The Sweet, the Sad, and the Sentimental
It was National Album Day on 13th October, and it had that part of the nation with too much time on its hands and who think such things hugely important, despite the fact that the social and planetary ecology is unraveling and the political world is officially mad, (me) reflecting on what they considered to be their all-time favourite albums. We do what we can, and it is the little things that keep us sane when the big things are so manifestly insane. So I gave the question of my choice of best/favourite album some thought. Whenever I’m asked what the greatest album of all time is, I tend to name Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On or Francoise Hardy’s La Question. And then I name every album from all those Liverpool bands I have loved over the years. (I'll put a good word in for The Coldest Winter For A Hundred Years by The Wild Swans here, but from student days The Christians by The Christians and Black by Black (the one with wonderful life on) are bound up with a lot of memories. There are other candidates, though, something by Prefab Sprout or Martin Stephenson and the Dainties, a Queen album (I had them all, spent ages trying to pick my favourite from the short list of all of them). And try Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left, very probably the greatest debut album by anyone ever.
It seems that the great public have supplied the list of the usual suspects, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Michael Jackson’s Thriller. That kind of thing. I’ll stop there. How incredibly dull, issuing in a list of all the same old faces. I find all of that so predictable and so tedious. The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper made the list. Of course it did. I think they did much better, myself, although any album that has A Day in the Life on it is going to be a contender.
Given the scientific, moral, and psychological impossibility of picking just one album as the best or the most favourite, I decided on another approach entirely. I’m going to choose the very first album I ever owned: Separate Ways by Elvis Presley. It’s not an album that belongs in exalted company. It’s a very humble album indeed, a very modest affair; indeed, it is one of those ‘budget’ albums that were released on the RCA Camden label, low-priced albums issued for people who had a limitless love of Elvis but only very limited pockets to indulge it with. The album cover pretty much advertises the fact, the cut-out figure of Elvis superimposed upon an extremely unattractive photo of a highway. Separate Ways. Get it? How utterly unimaginative, and all too indicative of the way Elvis' talent was thrown away by his management.
My brother was treated to Elvis’ Flaming Star the same day. I remember us accompanying my mother as she bought them. My mother was a big Elvis fan, so we all were. My brother and I got a choice of an Elvis album each. I remember the excitement of the day well. I even remember the layout of the record shop. I'm not quite sure where it was. It wasn't actually a record shop, a it was a department store, upstairs, quite posh. I'm guessing Boots here. My brother went for the album which had a picture of Elvis as a cowboy on the front. I can't for the life of me remember why I chose Separate Ways, although I think it is a safe bet it had something to do with the cape and the spangles on the front cover. Flaming Star contained the raucous Tiger Man. My album, though, was incredibly low-key, downbeat, reflective and melancholy. It was a world away from the bespangled, becaped Elvis figure on the cover. And it was a very strange album indeed for a seven year old to be listening to! Songs of sadness, loss, and regret, and all this in the middle of glam rock!
The only glam on this record was the Elvis figure on the front cover. My eyes examined every detail on the album cover, front and back. The big American roads, big cars, big mountains, wide open spaces. There was another version with a British background. This was the one with the U.S. background, which just added to the mythology of the U.S.A. in my young mind. It was very much another world. Travelling those roads many years later, my mind couldn’t help wonder back, every so often, to this album cover from 1973.
Of course, my sharp little eyes noticed the flaw on the front cover. Can you spot it? I’ll give you a clue, I was always rather taken by Elvis’ spangly jump suit and cape. Have a look. OK, I'll make it easier, have a look under Elvis’ right arm, above the guitar – it looks like the sky has fallen down and into the road. The cheapskates behind the design couldn’t be bothered to cut the figure out properly. The album could be classed as ‘cheap and cheerful,’ then, except that there is only the one cheerful song on there, and that by the title of ‘I slipped, I stumbled, I fell.’ But not cheerless. ‘Inexpensive and sweet, sad, and sentimental.’ It was a little bit of Elvis for a little bit of money. The album came in at twenty five minutes, of which over four minutes of which was a song about a dead dog.
The two headline songs, opening up either side, were taken from Elvis’ recent big hit, Separate Ways and Always on my Mind. These were songs about Elvis’ recent marital breakup, making it crystal clear that the poor man was far from over the loss, and very probably wouldn't ever get over it. What I, at the tender age of seven, was supposed to make of such emotionally weighty material, I don’t know.
We took the record to my grandmother’s, my Nin. She liked Elvis too. She also had one of those old wind-up gramophone record players for those old 78’s, armed with those heavy needles. and, in her eagerness to hear Elvis too, had the brainwave idea to play the new lightweight vinyl record on her heavy duty antique contraption. Even at the young age I was I just knew that this was not going to end well at all. The memory of me standing there, helpless, struck still and struck silent by the abomination of desolation that was about to unfold before my eyes is permanently and deeply etched on my psyche. “It doesn’t sound like Elvis,” my Nin said, as this screeching, scratching, high-speed wailing assailed the senses. She was right, it sure as Hell didn’t sound like Elvis. It was one of Elvis’ greatest ever songs, Always on my Mind. And this desecration has been on my mind ever since.
The rest of the album is remarkably .. well, if not exactly unremarkable then somewhat modest, containing songs so short and so slight as to be serviceable as filler on more substantial albums. These songs were the failures, the losers, the weeds, the rejects from Elvis' stellar gold-plated career, songs culled from films that bombed at the box office or were left over from unproductive recording sessions, songs long discarded in the obsession of the Presley machine with immediate hit singles and sales. This, most evidently, was not an Elvis Greatest Hits or Gold Records compilation. This was not the Elvis in Demand album that was to come out a few years later. This was very much the 'Elvis in no demand' at all album. Which, as it turns out, makes for a very special record indeed. It's Elvis off-duty, taking a break, being himself. It's the intimate Elvis, sounding about as far from rock'n'roll as to make him a serf who knows his place, without any pretensions to the crown. One of us, then. Elvis was a heart singer, and one of the very finest that there has ever been. It was when expressing fragility and simplicity that he was at his very best, striking a very human chord. As a result, these seemingly unremarkable songs become something incredibly precious. It's like having Elvis singing to you in your room.
At the same time, among the songs, there are occasional gems that had been overshadowed by the flash and glare of the gold of chart success. Exhibit A in this category has to be Is it So Strange, a song from 1957. This recording, it seems, had been destined for single release. The publishing company had tried to bully writer Faron Young into sharing his rights, but he wouldn’t give them anything. And so this absolute classic of a song was buried for fifteen years. I’d rate it as one the best fifty recordings of Elvis’ career, right up there with the number one hit Don't from the same year, topping even that, in my view. It’s a deep old song, a song of love and forgiveness, a naked plea really. So my unheralded little budget album unearthed some real gold, then. It sounded painful to me at the time, though.
From there, we have oodles of sweetness in songs as slight as the breeze. In My Way lasts just one minute twenty four seconds, Forget Me Never just fourteen seconds longer. Just Elvis and an acoustic guitar. Just that incredibly sweet voice, keening, high and pure, expressing a naked piety. It's all so airy as to be probably very forgettable for most people, hence the availability of such tracks to fill up this budget album. Insofar as an album that lasts twenty five minutes counts as being filled up. But they were in good company on this album. They would have been classed as album ‘fillers’ had they been on any album that had much by way of substance. On an album that seemed to be nearly all filler, apart from the two headline tracks, they fitted perfectly, and set a nice, gentle, if inconsequential, mood, all the tracks complementing each other. And given the space to shine, their qualities do indeed show, with repeated plays. There is nothing big and brash and loud in the surrounding sounds to drown them out or dwarf them. They can actually be what they are on this humble little record. Simple little songs. And they are beautiful. Or, rather, Elvis' voice is just perfect, it has the decay of strings and just pulls at the heart directly.
In a similar vein, although actually a very substantial song, is I Met Her Today. This was from 1961, a ‘proper’ song at two minutes forty five seconds in length, with a beautiful, minimal arrangement, and that voice like electric honey soaring high into the ether and fading the ache and pain away. Not that I had any ache or pain at seven. As someone wrote on Elvis' voice here: 'With full command of his supple multi-octave vocal range, Elvis glides seamlessly from the high tender, almost falsetto notes of this exquisite song to the lower tenor-to-baritone-to-bass notes with masculine timbre and resonant authority that so expertly interpret each lyric of this ballad of love and self-renewal, demonstrating why Elvis Presley - peerless, preternatural, almost supernal in terms of vocal musical talent, and absolutely in a class by himself - was, is, and shall forever remain, in musical lore, the one and only, "King."' So now you know. It’s another breakup song, mind, a song of a love lost followed by a love found. Just another silly love song, at a time in life when I was more worried about how my favourite football team was doing. It's a quality song, mind.
What Now, What Next, Where To? is another interesting one. Now then, this is an up-tempo song to cheer the hopeful heart. Actually, it is not up-tempo at all, but mid-tempo, and it is another song of loss, expressing a wish for heaven to send an angel in face of a very uncertain future. It's just that it sounded positively boisterous at the time when heard in this gentle and sedate company. It had been written for Johnny Cash apparently, who had turned it down. Cash didn’t think much of it. Elvis turned it into a little gem. I can hear Cash singing it. Not a patch on what Elvis did with it.
The song that made the most impression on me at the time was I Slipped, I Stumbled, I Fell, for the reason it was up-tempo and lively and had the gimmicks that were the staple of a hit song. (In fact, my brother and I wrote our own version of this song, but with words that would never have been allowed on radio. We called our band The Naughty Boys. Sex Pistols eat you heart out, here was the real anarchy in the UK. In our house, anyway. I digress). Again, it’s only a short song, at one minute thirty eight seconds.
A cynic would be inclined to look at the track listing and conclude that this ‘budget’ album is really a cheap and cheerless venture in rounding up the odds and sods in the Presley catalogue in an attempt to divest the poorest section of the Elvis community of their few meagre pennies. Elvis for Everyone, rich and poor alike. The rich get the quality hits, and the poor get a little bit of Elvis for that little bit of money they had. I don’t care, though, because this budget album brought Elvis within reach, and allowed us to hear that beautiful voice. And he sang beautifully on these songs, as insubstantial as many may consider them.
And, truth be told, it was the beautiful voice that was always the attraction. I maintain that, among all the squabbles about where Elvis got his songs and his music from, all the accusations that Elvis was a derivative talent or a cultural appropriator, the most important point of all is missed - Elvis' voice transcended the material. I'll state the point plainly: Elvis made some fairly average songs into the classics they became. And I'll be even more blunt, I'm sick to the back teeth of critics praising Leiber and Stoller to the high hills, and sick to the back teeth off Leiber and Stoller's somewhat condescending attitude to Elvis over the years - Elvis made their songs a whole lot better than they actually were. It was the voice that was the real quality, with Elvis making some average material sound world-class. And here, on the simplest of songs, we get to hear that voice at its purest. A lot of the songs on the album are so-so. In the hands of anyone else they would in all probability sound weak indeed. With Elvis, they are beautiful. It's the voice, I'm telling you, it's the voice. I don't care who wrote what or who did it first, it was the voice that mattered. The management knew it, hence the callous way in which writers were bullied out of their rights, or just plain cut out, depriving Elvis of the material his talent deserved. Put Elvis' voice to anything, and the fans will buy it. Elvis fans were hooked on the voice. It was an addiction. Hence the decidedly average material that came Elvis' way, when he could have commanded the best. Sad. But the management understood the truth - Elvis' voice was what people wanted to hear. I, for one. was hooked.
I didn’t much care for the songs on this album at the time, though. But I still loved this humble album. It was my first. And I still have it to this day, with Always on my Mind still showing its scars, testimony to my Nin's desire to hear Elvis' voice by any available means. I know, I’m an old sentimentalist. Oh yes, that was the second song on side one, Sentimental Me. Slight and sweet, and very nice. The last song is Old Shep, a sad sack of a song about a boy and his dog, both full of fun, and who grew up together that way. And, of course, the years fast did roll, and old Shep he grew old. For a song I always claimed to hate, I am suspiciously word perfect. As songs about dead dogs go, this was the mount Everest, the greatest peak. Or trough, like the Slough of Despond:
Old Shep, he has gone where the good doggies go
And no more with old Shep will I roam
But if dogs have a heaven there's one thing I know
Old Shep has a wonderful home
The last lines of the last song on the album. Let's say it made an impression. I remember well the moment when the album finished the first time we played it. It was getting to late afternoon. My mother said it was very nice and lovely, or something reassuring like that. Someone had to say something to break the silence. We listened to it in silence, too, expressing excitement only when I Slipped, I Stumbled, I Fell came on. That was the one and only thriller on the record. The rest I thought to be a bit, well, quiet, low-key, down, non-descript, depressing, frankly. But as the years have indeed fast rolled by, with me saying goodbye to four faithful old dogs and very many budgerigars and canaries on the way, and as I’ve come to acquire a couple of thousand other, much more heralded, albums, including the rest from Elvis’ immense, gold-plated, record-breaking, multi-million selling career, I’ve retained a soft spot for this slight, softly-sung, inexpensive little album which contains an absolute treasure trove of memories. And I’ll maintain that if you want to know just how great Elvis Presley was as a singer, don’t just listen to his great songs – and Always on My Mind is indeed a truly great song – listen to his voice on material so slender as to barely count as songs. That’s what you have here, the pure, unadorned Elvis voice.
It’s sweet, sad, and sentimental. But there it is. Sweet, sad, sentimental me. I think the album shaped my character for the rest of my life.
Songs of innocence and experience. I had the innocence back in 1973, the experience was yet to come. I like to think that my formative years allowed me to keep the innocence to this day, as expressed on this sweet little album, on which Elvis sounds so impossibly young at times, even as he comes to express the pain and heartache of living. So maybe that's the secret, to be none the wiser. And remember the days when Old Shep was a pup. God bless Elvis, he was a simple soul who lost what he had in the fame and fortune he gained through the big hits - but even in his experience, he still manages to sound like an innocent to me.
Track Listing
As for my brother's Flaming Star album, it was a much livelier affair, with tracks like Chuck Berry's Too Much Monkey Business and the old Rufus Thomas R&B classic from the '68 Special Tiger Man. Fantastic records, I loved them. But I was very protective of my first record, and a little jealous of my brother's. And of course I claimed that mine was better than his, in a different kind of way. There was no repressing my sweet tastes, though. I took a shine to Wonderful World from my brother's album, a song that was a failure in the competition to select the UK entry for the Eurovision Song Contest. Such a song would be considered the lowest of all lows, beyond redemption, but Elvis attacks it with alarming sincerity. So much so, his version is utterly endearing. Honestly, you'd think the song was the greatest aria ever written the way Elvis goes at it. Same with Old Shep. Others would dismiss the material as appalling. Elvis exudes nothing less than the utmost sincerity. And that's why he was the greatest: he could make the worst material sound like the greatest ever written. I keep telling you, it's the voice.
All told, I think this first album set me up for the way I came to appreciate Elvis' music in the round, beyond just the catchy hit singles. I mean, we all knew Elvis was great. But there wasn't much radio back then, so there wasn't as much exposure of even the familiar hit records as we get now. We knew Elvis was 'king of rock'n'roll,' whatever that meant to those of us too young to actually remember the time when rock'n'roll was king. These were the tracks on the pricier albums that were out of range for a wee while yet. So I got the budget albums packed with the lesser lights of Elvis' career. And I developed a taste for the sweet, the sad and the sentimental which, in retrospect, sums Elvis up far more than all those claims to be king of the realm of whatever. The 1970's weren't kind to Elvis, either his person or his reputation. It wasn't remotely fashionable being an Elvis fan in that decade. He put on weight, he wore of jumpsuit, and the former king of rock'n'roll, as he was frequently called, was singing ballads. The years pass, the need for hit records dissipate, and we reach a vantage point which allows us to see things more clearly. People are now actually seeing that Elvis was actually a ballad singer, and a very good one at that. I'd known from the first. I could never see what critics were complaining of whenever a new Elvis track came out, and it was another ballad. Sounded good to me then, and these tracks are increasingly sounding good to more and more people at this distance in history. I have a view that used to be considered eccentric, but is now being expressed by more and more people, that Elvis actually got better as he got older. "Elvis died when he went into the army," said John Lennon, and people repeat it like a mantra. Sorry, but Lennon had a tendency to talk complete pants! Whilst Lennon was knocking out The Ballad of John and Yoko, Elvis was recording Suspicious Minds, In the Ghetto, Kentucky Rain, Only the Strong Survive, Any Day Now and countless other tracks of similarly high quality. That was Elvis in 1969, long after he left the army. It's not a popular view, but I actually think that very many of Elvis' tracks in the seventies are better than the songs he is best known for in the fifties such as Hound Dog and Jailhouse Rock. Elvis got better. There you go, I've said it. And some of his very best records came in the 1970s (he was it his worst revisiting his old rock and roll hits, which he had a tendency to just breeze through in concert). I'll put it no stronger than that (although I could). My view is a minority one, but I am unanimous in holding it! Elvis' output in the 1970s may be uneven, and may tend towards the sad and sentimental, the frankly miserable and maudlin some would say, but much of his material in this decade is scandalously overlooked and underrated, and is sounding better as the years go by. Or maybe I'm getting older. As Elvis did. People just wanted him to be forever twenty one and knocking 'em dead as he had once done as the Tupelo Mississippi Flash. He wasn't forever young. He got older, and sadder, as we all do (to quote Kenneth Clarke on Michelengelo). But, as these songs on Separate Ways prove, he was always a sad soul.
And I'll admit to having a sweet tooth and a sentimental side. And no-one did sentimental better than Elvis, the King of the sweet, the sad, and the sentimental!
Proof. Take his version of Until it's Time for you to go from 1972. Many loathe the strings, saying that they murder Buffy Sainte-Marie's folk classic. Opinion is divided. There are a few, such as I, who see the point:
"Presley’s interpretation amps up the song’s sentimental side. His drawl tucks the words inside his mouth, like one of those enveloping hugs that makes you feel safe until you start to feel smothered. But his emotional treatment is effective — if you can listen to it in full with dry eyes, email me the secrets of your robot heart — and it’s Presley’s version that most people associate with the song."
Elvis' "interpretation amps up the song's sentimental side ..." I developed a taste for this kind of thing early on. I've spent an entire life with my first album, and my nomination for National Album Day. The second pair of Elvis albums my brother and I got had I Got Lucky on there. I did too.
And Elvis? It's worth looking at how it all went wrong, and what the corruption of innocence reveals about the nature of the society that can corrupt something so good, so quickly, and so tragically.
The life of Elvis tells the story of the corruption of “the American dream”. From the hopeful young buck of the 50s to the addicted, bloated shadow of himself in the 70s, Elvis mirrors the unravelling of the USA, a country characterised by incredible inequality, money-grabbing and addiction.
‘Elvis, hero of democracy, victim of capitalism’.
“Democracy in America has been undermined for decades by a society that is a winner-takes-all race to the top in which the winner gets ridiculously richer while everybody else lives lives that make less sense all the time in terms of their dreams for themselves and their children.
“Then you get a free-for-all in which isolationist, greedy forces with their own agendas treat your country like a plaything.
“To bring it back to the movie, that is what happened in the life of Elvis Presley. You watch a young, beautiful, authentic creature in a brave new world chewed up and destroyed by the power and the money.
“It seduces him and ultimately addicts him and suppresses whatever it was that was great about him and turns him into a monster of its own creation.
“He gets to a point where he is both a victim and a part of his own undoing – he wanted to tour and go abroad after the ’68 Comeback Special reinvigorated him but under the Colonel’s guidance chose the easy money in Vegas – and that’s happening to all of us.
“So Elvis is a cautionary tale of how that kind of corruption can run away with something and destroy it.
“He has an enormous service to give to everyone in his death, just as he served the world in giving it such beauty in his life.”
It’s true, then, that the real Elvis, the inner core to which his voice gave expression, did start to wither and die early on, as a result of the diversions and perversions of a corrupt and corrupting world. And that’s a problem for all of us, given that we live in that badly ordered world. The article is a good one and well worth reading and contemplating at length. I'd just be cautious of notions of Elvis as involved in any kind of sacrifice. Any service Elvis performed by way of example was unwitting, losing agency and autonomy in face of forces much greater than he. That sums up the world we live in pretty well. As I’ve said many times before, Elvis was neither a king nor a god; he didn’t die for our sins, he died of them, temptations permitted and multiplied by fame and fortune. In Elvis’ example we come to see those things for the pathetic, and (self-)destructive, frauds they are. A cautionary tale, indeed, with lessons for all of us to ensure the health and viability of the society in which we live, lest each and all of us come to overwhelmed by forces beyond our individual control.
This solo version of Lonely Man was recorded at the same time as some of the material on the Separate Ways album. Just Elvis singing as he strums his guitar, light years away from the over-the-top orchestrations of the seventies, and all the more immense for that.