Review - Elvis Presley: Elvis Presley (1956)

Tracks: 1) Blue Suede Shoes; 2) Iʼm Counting On You; 3) I Got A Woman; 4) One Sided Love Affair; 5) I Love You Because; 6) Just Because; 7) Tutti Frutti; 8) Tryinʼ To Get To You; 9) Iʼm Gonna Sit Right Down And Cry (Over You); 10) Iʼll Never Let You Go (Little Darlinʼ); 11) Blue Moon; 12) Money Honey; 13*) Heartbreak Hotel; 14*) I Was The One; 15*) Lawdy Miss Clawdy; 16*) Shake, Rattle And Roll; 17*) My Baby Left Me; 18*) I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.

REVIEW

If you want to do this chronology stuff 100% correctly, you should, of course, start with The Sun Sessions, a classic compilation that put together everything that Elvis recorded for his first label, but was not released until 1976 (as an unintentionally vicious last minute reminder for the failing King of what it used to be in the good old glory days) — or, better still, with the first disc of The Complete 1950s Masters, which simply arranges everything he did in rigorous chronological order and dispenses with the necessity of putting all the scrambled pieces of the puzzle together from his chaotic history of single / EP / LP releases. We shall, however, opt for this fairly messy path instead and proceed from the string of LPs, most of which still remain in print and, together with some accompanying singles as bonus tracks, still paint a fairly authentic picture of the way in which Elvisʼ original fans were learning of their idolʼs everyday routine.

Besides, if we just skip the LPʼs, we shall have no pretext to mention the iconic album cover of Elvisʼ self-titled debut — the same one, of course, that would later be symbolically imitated by The Clash for London Calling. The difference being that neither Elvis himself nor his overseers at RCA Victor probably attributed any revolutionary significance to the image, and yet there is hardly any question about whether the actual music here turned the musical world upside down or not, whereas with London Calling this would be fairly debatable. Even so, it is worth noticing that, for a long long while, this was the only Elvis LP to feature a typeface-covered hint at Elvisʼ golden hips, or actually capture him in a moment of ecstatic performance — on everything that followed, his posturing, facial expressions, and camera angles would hardly distinguish him from your average teen idol. Fortunately, enough damage would already be done with this photo so as not to let anybody worry about the inoffensiveness of any subsequent ones.

Another special feature of Elvis Presley is that it actually happens to mix material from his newer sessions for RCA with leftovers from Sun — with the market clearly demanding an Elvis Presley LP, it was discovered that there simply wasnʼt enough new material, so five out of twelve songs had to come from Sam Phillipsʼ stock. Most of those are ballads, with the exception of ʽJust Becauseʼ, but this is a good thing, because the minimalistic arrangements from the Sun Studios, focusing almost exclusively on Elvisʼ vocals, made the songs stand out from the generic doo-wop product of the day — when you listen to something like ʽIʼm Counting On Youʼ, you might seriously wonder about why you should be bothering with this stuff at all when you have The Platters or The Drifters, but that weirdly wobbly version of ʽBlue Moonʼ, all echo and popping bass and silence all around, actually makes it feel as if the singer is calling out to the girl in the tower while trying to cross a deep moat late at night.

This mix of Elvisʼ original Sun style — the lean, raw «power trio» synthesis of country-western and jump blues — and the early RCA style, in which the rawness was partially sacrificed in favor of updated production values and a bigger band, with actual drums and pianos, is delightful in that it shows the creative evolution and expansion of a great sound that has not yet begun to devolve into cuddliness and sentimentalism. Not all the 12 songs on the original LP are equally great, but not a single one is cringeworthy, a feat that would not be repeated on any subsequent record — and all this considering that Presleyʼs best material at the time was not even supposed to go on an LP in the first place.

From the very start, the «rockier» material that he did for RCA fell into two categories — «hard rock», usually inspired by or directly covering such masters of gritty R&B as Ray Charles and Little Richard, and «soft rock», typically driven by piano boogie lines and owing more to the tradition of saloon entertainment: your basic ʽShake, Rattle & Rollʼ vs. your typical ʽTeddy Bearʼ opposition. Naturally, the rebel in me will always fall for the first category before everything else, and these covers of ʽI Got A Womanʼ and ʽTutti Fruttiʼ will always remain the definitive ones. Of course, Elvis and his band whip the tunes into tight-focused action like the pistol-packinʼ white cowboys they are, rather than let them hang a little loose and sloppy and irreverent like their original black creators — which is a good thing, because each of these songs now got two lives instead of one. When I hear Little Richard go blop-bam-boom, my mind visualizes a crowded, tightly packed, smoky, sweaty ballroom; with Elvis, the song becomes a frenzied cowboy charge through the prairie — reach Point A from Point B in two minutes flat, lasso the bull, mission accomplished. (By the way, the absolutely insane instrumental break in the middle of ʽTutti Fruttiʼ might just be the single punkiest explosion of noise captured in the rockabilly era — what the heck are those drums even doing?).

Happily, though, the «soft rock» tunes this time around are also a lot of goofy fun: ʽOne-Sided Love Affairʼ features a beautiful rollickinʼ barrelhouse piano part from Floyd Cramer on top of a vocal that sounds like its owner has just run a marathon but still has to get it all out as if his life depended on it, and ʽIʼm Gonna Sit Right Down And Cry Over Youʼ is another successful stab at turning generic country blues into rockabilly — and for now, it looks as though adding piano and drums to the mix might have been a definitive win over the sparseness of the Sun sound... well, hardly anybody in early ʼ56 could have guessed about the way things would ultimately turn out.

Now, the big question: was the difference between an Elvis LP and an Elvis hit single at the time really that crucial? Answer: by no means. Sure, ʽHeartbreak Hotelʼ is only here as a bonus track, and few things in 1956 could beat the stunning effect of ʽHeartbreak Hotelʼ. But all these other 14 tracks — yes, some are weaker than others, but there is no true filler here, because (a) Elvis had great taste in covers, whenever he got to choose them for himself and (b) RCA had the wisdom, at the time, to hook him up with some really talented songwriters who could hammer out distinct, interesting personalities for their songs. And if ʽHeartbreak Hotelʼ may be a one-of-a-kind knock­out track indeed (is there one single tune in the universe that actually sounds even remotely like it?), its follow-up single, ʽI Want You, I Need You, I Love Youʼ, is actually a fairly straight­forward prom night slow dance track that is far less exciting than most of the LP tracks.

My point being here that it would be deeply incorrect to regard pre-army Elvis as specifically a «singles artist» because all pop artists were «single» at the time. The high quality of his LPs was not necessarily a good sign: what it really meant was that the commercial machine had almost immediately latched on to him as its major cash cow, and was ready to spin its wheels overtime to ensure high quality product (normally, not a lot of people bought LPs, but with Elvis, sales were guaranteed all the way). But for a while, as long as the industry was still young and as long as Colonel Parker could be able to stimulate the interest of people who could get excited about something other than just money, it worked, and it gave the world approximately two great years during which Elvis Presley would be the most prolific and the most consistent of all the young white entertainers in the rockʼnʼroll business.

• Only Solitaire: Elvis Presley review page