early January, 2006
- Elvis Presley - King of Interpretation
Angie Rayfield
(Bella Online, January 8 2006)
Most people with any familiarity with rock music know the basics about the King: Elvis Aaron Presley, born January 8, 1935, in Tupelo, Mississippi. His twin brother, Jessie Garon, was stillborn, and Elvis was raised as the only child of Vernon and Gladys Presley. By all accounts, the family led a hard-scrabble existence. Vernon did jail time for check forgery when Elvis was a toddler, and after his release, he had a hard time keeping a steady job. After Vernon lost another job in 1948, the family moved to Memphis, where Gladys' brothers helped him find a job, and the family moved into a public housing project. Elvis graduated from Humes High School in 1953 and took a job at Parker Machinists Shop. It wasn't long before he got a job at the Precision Tool Company, and then drove a truck for Crown Electric Company. (His trademark pompadour was the current truck driver style.)
Elvis began his singing career with Sun Records in 1954, and by the time of his death on August 16, 1977, he was an unparalleled legend. He starred in 33 films, and has sold over a billion albums worldwide, earning gold, platinum or multi-platinum on an astounding 150 different albums and singles. He also received a wide array of accolades, including 14 Grammy nominations (3 wins) and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. It's hard to imagine that anyone will ever equal his accomplishments.
Elvis helped create the rock 'n' roll genre, and was one of its first real stars. Described as "singing blues laced with country and country tinged with gospel," Presley was able to blend widely differing musical types to create a compelling new sound. His first recordings were at Sam Phillips' Memphis Recording Studios, a "vanity press" sideline of Sun Records, where anyone could record a record for a few dollars. Phillips began to feel that Elvis was what he was looking for, "a white man with the Negro sound and the Negro feel," and he set up a session with Elvis, lead guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black. On July 5, 1954, they recorded three songs: " Love You Because," "Blue Moon of Kentucky," and "That's All Right." The rest, as they say, is history.
But Elvis, for all his talent and charisma, never claimed to be a great musician. He was instead an incredible performer and entertainer. No songwriter, he didn't perform his own creations, but rather was a master of interpretation. He was not only able to find the most gifted songwriters available, but frequently covered songs released by other artists and made them his own.
Elvis releases and their original artists:
"That's All Right" - Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup
"Blue Moon of Kentucky" - Bill Monroe & His Bluegrass Boys
"Blue Moon" - Mel Torme
"Blue Suede Shoes" - Carl Perkins
"Money Honey" - The Drifters
"Too Much Monkey Business" - Chuck Berry
"I'm Movin' On" - Hank Snow
"Only the Strong Survive" - Jerry Butler
"My Way" - Frank Sinatra
- All shook up over the return of the King
By Daniel Dasey
(Sydney Morning Herald / Sun Herald, January 8 2006)
LADIES and gentlemen, Elvis is in the building. And in the park. And in that car, and leaning out that window, and working at the chemist shop. Indeed, in the Central West town of Parkes this weekend, you would be hard pressed to swing a cat without hitting at least two or three Elvises clad in satin jumpsuits.
Assisted by a $20,000 government grant, the organisers of the annual Parkes Elvis Festival are predicting record numbers of visitors, including scores of the King lookalikes. "We're expecting in excess of 4000 people - up from 2500 last year - and to generate more than $3 million," Parkes Shire Council tourism manager Monique Kronk said.
Telltale signs of a boom in the festival's popularity are everywhere. The Elvis Express - a CountryLink service ferrying festivalgoers to Parkes from Sydney - has doubled in size since last year, up to four carriages. Space in Parkes' hotels for the festival, which in the past was booked out a week in advance, dried up five months ago. More than 15 Parkes Boars rugby union footballers are spending the weekend in Elvis attire after getting into the spirit at an Elvis Ball on Friday night at the local Services Club.
At Elvis Central, a rock merchandise shop in Parkes run by festival organisers, many souvenirs sold out by Friday. "We doubled or trebled our orders for some items and they still sold out on the first day," said merchandise officer Lorraine Job. Among the hottest items have been $35 Elvis wigs, of which the store had managed to sell its entire stock of 300. Also selling out were 200 pairs of gold Elvis sunglasses at $12 each.
The organising committee hopes to shift more than $30,000 of stock during the three-day event, which culminates today with an Elvis gospel church service, Elvis birthday tribute performances and the departure for Sydney of the Elvis Express.
From a jersey to a jumpsuit ...
Parkes Boars players just can't help believin' they could be Elvis.
Photo: Jacky Ghossein
- Calling Elvis fans: Did you see him in Port Arthur?
By Darragh Doiron
(Port Arthur News, January 7 2006)
Elvis Presley's dreamy eyes jump out in the ad promoting his Port Arthur appearance. He wasn't the star he would become, but the Louisiana Hayride knew that Mississippi boy with the hip moves had something. The Port Acres Fire Department sponsored the "Western Show" Friday, Nov. 25, 1955, at Woodrow Wilson Auditorium. Scotty & Bill and The Chelette Sisters and "many others" were promised. Boneau's record store offered advance tickets for $1.25; holdouts paid $1.50 at the door. Ernst Jorgensen called The News from a house on a hill an hour's drive from Copenhagen. ³It's cold,² he said.
Jorgensen would love to reach local residents lucky enough to catch this Elvis show. It was a critical time in his career. Presley was switching from Sun Records to RCA and would soon become an international star. The plan is to compile memories and snapshots of young Elvis into a coffee table book with CDs, something for the serious collector, Jorgensen said.
The author imagines Elvis was feeling pretty good about himself, having signed with RCA on Nov. 21. Carolyn Monte, one of those Chelette Sisters, now of Dallas, didn't know to be impressed at that Port Arthur concert. He was still just that good-looking boy. "We had heard of him, but he wasn't that big of a deal at that point in time. We saw him as somebody who was entertaining - a cute guy. He was the most gracious young man - a gentleman all the way down the line," Monte said. Hanging around backstage gave you the real goods on a person, she said. "He was one of the sweetest, kindest, most well-behaved and well-mannered young men you'd ever want to have your teenage daughters around," she said. Mary Jo was her oldest sister, who has since died. "Elvis had an eye for her. He was a prankster by the way. He came up behind Mary Jo and put his arms around here and made this grotesque sound. It grossed her out so much. She said, 'Get away from me.' Then he asked her to go to a cafe for a Coke. She said,
No way.'" Monte recalled. At that point, she said she was thinking, "Pick me!"
The book compilers got this memory from Doyle Reynolds: I was at high school in Port Arthur. There was a little place where we had lunch called Skip's place, and they actually had a couple of Elvis records on the jukebox, so when he came to town, a lot of people were excited to see him, I wasn't going to see him. That day I was downtown Port Arthur, doing some work for my father, when I saw him drive by in his pink and charcoal gray Cadillac, and gosh what a lovely car, but what was even lovelier, and I hate to admit this, I was a hubcap thief, I said to myself I'm going to get these hubcaps. My friend and I went down the Woodrow Wilson auditorium, and there was a little parking lot in the back, and I was sure I knew exactly where the car was gonna be parked, and we went back there with our screwdrivers, we jumped out to steel these hubcaps but they were wire wheeled. So we picked up the screwdrivers and got back to the car, and at this time the back of the auditorium opens, and three other young men ran out back to look at the car, and right behind them came a policeman or some kind of security and said "You guys get back in here, you can't go outside during the intermission"
.
So they turned around and went back in and he then looked at us and said "You are no privileged characters, get back in." So we went in and I looked at the back of the stage was right at that back door, and I looked in there and saw a girl that I knew from high school, and she was part of The Chelette Sisters, they were kind of semi-famous around Port Arthur. They were on the same bill that night and I think they had already performed.
So I saw Mary Jo Chelette standing just inside the door. Garland Sonnier and I just walked in there, and she happens to be talking to Elvis Presley. There was a big heavy library table, he was kind of sitting on that, in the middle part of it, and she was talking with him. There was a guy on the other end of it counting money, so I kind of marched in there said hi to Mary Jo and Elvis.
He was about three years older than me. I said "I hear you like gospel music." That just lit him up. We talked for a good while about gospel music, and he had gone to church with The Blackwood Brothers and The Statemen and they were really my heroes, my sister had dated one of the Florida Boys. We talked for about 15 - 20 minutes, maybe, I can't remember the transition here, but he goes out on stage and he had a red jacket, black shirt, black pants and a tie.
Guys around school were wearing derbys. I had this red derby, and Elvis goes out on stage singing, and I wasn't really paying much attention to him, I was talking to someone else, I was just a social butterfly back then. I was kind of on the edge of the stage, off to the right looking at the stage. He was very active on stage, he just moved and jumped, and I remember he had to stop and get a new guitar, because his strings were broken, he said "I can't play with these three strings." So he comes to the edge of the stage, gets another guitar, sees my derby, and ask me if he can wear that derby and he walks out on stage with that red derby, with his red jacket, and the other people are laughing. I think to holler at him to get it back.
- Elvis Presley's drummer dies
By Amy Wilson
(DNA /
AFP, January 7 2006)
BOGOTA: Bill Lynn, who played drums for rock 'n' roll king Elvis Presley, has died in Colombia after suffering from lung problems, people close to the musician said on Friday. He was 73. Lynn died Thursday at his home in Villa de Leyva, a scenic town 200 kilometers north of Bogota where he owned the bar Legends and Superstars that featured Elvis memorabilia. ... Lynn played drums with Elvis in the 1960 song It's Now or Never, an English version of the Italian classic O'sole mio. A year later, Elvis sent Lynn a golden record to thank him for his collaboration. He went on to be Elvis' drummer for five years.
- Celebrate Elvis' birthday in a way he'd appreciate
By Amy Wilson
(HERALD-LEADER, January 7 2006)
The King would be -- you know, if he weren't dead and all -- 71 on Sunday. And although we are hard-pressed to understand why Congress hasn't declared this some kind of national day of hip maintenance, we nonetheless believe in partying on. Ah, but how to do such an occasion justice? Here's a suggestion, if we dare, that goes beyond buying the man's music and watching his films. (Bemoan that whole Col. Tom Parker mind-set that said Elvis needed to make Clambake Jailhouse Girls! and so he didn't get to show whether he could act and we'll never know if we missed something even more spectacular.)
Instead, throw a wingding.
The cheap Elvis event: Play pin-the-tail on the Hound Dog. Hide and seek the Blue Suede Shoes. Wear drug enforcement badges and capes. Don the sunglasses. Put 3 tablespoons of peanut butter and one banana together in a big bowl, and mash. Toast some bread lightly (just like E would have liked it). Put 2 tablespoons of margarine (not butter because that would have been too uppity of E) in a skillet and brown the sandwich on both sides. Serve on a black vinyl platter.
The midpriced Presley house party: Get some Memphis BBQ takeout. Serve sides of breaded chicken livers. Shoot your TV. Rent a karaoke machine and forbid anyone to sing Can't Help Falling in Love with You. Weep.
The big-spender blowout: Ask your interior decorator to redo the house completely in a Kentucky Rain theme. Eat everything you want off platinum platters. Drive to Memphis for the annual celebration there, and catch the last two days of mayhem. Or, better yet, get a ticket to Vegas and see why those glitter-whale impersonators can't even, on their best day and in your largest self-induced casino fog, start to conjure up the real thing.
- Other Voices: Elvis is long gone, but his music is still moving us
By MARK AILSWORTH
(dailypress.com, January 7 2006)
In case you've forgotten, Sunday is the King's birthday. Had he not left us in 1977, Elvis Aaron Presley would be 71 years old tomorrow. Viva Las Vegas, Elvis, and thank you, thank you very much.
It is difficult to overstate the impact that Elvis had on American popular culture. Discovered in the early 1950s by legendary Memphis recording impresario Sam Phillips, he arrived on the pop music scene at a moment when commercial radio was reinventing itself in response to television's ascendancy. A half-century ago radio was a medium in search of a new message. Thanks to Presley, it found rock 'n' roll, and nothing has truly been the same since.
As his star rose, particularly following his 1956 appearances on Ed Sullivan's television show, Elvis was vilified by self-appointed defenders of decency for his "suggestive" gyrations and his penchant for what was then called "race music." No matter, the kids loved it. Thus were the first shots fired in a culture war that endures today.
His music also helped open some closed minds. However unintentionally, the singer who had learned his chops on Beale Street and at all-night Memphis gospel sings built a bridge that encouraged whites to embrace black music and musicians. The Rev. Al Green acknowledged the same when he said of Elvis, "He broke the ice for all of us." The musical genre that Elvis spawned became the common currency of post-war baby boomers. We claimed rock 'n' roll as our own and employed it as a vehicle to test boundaries and inspire change. We constantly listened to it on the radio, bought the records and played it in our garage bands, blissfully unaware that "our music" was in fact an omelet made up of Delta blues progressions, gospel harmony and traditional country music rhythms.
Along the way, a handful of its practitioners made music for the ages. Lennon and McCartney, Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, to name but a few, owed their success in part to the man who first served up the omelet to the masses. Fifty years on, the social, political and economic impacts of rock 'n' roll continue to reverberate throughout the land.
Presley's demise has been well chronicled. Indulgence begat addiction, and toward the end he became a caricature of the persona that millions had found so endearing. The handsome, engaging performer with the benignly menacing smile was slowly buried beneath the detritus of unprecedented commercial success. Regrettably, he was unable to free himself and come up for air. He was 42 when he died.
Why, then, do we continue to remember this rockabilly renegade as a cultural icon? I suspect it is because we sensed that behind Elvis' facade of stardom lurked the substance of goodness. His longtime manager, Tom Parker, cultivated and promoted an image of Elvis that grossed millions, but we recognized the image as the illusion it was. When Elvis sang we could hear the voice of an innocent boy who merely wanted to make his mama and daddy proud. We heard a frightened man with feet of clay. Indeed, we heard ourselves.
For most of us north of 50, the name "Elvis" still conjures memories of songs like "Love Me Tender," "Hound Dog" and "Jailhouse Rock," their melodies and lyrical hooks indelibly imbedded in the hard drives of our minds. Yet what we really need today is not Elvis' music, but his heart. In an age when racial and religious intolerance threatens global security, we would all do well to reflect upon and respond to this prescient observation from the King of Rock 'n' Roll:
"Everybody comes from the same source. If you hate another human being, you hate a part of yourself." Amen, Elvis, and give Ray Charles our regards.
- Review: TROUPE gives Elvis an update
By JIM BUTLER
(theeagle.com, January 7 2006)
It's always fun to see the popular songs of Elvis Presley interpreted by others, particularly when some of them could be the King's grandkids. Presley would have turned 71 Sunday. Brazos Valley TROUPE's special tribute to him had a little bit of everything, from the rough-edged early days of You Ain't Nothin' but a Hound Dog to the inspirational finale, If I Can Dream. The star of the show was Brianna Buth, 18, who belted out the opening verses of Jailhouse Rock and Great Balls of Fire with as much grit as Janis Joplin. But she also came out in a red, strapless gown and a pink boa for a steamy rendition of Fever. ...
- Elvis Radio Honors the King: Satellite Radio Channel Plays the Hits and Obscurities From Graceland
By Calvin Gilbert
(CMT.com, January 6 2006)
Editor's note: Elvis Presley, a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, would have celebrated his 71st birthday Sunday (Jan. 8).
It's all-Elvis -- all the time. But the radio station is operating from the plaza at Graceland in Memphis, so what would you expect? While the self-proclaimed King of All Media -- shock jock Howard Stern -- debuts Monday (Jan. 9) on Sirius Satellite Radio, the real King has attracted loyal subjects there for the past 17 months. Elvis Radio, one of 65 commercial-free channels on the subscription service, is devoted solely to the music and career of Elvis Presley. Although others have experimented with dedicating an entire radio station to a single act, Elvis Radio is the first to be backed by strong corporate support -- in this case from Sirius and Elvis Presley Enterprises, a multimillion-dollar business operating the late singer's estate.
"I think a lower-powered AM station may have stunted for a couple of weeks or maybe a month with an all-Elvis format," according to Tony Yoken, Sirius' operations manager for Elvis Radio. "I think I've read that someone gave it a shot on a Beatles station for a week or two. I recall hearing something about a Frank Sinatra format ... but I don't know that these things had the company commitment." Sirius and its competitor, XM Satellite Radio, both launched in 2001. Subscribers pay $12.95 a month for access to more than 120 channels of programming at each satellite radio service.
Elvis Radio is one of three Sirius channels currently devoted to a single act. A Bruce Springsteen station was established on a short-term basis to coincide with the recent re-release of his Born to Run album. And although a Rolling Stones channel was initially intended to have a relatively short lifespan, Sirius recently extended the agreement. Elvis Radio is here to stay, Yoken says, although he notes that operating a niche channel on satellite radio creates unique opportunities and challenges from a programming standpoint. "When you're talking about creating something that didn't exist before ... the rules are completely different," said Yoken, who joined Sirius last year after more than three decades in the radio business. "I'm not here to say there aren't any rules, but it's not like anybody hands you a playbook and says, 'Do this.'"
One of the biggest obstacles to playing nothing but Elvis Presley music is the burden of using a relatively small number of songs to fill a 24/7 format. "The last time I checked, we were pushing about 2,800 or 2,900 titles [recordings of songs]," Yoken said. "If my memory serves me right, I think Elvis recorded somewhere in the neighborhood of about 780-790 [songs] that have been indexed and chronicled -- most of those through RCA, some from Sun."
The watershed is found in the tracks recorded live in concert, including previously unreleased tracks issued by Follow That Dream, a collector's label authorized by RCA, the company that owns the rights to all of Presley's recordings. Acknowledging the duplicate versions of Presley's most popular songs, Yoken says, "I can't tell you how many dozens of versions of 'Can't Help Falling in Love' or 'Suspicious Minds' or 'That's All Right' exist." Of course, not everything Presley recorded was on the level of "Mystery Train," "Heartbreak Hotel," "Burnin' Love" or "Kentucky Rain." Partly out of the necessity to fill time and provide variety, Elvis Radio places a strong emphasis on music from Presley's films that dominated his career in the early and mid '60s.
"We get to play material that in many cases never made it on the radio before," Yoken said. "Some of this music is really cool and got missed the first time around, so we feel that this is a particular advantage for our subscribers who come to Elvis Radio. They're hearing stuff they could never really hear before on a regular basis unless they owned the records or the CDs. Although some of the stuff would not be Grammy-award winning material, there are some elements to it that are very cool."
Elvis Radio air personality Bill Rock hosts Soundtrack Saturday Night each week, and other specialty programs include a Sunday morning gospel show. Presley's longtime friend, disc jockey George Klein, hosts a show every Friday night.
Referring to Sirius' partnership with EPE, Yoken said, "Much of the focus is to make sure what we're putting on our satellite airwaves works nicely with what the public might see if they visit the Elvis.com Web site or, even more importantly, when visitors come to Memphis and Graceland. We want to make sure there is a lot of cooperative content." Although Sirius' reach now extends throughout the U.S. and Canada, Elvis Radio has a small staff of air personalities and support personnel. Because die-hard Elvis fans tend to be experts about any and everything involving the King, it's essential for the air talent to be authorities, too.
"If you're going to come to work for us at Elvis Radio, if you don't know the subject matter, you better go to school and learn it before you pop open the mike," Yoken said. "Because our listeners will take us to school in a New York second -- and they do."
Yoken stresses he doesn't personally claim to know everything about the singer who has become the center of his professional life.
"I'm never going to tell you I'm an Elvis expert," he admitted. "A fan? Yes. A super fan -- like a lot of people who listen to our channel? Probably not to that level. But when you do the homework and you do the research and this is what you're trying to create day in and day out, you get smart pretty quick."
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