all the expectations of a film like this are missing the point. It's telling a story, and what a story indeed. How to gain the world and lose your soul, as wise men once said.

    That said, WHERE IS THAT BURNING LOVE FOOTAGE FROM? I have NEVER seen that before and I thought I had it all, at least in the DVD era.
     
  5. ClausH

    ClausH Senior Member

    Location:
    Denmark
    It's from the On Tour rehearsals.
     
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  6. GillyT

    GillyT Forum Resident

    Location:
    Wellies, N.Z
    So true!

    It was the army segment that impacted me the most in that regard. So often when it comes up for discussion, the talk is always around "oh he did his duty", was a "model soldier" etc. Not being American, I didn't know that the draft back then only applied to some people. So does that mean that Elvis was deliberately targeted and "removed" from circulation?
     
    Last edited: Apr 16, 2018
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  7. BeatleJWOL

    BeatleJWOL Senior Member

    Is that new, never before (officially!) seen footage then? I know the Separate Ways footage is in the film.

    I need it all, is what I'm saying.
     
  8. ClausH

    ClausH Senior Member

    Location:
    Denmark
    Yes, it is new footage.
     
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  9. kingofthejungle

    kingofthejungle Forum Resident

    Location:
    Jonesboro,AR USA
    One thing that I think the documentary elides is that the experience of growing up poor left Elvis with two competing impulses: A desire to rebel against the society that rejected him and an outsized need for personal validation. Nic Cohn touches briefly on the fact that Elvis needed someone to tell him he was a good man, and that was the role his mother filled. What was unmentioned is that absent more powerful forces in his personal life, Colonel Parker tended to fill that role.

    Elvis's career breaks down into 4 major eras:

    1954-1960, when he's at the top of the world creatively.
    1961-1965, when he retreats into himself and slowly slides into irrelevance.
    1966-1970, his renaissance period that begins with How Great Thou Art and extends through the TTWII/Elvis Country period.
    1971-1977, his blue period in which he again turns inward and slowly falls apart.

    Obviously, Elvis was fine as long as his mother was alive, and even for a brief period afterward. It's only when impersonal projects like G.I. Blues and Blue Hawaii massively outsell personal projects like Flaming Star and Elvis Is Back that trouble begins. Colonel is able to argue that the former represents what the fans really want, and Elvis listens. This begins the slide into irrelevance. His recordings become less and less personal, he puts less and less fight into making good movies, until he finally crashes in 1965.

    It's no coincidence that his renaissance period directly corresponds with his marriage to Priscilla, the birth of his daughter and his attempt to start a family. He's got someone more important than Parker to lean on for personal validation - and it's also no accident that as the marriage falters, so does the old cycle of Elvis becoming less willing to fight to impose his will on the direction of his career.
     
  10. spanky1

    spanky1 Forum Resident

    Location:
    East Tennessee
    I somewhat agree, as I'm a much bigger fan of the Statesmen than I am of the Blackwood Brothers. However, the Blackwoods were Memphis based, and Elvis would have been involved with them much more frequently. No doubt that Hovie Lister's showmanship and stage presence influenced Elvis.
     
  11. chacha

    chacha Forum Resident In Memoriam

    Location:
    mill valley CA USA
    Speaking of Elvis’s first album, what’s the best sounding version of that on LP?
    Thanks
     
  12. kingofthejungle

    kingofthejungle Forum Resident

    Location:
    Jonesboro,AR USA
    You have a point that the Blackwood Brothers were of closer proximity to Elvis, but the Statesmen appeared in Memphis rather frequently, and were a constant feature at the all night sings that Elvis went to. It's said that the Statesmen were the favorite gospel quartet of the young Elvis, and as I'm sure you know, a listen to their catalog certainly bears that out.

    A little taste for the uninitiated:
     
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  13. RSteven

    RSteven Forum Resident

    Location:
    Brookings, Oregon
    What has always amazed me the most about Elvis besides his great voice and charisma is the seemingly vast and unbiased nature of his music influences and sensibilities for a lack of a better term. This man was not the least bit worried, in most cases it would seem, about indulging in the broadest spectrum of American popular music be it country, gospel, blues, light opera, pop, easy listening or rhythm & blues. He admired such a diverse group of singers from Dean Martin to Mario Lanza and Roy Hamilton to John Gary. This diversity of taste can drive some of his more rock leaning fans nuts, but this is Elvis just being Elvis. To him there were no limits or boundaries on music, there was just good and bad. I think that Elvis, Ray Charles and Charlie Rich were just sponges when it came to music assimilation and were hell bound not to be confined to critical or popular music limitations or boundaries. It truly made the three of them very unique artists and their respective music catalogues really demonstrate it in spades.
     
    Last edited: Apr 16, 2018
  14. kingofthejungle

    kingofthejungle Forum Resident

    Location:
    Jonesboro,AR USA
    This is exactly right, and I'd add Bob Dylan to that category, too. These guys were musicologists before anyone knew what the term meant.
     
  15. dudley07726

    dudley07726 Forum Resident

    Location:
    FLA
    Seemed to really skip over the bloated Elvis and didn’t mention what he died from. Though, they did mention he was hooked on pills. Just caught the last 45 minutes of the 2nd part. Did they mention him meeting with Nixon and discussing how bad the Beatles were for America youth? I’m not a fan of Jon Landau, the producer. Interesting that Parker, being an illegal immigrant, is the reason he didn’t let Elvis tour overseas.
     
  16. ClausH

    ClausH Senior Member

    Location:
    Denmark
    No mention of the Nixon meeting.
     
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  17. PacificOceanBlue

    PacificOceanBlue Senior Member

    Location:
    The Southwest
    Whether he is "never far from the mark" is debatable, but his commentary can come across as pretentious and artificial when he overdoes the "poetic flair" route. There are some Springsteen enthusiasts who eat up every syllable, but I found some of his over-the-top analysis in "The Searcher" a bit embarrassing...but he certainly gets an "A" for effort.

    I would argue that Elvis did not intend to make his stage show a vessel for the entirety of the American experience, and if some view the end product as inadvertently encompassing that American experience, it certainly is a reasonable assessment to make, but the vast majority of Elvis' work was not driven by a social-policical agenda in the way Springsteen's work can be, and to some degree, some of Bruce's interpretation of Elvis' work in "The Searcher" was rooted from his own artistic motivation, which does not necessarily lend to an accurate appraisal of Elvis' own motivations and work.
     
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  18. dudley07726

    dudley07726 Forum Resident

    Location:
    FLA
    They sanitized it as much as they could. Though, at this point in time with most of the people in that doc dead, there’s no reason to. Still amazing that even ill, he performed a hell of a lot of shows in the last years. Not taking away from his talent as a singer, he’s was quite a boring performer from 68 on.
     
  19. kingofthejungle

    kingofthejungle Forum Resident

    Location:
    Jonesboro,AR USA
    Coming from a visual arts background, the idea that there is a single narrowly defined way to appreciate an artist's work before it can be considered "accurate" is totally foreign. We invite aesthetic reappraisal, and welcome the observation of forces exhibited in an artist's work that may have been unconscious. Great artists are often able to capture more than they intended. In fact, being able to capture some aspect of life in a multidimensional way is a large part of what makes someone a great artist. I think it's also worth considering that Elvis's art has an inherently political dimension whether he intended it or not, because of the highly charged moment in which he was mixing divergent cultural forces. It's not surprising that Springsteen connects deeply to that aspect of Elvis's work.
     
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  20. john beacham

    john beacham Forum Resident

    We all know how the story ends, but it's still an overwhelmingly sad one. I believe Elvis had so much more to give the world. If he had only followed artistic muse after the triumphant and brilliant '68 comeback, and parted ways with the opportunistic Col Tom Parker, there's no telling what more he could have achieved.
     
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  21. dudley07726

    dudley07726 Forum Resident

    Location:
    FLA
    I think Springsteen was only in there because his manager produced this doc.
     
  22. BeatleJWOL

    BeatleJWOL Senior Member

    Yeah, sure, Springsteen hopped the gate at Graceland not to try to meet the man, but because he was a big fat phony. Get that outta here!
     
  23. Olompali

    Olompali Forum Resident

    Springsteen buys into that Rolling Stone style of rock writing (<koff, Greil Marcus, koff>) in that much must be made into grand myths and legends, spiritual promises and truths unveiled.
    It's like...Dylan didn't pick up the electric to rock, he did it to bring the lightning of freedom that America and the world so desperately needed as it rolled into war.
    It can make some :rolleyes:
    It can also rob the audacious fun from the artist's work.
     
  24. SoundAdvice

    SoundAdvice Senior Member

    Location:
    Vancouver
    Petty met Elvis when he was a kid and Bruce saw one of Elvis' final shows in Philly after his failed attempt to meet him at Graceland in 1976.
     
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  25. MRamble

    MRamble Forum Resident

    Initial impressions: a triumph. They were able to streamline a dense and complicated story into something that was deeply engaging and at times, gripping. Their decision to keep the interviewees out of the visuals was perfect. It keeps you focused on the world they've created and more importantly keeps you focused on Elvis and no one else. Zimny and crew effectively peeled back the crusted over layers of pop culture and revealed the life of an artist, a searcher, who's story was more tragic than anyone could have known.

    I was pleased just how perfectly they were able to use as most of Elvis' music to help push the story. I always knew a perfect soundtrack could be made from Elvis' recordings going beyond the greatest hits. Using the music to frame the stories and transition in and out of certain periods of this huge story were all done with exceptional precision.

    As a fan, I'm thrilled with what they've done here. Bravo all the way.

    PS. As much as this documentary is Elvis'--it kind of is also Tom Petty's.
     
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