A: Blue Suede Shoes//I'm Counting on You//I Got A Woman//One-Sided Love Affair//I Love You Because//Just Because
B: Tutti Frutti//Trying to Get to You//I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry//I'll Never Let You Go (Li' Darlin')//Blue Moon//Money Honey
Well, this is something of a contrast. Where Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours constitutes a coherent, polished statement drawn from a single, focused recording period, Elvis Presley shows more or less the exact opposite trend – a mish-mash of left-over country recordings from Elvis’ days at Sun with a selection of harder-driving R&B numbers recorded with his new pals at RCA the following year. This is something of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, there’s a great breadth of material here – from straight-up country, to rockabilly to R&B, to pop – but on the other, not all the material is up to the standards set by the best tracks. Nothing here is really bad, per se – but the haphazard nature of the album’s construction shows. “I’m Counting on You” displays astonishing vocal control, but Elvis’ soaring and twisting vocals ultimately sound a little foolish over the modest country backing – he’s got an incredible voice, with one hell of a range, but doesn’t quite seem to know what to do with it here. “I Love You Just Because” is a much more successful attempt at the same thing, with some very soulful crooning in the upper register, even if he sounds almost unrecognisable.
Perhaps his finest vocal performances appear on two of the ballads at the end of the album. “I’ll Never Let You Go” and “Blue Moon” both feature a subdued backing of little more than bass and guitar. The former soars along with a beautiful, feminine R&B vocal in the Inkspots vein that suddenly erupts into a chugging bit of rock. “Blue Moon” is arguably the best song on the album. The bass is a primitive “walking” rhythm and the guitar clops like horse hooves in a simple repeating figure. There’s almost nothing there, and it gives a chance for Elvis to deliver an utterly arresting performance (courtesy, partly, of what sounds like a very fine echo chamber, I will grant). His falsetto vocalese across the bridge is beautiful – a trumpet couldn’t have done it better (and why is it that I keep praising so many Hart/Rodgers tunes?). Despite the fact that Elvis is remembered primarily as a rocker, I’d argue his true strength always rested in his crooning. I mean, the guy was a gospel singer for Pete’s sake! He knew crooning! Although, regrettably, no gospel appears on this album – Elvis was, at this time, the King of Rock and Roll, yet to crawl from the schoolgirl’s bed and endear himself to the housewife – and Gospel at the time actually being religious music, it wasn’t exactly sexual dynamite. It’s a pity – his driving approach to Gospel and R&B in the 60s is what really endears him to me.
“But Thomas!” you cry. “What about the Rock & Roll! Nobody cares about mellow pop music, man – this guy broke rock and changed the world! Talk about that!”. Well, okay then. I guess the reason I focus upon Elvis’ voice is because that’s where his true strength lies. He didn’t write, and he wasn’t much of a guitar player (there is some very able assistance on this album from no less a man than Chet Atkins). The rock here, is, however, pretty damn good. Did you need me to tell you that? Well, a song’s spending fifty years at the core of the pop canon may tend to colour people’s perceptions of it. The principal charm in the music is how feral it is. The version here of Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” lacks the heavy, measured thuds of the original, but makes-up for it with being a pure explosion of energy. It’s the whole punk rock thing – Elvis was pure youth distilled, shooting out of the speakers like white hot ejaculate to impregnate the teens of the world with rebellion. Or something. You don’t need me to tell you that the fifties were a pretty buttoned-down time, and that all the bored, middle class kids needed something wild and freaky to shake them up. Elvis, all his musical merits aside, had the image. He freaked-out the squares. He may not have been as good a rock & roller as, say, Little Richard – especially not judging by his cover of “Tutti Frutti”, which is rather anaemic compare to the original, salvaged by a marvellous guitar solo compensating for Elvis’ little boy vocals – but, if you want to get down to it and say what we’ve all been thinking, he had the one thing that mattered: he was hot he was white.
This isn’t to discredit the guy. He’s done a great album here. But rock music had been around a fair while before Elvis and he doesn’t do much that’s new or particularly accomplished. His main importance in the history of music comes from his popularisation of rock in white, middle class homes. If you do want to give credit, however, then even though Elvis may not have produced many innovations here, he did present one important formal shift. Elvis Presley is an enormously cosmopolitan album – Ray Charles covers sitting right beside Appalachian balladeering and the old-fashion rattle-and-hum Blues of “Just Because”. That Elvis Presley manages to push forward so many different styles on one album, and sometimes within one song, and do it for the better part quite well, is something of an achievement in shaking-up what was, at the time, a very carefully segregated pop-music landscape. And, considering that so many of the rockers to come after him took Elvis as a direct model, that seems pretty damned important.
Now, you could argue that Elvis “stole” “black” music. Maybe he did. I don’t know. Maybe New Orleans jazz stole French marching music. Granted, I don’t know if the New Orleans jazz movement ever set about systematically exploiting a host of white marching bands in the aftermath of their discovery, but anyway. You can’t really argue that the musical landscape isn’t much richer as a consequence of all this sort of thing. “Heartbreak Hotel” opened a floodgate (well, Little Richard and Fats Domino may have been important too). Black dudes got played on the radio! Is that a bad thing? Maybe I could do without all the people who insist that the Beatles and their imitators are the be-all and end-all of pop music, but oh well. At least we got Elvis’ killer phrasing on the chorus of “Sit Right Down and Cry” in compensation – it’s probably the one moment where his rock vocals really kick in, arguably the sound of the guy finding his rough edge, which would work so well later on in instances such as, say, the King Creole soundtrack.
Anyway, to further digress (and I suppose, given the importance of Elvis, I might as well), it does make a fair bit of sense. People these days tend to fall into one of two camps – those who, for some reason, think that Elvis just sort of sat down one day and invented rock music, and those who on the other hand argue that a bunch of white guys showed-up and simply lifted it from the black scene wholesale. Both of these are inaccurate, although the latter has far more truth than the former. Basically, trad rock is a hybridisation of “white” country & western and hillbilly music - originating in a complex mixture of Eastern European, Spanish and British folk styles - and rhythm & blues. The restructuring of country around a blues back-beat, coupled with adoption of the 12-bar structure, led to the “rockabilly” style that lead more or less into conventional rock a-la Buddy Holly (see also: Chubby Checker). At least, I think that’s how it went. Obviously, the styles that developed more directly out of R&B have a very different origin, but if you want to look at Elvis as the prototypical rocker – and given that he probably had the most defining influence on the direction of early rock, it seems fair – then this album is actually a very honest mixture of the various elements that would lead to, say, The Beatles, I suppose.
Of course most musicians, Elvis included, simply plucked willy-nilly from the Blues tradition, thus shooting my theory to shit. But hey!
Anyway. So, this is a very promising debut. The sound of the recordings is very raw, and cheap, but it works. Everything is sort of up in the air – Elvis was a live performer, after all, and this captures that live feel quite nicely. There’s an invigorating energy and a certain panache that glosses over the album’s numerous flaws like a solid local act playing on the marquis at a street festival. It’s all fine stuff, and it lead to one of the most bizarre and fruitful careers in pop music. Elvis would remain hit-and-miss for the rest of his career, but the hits were usually worth it.
7/10
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