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The
catch here is that Neil McCormick, like most people, would probably agree that much, if not most,
of Elvis’ career in the Sixties represented a gradual slide into corniness,
self-parody, and irrelevance — and since any such slide has to have a
reasonable starting point somewhere,
would he really draw a massive dividing line between Elvis Is Back! — an alleged «masterpiece» — and whatever came after it, starting with, say, G.I. Blues? It is not really an issue
of «good» or «bad»; it is an issue of changing musical values, of setting
upon a different path of development which may, one day, lead to artistic
bliss or complete artistic breakdown. I certainly like Elvis Is Back! quite a bit, but I could never bestow the title of
«masterpiece» upon it (at least, provided we’re only allowed one masterpiece) precisely because
this is where the seeds of Elvis’ impending decline are sown for all to see;
and the recent retrospective drive to upgrade its status to VIP level seems
rather telling for an age that shows more and more propensity for branding
the «tepidly mediocre» in pop culture as the new «emotionally exciting».
In
reality, Elvis — or, perhaps, «The Elvis Machine», as would be appropriate to
refer to the artistic world of Elvis by that time — was no more exempt from
the «Fifties’ Curse» than any of his contemporaries: having already once invented his own rules of the
game, he had no inclination or stimulus whatsoever to try and change the
rules one more time. But that was only one part of the story — had it just
been the «Fifties’ Curse», we might have seen Elvis churning out pale
inferior shadows of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and ‘Hound Dog’ throughout the decade,
the same way Chuck Berry and Gene Vincent did, for instance. The other part of the story, of course,
was that Elvis was King, and as King, he had certain moral obligations to his
nation — for instance, the obligation to grow up from Teenager to Man,
setting up a proper «maturity example» for the millions of young Americans
remaining in dire need of a role model. At least Chuck Berry and Gene Vincent
were totally free of any such obligations; Elvis was not. Had he married an
underage cousin or something like that, God would probably have spared him
any further embarrassments. But he was a «good boy» — too good for his own
sake, perhaps.
I
am not entirely sure when people started entertaining the actual idea that
"Elvis ‘died’ in the Army"
(which, if I am not mistaken, stems from a John Lennon quotation from one of
his interviews). Certainly legions of fans, both in America and across the
Atlantic, were impatiently waiting for the god of rock’n’roll to come back
and provide them with a new flow of energetic classics — and the small amount
of stuff that Elvis recorded while on furlough, such as ‘I Got Stung’ and ‘A
Big Hunk O’ Love’, was definitely promising, showing the exact same kind of
rock’n’roll bite as most of his 1950s RCA output. Just how many people were
seriously disappointed with Elvis Is
Back! and its surrounding singles such as ‘Stuck On You’ at the time of
release is something we’ll never know — but I think it would be a fair guess
that John Lennon, for instance, was not impressed, or else the whole "dying in the Army" thing wouldn’t
have become a thing.
Of
course, there is no impenetrable iron curtain that separates Elvis Is Back! from its predecessors.
Elvis had already recorded plenty of pop songs and sentimental ballads
before; and while there is not really even a single straightforward
rock’n’roll song à la ‘Blue
Suede Shoes’ on this record, it does feature a small bunch of grittier
numbers in a bluesy vein (‘Like A Baby’ and ‘Reconsider Baby’, above all)
which could easily appeal to a demanding musical taste (at least, back at the
time). There is no single ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ kind of moment here where
the artist crosses a very specific artistic border that separates the likes of
«erotic modeling» from «pornography». But there is clearly a focused
intention to show the world a ‘new’ Elvis, one who has left the style of
‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and ‘Hound Dog’ behind because it is clearly embarrassing
for anybody over 25 years old to sing the likes of ‘Hound Dog’ — particularly
for a King.
All
of this is already clearly illustrated with ‘Stuck On You’, Elvis’ first
officially released post-Army single that predated the LP by a couple of
weeks. On one hand, ‘Stuck On You’ is a disappointment — it is a relatively
quiet, unhurried, blues-poppy creation from the brain of Aaron Schroeder,
nowhere near the maniacal level of noise and energy that was ‘I Got Stung’,
written by the same guy and recorded less than two years ago. On the other
hand, it’s not as if Elvis had never done well-received blues-poppy material
like ‘Stuck On You’ before — there is nothing that would make it
intrinsically worse than, say, ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ or ‘Paralyzed’. It’s got the
self-assured macho attitude a-plenty, too, and a super-tight Nashville
backing with all of Elvis’ great sidemen involved (Scotty Moore, Hank
Garland, Floyd Cramer, you name ’em), and the Jordanaires return for their
usual role of Resplendent Retinue (gotta love how they «open the doors» for
the main vocal hook at the end of each verse, right?). It’s a pretty damn
good song — just maybe not the kind
of song that Elvis’ most loyal and steadfast fans would expect him to
announce his comeback with.
The
real bad news of March 23, 1960,
was the B-side: ‘Fame And Fortune’, a thoroughly formulaic doo-wop ballad
from the embarrassingly lazy hands of the Fred Wise / Ben Weisman team, is
the first and the most typical representative of the «tepid Elvis ballad» for
the upcoming decade. Take something in a similar style from just a few years
back — say, ‘I Need You So’ from Loving
You — play the two tracks back-to-back a couple of times, and the meaning
of the word «sanitized» shall crystallize right before your eyes, clear as
day. In the place of a rougher, rawer style as practiced not just by Elvis,
but by his entire band, we have a professional, tight arrangement where
everybody quietly keeps to their own business, not allowing themselves any freedom; and in the place of a
singer who once captivated his audiences by breaking all the «rules of
decency» even while singing sentimental love ballads is an equally tightly
disciplined crooner, whose voice feels more oriented at middle-aged ladies in
a Las Vegas casino than a hormone-addled teenager. (Far be it from me, of
course, to discriminate one of these target groups over another — but it does go without saying that
boundary-breaking art has more often been created when trying to pander to
hormone-addled teenagers than to middle-aged ladies in Las Vegas casinos.) At
least ‘Stuck On You’ was a bouncy, catchy, well-written pop song; ‘Fame And
Fortune’ is one of those throwaway compositions whose value is completely
dependent on the style of delivery — and this particular style, wallowing in
its own so-called «maturity», pretty much spells out an extended death
sentence for the musical career of Elvis Presley.
The
actual LP, recorded during the same late March / early April sessions in
Nashville as the single, is fully consistent with the promise of its A- and
B-sides — typically alternating between fun, catchy pop songs and crooning
ballads, all tied together with this new, tightly disciplined and restrained
sound from everybody involved. A small part of the blame could perhaps be
placed on Chet Atkins, the great Nashville discipliner, as co-producer, but
let’s not pin everything on the
alleged Nashville strictness: ‘A Big Hunk O’ Love’ was also cut at Nashville,
and somehow managed to combine tightness with maniacal excitement. The
bottomline is that if you really want to get wild in Nashville, you can get wild in Nashville; it’s just
that in April 1960, nobody wanted to get wild in Nashville.
Arguably
the only small echo of that old wildness comes out with ‘Dirty, Dirty
Feeling’, a very short Coasters-style pop-rock number (with Boots Randolph
providing the obligatory yakety-sax backing throughout) which, not
surprisingly, comes from the remains of the old Leiber-Stoller stock
(although Colonel Parker would keep those guys away from Elvis, he apparently
did not have a serious problem with Elvis revisiting the old archives). It’s
very lightweight, nothing particularly special, but it’s got a fast tempo, a
pretty demonic, out-of-control guitar break (probably Hank Garland rather
than Scotty), and such a high-pitched, frenetic delivery from Elvis that you
could honestly mistake this for a recording from circa 1957-58, probably the
only such case on the entire album.
Alas,
much more typical here are songs
like the opening ‘Make Me Know It’, a rather average piece from the usually
reliable Otis Blackwell which should
be working along the same lines as a ‘Treat Me Nice’, but actually does not,
and what kills it is, once again, the lack of rawness — everything is tight
as a button, and what once used to be a lively, nervous, hiccupy,
unpredictable vocal style has turned into a self-assured, evenly paced,
«adult» delivery. The vocal timbre, the phrasing, the pacing, all of that is
still unmistakably and uniquely Elvis, but the difference is that just a few
years ago he and his band could elevate a generic pop throwaway to the status
of a classic; in 1960, in order to be truly memorable, a song on an Elvis
album had to have at least a pinch of compositional genius — otherwise, you
ended up with this middle-of-the-road stuff like ‘Make Me Know It’, which
sounds kinda cool while it’s on and then goes out the window immediately.
By
contrast, it is hardly possible to forget ‘Fever’, yet this is largely
because most of the creative work on that song had already been done by Peggy
Lee (the original
version, released by the somewhat obscure R&B singer Little Willie
John, was OK, but clearly it was Peggy Lee who really brought to light all of
the song’s unique potential with that bass-’n’-percussion arrangement and
all). With its glitzy-sensual reputation and all, ‘Fever’ is a number which
is probably very hard to be taken not
tongue-in-cheek in the modern day and age (even I have to confess that
‘Fever’ works best with the
Muppets), but at least it is a good showcase for Elvis’ new-found
«maturity»: Peggy Lee may have found the perfect way to make the song work
and turn it into something unique, but it took Elvis to really bring a
«feverish» aspect to the singing — it’s not just the deep tone, it’s the wobble in the voice that matters. It
is Elvis’ most theatrical delivery on the entire album, and also one that, I
think, he would be incapable of earlier (although a few of these dramatic
elements in his voice do crop up as early as the Sun era — see ‘Blue Moon’
and suchlike), which kind of makes me wish that, perhaps, if he really cared
so much about sounding more «adult» and all, he might have simply tried to
record an entire album of vocal jazz like this.
On
the other hand, while I might be alone on this, I am not so sure of Elvis as
a great blues singer. Surprisingly,
Elvis Is Back! is capped off with
not one, but two slow blues tunes:
Jesse Stone’s ‘Like A Baby’ and Lowell Fulson’s ‘Reconsider Baby’, taken at
more or less the same tempos and given the same piano-and-sax-centered
arrangements. They’re decent, and they certainly sound a bit more
raggedy-shraggedy than the glossy pop songs on the album, and the Boots
Randolph-led two-verse jam on ‘Reconsider Baby’ is a nice boost to the entire
band... but I honestly do not see what it is exactly that Elvis’ delivery
brings to the table that was not already present in Fulson’s classic original;
besides, the song is really more like a vehicle for cool guitar soloing than
vocalizing, so I’d rather listen to people like Eric Clapton covering it than
Elvis. Now it goes without saying that hearing Elvis rock out on a slow blues
jam with his Nashville buddies is a way
better proposition than hearing him do his Vegas stuff; but even so, this cat was born to give chicks
‘Fever’, not waste his time on blues triplets. Mick Jagger could give the
blues a new voice; Elvis really couldn’t.
(Important
correction, however: he could give a pretty damn solid voice to «blues-pop» —
‘A Mess Of Blues’, recorded during the same sessions and later released as
the B-side to ‘It’s Now Or Never’, is a terrific performance, but that is
because its melody and structure give Elvis a better opportunity to showcase
his trembling, vulnerable, quivers-down-my-backbone voice; he doesn’t have
that much luck with the nonchalantly threatening style of ‘Reconsider Baby’
which simply does not give him a good opportunity to play Emotional Elvis,
and who needs a non-Emotional Elvis?).
In
between the fabulous «jazz-pop» of ‘Fever’ and the somewhat less jaw-dropping
«blues-rock» of the ‘Baby’ songs, we largely find what we expected to find —
pop ditties and crooner ballads, some a bit nicer than others, but none
really matching the strength and freshness of what used to be. Tired old
chord sequences married to tightly predictable Nashville arrangements and
well-disciplined, but not tremendously exciting vocal arrangements — listen
to something like ‘Soldier Boy’ and you’ll hear all of Elvis’ tried-and-true
vocal tricks, but restrained this
time, as if he were simply too afraid to wake up the neighbors or something.
Of all this remaining stuff, my personal favorite is probably a cover of the
Drifters’ ‘Such A Night’ — Elvis’ loving tributes to Clyde McPhatter are
always adorable, and at least this one here’s a real naughty one,
particularly the ending, which horndog Elvis and his «slutty» Jordanaires
retinue somehow manage to turn into the dirtiest bit of moaning on record
since Ray Charles’ ‘What’d I Say’ (I made sure to revisit the original
Drifters recording and, sure enough, there was nothing like that set of ecstatic oohs and aahs in Clyde
McPhatter’s coda).
On
the whole, as you can already tell, Elvis
Is Back! is quite a bit of a mess. In a way, Elvis’ post-Army career is
not so much «flat-out awful» as it is frustratingly intriguing — few artists
had the same mix of highs and lows for such a long time, a Jekyll-and-Hyde
sort of thing going on where sometimes Man temporarily triumphs over Machine,
but more often it is the Machine that engulfs and enslaves the Man, and the
end is always tragic. Here, we see the beginning of the process where Man and
Machine sort of work in tandem, with a seemingly mutually beneficial
compromise whose consequences, however, in the not-so-long run shall be as
strictly determinant as those of the Munich Agreement. In any case, there is
no sin in liking this record, in singing along to even its sappiest bits,
even in thinking that ‘Reconsider Baby’ is a truly great piece of slow blues
if you so desire. There is, however — returning full circle to the quotation
at the beginning of the review — something deeply wrong in overrating this
record, daring to call it a «masterpiece» and thus insinuate that somehow, it
embodies genuine, if not monumental, artistic progress for Elvis compared to
his pre-Army years. Statements like these basically put an equality sign
between the type of art that dashingly challenges formula and the one that
largely conforms to its rules, which I find deeply unjust. (It is true that
«challenging formula» is not the only necessary condition for great art, but,
fortunately, Elvis had no problems satisfying all those conditions in the
Fifties).
Case
in point: my favorite track on the expanded CD edition of the album has
always been ‘I Gotta Know’, the B-side to the boring ballad ‘Are You Lonesome
Tonight?’ released late in 1960, but also recorded at the same sessions. The
song, written by Paul Evans and originally recorded by Cliff Richard in a
more countrified version, is given an absolutely perfect pop arrangement
here, catchy as hell and featuring brilliant vocal harmonizing between Elvis
and the Jordanaires. The drums, the bass, the piano, the slightly sratchy
weave of the rhythm guitar, the perfect choreography of the backing vocals —
it’s like a geometrically precise rococo construction without a single flaw
in the complex design; even a next-generation popmeister like Paul McCartney
would have a hard time topping something like this. But if I had to choose
between ‘I Gotta Know’ and something, like, say, ‘Milkcow Blues Boogie’?
(It’s a good thing I don’t). It’s not an issue of «pop» versus «rock», mind
you; it’s more an issue of inspiration versus perspiration, of ecstasy versus
craft, all of the good and evil of which can be found in «pop», «rock»,
«blues», «jazz», whatever label the algorithm sticks on it.
That
said, I do not want to make it seem as if «craft» and «perspiration» by
themselves are necessarily a bad thing, even if the balance of powers is
completely overthrown and all the good cards are on their side. It is, after
all, quite possible that, had Elvis had the strength to resist the Machine
and stubbornly stuck to his rock’n’roll formula, all he would be capable of
would be mediocre self-plagiarism (like, indeed, most of the stuff that Chuck
Berry did in his post-Fifties career); there is little reason to argue that,
if not for Colonel Parker and the rest of the Memphis Mafia, Elvis’ career
would have flourished (although it is true that he would probably spend less
time on his stupid movies). His submissive placing himself in the hands of
«professionals» did bring on mixed results, but said «professionals» weren’t
exactly mindless, soulless, heartless automatons — accusing the Nashville
session players of not loving music or not understanding its purpose would be
totally ridiculous. What they could
be accused of is a lack of ambitions: for most of those guys, music was there
to entertain people, giving them what they already want rather than
suggesting there might be something else
out there. The entire point of Elvis’ «maturity» was to subscribe to that
philosophy — a subscription fully and completely responsible for both his
high and low points from now on, and, ultimately, for August 16, 1977.
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