Elvis Presley - The Albums and Singles Thread pt2 The Sixties

Wow, good to know that I am not the only one that rates He Touched Me so highly. I love all three of Elvis's gospel albums, but I would place them in the exact same order as you do.

 

Me too!!

 

Hey, @PepiJean where did you get that pic for your avatar? I really like it.

 

Thanks! It is the cover of my favorite Elvis compile: "American Rock'n'roll Hero" (1968/1971). I did it with Photoshop, drawing directly on a 1971 blury picture.

 

That's really, cool. If you could post a bigger image of it, I would appreciate it.

 

Obviously Elvis and his management felt that Easy Come, Easy Go was an exceptional piece of work, since it was allowed to leapfrog Double Trouble on the schedule and get released first. Ha. Just kidding. I do wonder why it came out first, though.

This is one of those films I enjoyed watching with my daughter when she was younger, and we also enjoyed listening to the soundtrack. So it's one that I probably cut more slack than it deserves.

The title song is catchy but lightweight. The performance seems unenthusiastic. The sound is lousy, being recorded on the soundstage.
The Love Machine is a silly movie song, and incredibly sexist to boot.

Looking at Keith Flynn's site, I see that Jerry Scheff plays the saxophone on these sessions... I believe this is his debut on an Elvis record. Better things to come for him later.

 

That is what got my attention when looking at the musician credits. Jerry apparently was adapt at more than one instrument. I am glad he took up the bass though because he turned out to be a virtuoso with that instrument.

 

"Take it on, Jerry." - E

 

Speaking of Jerry Scheff, here’s a great interview where he talks about getting started in the industry, playing horns, etc.:

Interview with Jerry Scheff | Elvis Articles

 

Yoga Is As Yoga Does
Written By :
Fred Burch & Gerald Nelson

Recorded :
Paramount Studio Recording Stage, Hollywood, September 28-30, 1966: September 29, 1966. take 12

You can almost hear Elvis saying "thank God" at the end of this take. This song may have some relevance in the movie .... here it sounds like a children's song by an uninterested entertainer. Possibly my least favourite Elvis song.

 

You Gotta Stop
Written By :
Bill Giant, Bernie Baum & Florence Kaye

Recorded :
Paramount Studio Recording Stage, Hollywood, September 28-30, 1966: September 30, 1966. take 1

The opening of this song sounds like it came straight from Runaround Sue. The song isn't too bad, but after the yoga song, it would need something amazing to pull this out of the fire. As mentioned earlier by someone earlier, it is nice to hear some guitar with a bit of grunt on an Elvis record.
This isn't a bad song but even on this one I can hear Elvis saying please let this nightmare end.

 

Hmm...I really love You Gotta Stop. It reminds me of Shout It Out, what with the slow-burn intro and the stuttering rhythm. It's loaded with hooks, and Elvis sings it well. It's definitely one of my favourite soundtrack cuts.

As I mentioned earlier, I sort of like Yoga Is... on the I Got Lucky album. It's just outrageous, putting it after I Need Somebody To Lean On. I mean, even the songwriters marveled at the fact that Elvis actually recorded the song. It's so obviously terrible that it's almost brilliant (in a post-modern sort of way) to juxtapose it with one of the best hidden gems in the Elvis catalogue. I dunno...I enjoy it.

 

Yoga Is As Yoga Does is horrific, but slightly interesting as an example of the 60s counterculture fad for all things Eastern seeping into the hermetically sealed world of the Elvis movie. By this time, Elvis had been turned on to Eastern spirituality by Larry Geller, I think, although I doubt Elvis was ever into yoga. Not sure if his interest in karate had begun by this time. This flirtation with 60s hippie fads would be repeated, much more successfully, with Edge of Reality.

 

I like You Gotta Stop, but it’s marred by lesser sound quality. I actually own Elvis’ lyric sheet to this track.

 

Yoga Is As Yoga Does is quite simply a terrible beast of a song. And even the context of seeing it in the movie does not make it any better, which sometimes was the case with these songs. In fact, the lady makes it even worse and watching Elvis have to struggle through that scene is painful. Unfortunately, this song somehow is what some people think of when they think of his movie songs, when in reality there are many songs of redeeming quality throughout the soundtrack recordings. This terrible song is really the exception and not the rule, along with a handful of other stinkers.

Elvis's love and appreciation for karate began a few years before, while he was stationed in Germany and serving in the Army.

 

I really like this song as well. I like the production on it a lot too, especially the opening, but the overall sound as @Shawn and others have pointed out is really not good.

 

I have a question for the experts. I've read that Elvis had a falling out with Hal Wallis because Hal made a comment that he just did Elvis movies in order to do projects that he really wanted to do. Was this before ECEG or afterward?
I guess by this time, Elvis was marking each movie off his calendar like a prisoner with a few weeks left to go before release.

 

Yep. 1964/1965 maybe? Wasn't it during the filming of Roustabout?
It had to be when Elvis still was a major force in hollywood.

 

Whether Elvis actually had a falling out with Wallis directly I do not know, but I can tell you that my father, who I mentioned before had experience in television as a director, had a huge issue with Hal Wallis and his low budget Elvis movies. He thought it was shameful that better directors and scripts were not chosen on Elvis projects.

 

Yoga is as Yoga Does is an easy song to make fun of, but it's important to remember it was intended to be silly, ridiculous fluff. No one thought they were producing a great song. Of course as usual the question then becomes "should Elvis have been doing movies that were silly and required him to sing silly fluff?" and we all agree on the answer to that. But it's unfortunate that (as Steve noted) people sometimes think of Yoga as representative of all his movie work, and dismiss it all as crap.

Interesting that most of this soundtrack was written by Fred Burch and Gerald Nelson, best known for writing "Tragedy", a 1959 hit for Thomas Wayne produced by none other than Scotty Moore. They didn't write anything else for Elvis until 1970, when Nelson submitted the pretty decent country song "If I Were You."

 

The scripts did take a turn for the better after the nadir of the mid-60s. Live A Little, Love A Little may be more of an interesting failure than a great movie, but it was adapted from the contemporary novel Kiss My Firm But Pliant Lips. This had actually been fairly common earlier in Elvis’s Hollywood career: King Creole, Flaming Star, and Wild in the Country were all adapted from novels, but Live A Little, Love A Little was the first time in a long time that Hollywood didn’t simply knock out a quickie formula travelogue script for Elvis. Change of Habit is another interesting film that is off the radar of the general public; while, again, it may not be the greatest film ever made, it at least attempts to engage with some of the issues of its day in a more serious way than many of Elvis’s movies.

 

I don't recall hearing about a falling out with Wallis, but it wasn't a secret with Wallis about the type of film he was planning for Elvis.

Here's a YouTube clip... Elvis talking about his movie career

A very serious talking about his movie career with the man himself. This interview was recorded in Elvis On Tour (1972) movie sessions. It was never included in the actual movie.

 

Agreed. It’s similar how the “fat Elvis” of the 1977 TV special colors so many people’s perceptions of Elvis’s entire 70s live career, when, as we know, the earlier years of that return to live performance were so very different. The recent The Searcher HBO special may have begun to make some headway in repairing Elvis’s image with the general public, but, when you’re as famous as Elvis, everyone has a casual opinion of you based on the broadest clichés about your career, while fewer are going to dig deeper and distinguish between the nuances of the better and worse movies, or of the better and worse Vegas seasons.

 

Although I have not seen Change Of Habit in a very long time, I remember being fascinated that Elvis's was in a fairly serious dramatic role and playing a doctor no less. He looked pretty good too as I recall. I would like to see it again sometime.