Elvis Presley - The Albums and Singles Thread pt3 The Seventies

I always find it interesting that his home recordings always sound more like a very young Elvis compared to his official recordings of the 70s.

 

Double 'like'. Has to happen. I'd say a definite for the 50th anniversary coming in 4 years but the state of physical media will likely be toast. So do it now, people (EPE) !!!

 

I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry is one of the very best performances from Aloha. A gem of a performance with a tasteful arrangement.

It’s Over is another highlight. It was the sort of MOR ballad that Elvis was so attracted to during the era. While the 1972 versions are better, the Aloha version is a fine performance.

With respect to Johnny B. Goode and Blue Suede Shoes, they are both pretty forgettable renditions, the latter a typical bland arrangement so common with Elvis’ 1950’s material. They work better with the visual accompaniment, but as pure audio experiences, they are pedestrian.

 

It is a truly great song and inspired by a real break-up according to singer-songwriter Jimmie Rodgers.

"I was with Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass at Carnegie Hall in New York, and there was a girl there at the show. She was standing outside crying and we began to talk. She had just broken up with her boyfriend. I asked if she was okay. She said, 'No, my boyfriend and I broke up today and it's over.' I went back to my room and wrote 'It's Over.' I never had Elvis in mind to do it when I wrote the song."

I love Eddy Arnold's fantastic remake as well, which might have been the actual inspiration behind Elvis's great take on the song. Elvis starts out at an almost whisper and lets the song build-up to a dramatic vocal climax along the lines of many a Roy Orbison song, who ironically recorded another great song with the same title as It's Over, but it is a totally different song, but just as great to my ears.

I love the sequencing of the setlist by Elvis for Aloha as well, with a fast song or two pretty much followed by a gorgeous ballad. I actually like Johnny B Goode a whole lot as Burton's guitar solo is worth the price of admission alone. I love Hank Williams, who is one of the two or three greatest songwriters in country music history, but I was never really drawn to I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry until I heard Elvis's stupendous version from Aloha. I was even underwhelmed by Charlie Rich's take on it in the 60's, but now I consider it one of the most hauntingly beautiful songs ever written. Blue Suede Shoes is best seen than just listened to from the album. Here is Eddy Arnold's fine remake from 1968 before Elvis got hold of it:



https://www.youtube.com › watch

 

Mate you nailed it, far better than me. Your posts are always great to read because you come out with these pearlers. ^^ Of course! Elvis had such a good ear for music, "an ethnomusicologist without a degree" as Guralnick put it, yet the well-crafted albums he made didn't sell in great quantities. My guess is that he sang what went over well with the audience he had in front of him and they weren't likely to challenge him as time went by. It may have been a different story had he been able to tour internationally. Anyway back to Aloha...

 

It's got that unselfconscious singing on the front porch feel. Love it. Where's it from?

 

Yet, Elvis rarely performed material from any of those albums. A token selection here or there, or one song for a period of time (e.g. Suspicious Minds, Hawaiian Wedding Song, Funny How Time Sips Away, etc.), but he frequently ignored his best work and/or his most popular work. He assumed the crowd wanted to hear Hound Dog and Teddy Bear, so he made a mockery of them with quick, pedestrian arrangements and the filled the rest of his show with a few recognizeable songs, covers, and a wide range of oddities. Sometimes one wonders if he actually cared about what the public wanted.

 

Based on the sales, I wonder if he thought the public were idiots lol

 

Actually I'll take that in a different direction.
Think about this maybe...
After the initial explosion, It seems like most of the projects/albums/sessions that Elvis really put it on the line and poured himself out into, comparatively failed, but the ones he was less invested in sold by the bucket loads ..... Is this what helped steer Elvis into the "don't care, don't try" zone?

 

It is my theory that most of Elvis' fans were women. They seemingly go to the concerts and buy the paraphernalia. Archivists and completists they are not. Men tend to fall into that category. Most people tend to buy what they know and what they know are the hit singles. There are no hit singles on Elvis Is Back. As for FEIM and Elvis Country, they had one hit single each. And their initial sales are 2.5 times higher each than Elvis Is Back.

Anthologies and even to a greater extend, Gold Record series are what people buy, along with Christmas albums. I bet the % of women who have even heard the Elvis Is Back album is pretty low. The sales for his comeback albums included NEW fans, younger fans as well as the old reliables.

"Event" albums, which were the live albums, also sold pretty well. Not only did they contain the same 5 or 8 hits, they also were souvenirs for those events (Aloha, MSG and Recorded Live-Memphis).

Elvis Is Back, FEIM and Elvis Country will be appreciated by critics and musicologists and some core MALE fans. Not so much the women. If it ain't got Teddy Bear on it, who needs it?

 

Good points. Take the Jungle room sessions for example. Elvis was basically forced to record. He refused so they drove a portable studio to his home to force him to record. Even with those circumstances I enjoy a lot of those songs

 

I suspect he didn’t pay much attention to sales. Often he had no idea how his albums were compiled, only finding out after the fact that something had been released in some specific manner or configuration. Post-1970, he recorded and left the rest to Parker, Jarvis and RCA. With respect to the public buying almost anything RCA released, he probably privately acknowledged that Tom Parker was correct, anything would sell, so why bother caring?

 

I wouldn't be surprised at all if he had quit caring about product by the 1970s. It seems that I read back in the 1960s thread (yes, I'm too lazy to retrieve it) that there is an almost worn out copy of EIB at Graceland and that he was really proud of that album even though Elvis was known to play stuff like that off as being aloof. Even before that, I can recall an interview Elvis gave in the 1950s while in the army when a reporter asked him about record sales. Elvis seemed pretty up to date on his sales stats then anyway (even correcting the reporter's stats). Although by the 1970s, I'm sure he wasn't checking, but I'm almost positive that he was checking up on sales for EIB. I imagine it was quite a letdown when it wasn't a giant seller.

 

Well, EIB was a respectable seller in 1960 and immediately went gold (which was an achievement during that era). The issue was that GI Blues, a project that Elvis was not creatively invested in, significantly outsold EIB.

During the 1970’s, he became pretty detached from the creative process, and cared less and less about what he produced.

 

I don't like I'm So Lonesome either

 

Talking about the wonderful "Elvis is Back!" LP, here is an excerpt from Ray Connolly's "The King and I" article:

Connolly has just met Elvis for the first time (Vegas, august 2nd 1969):
<< I said I had liked his rhythm-and-blues album “Elvis Is Back”, which was the closest he had got to the music he’d been making at the beginning of his career. [Elvis] nodded: he’d liked that one too. “We were just talking about doing another one like that,” he said. >>
(Full article here)

 

I Can't Stop Loving You
I think this song comes across well. I have grown to enjoy Elvis' version of this song, and it is quite a different version to Ray Charles version. This is an odd one, because to me, most of the song Elvis is killing it, but there are just a couple of spots where the vocal is just on the edge.

 

Hound Dog
Hound Dog is one of the songs that suffers the most from Elvis disinterest in it. This is actually a pretty decent version of it, because he just gets it out of the way. I am still somewhat bemused as to why he bothered playing it at all. Sure it was a big hit, but it rarely if ever lasted more than one minute, and he only ever sang the first verse.... As I think I have stated, I would prefer Elvis to have done no fifties songs in his live sets, rather than play these versions that just leave the impression that he doesn't even like them.

 

What Now My Love
We start with a staccato piano and a very controlled delicate vocal from Elvis. This vocal is the epitome of a controlled wonderful vocal, and the gradual rise into the crescendo of passion is quite wonderful.
I think everyone enjoys a little bit of Elvis goofing around, but the fact of the matter is, we are generally listening to him, because we love hearing him sing a song with his heart .... When he does something like this, it is a moving cathartic experience. When we compare this to Hound Dog or Love Me from these live shows, it could well be a different singer.
The vocal here is magnificent.

 

Fever
I had forgotten that he even did this on here ... I don't know why...
This is a very good version.
It has me on the edge, because the audience responding to Elvis feels like it could send him into one of his comedy routines lol

It ends up getting home well, and it is nice to have something from Elvis Is Back on here and done well.

 

What Now My Love is a perfect song for Elvis: dramatic, full of emotion, and naturally builds to a shattering climax. He makes the song sound passionate and rhythmically natural, whilst every other performer's version that I've heard is stilted and - at best - accented with fake emotion. It's definitely my favourite Elvis performance from the two Aloha concerts.

Fever isn't a great performance, but it's a very good one, and a wonderful way of dialing things back after the sonic violence of What Now My Love.

 

It's Over and What Now My Love are both highlights here. None of his live Fever performances can hope to touch his 1960 EIB recording. (Same goes for Reconsider Baby).

 

While this performance of Fever is fine, I've never been a fan of Elvis doing this song live in the 70's, it just seems kinda hokey to me.

 

He tosses it away without a care in the world, although it isn’t the only song lacking effort (Love Me, Blue Suede Shoes, Johnny B Goode, Suspicious Minds, etc.). In general, I don’t disagree with the perspective that he should have discarded disinterested 50’s era songs from the live set, but for a worldwide telecast going out to a number of fans that would never again have the opportunity to see him perform live, it was appropriate to perform a handful of his biggest 1950’s era hits — and frankly, one can argue he didn’t perform enough of that material under the circumstances (of course in doing so, it would have lowered to quality of the show).

 

I don't care much for Aloha From Hawaii. As others have stated it feels kinda bland. Elvis is in good bodily condition but the look in his eyes is a million miles away.
It's interesting how he seems to be more 'there' at the rehearsal show. He looks better (his hair at the main show is atrocious!) and there's a little more of a spark in his eye. Nonetheless, during the quieter parts of What Now My Love and -especially - I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, all the showbiz dross falls away and he creates very sad moments of magic!