The Rockin' Machine had the best view .........





ROCKMAN

Different Studio, different musicians Gazza. there MAY have been some overlap of musicians but the STAX Studio and label was an entirly different entity from American Recording Studio;s where Neil Diamond cut his early hits and Dusty did her wonderful In Memphis album.

He did of course record at Stax but not sure if he used the regular house band, which was a rather loose collective in any case, but most people would associate the sound with the some or all of the booker Ts and the Memphis Horns/ Markeys. with the likes of Spooner Oldham and Dan Penn and others sitting in.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2009-04-21 15:22 by Nanker Phlegm.

I know mate - but he recorded in both. American in 1969 and Stax in 1973. In the latter he used both his own band and session musicians, including some of the MG's.

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TooTough
Public Enemy seem to have a different view on him:

[at 2:36]






Elvis was a hero to most
But he never meant shit to me you see
Straight up racist that sucker was
Simple and plain
Mother @#$%& him and John Wayne

I was wondering when that old chestnut would pop up. Cracking song that, but Chuck D's since retracted said lyric - well, the Elvis part. It's a known fact that John Wayne was a self-confessed white supremacist.

Read on ....

Why did it continue to find common acceptance up to, and past, the point that Chuck D of Public Enemy could declare in 1990, “Elvis was a hero to most... straight-up racist that sucker was, simple and plain”?

Chuck D has long since repudiated that view for a more nuanced one of cultural history, but the reason for the rumor’s durability, the unassailable logic behind its common acceptance within the black community rests quite simply on the social inequities that have persisted to this day, the fact that we live in a society that is no more perfectly democratic today than it was 50 years ago. As Chuck D perceptively observes, what does it mean, within this context, for Elvis to be hailed as “king,” if Elvis’s enthronement obscures the striving, the aspirations and achievements of so many others who provided him with inspiration?


(How Did Elvis Get Turned Into A Racist? - Peter Guralnick - New York Times


Full piece here:

One of the songs Elvis liked to perform in the ’70s was Joe South’s “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” its message clearly spelled out in the title.

Sometimes he would preface it with the 1951 Hank Williams recitation “Men With Broken Hearts,” which may well have been South’s original inspiration. “You’ve never walked in that man’s shoes/Or saw things through his eyes/Or stood and watched with helpless hands/While the heart inside you dies.” For Elvis these two songs were as much about social justice as empathy and understanding: “Help your brother along the road,” the Hank Williams number concluded, “No matter where you start/For the God that made you made them, too/These men with broken hearts.”

In Elvis’s case, this simple lesson was not just a matter of paying lip service to an abstract principle.

It was what he believed, it was what his music had stood for from the start: the breakdown of barriers, both musical and racial. This is not, unfortunately, how it is always perceived 30 years after his death, the anniversary of which is on Thursday. When the singer Mary J. Blige expressed her reservations about performing one of his signature songs, she only gave voice to a view common in the African-American community. “I prayed about it,” she said, “because I know Elvis was a racist.”

And yet, as the legendary Billboard editor Paul Ackerman, a devotee of English Romantic poetry as well as rock ’n’ roll, never tired of pointing out, the music represented not just an amalgam of America’s folk traditions (blues, gospel, country) but a bold restatement of an egalitarian ideal. “In one aspect of America’s cultural life,” Ackerman wrote in 1958, “integration has already taken place.”

It was due to rock ’n’ roll, he emphasized, that groundbreaking artists like Big Joe Turner, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, who would only recently have been confined to the “race” market, had acquired a broad-based pop following, while the music itself blossomed neither as a regional nor a racial phenomenon but as a joyful new synthesis “rich with Negro and hillbilly lore.”

No one could have embraced Paul Ackerman’s formulation more forcefully (or more fully) than Elvis Presley.

Asked to characterize his singing style when he first presented himself for an audition at the Sun recording studio in Memphis, Elvis said that he sang all kinds of music — “I don’t sound like nobody.” This, as it turned out, was far more than the bravado of an 18-year-old who had never sung in public before. It was in fact as succinct a definition as one might get of the democratic vision that fueled his music, a vision that denied distinctions of race, of class, of category, that embraced every kind of music equally, from the highest up to the lowest down.

It was, of course, in his embrace of black music that Elvis came in for his fiercest criticism. On one day alone, Ackerman wrote, he received calls from two Nashville music executives demanding in the strongest possible terms that Billboard stop listing Elvis’s records on the best-selling country chart because he played black music. He was simply seen as too low class, or perhaps just too no-class, in his refusal to deny recognition to a segment of society that had been rendered invisible by the cultural mainstream.

“Down in Tupelo, Mississippi,” Elvis told a white reporter for The Charlotte Observer in 1956, he used to listen to Arthur Crudup, the blues singer who originated “That’s All Right,” Elvis’s first record. Crudup, he said, used to “bang his box the way I do now, and I said if I ever got to the place where I could feel all old Arthur felt, I’d be a music man like nobody ever saw.”

It was statements like these that caused Elvis to be seen as something of a hero in the black community in those early years. In Memphis the two African-American newspapers, The Memphis World and The Tri-State Defender, hailed him as a “race man” — not just for his music but also for his indifference to the usual social distinctions. In the summer of 1956, The World reported, “the rock ’n’ roll phenomenon cracked Memphis’s segregation laws” by attending the Memphis Fairgrounds amusement park “during what is designated as ‘colored night.’”

That same year, Elvis also attended the otherwise segregated WDIA Goodwill Revue, an annual charity show put on by the radio station that called itself the “Mother Station of the Negroes.” In the aftermath of the event, a number of Negro newspapers printed photographs of Elvis with both Rufus Thomas and B.B. King (“Thanks, man, for all the early lessons you gave me,” were the words The Tri-State Defender reported he said to Mr. King).

When he returned to the revue the following December, a stylish shot of him “talking shop” with Little Junior Parker and Bobby “Blue” Bland appeared in Memphis’s mainstream afternoon paper, The Press-Scimitar, accompanied by a short feature that made Elvis’s feelings abundantly clear. “It was the real thing,” he said, summing up both performance and audience response. “Right from the heart.”

Just how committed he was to a view that insisted not just on musical accomplishment but fundamental humanity can be deduced from his reaction to the earliest appearance of an ugly rumor that has persisted in one form or another to this day. Elvis Presley, it was said increasingly within the African-American community, had declared, either at a personal appearance in Boston or on Edward R. Murrow’s “Person to Person” television program, “The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes.”

That he had never appeared in Boston or on Murrow’s program did nothing to abate the rumor, and so in June 1957, long after he had stopped talking to the mainstream press, he addressed the issue — and an audience that scarcely figured in his sales demographic — in an interview for the black weekly Jet.

Anyone who knew him, he told reporter Louie Robinson, would immediately recognize that he could never have uttered those words. Amid testimonials from black people who did know him, he described his attendance as a teenager at the church of celebrated black gospel composer, the Rev. W. Herbert Brewster, whose songs had been recorded by Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward and whose stand on civil rights was well known in the community. (Elvis’s version of “Peace in the Valley,” said Dr. Brewster later, was “one of the best gospel recordings I’ve ever heard.”)

The interview’s underlying point was the same as the underlying point of his music: far from asserting any superiority, he was merely doing his best to find a place in a musical continuum that included breathtaking talents like Ray Charles, Roy Hamilton, the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi and Howlin’ Wolf on the one hand, Hank Williams, Bill Monroe and the Statesmen Quartet on the other. “Let’s face it,” he said of his rhythm and blues influences, “nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. I can’t sing it like Fats Domino can. I know that.”

And as for prejudice, the article concluded, quoting an unnamed source, “To Elvis people are people, regardless of race, color or creed.”

So why didn’t the rumor die? Why did it continue to find common acceptance up to, and past, the point that Chuck D of Public Enemy could declare in 1990, “Elvis was a hero to most... straight-up racist that sucker was, simple and plain”?

Chuck D has long since repudiated that view for a more nuanced one of cultural history, but the reason for the rumor’s durability, the unassailable logic behind its common acceptance within the black community rests quite simply on the social inequities that have persisted to this day, the fact that we live in a society that is no more perfectly democratic today than it was 50 years ago. As Chuck D perceptively observes, what does it mean, within this context, for Elvis to be hailed as “king,” if Elvis’s enthronement obscures the striving, the aspirations and achievements of so many others who provided him with inspiration?

Elvis would have been the first to agree. When a reporter referred to him as the “king of rock ’n’ roll” at the press conference following his 1969 Las Vegas opening, he rejected the title, as he always did, calling attention to the presence in the room of his friend Fats Domino, “one of my influences from way back.” The larger point, of course, was that no one should be called king; surely the music, the American musical tradition that Elvis so strongly embraced, could stand on its own by now, after crossing all borders of race, class and even nationality.

“The lack of prejudice on the part of Elvis Presley,” said Sam Phillips, the Sun Records founder who discovered him, “had to be one of the biggest things that ever happened. It was almost subversive, sneaking around through the music, but we hit things a little bit, don’t you think?”

Or, as Jake Hess, the incomparable lead singer for the Statesmen Quartet and one of Elvis’s lifelong influences, pointed out: “Elvis was one of those artists, when he sang a song, he just seemed to live every word of it. There’s other people that have a voice that’s maybe as great or greater than Presley’s, but he had that certain something that everybody searches for all during their lifetime.”

To do justice to that gift, to do justice to the spirit of the music, we have to extend ourselves sometimes beyond the narrow confines of our own experience, we have to challenge ourselves to embrace the democratic principle of the music itself, which may in the end be its most precious gift.


Peter Guralnick is the author of “Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley.”



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2009-04-21 15:29 by Nikolai.

Quote
oldkr
lets face it memphis is a musical theme park you play dodge the homeless drug addict on your way between beale street, sun, stax and graceland- all incredibly commercialized, the level of which cannot be reasonably known to the initiated! I was caught unawares.

OLDKR

If it wasn't commercialized, it wouldn't have made enough money to survive for us to witness it today.

Guralnick's two Elvis bios are amongst the greatest books ever written in the history of popular music.

I think the pro-Elvis argument in this thread is winning by a landslide, myself.

Some of the counter arguments actually rival the article quoted by Justin in his initial post for idiocy.

Sadly, it wasnt remotely surprising.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2009-04-21 15:46 by Gazza.

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Muppet HiFi
"Elvis recording at Stax" means- de facto- Elvis recording with the MG's, prior to Al Jackson Jr.'s death..

Except that it doesn't.

They followed up in 1971 with what would be their last Stax single, "Melting Pot", and their last Stax album, also called Melting Pot...Before the Melting Pot album was recorded, Booker T. Jones had left Stax. In fact, part of the album was recorded in New York, not the Stax studio. Steve Cropper had also become unhappy with business affairs at Stax and soon left. Dunn and Jackson remained on and did session and production work...


[en.wikipedia.org]



"By the time Elvis showed up, I had already left to start my own studio, Trans-Maximus," (Steve) Cropper says.


Now, Al Jackson and Duck Dunn may have played on the sessions, but no Steve Cropper and no Booker T means that Elvis did not play with Booker T & The MGs. Are the New Barbarians the Rolling Stones? Why not, they have 2 Rolling Stones in the group? As I wrote, the Elvis Stax sessions were recorded post-Booker T & The MGs - the BTMG rhythm section does not the MGs make.

Quote
Muppet HiFi
And to the poster who indicated (I believe in response to my view- and Little Richards and Chuck Berry's) that Elvis' huge popularity was some sort of "reverse Affirmative Action" (whatever that is; is that like "reverse racism"?)-

CLEARLY Elvis was groomed, sought out, manipulated, and courted as a sort of "great white hope" in the '50's. He NEVER sounded like what most black singers of the time sounded like, certainly not the rhythm and blues artists of the day (think of a popular one like Louis Jordan- no vocal similarity at all). Even compared to Nat King Cole, Elvis still sounded like Pat Boone in comparison.

There's a lot of nonesense mixed up in Elvis' mythology (as there is for any legend), but to say his race didn't play a big part in his success is misguided.

So? Saying that Elvis being White led to an increase in his popularity, or a greater opportunity for success, is very different from saying that Elvis was talentless and only was popular because he was White - which is what some seem to be saying. Being White led to greater opportunity in all arenas of American life at that time, it was unfair, but, that's the way it was. You're going to penalize Elvis for that?

At the start, Elvis was a rockabilly singer - he incorporated Country & R&B into one sound. Saying he didn't sound like Louis Jordan or Nat King Cole (which I think is your clumsy way of saying that he didn't sound "Black" enough - not even as "Black" as "Whiter" sounding Black artists of the day - nice of you to see everything in terms of race, by the way. You are so enlightened!), is completely immaterial. Elvis sounded like Elvis. If you don't like his voice, fine, but don't start tearing him down because he didn't sound "Black" enough for you, White man. You don't sound Black enough for me.

EDIT:
I apologize for my harsh tone there, I just get angry when people short Elvis. As I wrote earlier, Elvis' importance in the early days of Rock n Roll was undeniably crucial to the very survival of the genre.

...and, reverse affirmative action is exactly what it sounds like - affirmative action for White folks. I was scoffing at the supposition that Elvis' success was solely predicated on the fact that he was a White man, which is an absolute joke.





Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 2009-04-21 22:56 by The Ghost Of Good taste.

Quote
Justin

Quote
Muppet HiFi
He NEVER sounded like what most black singers of the time sounded like, certainly not the rhythm and blues artists of the day (think of a popular one like Louis Jordan- no vocal similarity at all). Even compared to Nat King Cole, Elvis still sounded like Pat Boone in comparison.

Then why did Sam Phillips believe so strongly that he found a kid that could sing black? And how did many DJ's at the time actually were unaware if the voice they heard coming from the radio was black or white?

Good point, Justin - (Memphis DJ) Dewey Phillips took great pains to point out that Elvis attended Humes High (the White HS) when Elvis was first interviewed for local radio - he wanted to let his listeners know Elvis was White, because, in Dewey's estimation - and Dewey was quite a curator and afficianado of R&B music of the day - Elvis could easily have been thought to be Black (because of both sound and material).





Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2009-04-21 18:44 by The Ghost Of Good taste.

Elvis is the King Kong......

2 1 2 0

Gnat, you obviously know nowt about nowt!

Quote
GNAT
1. The movies.
The movies completely and totally sucked 100% of the time. I have never, ever been able to sit through one,and would feel really bad for myself if I were able to sit through one.Theres only so much torture one human can take. Burn these "movies" now, and save the future generations from these visual atrocities.]

The songs from some of the Elvis films are amazing - some are ridiculous, to be sure, but there is some great music that came out of those movies.

Quote
GNAT
2. The fake songwriting credits.
We all know by now that Elvis was a puppet with no talent. He didn't write his songs, and he didn't mean what he was saying anyway. Totally phoney.

I ask again: So, Billie Holiday, all of the early Motown recordings, The Coasters, Muddy, the Wolf, Bessie Smith, Sam & Dave,(and on and on) they're all crap too? Just because they didn't write their own songs? If you believe that, your opinion is clearly worthless (hold on, you'll prove my point for me in a minute).

Quote
GNAT
3. The title "the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll."
The title belongs to Chuck Berry, because HE wrote HIS own songs and HE did mean every word he sang.

True - he definitely wants you to play with his dingaling. I love Chuck Berry, and I don't believe Elvis was the King of Rock n Roll, but he never gave himself that title - you can't hold it against him.

Quote
GNAT
4. “Amazing Grace” (and other terrible gospel songs).
There is no such thing as a good gospel song, but one by Elvis is really bad.

...and here it is, incontrovertible proof of your idiocy. There is no such thing as a good gospel song? You, sir or madam, are clearly retarded and devoid of any modicum of taste. That's one of the most ignorant statements I've ever read on this board.

Quote
GNAT
5. The fashion.
Tacky, terrible jumpsuits. Yuck. How could women find him sexy? He looked silly as hell. And those sideburns. LOL!

Yes, and Mick's outfits were the epitome of class and style. I suppose the Rolling Stones suck as well. "Sex appeal" is a criterion for good musicians in your book? Again, clearly, you are a special needs individual. Women need to find him sexy to justify his worth as an artist, huh? By the way, Fats Domino called and said "go F yourself".

Quote
GNAT
6. Vegas.
A worthy place for the king of black velvet.

You again are using fashion sense to somehow discredit the man as a musician? You know you're supposed to listen to the record inside of the cover, right? You don't just look at the pictures and then decide whether the music is good, dingbat.

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GNAT
7. The Impersonators.
Elvii....thats plural for Elvis. How can Elvis be considered so great if all these fat guys can do his act?

Yes, this is totally Elvis' fault - and again, has a lot to do with his worth as a singer/musician. Nice job by you.

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GNAT
8. "Jailhouse Rock".
Should be in lockdown. Through it in the hole.

Written by (arguably) the greatest songwriting team in American pop music history. Yes, the strange gay subtext is bit bizarre, but have you heard some of the Rolling Stones songs post 1981? There's a good 28 years of 90% crap songs to choose from - you're going to cherry-pick "Jailhouse Rock" and hold it up as an inferior song, and try to use it as proof that Elvis is overrated?

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GNAT
9. Graceland.
Tacky, Tacky, Tacky.

I will write for the millionth time: this has what to do with music?

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GNAT
10. He won’t go away.
Ok, losers, I will repeat the words of Living Colour: ELVIS IS DEAD!!!

...and this seals it, you're a retard. Quoting Living Colour? Really? Holy crap. You have once again proven my point that your opinion is devoid of any worth whatsoever. Living Colour? You've got to be kidding me. You have the balls to come on here and speak ill of Elvis? Friggin' Elvis? You quoted Living Colour, Living goddamned Colour! What's the matter, couldn't find an applicable Journey lyric to use? Living Colour could not be more worthless.

So, to sum up, this fool who thinks "sexiness", whether someone has crazy fans who dress up like them, and tackiness of home and wardrobe are germane criteria to assess an artist's worth, this fool who thinks there is no such thing as a good gospel song, this fool who thinks that artists who don't write (and believe every word of what they sing - which I don't even understand) their material are garbage, this fool who dares to quote the steaming pile wrapped in day-glo spandex that is Living Colour (I'm still just blown away by that), says that Elvis stinks.

OK, you've convinced me.

Jesus, man, put down the crack pipe and step away from the keyboard.





Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 2009-04-21 21:47 by The Ghost Of Good taste.

I have a couple of DVDs of music from the Ed Sullivan shows. It is interesting to compare the groups side by side like that. I cannot remember the poor guy's name who sings (I think) Teen Angel. I say poor because on the disc the next act is Elvis. You see him and he hits you like a direct right cross. WHAM! Same thing with The Beatles. Some people have it. I understand all the criticism, but the rebuttable is easy. He's was Elvis and the other weren't. For a while there he had the impact of a giant meteor.

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The Ghost Of Good taste
I just get angry when people short Elvis.

Me too, man!

I like Elvis, and it's ok if you don't.

I think there was also a mood swing that came with the British Invasion that for many simply erased lots of the music that was considered cool up til then. For a long time,years I didn't listen to him, and only much later did I get into a lot of his songs (not all), and pay him more respect.

Minus the hype that is really unfortunate, the guy had something to sing, and sang it well.

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GNAT
LOL! I have not laughed so much at a post in a long time.

Ghost Of Bad Taste, this ones just for you! Double click it!

I'd rather repeatedly slam my testicles in a drawer than listen to Living Colour.

Listen, Pally, you saying I have bad taste, is a true compliment.

Now, go slip into your electric orange Body Glove wetsuit, glamour boy.





Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2009-04-21 22:55 by The Ghost Of Good taste.

The Ghost of Good Taste

I agree with the GNAT on every point. However, your humor cannot be denied:

"True - he definitely wants you to play with his dingaling. I love Chuck Berry, and I don't believe Elvis was the King of Rock n Roll, but he never gave himself that title - you can't hold it against him."

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GNAT
Here is the graceful and so very talented Elvis just stunning the hell out of his audience. This is just a beautiful performance.

That clip of drugged up Elvis (tht you find so comicl) is so far preferable to Living Colour, I almost wept in relief that I didn't have listen to Danny Glover's kid and a bunch of studio musicians suck out loud.

I'd rather watch Elvis shart in his pants, than listen to your buddies in Living Colour.

Listening to Living Colour is like having someone crap in your mouth - some people may be into it, but not I.

Go buy "Let's Take It To The Stage", and get a clue.





Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 2009-04-21 22:57 by The Ghost Of Good taste.

OK, now I get it. I friend of mine was an Elvis impersonator and he would always seem to mess up the talking part of Lonesome Tonight, but I see now that it was "just like the way Elvis did it".

Gnat just looking for attention. Ignore and he'll grow up.

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GNAT
"Let's Take It To The Stage", is that an Elvis thing?

Should be "Let's take it to the buffet".

GNAT here is good depiction:

GNAT, how many performers do you know have triggered a chain reaction of events as startling as Presley did yet struggles to gain even an ounce of respect from so-called "music "fans."


[en.wikipedia.org]

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GNAT
"Let's Take It To The Stage", is that an Elvis thing?

Shocking that you don't know Let's Take It To The Stage. Positively shocking.

i just love Elvis. his version of 'promised land' alone would have made him a GREAT recording artist...and we have so much more...Thanks Big E. Always in my heart.

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GNAT
Hey, I'm grown. In fact, I'm 42- the same age as Elvis when he died. Except I'm not fat and pathetic...

You've got to be kidding me, you're that old? I was positive you were some teenager who just didn't know any better. I am in complete shock. Yikes.

EDIT:
No offense to teenagers - I've known some teenagers who actually really had their thing together musically.





Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2009-04-21 22:57 by The Ghost Of Good taste.

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Beelyboy
i just love Elvis. his version of 'promised land' alone would have made him a GREAT recording artist...and we have so much more...Thanks Big E. Always in my heart.

Elvis's 70s recordings are hugely underrated - Hurt, Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues, Burning Love, Always On My Mind et al are superb. I know I'm in a minority, and both The Ghost and Gazza will probably give me a kicking, but I personally think he never sang better than he did in the 70s.

On another note, what do the Elvis fans on here think of Albert Goldman's book?

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GNAT
Ghost Of Bad Taste:

Give me ten reasons he is not overrated.
If you can.

How can I resist, when you ask so nicely?

I'm not going to try to convince you, you clearly know better.

...and again, why would I even care to? Allow me to re-re-iterate: You don't think there are any good gospel songs, you think "sexiness" and wardrobe have something to do with an artist's worth, you don't think a singer/musician who doesn't write their own music is worth anything, and you listen to Living Colour. Your opinion doesn't count to me - anyone who would value your musical opinion, knowing those "bona fides", would have to be the same type of person who thinks Richard Simmons could show them how to get in shape. Richard Simmmons is chubby and has the same amount of muscle as a veal - why would he be able to train someone, when he can't even train himself? Likewise, you clearly have some problems discerning what is "good" (as far as I'm concerned), why would I care what you think? Why would I trouble myself trying to convince you of my point of view?

Why the hell did I take the time to write that paragraph?

Sometimes, The Ghost mystifies even The Ghost.





Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2009-04-21 22:58 by The Ghost Of Good taste.

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Nikolai
Elvis's 70s recordings are hugely underrated - Hurt, Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues, Burning Love, Always On My Mind et al are superb. I know I'm in a minority, and both The Ghost and Gazza will probably give me a kicking, but I personally think he never sang better than he did in the 70s.

On another note, what do the Elvis fans on here think of Albert Goldman's book?

I know this will surprise you, Nikolai, but I do like a good deal of Elvis' work from the 70's, and you'll get no kicking from me. I must say, for me, his voice was at its best in the 60's, but I can understand where you're coming from - Just Pretend, Patch It Up, Polk Salad Annie, I Just Can't Help Believing, It's Midnight, Promised Land, Burning Love, Hurt, Twenty Days & Twenty Nights...some great material, and some great Elvis performances from the '70's.

As far as the Goldman book, I haven't read it - I've really only read the 2 Guralnick books (which I really enjoyed).

"Except I'm not fat and pathetic,"

I've never seen a photo of ya son so I can't vouch for your weight but you sure are being pathetic!

Quote
The Ghost Of Good taste

Quote
Nikolai
Elvis's 70s recordings are hugely underrated - Hurt, Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues, Burning Love, Always On My Mind et al are superb. I know I'm in a minority, and both The Ghost and Gazza will probably give me a kicking, but I personally think he never sang better than he did in the 70s.

On another note, what do the Elvis fans on here think of Albert Goldman's book?

I know this will surprise you, Nikolai, but I do like a good deal of Elvis' work from the 70's, and you'll get no kicking from me. I must say, for me, his voice was at its best in the 60's, but I can understand where you're coming from - Just Pretend, Patch It Up, Polk Salad Annie, I Just Can't Help Believing, It's Midnight, Promised Land, Burning Love, Hurt, Twenty Days & Twenty Nights...some great material, and some great Elvis performances from the '70's.

As far as the Goldman book, I haven't read it - I've really only read the 2 Guralnick books (which I really enjoyed).

Not surprised, mate. Anyone who's got Sam Cooke's greatest album as their sig is someone of impeccable taste. I think Elvis sounded totally engaged with those 70s songs - especially the break-up ones like Fool and Hurt. Really blistering performances. And Moody Blue's a corking album.

The Guralnick books render the Goldman one pretty redundant. The Goldman is also hateful and mean-spirited in parts, more a knee-jerk character assassination than a plausible bio. It does go into great detail about the Colonel's business deals though, which make Don King look positively honest and upright in comparison.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2009-04-21 21:25 by Nikolai.