Review: Elvis Presley - Something For Everybody (1961)
Tracks: 1) There’s Always Me; 2) Give Me The Right; 3) It’s A Sin; 4) Sentimental Me; 5) Starting Today; 6) Gently; 7) I’m Comin’ Home; 8) In Your Arms; 9) Put The Blame On Me; 10) Judy; 11) I Want You With Me; 12) I Slipped, I Stumbled, I Fell; 13*) Surrender; 14*) I Feel So Bad; 15*) His Latest Flame; 16*) Little Sister; 17*) Good Luck Charm; 18*) Anything That’s Part Of You.
REVIEW
There was an actual chance for Elvis’ second proper post-Army LP to have one good song on it. Originally, the cover of ‘I Feel So Bad’, a semi-forgotten Chuck Willis R&B hit from 1954, was supposed to go on the record — then, for unclear reasons, it was substituted at the last minute for ‘I Slipped, I Stumbled, I Fell’, taken from the mini-soundtrack of Elvis’ Wild In The Country movie and, thus, the only song on the LP to have been recorded earlier than the sessions of March 12-13, 1961. Unfortunately, that song is essentially a poorly masked rewrite of ‘I Got Stung’, with Fred Wise and Ben Weisman faithfully copying the basic skeleton of Aaron Schroeder — except that the song rolls along at a sludgier tempo and has twice less the energy of the original pop-rock mini-masterpiece. Faint, feeble fun at best.
‘I Feel So Bad’, on the other hand, is a damn good cover. Elvis sticks very closely to the original, preserving that nagging, persistent, can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head piano riff as the main hook — for good reason, since the song needs a unique hook to compensate for its generic blues structure — but employing the full talents of his Nashville team to upgrade and energize the sound to contemporary standards. Buddy Harman, in particular, gives it a tough, frenzied drum sound, with his nervous fills often stealing the attention away from the singer. The most interesting comparison, though, would be for the instrumental break section: in Willis’ original, the «Latin-meets-blues» groove temporarily gives way to a decidedly jazzy little improv, while the Elvis version kicks the song into a rock’n’roll-ish overdrive instead, as Boots Randolph contributes a sax part that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Little Richard record. It all clicks together, and ‘I Feel So Bad’ genuinely lives up to its title in the end. The piano riff, the paranoid drumming, Elvis’ «I-really-got-a-splittin’-headache» approach to his vocal delivery, the maniacal mid-section — all contributes to a damn fine artistic portrayal of somebody in a state of complete mental disarray, gnawed by doubt and confusion.
Alas, it looks like there was simply no place for this bit of psychological triumph on an LP entitled Something For Everybody — and by «everybody» I’m assuming that they mean «everybody who has never listened to good music in the Fifties». Recorded in its near-entirety during the same two-day session in March, the record is semi-officially separated in two parts: slow-and-sentimental A-side for lovers of romance, fast-and-danceable B-side for lovers of butt-shaking... and I guess they must have instinctively realized just how weak the album is, because otherwise it would never have required any special structural gimmicks to help market it for the masses. Only goes to show, really, just how much genuine «importance» Elvis and his gang were attaching to original LPs at the moment (though, admittedly, the soundtracks to their cherished movies showed even fewer signs of life).
The main problem with the record is that it not only sounds as if it were recorded in a mere two days (as we remember, the Beatles recorded Please Please Me in one day and it turned out pretty cool); it sounds as if it were written in a mere two days, if not two hours. All of the usual culprits are assembled for the reaping — such as Schroeder, Wise, and Weisman — plus some newcomers from the country scene, e.g. Fred Rose and Don Robertson; but nobody even lifts a finger to produce something original. The country numbers are stereotypical as heck, and the pop numbers all sound like half-assed rewrites of what used to be fresh and exciting a few years back, but has now been reduced to a set of weak shadows of former glory. It is, quite honestly, as if most of those songwriters were specifically tasked with quests such as «write a song for Elvis that would evoke ‘Blueberry Hill’», «write a song for Elvis that would have the same hooks as ‘One Night’», «write a song for Elvis that would have the same cool bridge section as ‘Stuck On You’», etc. For all the relative disappointments about the level of songwriting on Elvis Is Back!, that album was a true masterpiece of human creativity when compared to the creative cesspool of Something For Everybody. Who even remembers anything off it these days?
The only «good» thing I can say is that the technical quality of the arrangements, vocals, and production is at the usual super-high level of Elvis’ entire Nashville period. As always, Floyd Cramer shines on crystal-clear piano; Scotty Moore and Hank Garland ring out loud and proud on electric guitars; the rhythm section is impeccably tight; and Elvis himself polishes each note as if his checks were directly dependent on their tone, pitch, and sustain. Faced, however, with this blatant trade-off of the old Dionysian rawness for the new-fangled Apollonian sterility, I could only accept the deal if it were accompanied by a complete change of musical style and direction, which is clearly not the case here.
It is even difficult for me to say which of the two sides sucks worse — the ballads or the pop-rockers. Normally, my own preferences rather veer to the bouncy pop-rocker than the sentimental serenade, so I’d be tempted to smear the first side, shared more or less equally between the most formulaic country (‘There’s Always Me’, never living up to the expressive five-second piano intro from Cramer; ‘It’s A Sin’; ‘Starting Today’ — aren’t they really the same song?) and conventional doo-wop (‘Give Me The Right’; ‘Sentimental Me’); only the closing ‘Gently’ breaks the mold a bit with a pretty folk-pop acoustic melody nested somewhere in between Buddy Holly and The Weavers, but even then it can hardly hope to knock ‘Love Me Tender’ off its throne. All of that is Dullsville incarnate.
Then, however, we get to side two and I feel even more offended because this is where the songwriters infringe upon Elvis’ classic bread-and-butter territory and burn down the bread, leaving nothing but the butter. Charlie Rich’s country-rocker ‘I’m Comin’ Home’ is barely passable, similar in terms of arrangement to ‘A Big Hunk O’ Love’ (again, Cramer and Garland kick up an enjoyable guitar-piano storm) but without a single shred of threat or naughtiness; still, it’s probably the best of all these half-baked numbers. ‘In Your Arms’ is a poor man’s copy of ‘Stuck On You’ (shame on you, Mr. Schroeder); ‘Put The Blame On Me’ is a rip-off of some lounge jazz number I can’t remember, with the bridge section recycled from ‘A Mess Of Blues’; ‘Judy’ is pedestrian country as already reflected in zillions of radio standards; ‘I Want You With Me’ sounds like an Elvis cover act seeking to recreate the form and spirit of ‘Trouble’; and I have already mentioned the musical debt that ‘I Slipped, I Stumbled, I Ripped Myself Off’ owes to ‘I Got Stung’. So much for «rocking out».
It’s all the more baffling to witness this train wreck of an LP in the context of Elvis’ singles from the same year — three of them, in fact, each showing that he was anything but spent in both the pure pop and the rock’n’roll department. In addition to the already discussed ‘I Feel Bad’, just three months later another recording session brought back the virtues of the Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman team. ‘(Marie’s The Name Of) His Latest Flame’ was a song originally recorded by Del Shannon for his debut LP — but the original version made the dreadful mistake of setting the melody to a syncopated Bo Diddley beat, atmospherically incompatible with the song’s plaintive melody (the Bo Diddley beat really only works properly in an uplifting context, rather than a depressed one). The Elvis arrangement wisely corrected the annoying discrepance, and now the song sounds denser, darker, more frantic due to the frantically strummed acoustic rhythm — and Elvis sings everything in a moodier, lower pitch than Del, sort of «introverting» the pain of being dumped by one’s lover rather than singing his heart out to the wide open spaces, as the Who would say. As a result, ‘His Latest Flame’ alone is worth all the twelve songs on Something For Everybody put together.
But I am even more partial to the B-side: ‘Little Sister’, also by Pomus and Shuman, is the song that might have singlehandedly saved Elvis’ reputation as a rocker in the year when the double-mispunch of Something For Everybody and Blue Hawaii would pretty much bury it for good. In fact, it’s not even clear how such a (relatively) ferocious track even slipped out from under Colonel Parker’s radar. It’s dirty, it’s threatening, it’s sexually aggressive, it’s downright indecent for the times: "Little sister, don’t you kiss me once or twice and say it’s very nice and then you run / Little sister, don’t you do what your big sister done". That menacing twangy little riff alone — the one that Hank Garland twirls twice during the intro and then, unfortunately, loses forever — is worth the price of admission; but the entire song consistently cooks along the same delightfully cynical-delinquent lines of ‘A Big Hunk O’ Love’ without, however, copying any of that song’s melodic patterns. For one brief moment, «Elvis The Parental Nightmare» is back...
...and guess what? The single sold pretty damn well, though, just like ‘I Feel So Bad’, it did fail to rise to #1, proving that (a) «darker Elvis» was indeed in slightly lower demand than «family-friendly Elvis» back in 1961; (b) however, «darker Elvis» was still in pretty high demand, and if only they’d agreed to settle for a wee bit lower chart status, his artistic reputation for future generations might have fared much better. Alas, «The King» required a properly kingly status, so the reconstructed reasoning is simple enough — if gritty, hard-hitting material had no chance to go to the top of the charts in 1961, there’d be no more gritty, hard-hitting material for The King’s singles, period.
Not that we should mind if the non-gritty material for The King’s singles is as good as ‘Good Luck Charm’, a song that is also commonly appended as a bonus track to Something For Everybody, even if it did not come out until early 1962 (but it was recorded in October 1961). Again, this is a prime example of how it is still always possible to excel within the limits of a set formula if you truly put your mind to it. Written once again by the almighty Aaron Schroeder and following, once again, along the lines of ‘Stuck On You’, it is, nevertheless, quite different melodically and featuring a completely different hook. A lightweight love ditty, for sure, but catchy, with a beautifully constructed and resolved chorus that adds a pinch of sexual suggestivity to the general sentimentality of the verses; the cherry on top is the back-and-forth bass-baritone vocalizing between Elvis and some of The Jordanaires which, if you strain your imagination far enough, can seem like a surreptitiously gay perspective on the carnal ritual of Ray Charles’ ‘What’d I Say’. At the very least, I can never repress a lewd grin while listening to the song — which is a far more human and pleasant reaction than the near-complete emotional paralysis I get from just about anything on Nothing For Anybody.
Only Solitaire reviews: Elvis Presley