Elvis Presley - The Albums and Singles Thread pt3 The Seventies

As with You Gave Me A Mountain, I much prefer the EIC version of My Way to the Aloha version. It's a stunning performance, with Elvis taking an incredibly mawkish song and making it meaningful. My go-to version is the mix/edit on the silver box, which omits the spoken intro (and single-handedly makes the TV shows disc worthwhile).

By contrast, Elvis couldn't sound less engaged on Can't Help Falling In Love than he does here. I Got A Woman/Amen could probably be edited down to a decent filler track by editing out the interminable intro and the dive bomb sequence, which end up making the performance very hard to sit through.

I don't mind Love Me, but it's not something I would ever seek out.

 

Thankfully, the master is edited and we only have to suffer the divebomb once on record. Elvis made JD do it twice at the Rapid City show.

 

It is a good thing EIC was omitted from the box set. No need to bring the overall quality of the package down by including a posthumous live album representing Elvis at his worst.

 

He alternated between once and twice, sometimes J.D. just wasn't low enough.

 

I always get a little choked up even years later here. This was recorded just a few weeks after Vernon lost Elvis. He wasn't a rock star to Vernon but a son. I've heard that the hardest thing anyone will ever have to do is bury one of their children. I recall that Elvis introduced his dad in EIC and said that he was glad he could be there because he had been too sick to travel for a time before. I've read that Vernon pretty much died of a broken heart over losing Elvis. Add to that an attempt at stealing the body of Elvis that prompted him to move the graves of Elvis and Elvis' mother's remains to be buried at Graceland. He only lived a couple of more years.

 

Two notes about EIC:
1. The saddest part is when Elvis introduces his father, he can barely get the words out.
2. When Elvis is straining at the climactic end of Jailhouse Rock, you hope against hope he's not going to get a stroke. And I was surprised at the body movement he does during that sequence, a very brief burst of energy.

 

Vernon's "goodbye" is absolutely heartrending. Interestingly, the "goodbye" is not on the video version. And who needed the echo added on the LP version?

 

I feel the opposite. EIC has been treated by RCA and then BMG as a regular item in the catalogue - the only posthumous album to have remained permanently in print, I believe. It was even released relatively early on in the Elvis in the 90s campaign - so it seems odd that, now, Ernst & Co try to forget it exists. That doesn't mean I think it's of great quality, because it clearly isn't, but I also wouldn't say it was much worse than Boulevard.

But the idea of 60 discs for 60 years was clearly decided upon before they worked out how many albums Elvis recorded. I like the box very much, and it is very interesting to hear the albums and songs in the order they were released rather than the chronological order of sessions that we are so used to now. But limiting it to 60 discs meant they were trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, and ultimately resulted in some ludicrous choices of bonus songs (most, if not all, of which should have been on the final three discs) and the elimination of albums that should have been included, whether they included duplication or not. But Sony do have a habit of messing things up. Even on the Johnny Cash set - which is more coherent than the Elvis one - they still deleted Destination Victoria Station, meaning a number of masters are not included.

 

I couldn't find the This Is Elvis edit but I think this is pretty good.

 

Regardless if the album has quietly been in print for decades, the box set was designed to focus on lifetime albums (albeit with flaws), and EIC was clearly not a lifetime album. There was no value in adding EIC.

 

Arguably the strongest performance from EIC. The arrangement and overall vocal delivery from Aloha is preferable, but as with many later period Elvis concerts, he delivered on one or two ballads during the course of an hour-long, mostly substandard concert, and in Rapid City, he mostly delivers with My Way.

 

I doubt at this point that Elvis was going to change any of the fixture songs in the show. I was thinking when he did Love Me, that was a que to the band and security that he was going to mingle and kiss and say hello to the crowd of ladies just like in part of Suspicious Minds. Everyone with the the show knew what to do and where to be by these signpost songs including Elvis. I get that CHFIL was the perfect closing song for the show but I often wonder what it would have been like if he would have mixed it up earlier when he returned to live performing.
Songs like an uptempo I Want You, I Need You I Love You or As Long As I Have You would have been great show closers too.

 

Elvis does a fine job here with You Gave Me A Mountain and My Way. I have to admit that I think the Aloha version edges out the EIC My Way but I enjoy both versions.
The I Got A Woman/Amen sequence was always pretty cool to me. I figure it was just show filler but I liked it from the beginning how Elvis would segue from IGAW into some quasi gospel then over to a JD divebomb then to a reprise of IGAW. From what I've heard of his private jam sessions, this was the kind of stuff he liked to do. I Can't Help Falling In Love has lost its luster for him long ago it seems. I wished he had mixed it up with closing songs just to keep things interesting.

 

For me, My Way is leagues better on EIC than Aloha, because of the emotional resonance of the 1977 version. The 1973 version feels detached.

 

I lean to Elvis On Tour for You Gave Me A Mountain.

For My Way, it's not a song I was ever keen on Elvis doing, but of all the versions Aloha is better executed.

Elvis In Concert is performed well enough, but its gravitas seems to be wholly tied to Elvis passing less than 2 months later.

 

I can see that. My Way from EIC is more intimate and Elvis gives a great performance. I like the Aloha version because of the much larger orchestral accompaniment. The one thing about My Way is that which ever version someone is playing, I would enjoy listening to it!

 

I'm partial to Saginaw 4/25/1977.

 

Ironically, this version has been confused for the Rapid City single master on at least one release; FTD's Hits of the 70s.

 

What a pointless release that was....

 

It could have been so much better with the mono tracks...

 

Hitstory as well.

 

Sad to say, but the detail that sticks in my mind re. the My Way single is the terribly executed applause loop on the end.

Or am I thinking of Unchained Melody - or perhaps it was both!

Y'all know what I'm talking about!

 

The latter!

 

I think it should have been included. It was a project/release that Elvis knew was going to happen, and "approved of" as much as he approved of any project. The album would have been released had he lived... its configuration might have been slightly different, but the performances by Elvis would have been exactly the same (meaning, it was not an unfinished album that he was planning to do additional work upon). I believe that its omission from the box was a subjective decision with "it's a posthumous album" being used as an after-the-fact rationalization. What I mean by that is that if the concert had been a fantastic performance that everyone agreed was great, then no one would have cared that it was posthumously released and it would have been included on the box without question. Since it's not, they contrived the excuse that it was posthumous as a way of excluding it.

To look at it another way. Let's imagine hypothetically that The Who had decided to break up when Keith Moon died. And then imagine that years later they released a Complete Who box set. Would you argue that The Kids Are Alright soundtrack album should be excluded from that set because it was a posthumous release?

 

This is easily the best track on the album. I prefer it to the Aloha rendition, actually. Elvis' voice isn't the same, but he gives it a more melodramatic performance that in this case works well, despite his diminished vocal ability. And I think the band is far better on this version than the 1973, particularly Ronnie Tutt.