Sunday, August 5, 2007
Elvis' Seven Best Albums?
Posted by John Branston on Sun, Aug 5, 2007 at 4:00 AM
The London Telegraph's Neil McCormick came up with this one: the seven albums that "define Elvis' legacy. He also offers some rather pretentious takes on the King's life: "The trademark Elvis is fixed forever in the first flare of youth and beauty, commemorated on everything from coffee mugs to bed linen, a supernaturally gifted avatar whose instinctive talent made him catalyst and figurehead for the 20th century's rock and roll revolution, a poor boy who became the populist king of America, his rags to riches ascent a symbol of the shift of cultural and social power from the elite to the masses.
"Twist the prism and Elvis becomes a metaphor for American innocence corrupted and destroyed, a talent that laid waste to itself, harbinger of the bloated future of a fast food nation."
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what about the albums? Are they really the best? See if you agree.
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I probably posted almost this same comment a year ago. It's really kind of difficult to talk about Elvis in the context of albums. He was from the period before the true rise of the album, as in a bunch of good songs, a few of which have commercial potential that you can listen to start to finish. Elvis was the era when the album was three singles and a handful of songs that were such blather that they wouldn't have even made good b-sides. It's no mistake that the writer from the Telegraph couldn't come up with seven great albums without including a greatest hits collection and a live album of the '68 Comeback (Does anyone on this side of the pond even refer to it as the "Elvis NBC TV Special"?). Sorry, but the Elvis "legacy" is written in greatest hits collections. Realistically, if you get "The Top Ten Hits", "'68 Comeback", "Aloha From Hawaii (This was after he devolved into Vegas Elvis, but you gotta have "My Way") and perhaps a gospel collection, you have got everything memorable Elvis did. And that's not bagging on him. It's the shape of the industry at the time. Had he screwed up and recorded eight great songs in one session, the studios would have sent him back to record something lame and spread the eight good cuts across three, perhaps four albums.
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