Different Elvis heard in songs
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — To be an Elvis fan in the 1960s could be as awkward as defending Frankie Avalon. While the Beatles were recording "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," Presley was filming "Clambake." The Stones sang "I Can't Get No Satisfaction"; the King offered "(There's) No Room to Rhumba in a Sports Car."
But did Elvis really go soft after getting out of the Army? Some think his downfall had as much to do with marketing as it did with music. Buried under the schlocky sound-tracks — sometimes as many as three a year — were songs as good, or even better, than his famous hits of the previous decade.
"I think the point is once you remove the movie music and you're just dealing with the music Elvis made in the studio, you actually see a much wider range than what he made in the 1950s," said critic Peter Guralnick, who wrote the liner notes for "Elvis: From Nashville to Memphis," a five-record box set that compiles the King's nonmovie '60s music.
"The '60s was when Elvis became a singer," added critic and long-time Elvis defender Dave Marsh. "He could sing a ballad as corny as 'Are You Lonesome Tonight?' or a blues like 'I Feel So Bad.' By the time you get to the end of the decade, 'Suspicious Minds,' he sang as great as he ever did."
The box set, the second volume of RCA's Elvis retrospective, covers his recording career from the first post-Army records in the early '60s through the 1969 "comeback"
sessions that produced "Suspicious Minds."
Gone are embarrassments such as "Song of the Shrimp" and "Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce." Among the rescued is a slow, haunting cover of Bob Dylan's "Tomorrow Is a Long Time."
That Guralnick even agreed to write the liner notes is a sign some have changed their minds about Elvis. In "The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll," Guralnick had dismissed much of his '60s music as an "eight-year slumber in Hollywood." He wrote of his "self-parodying mannerisms," his "indifference to the material he recorded; his apparent contempt for his own talent. ... The spectacle itself of the bad boy made good."
So what happened?
"I think my eyes have been opened considerably since I started working on this biography, also from listening to a great deal of material which I had never closely listened to before," he said.
Two of the records in the set largely are devoted to music no one, not even Guralnick, ever doubted: the songs Presley recorded after his 1968 television "comeback" special.
Vowing "never to sing another song that I don't believe in," Elvis finally ditched his movie career. In January 1969, he returned to Memphis for a recording session for the first time in 14 years.
Within weeks, Presley had recorded more than 30 songs. Hit singles included "Suspicious Minds," "Kentucky Rain" and "Don't Cry Daddy." There was pop, soul, even social protest.
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