Elvis Presley - The Albums and Singles Thread pt2 The Sixties

That’s a really good point.

 

It funny because after I bought a fair amount of Elvis and Charlie Rich albums on eight track, I replaced by entire collection with vinyl as I started to hate those tapes. My favorite part is how they would divide the last track on the first side of the album in half. Good grief!

 

I agree Skatterbrane. I think the "pre-Beatles" part is key here. Once Elvis relented on the publishing, he had some great material to record again.

 

Not being critical or judgmental. I am just conveying how the LP experience can be different as it comes to sequencing. I bet if HGTA came out after the advent of CDs, the sequencing may indeed have been different.

 

Though my friends had 8-tracks, I never did. I am the kind of person that if I can't get what I want, I do without. Thick As A Brick sucks on 8track.

 

I had to look that one up to see what you meant. Oh, I can imagine that would ruin the whole concept of the piece, it being one long song or piece of music.

 

I still have some old 8 tracks although I have replaced them with vinyl and CD over the years. It's funny that I haven't listened to them since the mid 1980's but I can still mentality cue the stop play-pause-CLICK-pause-resume play on several songs when I hear them now on different media. One of these days I'm going to mix a CD to mimic the horrific 8 track experience minus the match book under the cartridge of course.

 

I first heard the album on cassette, where it was heavily resequenced to make both sides roughly the same length:
A1 So High 1:56
A2 Farther Along 4:04
A3 Somebody Bigger Than You And I 2:25
A4 How Great Thou Art 3:00
A5 In The Garden 3:11
A6 Crying In The Chapel 2:24
B1 By And By 1:49
B2 If The Lord Wasn't Walking By My Side 1:36
B3 Run On 2:21
B4 Where No One Stands Alone 2:43
B5 Stand By Me 2:26
B6 Without Him 2:27
B7 Where Could I Go But To The Lord

I never really developed an attachment to this cassette sequencing however, because shortly thereafter I found the six-LP Australian box set (which I mentioned upthread) that had all the 1965-67 recordings in chronological order. That became my preferred listening order. Looking back though, I find the cassette sequencing to be an improvement over the LP, because it has a stronger opening track and puts the best song as the closing track, and has at least some variance in tempo throughout (even though the fast songs and slow songs remained fairly clustered together).

I grew up listening to records, and I'm here to tell you I most definitely would not have liked the original sequencing even if I'd first heard it that way on a record. I don't like that sort of sequencing (slow on one side, fast on the other) on any record I have ever heard. The "ton of bricks" effect could have been achieved by having a slow song end side one and a fast song open side two... you don't need both sides to be all fast and all slow.

 

I never thought you were mate

 

Before I got on here I thought 8-track was a recording device. I never saw any all through the seventies in Australia, not to say they weren't there ...

 

Bill Lear of Learjet invented them. The concept of a cassette is much less complicated. It is a wonder that cassettes didn't come out first. (And had they, 8-Tracks would have never taken off, pun intended).

 

I’ve never liked the song order on a lot of the early Elvis albums - fast song, followed by slow song, followed by fast song. And then - wait for it - a slow song.

 

It is a small world. My father knew Bill Lear as he got into the airline business in the late 60's and throughout the 70's, after the family got out of radio and television for awhile. One of the airlines had a fixed based operation and if memory serves me correctly, sometime in the early 70's, Elvis charted at least one of their Hansa jets (Not made by Lear, but a German company). I was watching The Searcher and I thought I recognized one of our planes in the footage. I could be wrong as I did not get great look at it, but I thought I recognized the red stripes, but for all I know it was a Lear and not a Hansa jet. I will have to look at it again. The Hansa jet had a wing forward configuration. I do remember my father talking about how they asked him if he wanted to meet Elvis, but my dad did not want to bother him with a meeting. One of my father's biggest regrets.

 

I used to install interiors in Lear jets back in the 80s.

 

Okay, I was mistaken as the footage in The Searcher is from the late 1960's and it is definitely a Lear jet and not a Hansa jet. I believe the leasing of the jet by Elvis occurred in the early 70's, before he owned his own airplanes.

 

You didn't miss anything. It was an amazing bit of mechanical technology coupled with horrendous audio capabilities. Cassettes were far superior for portable audio until the digital era.

 

According to wiki, cassettes were invented first, in 1962 (with 8-tracks being invented in 1964). But apparently the earlier cassettes had lower-quality tape and consequently lower fidelity, and they didn't start putting effort into making hi-fi cassettes until the early 70s.

 

RCA tape cartridge...



RCA tape cartridge - Wikipedia

 

Elvis had three albums released in this format... Elvis Is Back!, G.I. Blues and Blue Hawaii.

I've heard from a few collectors Something For Everybody was released too, but haven't been able to confirm this with any catalogs, photos and/or matrix numbers by RCA.

 

RCA mfg several models/players, here's an RCA IYB29 Model...

 

May 1st 1967

 

May 2nd 1967

 

By and By
Written By :
Charles Tindley, arranged by Elvis Presley

Recorded :
RCA's Studio B, Nashville, May 25-29, 1966: May 27, 1966. take 10

Another uptempo song directed at encouragement and uplifting. This isn't quite as a good as So High, but still has that good vibe about it.

 

If The Lord Wasn't Walking By My Side
Written By :
Henry Slaughter

Recorded :
RCA's Studio B, Nashville, May 25-29, 1966: May 28, 1966. take 5

This has a nice swing and is based around a call and response structure that works very well.