Elvis Presley - The Albums and Singles Thread pt3 The Seventies

It's interesting that Guralnick (and everybody at the time, probably) had no idea how Elvis recorded his 1970 albums. He has no idea that the "saccharine ballads" that were on singles and That's the Way It Is had been recorded at the very same sessions as the "return to roots" Elvis Country. Rather than being two separate Elvis projects that were focused on different areas and had different goals, it was all one big project that was later subdivided artificially by genre. It's interesting that he sees such a qualitative distinction between material that was cut at the same sessions with the same musicians.

I became an Elvis fan in 1976 but I didn't seriously start getting into his non-hit single catalog until 1987. My first exposure to the Elvis Country material was on the 70s box set, which I later resequenced to be completely chronological. That, coupled with my overall bias toward listening to Elvis by session, makes me see little inherent value in the subdivision of tracks known as Elvis Country. It's certainly a strong collection of songs, but to me it works better heard in tandem with all the other songs from the same Nashville marathon. Of if you want to divide it up, I think it would have worked better to create two stylistically diverse albums with a variety of material rather than putting all the EZ listening/pop stuff on one record and all the country on another.

The link track is a horrible idea. I know Jarvis has blamed Elvis for the idea, but if true then he (Jarvis) should have put some effort into talking Elvis out of it. I don't think it would have been difficult. It seems uncharacteristic of Elvis to care how his record was presented after he completed the masters.

 

Re: Snowbird as an opener, perhaps my view of its strengths is coloured by the fact that I first heard it on the 70s box and found it to be a highlight. In fact, along with Stranger In The Crowd, it was far and away my favourite song on Disc 3. So when I finally got around to hearing the Elvis Country album proper, it made sense to me to kick off with Snowbird. I think it's also a perfect prologue to the slow-building drama of Tomorrow Never Comes.

I'm not a fan of the Anne Murray version at all. It's stilted and passionless. I know it's becoming a common refrain, but it's often the case...Elvis took a pedestrian pop/country song and turned it into something magnetic and wonderful.

 

Jason, I thought it was I Will Always Love You, but I am just going by sheer memory here, so your probably right.

 

Yes indeed, I actually had a strong dislike of Snowbird until I heard Elvis's version. It has definitely grown on me over the years, even though it is still not a highlight for me from this stellar album.

 

I've always liked Snowbird, it's a beautiful song, and Elvis does an excellent job.

 

When Dolly has told the story in recent years, she has indeed said that it was I Will Always Love You. But according to Marty Lacker it was actually Coat of Many Colors. Marty had an eidetic memory, so I trust his recollection more. I suspect Dolly has sorta allowed herself to misremember because her version makes for a better story. Coat of Many Colors was a moderate country hit (#4) that probably nobody under the age of 50 has even heard of today, whereas I Will Always Love You is by far the best-known and most popular song she's written, a #1 country hit in 1974 and a #1 pop hit in 1992 that is still well-known to generations of listeners. The idea of Elvis almost doing the latter song makes a far more tantalizing story. It's kind of like how Micky Dolenz will tell the story of the Monkees rejecting the song Sugar Sugar in 1967, even though the song was not written until a couple years later and was never pitched to the Monkees, and it was actually a song called Sugar Man that they turned down. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. I can see how Coat of Many Colors would have appealed to Elvis, with its sentimentality and references to "mama."

 

From memory, Guralnick dismisses Snowbird because he claims that Elvis cut it in a hurry because he wanted to catch a flight to L.A. either with or to see his girlfriend of the moment. Even if this is true, this is a classic example of the fallacy that “Elvis’s personal life in 197x was a mess, therefore his recording session from 197x is compromised.” I actually like the Anne Murray original, but I agree with you that yet again Elvis finds the beauty in a song that many dismiss. The electric sitar from the 1969 Memphis sessions pops up again here, I wouldn’t argue with anyone who finds it dated today, but it works for this track, in my opinion. The string arrangement and female backing vocals hit the mark. Just a beautiful restrained vocal throughout by Elvis, with an amazing final run on “If I could you know I would fly-y-y-y away with you.”

 

In the introduction to one of the two volumes of his Elvis biography, Guralnick claims to have come to appreciate the totality of Elvis’s body of work, i.e., not just the Sun/roots material, but also the ballads, pop songs, Vegas material, etc. I don’t know if it’s appropriate to call that a flat-out lie or not, but Guralnick has a huge bias towards the Sun/roots material over all else, and I don’t find it surprising it all that he simply assumes that Elvis got back to what he ought to be doing on a “pure” Elvis country session, even though, as you point out, the reality was quite different.

I just listened to Snowbird with and without the link track, and the link track is an unmitigated disaster. I find it impossible to believe that Elvis suggested this dumb idea, for the reason you note.

 

He had a good memory of the past, but not photographic (in my opinion) cause I corresponded quite a bit with him, and know he wasn't always on the money. I go with Dolly.

 

I have no idea either way, but I Will Always Love You sounds like it would be done by Elvis. I love coat, but I don't hear Elvis singing it in my head.

 

I Really Don’t Want To Go and There Goes My Everything are both good ballads right in Elvis’s wheelhouse, if perhaps lacking that final push into transcendence that he somehow located in Just Pretend, a weaker song in the abstract than either of these two. Not sure I would have put two kind of similar mid-tempo ballads on the A & B sides of the same single, but, as with trying to figure out why the link track was used on the album, good luck trying to figure out the marketing strategy of RCA and the Colonel. I would have led with either Snowbird or Tomorrow Never Comes as the first a-side from this project, and put either I Really Don’t Want To Know or There Goes My Everything on the b-side.

 

I am very skeptical of that tale. It is very difficult to believe Elvis was that involved with the overall production and creative direction of what became Elvis Country, particularly during the post-recording phase when he no longer was present in the studio. The cross-fades/link track screams Felton Jarvis gimmickry, along the same lines as his bump and fade addition to Suspicious Minds.

That said, I never had an issue with the link track. I think it works by tying together various country-influenced recordings, some more polished than others; for example, something polished and fully produced (arguably overproduced) like Tomorrow Never Comes segues nicely into a less-developed Little Cabin On The Hill with their shared, common thematic piece. While I fully understand that some fans find it grating and misguided, I don’t think the album is significantly improved without it (or at all).

 

Agreed. For me, this is probably the best overall performance from the TTWII LP, even though it doesn’t have the bombast and flash of some of the other recordings. It is more understated, both in its arrangement and vocal delivery. It is also a quality piece of material from a group of non-country songs brought into the session that contained inconsistent lyrical content.

 

One of the more interesting arrangements on the album, but really corny lyrics that are hard to get past, especially in the second verse. “Made some faces at some people in the park and didn’t bother to explain;” “Fun fun look at us run, going nowhere special really fast;” “But we’ve yet to taste the icing on the cake that we’ve been baking with the past.” Yuck.

 

Same here. As soon as I heard the story about Elvis potentially cutting IWALY, I thought to myself, "Yes, that sounds like a perfect song for Elvis." Years later, I can still hear him singing it.

 

But it most likely wasn’t the song offered to him.

 

You beat me to the punch. My exact thoughts on both songs. Elvis could have sung a beautiful version of I Will Aways Love You, but I do not think Coat Of Many Colors would have suited him at all. I am not too sure about Marty's memory on this matter. I actually love both songs, so it is not a matter of my personal song preference here, but more a matter of which song better suited Elvis, lyrically and melodically.

 

It doesn't matter. He could have recorded it during his lifetime, had he heard the album or the single, and it would have been perfect for him. I'm sure he would have done a marvelous job on COMC as well, but the lyrics are just too specific for anyone but Dolly to have really sold, imo.

 

A really excellent point here, and it really shows some of Peter Guralnicks's music bias against some of the really fine MOR/Easy-listening material that Elvis recorded during these sessions. I place both of these albums in my top ten Elvis album list, and it is song quality and Elvis's commitment to the material that moves the material up or down on my preference list, and not the style or genre of the songs recorded for the sessions.

 

An eidetic memory does not mean you are infallible, it just means you have a superior ability to recall specific details with only brief exposure. Marty claimed to have such a memory, FWIW. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. He did seem to have a very good memory for detail.

Doing a bit more research... Marty first told the story about Elvis wanting to record Coat of Many Colors in the Memphis Mafia book in 1994. The earliest instance I can find of Dolly telling the story of him wanting to do I Will Always Love You is this interview in 1996. So Marty seems to have told his story first... it wasn't a case of Dolly telling her story and then Marty correcting her. He recalled it as being Coat of Many Colors independently of anything else, a couple years before Dolly told her story.

Interestingly, in her 1996 interview, Dolly mentions that Elvis "also loved Coat Of Many Colors, but I wouldn’t give up the publishing on that either." While in this interview ten years later, she only mentions I Will Always Love You, and that seems true of the multiple interviews I've found from this century... Coat of Many Colors doesn't get mentioned anymore.

So at minimum it appears certain that Elvis did want to do Coat of Many Colors, since both Marty and Dolly reported this. Is it possible he also wanted to do I Will Always Love You? Perhaps, but it seems kind of unlikely that having been turned down for one song, they'd proceed to ask for a second. Or that they'd hit her up on two separate occasions.

There's also a few reasons to suspect that Dolly's memory is questionable. One is that in the 1996 interview, she says it was Felton Jarvis who called her: "It was Felton, who was producing him at the time, that called me about it, and I said “No.”" While in the 2006 interview she says she spoke to the Colonel: "Then Colonel Tom [Parker, Presley’s manager] gets on the phone and said, “You know, I really love this song,” and I said, “You cannot imagine how excited I am about this. This is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me as a songwriter.” He said, “Now you know we have a rule that Elvis don’t record anything that we don’t take half the publishing.”"

In both interviews, Dolly claims that Elvis was recording in Nashville:
1996: He was here recording and he wanted to do it, so they notified me and I was so excited.
2006: They get to town and they call and they ask if I want to come to the session — and, of course, I was going to go.
The problem with this recollection is that the last time Elvis recorded in Nashville was in June 1971, before either Coat of Many Colors (October 1971) or I Will Always Love You (March 1974) had been released. It's possible she was invited to a Memphis session, which would be moderately close to Nashville, but if that were the case then the song wouldn't have been I Will Always Love You since Elvis' last Memphis studio session was in December 1973.

The fact that Dolly's memory is not consistent and contains at least one detail that could not be true makes her recollections somewhat suspect overall. So I remain a bit skeptical about the I Will Always Love You story because it just seems too pat. Elvis just happens to have been interested in the one song that would unexpectedly become a huge hit 20 years later, and she avoids losing millions by turning him down? That makes a far better story than him wanting to do the now-obscure Coat of Many Colors, which probably hasn't made her all the much publishing income since the 70s.

 

Here's an impersonator attempting to do an Elvis-style version of the song. Not saying it's that good, but it at least gives something of an idea of what an Elvis version might have sounded like:

 

Holy ****! This guy managed to turn one of the most beautiful songs ever into a three min monotonous bore. Terrible!

 

The hit version of Snowbird in Australia was by Liv Maessen. She was one of the artists who made it big because of the infamous 'record ban' that stopped radio from playing certain records at the time.

 

To be fair, I've heard Elvis impersonators butcher songs that the real Elvis knocked out of the ball park. This is when they had an actual audio guidepost of how Elvis would interpret a song so I doubt it would have been that bad. (thinking of "Hey Jude") I would hope. Lol

 

Snowbird
Written By :
Gene MacLellan

Recorded :
RCA's Studio B, Nashville, September 22-23, 1970 : September 22, 1970. take 6

This a is a beautiful little two beat country ballad. I am not a fan of the choral sitar on these types of songs to be honest, but it is bearable here.
I really have always liked the lyrics in this song. For me it has a sweetness without that tang of artificial sweetener. I think the tempo and the string arrangement work very well, and the backing vocals work well here as well. I think the finally section also works very well.
I don't have a problem with this song opening the album, but I think a better choice could be made. I find the tacking on of I was born 10,000 years ago coming in before the song has properly resolved to be a little obnoxious.