75 years of the King
75 years of the King - Elvis Presley would have been 75 this month
Also In The News
|
By Adam Leveridge
McLaren has reshuffled its race engineering team in order to facilitate the arrival of Jenson Button to the outfit alongside Lewis Hamilton. |  |
Tuesday, 12, Jan 2010 10:58
Had Elvis Presley not died in 1977 the King of Rock 'n' Roll would have turned 75 this month.
To mark this event a new greatest hits package has been released from Sony Music entitled, rather fittingly, Elvis 75.
The impressive collection features three CDs jammed with Elvis' biggest hits, covering the full spectrum of his career, from Heartbreak Hotel in 1956 through to the JXL remix of A Little Less Conversation from 2002.
Elvis 75 ties in nicely with a season of BBC Radio 2 documentaries exploring the singer's life and music, from Michael Freedland's The Elvis Trail to the fascinating When The King Met The President, which details Elvis' 1970 meeting with US President Richard Nixon.
The first CD of the Elvis 75 set contains 25 songs, as do the other two discs, opening with the sparse-sounding honkytonk-meets-rebel yell of Heartbreak Hotel, recorded in 1956 and the song that made the King a household name in the UK.
This is followed by eternal party favourite Blue Suede Shoes, also from 1956, and oozes Elvis' musical influences - black blues, hillbilly folk and gospel - all given a fiery 50s sprucing up.
Hound Dog, also originally recorded in 1956, blasts in after the sedate I Want You I Need You I Love You, and crackles with the same knockout mixture of blues and gospel.
Then we leap to a 1972 rendition of Blue Moon, given a jaunty but seriously over-produced atmosphere, making the track veer toward pastiche.
The lush lullaby Love Me Tender is next which despite being a 1972 re-recording still lets Elvis' gentler and more considered southern persona shine through.
It's this gentle side of the King that one of his cousins, Sybil Presley, recalls in The Elvis Trail, broadcast on Radio 2, as she says: "He was a nice kid."
A trait echoed by family friend Azalia Moore, who said of Elvis: "He was a sweet boy. Very different."
Elvis was born just before dawn on January 8th 1935 in a two-room shack in Tupelo, Mississippi built a year before by his father Vernon and grandad Jesse.
And this tiny clapboard house, 90 miles from Memphis, has taken on near-religious proportions for the legions of Elvis fans, who make the pilgrimage to Tupelo every year.
Elvis Presley's family have often been called 'white trash', a label that is strongly refuted by the community in Tupelo.
Quoting the writer John Steinbeck, the folk of Tupelo say 'trash don't wash their potatoes' whereas Elvis' family despite being dirt poor always washed their food and had strong moral codes.
As Azalia Moore says in The Elvis Trail: "They were poor folk but it was a good life. We had things far more important than money, we had faith."
Yet faith can only go so far and when Elvis' dad was sent to prison, the family, unable to make the mortgage payments on their house, had to move across town to a poor black area on the other side of the railway tracks.
Being in the deep south, Tupelo was in the midst of segregation but the young Elvis, who regularly sung in church, ignored this vile law and would sit with his black friend Sam Bell in the Lyric, the town's cinema.
The two boys would also play in the woods and collect scrap metal.
In 1946 Elvis' parents bought him his first guitar and he played it when he sung Leaf On A Tree that November for his classmates at Milam Junior High School.
Elvis and his parents packed their belongings into a trunk that was strapped to the roof of their 1939 Plymouth and moved to Memphis, Tennessee in November 1948.
The Elvis Trail is a well-researched and eminently listenable documentary, airing on Radio 2, by Michael Freedland, that provides the background to one of the last century's greatest entertainers, illuminating the factors that contributed to his music that is showcased on the Elvis 75 greatest hit package.
The first CD of which keeps the hits coming with the buzzy All Shook Up, the cuddly Let Me Be Your Teddy Bear and the swagger of Jailhouse Rock.
This smattering of songs are great examples of the musical styles that inspired Elvis, ranging from the gospel music he heard in church and the R 'n' B he absorbed as a teenager on Memphis' historic Beale Street.
A year after graduating from Humes High School, Elvis began his musical career when he was signed to Sun Records in 1954.
In late 1955 his contract was sold to RCA Victor and a year later he was an international star, with a style that deftly fused genres and defied the social and racial barriers of 50s America.
Alongside singing Elvis made 33 films and numerous TV appearances and concerts, successful tours and he took Las Vegas by storm.
He sold more than one billion records around the world and still found time to serve in the US military.
Elvis' music is a strange mixture of electrifying hillbilly rocking folk, upfront and unafraid blues, and sentimental gospel as evidenced by songs like Don't, Hard Headed Woman and A Big Hunk O' Love, the recording of the latter being spliced together from two takes in June 1958.
In fact, this heady brew makes up Elvis the man as well. While he was viewed by many in the so-called establishment as a threat to America's youth, he was a great admirer of law enforcement.
He accrued a collection of police badges, hats and guns as his career continued.
And when he got the opportunity to go on patrol with two Denver cops who had been assigned to him during a US tour, Elvis was described as being like a "giddy teenager".
When the cops stopped known drug dealers and put them in the back of their car for questioning, the felons were stunned to see Elvis in the vehicle.
Elvis had a longing to be a police officer, to work in law enforcement. This desire came from his childhood when he read and identified with comic book and movie heroes.
He would have to wait until 1970 to have this dream realised, albeit to an extent.
At the start of the 60s Elvis released the beautifully pompous and chintzy-sounding It's Now Or Never, which is the final track on the first Elvis 75 disc.
Elvis' star continued to rise as the 60s started as the second CD demonstrates with two sumptuous tearjerkers recorded in 1960 - Are You Lonesome Tonight and Wooden Heart.
As the 60s unfurled Elvis was there with the fantastic Can't Help Falling In Love, Return To Sender and the defiant chutzpah of Viva Las Vegas, recorded in July 1963 and so indicative of the Hollywood/show biz-influenced America of JFK.
However, by the end of the decade Elvis was regarded as a symbol of the past, out of touch with American youth.
This is the theme of another of Radio 2's Elvis documentaries, When The King Met The President, narrated by West Wing actor Martin Sheen.
As the 60s raged with the war in Vietnam and social unrest in the US and around the world, Elvis found himself reduced to recording poorly received movie soundtracks.
Then came the 1968 Comeback Special, echoing another comeback, this time by Republican Presidential candidate Richard Nixon aiming for the White House that November.
Nixon, who had narrowly lost to Kennedy in 1960 and then lost the governorship of California in 1962, won the 1968 election inheriting a divided nation.
This sense of a fractured America could be heard on Elvis' 1969 album From Elvis In Memphis.
This powerhouse album featured In The Ghetto, a socially-aware song that marked a real return to form for the King, and the opening track on the third Elvis 75 disc.
Man in in Elvis' inner circle believed In The Ghetto to be 'too thoughtful' with its theme of poverty. Yet this was the Elvis that his close friends understood, a man who was socially receptive despite being conservative, the product of his upbringing.
In The Ghetto gave Elvis his first hit for four years and he followed up with the stunning Motown-edged Suspicious Minds.
Thus 1969 began with a resurgent Elvis and Nixon. On the Radio 2 documentary When The King Met The President, writer and broadcaster Paul Gambaccini says of Presley: "Elvis was not, to public knowledge, a party political person.
"Even though he was this great talent, he was not an intellectual. He was a good boy, as they say down south.
"He was very sympathetic to the plight of ghetto black youth but he also admired Nixon."
A year later America was an even more fragmented place. Its youth were angered over Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia and the shooting of students at Kent State University by the National Guard.
And Elvis' yearning vocals on the beautiful Always On My Mind, admittedly from 1972 on the third disc, sums up the mood of the country at that time extremely well.
Speaking on When The King Met The President, David Greenberg, a professor of history and journalism, sets the scene: "In 1970 Nixon was on the ropes politically. He struggled to command a majority during a very turbulent time."
So even though Nixon and Elvis had enjoyed an upturn in their careers at the close of the 60s, the new decade saw them struggling to fit into a polarised America.
Elvis viewed hippies, drugs and the Black Panther movement as threats to the US and he admired Nixon for his determined stance on law and order.
In November 1970 Elvis flew to LA and met Disney voice artist Paul Freas, who was a part-time federal agent with his own badge to prove it.
It was then that Elvis hatched a plan to become a federal agent too, with his own badge.
On the musical front, the King's 70s output included the epic My Boy, the rollicking Promised Land and the re-release of A Little Less Conversation, remixed as a dance hit by JXL in 2002.
Elvis contacted his friend Jerry Schilling and the two flew out to Washington DC.
The plane was full of American GIs returning home from Vietnam for Christmas. After a long conversation with one of the soldiers, Elvis returned to where his friend Jerry was sitting and asked for the $500 the pair had.
It was all the money Elvis and Jerry had brought on the trip but the King gave it to the GI who had just returned to America after a year-long tour of duty in Vietnam.
Later in the flight Elvis spoke to US senator George Murphy and when Presley came back to sit with Jerry Schilling he said he was going to write a letter.
He was going to write to President Nixon.
In the letter that began with the words: "Dear Mr President, first let me introduce myself. I am Elvis Presley", Elvis detailed the threats that he believed were menacing America, from drugs to the counter-culture movement. Then he put himself forward to become a federal agent at large, using his status as an entertainer to infiltrate and undermine those who threatened the King's beloved United States.
It was as if the small child who had watched the derring-do of movie heroes and thrilled to the exploits of comic book superhumans, now a man clad in an equally garish costume, a black velvet suit with a cape, was about to become a crimefighter in his own right.
If Elvis of the early 70s looked like a superhero with an outmoded and simplistic view on the issues affecting America, then his music took on an equally retro-themed approach.
Tracks like My Way, recorded in 1971, and Moody Blue from 1976 came from a man looking back to another time, another America.
When Elvis, clad in a cape with a high collar and with hair that was long even for him, landed in Washington he wanted to deliver the letter to the White House.
The letter was delivered and initially viewed among Nixon's aides as a practical joke of the type enjoyed by the staffers of that administration.
However, presidential assistants Dwight Chapin and Bud Krogh contacted Elvis via Jerry Schilling at the Washington hotel that the pair was staying at, and the meeting with Nixon was set for December 21st.
Prior to the meeting Krogh and Chapin put together a list of talking points for the King and Nixon, including asking Elvis to record an album with its theme being 'high on life' to counteract the prevailing drug-influenced rock of the time.
However when the meeting took place all the points were ignored and Nixon, who preferred classical music, barely knew who Elvis was.
In spite of Nixon's unfamiliarity with Elvis, an incredulous state of affairs by anyone's thinking, the pair hit it off, although Nixon seemed unaware of anti-American sentiments expressed by the Beatles when they visited America in the 60s as related to him by Elvis.
According to his aides present in the meeting - where the president and Presley talked about Communist brainwashing and Las Vegas - Nixon, on that cold winter's day, took Elvis' rant against the Fab Four as that of a man painfully aware of how his star had been eclipsed.
As the meeting wound down, Nixon had somehow agreed to let Elvis become a federal agent, and Elvis asked if he could have a federal badge as befitting his new role.
Floundering, Nixon turned to his aides who hurriedly brought a federal badge to the King.
Overjoyed, Elvis did the unthinkable and hugged the president. Elvis proudly carried the badge with him for the next seven years.
Ironically, the badge and Elvis' position were merely honorary, with no actual authority.
Therefore, Tricky Dicky's corrupt regime had managed to dupe even the King of Rock 'n' Roll.
Yet the final track on Elvis 75, That's All Right, originally recorded in 1954 at the start of Presley's career, seems to sum up the King's final years and with his possession of a federal badge the hero-loving young boy from Tupelo, Mississippi was now a hero as well as an idol to millions.
Lee Davis