Elvis Presley - The Albums and Singles Thread pt3 The Seventies

Elvis getting his Kentucky County Police badge April 1970

 

Agreed. The general quality of the movie songs and their arrangements began to improve at the tail-end of Elvis' movie career, but understandably largely went unnoticed. Let's Forget About The Stars is a pleasant, airy, somewhat underrated ballad with an attractive arrangement.

 

I like Let's Forgot About The Stars quite a bit. Some beautiful piano runs throughout the tender vocal performance from Elvis. I guess the most notable thing about the song Mama, besides Elvis's obvious reasons for connecting emotionally with the song, is that it was co-written by one of Elvis's best go-to piano players, the great Dudley Brooks, best known for his stupendous piano playing on Santa Claus Is Coming To Town.

 

What if the preacher man was Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Bakker?

 

"Mama" is a strange inclusion, being so much older than the other tracks. I guess at this point they were still determined to include only songs that had never been on a record before, which limited their options. The weird thing to me though is that they didn't use "Let Us Pray" which also would meet that criteria and obviously would have been a much better fit musically. It seems unlikely that they were deliberately holding it back with the intent of putting it on a Camden gospel album a year later, because that would suggest a level of planning and foresight that seems quite implausible, given what we know about RCA. I guess trying to make sense of how the Camdens were compiled is kind of a fool's errand.

 

I was a kid in the 70s. Let's Be Friends and Burning Love(and hits from his Movies) were the first albums by Elvis I got so they are special to me. I'm sure the fact they were less expensive had a lot to do with me getting them. Nice memories if not all classic songs.

 

Jimmy Swaggart could play some pretty righteous piano though, just like his cousins Jerry Lee Lewis and Mickey Gilley.

 

Great singer, too. My mom had a lot of his records.

 

I found Jimmy Swaggart to be extremely charismatic as both a preacher and a singer-musician. My brother would call me on a Sunday afternoon and tell me, "Swaggert says I need to come over and throw out all your country-western albums that are not based in gospel," and I would just laugh my a-s off. He really was a riveting speaker though before the downfall.

 

He definitely shared some of the genetic musical talent and charisma of his cousins. But (having been raised a Lutheran, about the most staid branch of Christianity you can get) I always found his melodramatic oratorical style to be silly and undignified, and it struck me as insincere.

 

Yeah, I suppose a lot of people would find him extremely hypocritical in the end, but I just seem him as a very interesting, but very flawed human being.

 

The interesting thing is that most preachers that have those highly charismatic, charming personalities, fall into the trap (it takes different forms, and happens to varying degrees obviously).... They are like rock stars, and get swept away in the adulation. It's very sad. Church members that worship their preacher/teachers need to really get their heads together, and anyone that stands on a pulpit really needs to keep themselves grounded ... Often that is where big battles are won and lost. Anyone who doesn't believe there is a spiritual war, just needs to look at how that all comes about.

 

"Long Legged Girl" was just as much out of place on this LP as "Mama" was on Let's Be Friends.

 

I really like "Let's Forget About the Stars". I dig the " rough mix" with Elvis' comment at the end

 

And it will not stop there...

Wait til "Hey Jude" shows up

 

I know we're many, many, many songs away from going in depth with it, but his version of Hey Jude was the only song I found I couldn't finish listening to. Between not knowing the words and him being off pitch at times, it's a train wreck. I don't care how desperate you would have to be to fill an album, this should NEVER have been released.

 

I liked him better after he was busted. I appreciated the fact that he owned up to what he did rather than trying to deny it, unlike Jim Bakker or so many other famous people caught up in sex scandals. But I still didn't like his melodramatic approach to preaching, or the fact that (like all other televangelists) he seemed more concerned with dollars than anything else.

Yep. Too often it becomes all about the messenger, rather than the message. That is never a good thing in any religion.

Heh... the tangents we go off on here.

 

I wonder what Jimmy Swaggart thought about the main character in Kentucky Rain...

 

I wonder what he thought of Clean Up Your Own Back Yard?

 

We didn't have a lot of extra money when I was a kid but I did like listening to all kinds of music. One day my aunt called from a garage sale and they had a box of records to sell cheap. Mom said told me and I was excited as she told my aunt to go ahead and buy them and she would pay her back ( it couldn't have been more than a couple of dollars). My aunt pulls up with three big giant boxes of records that they apparently just wanted out of the garage. These boxes of records turned me into a audio anthropologist. I find it fascinating the mix of records that people have. In this box was gospel including a nice chunk of Jimmy Swaggart records. I found them to be very good for the most part. Along with a nice representation of country gospel was a nice variety of country records. I was too young to know what Buck Owens was talking about when when he wasn't going to stand in her welfare line but I liked the honky tonk sound. Lol. There was some Dean Martin records and even a couple Elvis 45's. In those boxes I had a nice rounding of material.
As for Jimmy Swaggart, I think what made it so bad for him was how he was so quick to point fingers at pretty much everyone else. If we're all honest, none of us can say we haven't been somewhere we shouldn't be doing something that we shouldn't be so I don't want to beat up on Jimmy Swaggart too much. He was a very good musician and I often wonder who liked his recordings and who like the other stuff. Was it different people or the same one for all of it? Fun times.

 

Okay, now I'm going to have to get the "Let's Be Friends" album. I like "Let's Forget About The Stars" and "Mama" that much, just from listening to the videos posted here.

 

All of the Camdens can be bought individually on CD except C'mon Everybody. Then there is this 60 CD box set I have heard so much about.

 

In that case, After dropping the man off, they would have set off on their own to find said woman for a little "fun". Bakker may have even given the man a big sloppy bucket of mac n cheese for the road.

 

I like that scenario. Jim Bakker would have told him that after all this rain, the only logical place to find your lady is in the cosmetics store (it would be melting off her face by the gallon by now Bakker reasons). While the man checks out every beauty counter in town, he is so determined to find her that he vows that he will meet with President Nixon in the oval office about this if he has to. At his side the whole time is Charlie Hodge carrying the bucket of mac & cheese until she is found. In the meantime Jim Bakker takes off abruptly after finding out that the man is represented by Tom Parker. He knows that he is way out of his league with that huckster. Lol.