THE BEAT GOES ON: Elvis Presley

There’s no disputing the historical significance of Elvis Presley. He was the first great superstar of rock ’n’ roll—the “King”—and he has never been dethroned. Michael Jackson was the only pop star ever to come close to Presley’s aura, not only through his astounding popularity and commercial success but by self-consciously pursuing the crown, burnishing his own legend by marrying Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie, and giving himself the title “the King of Pop.”
 

What remains in question, however, is the nature of Presley’s creative achievement. Given that he would have turned seventy-five this year had he lived, the entertainment industry is awash in freshly minted retrospectives examining Presley’s life and career, and the four-CD box set, Elvis 75: Good Rockin’ Tonight (RCA/Legacy) serves as a fine yardstick by which to measure the merit of the man as artist.
 

From this vantage point, the most enduring and distinctive quality of Elvis Presley is his voice. Say what you will about the relative merits or demerits of his music, spanning the rollicking rockabilly of “I Got a Woman” to the old-fashioned doo-wop of “I Was the One” to the overwrought balladry of “Don’t Cry Daddy”—the single consistent thread running throughout Presley’s recordings, no matter what the style or song, is his voice. It was a remarkable instrument, full of color, depth, and personality—probably accounting for at least half of what made him so popular and controversial when he first burst onto the scene with “Heartbreak Hotel” in 1956. Producer Sam Phillips recognized this, of course, and he wisely placed Presley’s vocals at the forefront of the mix.
 

The early arrangements recorded at Phillips’s Sun Studio in Memphis in 1954 and ’55 were strikingly spare, featuring just Bill Black’s standup acoustic bass, Scotty Moore’s penetrating guitar lines, some acoustic guitar by Presley, and minimal to no percussion. Presley’s voice, therefore, dominated the records. Even the number one hit single “Heartbreak Hotel” was, for the most part, a vocal-and-bass duet, with only a sprinkling of piano and guitar. The record was all about Presley’s voice, which, boosted with echo and otherworldly reverb, sounded almost as if he were on another planet.
 

But Presley wasn’t to stay in Memphis for long, and once uprooted, he apparently lost his musical bearings along with his geographical ones. The first sessions he recorded at RCA Studios in Hollywood, California, in 1956 featured an expanded instrumental lineup including drummer D.J. Fontana, Floyd Cramer or Shorty Long on the piano, and some additional guitar by Chet Atkins. These sessions also saw the addition of a choir—eventually his longstanding backup vocalists, the Jordanaires—on selected numbers. Presley’s voice was crowded out; questionable aesthetic choices were made; and the songs he was recording went beyond the homespun country, roots, and blues tunes he had mostly favored back east.
 

By the end of 1956, Presley had made all his greatest recordings, and, with rare exception, what came afterward marked a long, slow decline. To some extent, this was due to the material Presley chose—sentimental ballads, novelty tunes, and perhaps worst of all, ham-fisted attempts to make him sound like another Cab Calloway or Louis Jordan. Case in point: the jazzy, big-band arrangements for the soundtrack to King Creole, including the unintentionally psychedelic title track, “Hard Headed Woman,” and the aptly titled “Trouble.” His recordings were dressed up in syrupy clothing—Hawaiian guitars (“This Is My Heaven”), heavenly choirs (“How Great Thou Art”), spoken-word narration (“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”)—and the arrangements became as gaudy as the Vegas-style outfits he began to favor in the late 1960s when performing live.
 

Not even recording the work of such great songwriters as Bob Dylan (“Tomorrow Is a Long Time”), Chuck Berry (“Too Much Monkey Business,” “Promised Land”), Willie Nelson (“Funny How Time Slips Away”), or James Taylor (“Steamroller Blues”) late in his career could salvage Presley’s artistic credentials. In Presley’s hands, these songs’ origins are unrecognizable; he had a knack for taking the work of the best songwriters and turning it into processed corn. Attempts at socially conscious numbers such as “In the Ghetto” and psychologically sophisticated material such as “Suspicious Minds” (both recorded in 1969) were equally ineffective, betrayed by bland musical settings in which Presley seemed lost, his voice devoid of any character or commitment.
 

There’s a lot of speculation about what might have been if Presley were still with us. I’m not sure it’s well aimed. Other singers have enjoyed career trajectories with commensurately long arcs of evolving talent: Willie Nelson at seventy-seven years old continues to sound like Willie Nelson. Bob Dylan is still going (relatively) strong at sixty-nine. To ask what Presley would have sounded like at seventy-five, had he not died prematurely at the young age of forty-two, however, is to beg the question, because he basically ceased sounding like Elvis Presley at the age of twenty-five and went directly to sounding like he was over-the-hill by 1960.
 

How then to explain Presley’s astounding ascent to superstardom—to say nothing of the sustained following of his most passionate devotees up to and beyond his premature demise in 1977? Frankly, listening to these hundred-odd songs, I can’t account for it. Maybe it was just a fluke? The answer certainly can’t be found in the recordings, suggesting his appeal lay elsewhere, presumably in the relationship he was able to establish with an ardently loyal fan base that, to this day, still hails Presley as the one and only King. [MARCH/APRIL 2010]

Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s award-winning editor-in-chief and music critic. He is the author of  Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet.

THE GOODS

Elvis Presley
Elvis 75: Good Rockin’ Tonight
RCA/Legacy
www.elvisthemusic.com
 

PHOTOS COURTESY LEGACY