Elvis’ first posthumous Number One is like a miniature of his career: a brilliant beginning, a saggy middle, and it ends way too soon. Elvis comes out fighting, swaying and swaggering over a roiling disco boogie – when the brass stabs in on “all of my resistance” it’s a genuine thrill. His voice is still iconic: its slurs and mumbles an economical, broadstroke sketch of Presley past, but born of expertise as much as laziness. “Way Down” is let down by its chorus, whose jauntiness sweeps all tension away and whose ending dispels any momentum: the song’s components just never really fit together.
And then he’s left the building. With the rock’n’roll revival such a force in mainstream seventies pop it’s fitting Elvis got his own last word in – and “Way Down” is considerably better than the Showaddywaddy or Stardust efforts we’ve been through, even if it’s a minor entry in the King’s own record book. At the time of his death, by all accounts Elvis was a marginal figure – with the right medical care, maybe he’d have had a comeback or two in him. Maybe not.
A strange thing about Elvis Presley is that his figure in decline has become an archetype as strong as his younger self. It can be hard to feel his direct impression on pop, harder the further away we get from the event zero of his emergence, but if he no longer defines pop he still encompasses it. Few began so blazingly, sold out so totally, returned so fiercely, collapsed so gracelessly: Presley anticipates every pop story.
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And yet as a prototype for posthumous hit making this is pretty amateur. There was no quick cash in run out of Heartbreak Hotel, what you do when a legend dies unexpectedly was not in the rule book. Which is possibly what makes and breaks Way Down, its as half hearted as many of Elvis’s sixties hits, whilst surprisingly modern for the seventies. This is kind of the disco Elvis we were spared. It doesn’t really promise that much.
I think there might have been a cash-in if “Way Down” hadn’t already been in the charts. But I also wonder how surprised the record company (and the biz) were by the level of reaction to Elvis’ death – maybe they simply didn’t know.
From the Electric Banana school of posthumous No.1s, then – if that’s not a spoiler.
Where was this in the chart right before he died?
Number 44, if I recall correctly.
Now then:
I remember this, as I got onto a Record Review panel for our local Radio 210 (as it was then..), Paul Hollingdale (the ex-radio2 bloke) and a whole chunk of new or newish singles. This was on this weeks show, as well as Pretty Vacant, and various other John Christie awfulness etc.
For what it’s worth, I predicted it would be a big hit, and speculated on something I thought I’d heard about Elvis leaving Col Tom Parker.
It does seem to have taken its time getting to the top after his demise. How different from what happened only a few years later when Aaaarggh! Ouch! Stop it Bunny, that hurt!
I mentioned somewhere else Playback, the novel squeezed out of Raymond Chandler’s final illness/binge. Had anybody else written it, it might have been viewed as a good crime novel but as it is it’s a sad shadow of a once-great writer. I’m not sure that this even comes up to that level. It may have been a respectable minor hit for almost anybody else but it really is a bit limp and forgettable. It’s an indicator of how far the great man had fallen rather than a tribute to a mould-breaking career. The man was clearly ailing when he recorded this. It’s not just that he’s lost some of the old energy, it’s that Way Down is as limp as a wilted cabbage and with about as much punch.
I was in my bedroom, listening to the Radio Luxembourg Top 30 rundown, which that particular Tuesday was hosted by Tony Prince – “Stay tune for some very important news at eleven o’clock after the show!” – but there was no need to heed that request; as the Stranglers pummelled their way through “Something Better Change” at number seven, my dad came in and told me. I rushed into the front room, and on News At Ten a grave-looking (or possibly looking ready for the grave) Reginald Bosanquet seemed to be in the process of being crushed by the huge picture of Presley above him, to his right. A heart attack, on the toilet, aged 42. How – unbecoming, I thought (as yet I had no idea of “how apt”).
Was it a shock? For me, yes, but only in terms of a jack-in-the-box surprise; we’d been expecting it, most people had been expecting it for some years, but the reaction on my part was an involuntary jolt rather than grief, or sorrow, as such.
That week “Way Down” had continued its sluggish climb up the charts, from 46 to 42, with little indication that it would go much further; yet another middle-ranking Presley entry to file away with “I’ve Got A Thing About You Baby” or “If You Talk In Your Sleep.” “Moody Blue” had gone top ten earlier that year, but hits of that size had become increasingly rare – one every two or three years, if he was lucky, which in the end he wasn’t.
But the following week “Way Down” soared to number four, and every one of his sixteen previous number ones had re-entered the Top 100 – helpfully, RCA had reissued them that May in a special picture sleeve edition, in an attempt to reproduce the success of EMI’s Beatles reissue programme the previous year – while pretty well all of his major albums did likewise in the album chart, a two-year old 40 Greatest Hits compilation going straight to number one (at its peak, in early-mid September, Elvis’ back catalogue accounted for more than a quarter of the Top 100 album chart).
By the time “Way Down” had reached the top I was back at school and my classmates’ reaction to the news was decidedly sanguine, in the form of gentle and not-so-gentle mocking. “Aye, Way Down – six feet doon to be exact!” was the typical standard – and, as previously noted, this was no school of punk adherents; the big album of that third year in my class turned out to be ELO’s Out Of The Blue. But the inference was clear; Elvis was not hip, our parents liked him, why should we feel anything? Indeed, when you look at the legions of Elvis impersonators, virtually without exception they mimic the Elvis of the seventies; not the lean Memphis Flash whose moves could remind you exactly why Western civilisation got an instant hard-on, but the Moby Dick Elvis, the bloated, sweating, stuffed god spinning on the axis of his belt buckle; not the UNZIP ME NOW IF YOU DARE FUCKERS cool bravado of “Love Me” or even “King Creole,” but the sobbing sarcophagus who stood, or staggered, as a horrible example of what becoming an All-Round Entertainer does to someone who doesn’t really want it; the endless autobiography once-removed of weepies like “Always On My Mind” or “My Boy” or “You Gave Me A Mountain.” And because he was in essence a dumb, gullible old truck driver who didn’t like to upset anybody, not really, he remained Colonel Parker’s blubbering balloon despite every sinew in his being willing him to do the precise opposite.
(I mean, what is it with the stock Elvis impersonator shots you invariably get on X-Factor and Britain’s Got Tinnitus? Do they hire them specially? And, if so, WHY? What is Cowell supposed to be SAYING?)
(And I make early note of the encasement of icons in their declining poses; always the Johnny Cash of “Hurt,” never the “San Quentin may you rot and burn in hell” one; always the conveniently immobile memorial, never the living, hilarious, irritating, argumentative, farts loudly in the toilet real Di or Biggie or Lennon because real, living people are so damned INCONVENIENT in Rock’s Rich Tapestry…)
We fantasise the alternative scenarios, of course; encouraged by a chance meeting with, say, Springsteen, and subsequent endless nagging, Elvis tells the Colonel to go fuck himself, take the fucking money I don’t care, works out furiously to lose weight, seeks out new writers and producers who can re-energise him, maybe even makes that long-delayed trip to Britain to check out this punk thing. But the man who was once the epitome of Art As Fuck ended up a debased cabaret act, expiring while straining to produce just one more miserable turd. That was symbolic enough.
The trouble with all this is that “Way Down” indicated a way back. With its unlikely but welcome opening of burbling synth and sighing bass, “Way Down” is a more than agreeable attempt at schaffel rock, and showed Presley at just about the liveliest he had been since “Burning Love.” The track evolves purposely, with those layers of bass synths subtly augmented by a horn section, galloping piano and a slightly bemused but still sufficiently emboldened Elvis singing – you are rooting for him as he strives to scream “Ooohh, and I can feel it/Feel it/Feel it!/FEEL IT!”
And he appears to be celebrating the joys of…well, you work it out yourself: “Way down where the music plays/Way down like a tidal wave/Way down where the fires blaze.” In truth it is a quietly astonishing show of assertion from the King, as for one of the very rare occasions in his recording career he is glad to surrender to the Other’s desires (“Oooh, my head is spinnin’…/A hundred magic fingers on a swirling carousel/The medicine within me no doctor could prescribe”) and he sounds sated and even a little ecstatic at what she’s doing to him, how she’s feeding (on) him.
“Way down where it feels so good/Way down, where I hoped it would/Way down, where I never could!” and he gives a little chuckle during that last line, as if: heck, I’m dying, but at least let me die happy. In the end, stalwart Jordanaire Felton Jarvis, who’d been there since the days of “Hound Dog,” buries his King with a never-more-final basso profundo of “way on down” as the piano echoes him and its lid closes.
Elvis’ was only one of a quite shockingly rapid procession of celebrity deaths in the autumn and winter of ’77; Bolan’s car crashed barely a month later, and then Bing Crosby, Groucho Marx, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and finally, on Christmas morning, Charlie Chaplin, all departed. It was clearly time to come to terms with what was, in tandem with the now palpable spectre of O levels, a new world which I was going to have to inhabit, like it or not, if we’re talking about “taking me to places I’ve never been before.”
And meanwhile, somewhere in the pastoral depths of Kent, an 18-year-old girl is wondering to herself: “Elvis, are you out there somewhere…looking like a happy man?”
That bolan comparison, part two.
Bolan dies in a car crash.
“Celebrate Summer” does not suddenly shoot up the chart.
The next single, “Crimson Moon”/”Jason B.Sad”, the last one scheduled to appear from the album “Dandy in the Underworld”, is issued almost as rote but without ‘posthumous’ pushing, like the artist is currently on tour in Japan and not available for promotion/video/TOTP Performances.
This would never happen again.
I’m assuming that this isn’t the first posthumous No. 1, so what was? I have a feeling that that young DJ Punctum may be able to tell me…
Isn’t it Buddy Holly? I remember writing an early entry and stating, with reasonable confidence, yes, this is the first posthumous number one.
This was quickly followed by a pack of hideous tribute singles, too. Not a good way for the great man to be remembered, frankly.
Young punk’s leather jacket: “Elvis Is Dead. HAHA.”
It was definitely “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.”
The most hideous of the Elvis tribute singles was also the biggest hit: “I Remember Elvis Presley” by Dutchman Danny Mirror, a number four hit in the month of mourning, although “The Greatest Star Of All” by Australia’s Skip Jackson, as included on Kenny Everett’s World’s Worst Record Album, was also pretty dire.
One celebrity death missing from Marcello’s list – Maria Callas, who died on the same day as Bolan.
Rosie noted that “Way Down” took its time getting to the top after Elvis’ death, from 16 August to 3 September. In fact 16 August was a Tuesday, so news of his death broke on the evening of a chart day, and as Marcello notes above “Way Down” had imped from 46 to 42 in that day’s chart. The chart announced on 23 August would have covered sales from the whole of the previous week, so the posthumous sales would only have counted for part of that week’s chart, and Elvis was at 4 behind the Floaters. He reached Number 1 on Tuesday 30 August, but the chart is officially dated 3 September as that’s the “week ending” date.
Funnily enough I don’t remember Elvis’s death sparking a spate of sick jokes at school like Marcello does. Maybe because it had slipped off the news agenda by the time we got back to school. We certainly had the “What was Bolan’s last hit? – a tree” and “What do Hitler and Bing Crosby have in common? – they both died in a bunker” ones.
But I do remember the sheer shock of that announcement towards the end of that night’s News at Ten by Reggie Bosanquet – remember how the words “Elvis Presley” and “dead” sounded so alien to each other. News at Ten actually retracted the story right at the end of the bulletin – so he’s not dead after all? I went straight to the radio and Piccadilly’s Tony Emmerson had embarked on several hours’ worth of solid Elvis, which kind of confirmed it.
Radio 1 copped some flak for not doing the same, but then it was John Peel who was on the air, playing “Trod On” by Culture at the time the news broke. Peel announced it, then got straight on with the rest of his scheduled programme, reminiscing off-air with John Walters about the day he bought “Heartbreak Hotel”.
As it happened, Sounds that week was running a feature on punk fanzines and comparing them to the fan magazines that sprouted in the early days of rock’n’roll. Which is why their front cover which hit the news-stands the morning after Elvis’s death featured a 50s magazine cover about “The Amazing Elvis Presley!” Remarkably, they apologised the following week with the words “We don’t have a wooden heart – honest”.
And that Wednesday morning I did something I’d been planning to do for some time – visit Manchester’s Central Library to look at microfilms of vintage newspapers. Inspired by “The Story of Pop” (of which Marcello still has every issue complete with binders), I wanted to study newspaper coverage of 1955, the “Rock Around the Clock” film and Bill Haley’s first UK tour. Quite appropriate I should do that on the day Elvis was on all the hoardings. That mode of research, which I was trying out for the first time that day, has stood me in good stead ever since.
I suppose I hadn’t seen footage of him in his bloated condition, and “Moody Blue”, his last hit to that date, still sounded pretty lively. 42 might have been nearly three times my age at the time, but it was still a ridiculous age to die. Many of the regulars here – certainly Rosie, Waldo, Marcello and myself – have passed that age now, and certainly in my case I thought “so this is when Elvis died, it still feels bloody young”. Same with the age of 45 and Freddie Mercury. To see rock figures still performing now and note their ages – the likes of Daltrey at 64, Springsteen at 58, the Stones 60-plus at least – they’re pushing back the boundaries of what we thought was possible for the music, and you wonder what Elvis would be doing at 73.
H #9 – Buddy Holly’s posthumous number one was followed by similar hits for Eddie Cochran and Jim Reeves and Jimi Hendrix before Elvis.
Oh, and Dutchman Danny Mirror’s next single was a tribute to Bing Crosby, who had also recently just died.
DDM’s sincerity was called into question at this point.
Presley drives one way down extra cover’s throat and this happened to be in the lower reaches of the chart at the time. End of.
Final word on Wimbledon (at least from me!). Astonishing Men’s Final but as I predicted, Nadal proves to be McEnroe to Roger’s Borg. To me, it was all in the stars. Just banked £700 for doubling up Rafa with Venus but I’m not feeling smug at all.
“Retractable roof? We don’t need no stinking retractable roof!”
Marcello #7 – another celebrity death you missed out in your list was Maria Callas, who died on the same day as Bolan.
Rosie #6 – you say “Way Down” took its time getting to number 1, from 16 August to 3 September: 16 August was a Tuesday, so Elvis’s death occurred on a chart day on which, as Marcello noted, the record had limped up from 46 to 42. The chart for the following week encompassed the whole of that week’s sales, so the posthumous sales effect was only for half the week, and Elvis went up to 4 behind the Floaters. He reached Number 1 on Tuesday 30 August, but the following Saturday, 3 September, is the official “week ending” date.
Funnily enough I don’t remember any sick Elvis jokes circulating at school, probably because it had slipped off the news agenda by the new school year. We did get the “What was Bolan’s biggest hit? – a tree” and “What do Hitler and Bing Crosby have in common? – they both died in a bunker” ones.
It was certainly more of a shock for me than it had been for Marcello. I remember that News at Ten newsflash well, and particularly how the words “Elvis Presley” and “dead” seemed alien to each other. (42 might have been nearly three times my age back then, but it was still a ridiculous age to die. Of the regulars here I know Waldo, Rosie, Marcello and I among others have all passed that age, and when I did I thought “so Elvis died at this age? It still feels bloody young”.) Indeed News at Ten even retracted the story at the end of the bulletin – so was he dead or not? I turned to the radio and Piccadilly’s Tony Emmerson was embarking on several hours of solid Elvis, so it was clearly true.
Radio 1 copped some flak for not doing likewise, but then again it was John Peel who was on air when the news broke, playing “Trod On” by Culture. He announced the news then returned to his scheduled playlist, whilst reminiscing off-air with John Walters about the day he’d bought “Heartbreak Hotel” in a Liverpool record store.
As it happened, “Sounds” that week ran a feature on punk fanzines, comparing them with the fan magazines that came out in the early rock’n’roll era – which is how come the issue that hit the newsstands the morning after Elvis’s death featured on its front page a 50s magazine cover on “The Amazing Elvis Presley!” Remarkably, Sounds apologised for any offence caused the following week, with the words “We don’t have a wooden heart – honest.”
That Wednesday morning I did something I’d been planning for a while – went to Manchester Central Library to study microfilms of vintage newspapers. Inspired by “The Story of Pop” which we’ve discussed before, I wanted to look at how papers of the time covered the birth of rock’n’roll, “Rock around the Clock” and Bill Haley’s first tour. Quite appropriate I should be doing this the day Elvis was all over the newspaper hoardings. That mode of research, which I tried for the first time that day, has stood me in good stead in work and leisure pursuits ever since.
Oh yes, Maria Callas. And Angelo Muscat, the guy who played The Butler in The Prisoner. And, if we must, Victor the Giraffe.
Victor the Giraffe – who could forget!! We went to Marwell Park zoo last summer (on the day of the foot-and-mouth outbreak in Surrey) – sad to see there wasn’t a plaque.
Another event of August ’77 which turned out to have widespread cultural influence – the arrest of the New York serial killer Son of Sam, as referenced (selon Wikipedia) by the Dead Boys, Marilyn Manson, Elliott Smith, Offspring, Cypress Hill, Nas and Lupe Fiasco among others.
By August of ’77 we were back in Los Angeles, housesitting in…our old house, in Silverlake. It was hot and there wasn’t much to do. I remember watching tv, going shopping with my mom, playing gin rummy with her, and sleeping in a bunk bed, which was a new & exotic thing for me (we had sold the house to a woman with two daughters). The most memorable thing to happen – not one but two small earthquakes, nothing too serious, just enough to make tables shake and water slosh around in a glass. It was a weird ‘welcome home’ sign.
What I don’t remember is hearing about Elvis’ death. Not too surprising, as neither of my parents cared for him that much – we had no albums by him, I’d never seen any of his movies on tv. Indeed my first memory of him at all was a little while later when we had moved to a duplex in Los Feliz. It was an ad on tv for his greatest hits (on vinyl, cassette and eight-track tape) – so I heard him for the first time knowingly in little bursts for thirty seconds. Around the same time Liberace was hawking a compilation of the ‘most romantic piano music of all time’ which was exactly the kind of music I didn’t like, as it was all big pounding chords and tons of strings sawing away. (If there were parallels between Elvis and Liberace to be made, I wasn’t anywhere near smart enough to make them then, other than ‘this is OTHER people’s music, but not mine.’) Eventually I would get my own radio and actually hear Elvis now and then, but I wouldn’t really understand him for some time. (I should also note I had no idea punk rock was happening at the time, and wouldn’t hear a song by a punk band until 1980.)
I was in my bedroom too (doing my homework I think) when my Mum came in to tell me Reggie Bosenquet had just announced Elvis had died. I remember feeling sort of “so what?” as has been said, he was an icon of my parent’s generation and, you know, never meant shit to me at the time. My mother was upset though, not least because she was the same age as him. She got me back for my nonchalance a few years later though when I was all upset over Ian Curtis dying and she said “Ian who?”
I wonder why there weren’t any Elvis is dead jokes at school too. Did we care so little that we couldn’t even be arsed to think of any jokes?
I quite liked this though, not up there with “Burning Love” for 70s period Elvis but chugs along nicely.
Maybe he was a big enough joke on his own?
I don’t even remember how I found out.
I remember playing Bolan’s Zip Gun album for the first time for some years the night before he died. So I’m sure it was on Radio 1 news.
I was staying with my sister and was actually out in a pub with some old school friends. I didn’t find out until my sister told me the following morning.
42 seems very young now but of course my generation had seen off Morrison, Joplin, Hendrix, Jones and a good may others by this time, all much younger than Elvis was. And Elvis seemed to have been around for ever and was now washed up and well past his best.
Celebrations of death come and go, but nobody but me seemed to care very much about the tenth anniversary of Jim Morrison’s demise (overshadowed, perhaps, by falling just a few weeks after Bob Marley died). The twentieth anniversary, on the other hand, spawned a whole Morrison industry. And young folks not born when the Lizard King took his fateful bath were keeping a noisy and pungent vigil in the Père Lachaise cemetery. (Graffito seen on Oscar Wilde’s tomb round about this time – “yours is better than Jim’s”)
I’ll tell you about the death of F Bulsara when the time comes.
Wasn’t Eddie Cochran’s posthumous hit “Three Steps To Heaven”?
Yep.
I’m still young enough for this death to be a classic rock myth, rather than a memory (you have to get to the death of Kurt Cobain in the spring of death of 1994 – alongside John Smith and Ayrton Senna – for one that affected me as a pop consumer), but I wore a t-shirt of the classic NME obituary cover many hundreds of times in my twenties. It’s a picture of him at his 1956 peak. Either side of this photo are the two words of the anagram ELVIS LIVES – underneath is the instruction “REMEMBER HIM THIS WAY”. Sadly, his posthumous reputation would suggest that that’s not how he is generally remembered. That t-shirt served a useful function in finding like-minded souls at contemporary music events in the 1990s.
That said, there’s something about Elvis that can lead you to forgive and be amused by all periods of his career that isn’t true for any other revered figure (duff John Lennon and Lou Reed records make me cross while poor Elvis ones make me shake my head in wry amusement). This is, I think, because even at his volcanic peak, there’s a sense of the ridiculous in his phrasing and poses, ridicule being nothing to be scared of, etc.
Which is why I find ‘Way Down’, like ‘Burning Love’ and ‘Moody Blue’, to be a thing of delight. It’s an okay song, and Elvis sounds like he’s laughing as he sings it. And the “swirling carousel” section does sound genuinely giddy. And a sense of fun and play is one of the best things about pop.
More than a word required for the record “Way Down” kept at number two; the amazing “Magic Fly” by Space, the missing link between Joe Meek and Daft Punk, a French disco whose implications and ramifications would not become fully apparent for another 20 years or so (and their similarly-titled album is well worth seeking out).
I was too young yet to appreciate Elvis’s astonishing importance to world culture. I was old enough, however, to note the oddness of the BBC’s coverage. On the early evening magazine show, Nationwide, who did they get in to talk about her memories of the King? Irene Handl.
Now, I wouldn’t want to say a word against Irene Handl (Maida Vale’s finest, etc.) but even aged eight I thought it passing strange to watch Irene Handl sit being interviewed by Bob Wellings – or whoever it was – tearfully talking about the great influence of Elvis on her life.
This is a smashing bit of late Elvis. Gracefully boogying, making fine use of his gospel tenor to create a kind of Burning Love II. Unlike some of his self-important ballads, this makes sex sound fun. Hell, it makes being alive sound fun. He did churn out some wretched material and when they started releasing things like ‘I Can Help’, you were aware that we were already near the bottom of the barrel. But this is marvellous stuff.
Does it matter that Elvis is so often recalled in his Vegas Whale period? I don’t think so. Guralnick’s magnificent two-volume biography makes very clear that Elvis was in uncharted waters. It’s easy to tut and say that he should have left Tom Parker and made no movies after G. I. Blues and ditched the Memphis Mafia and stayed thin and never gone to Vegas and recorded a series of roots recordings with Rick Rubin etc. etc. etc., but that’s all hindsight and there were no career paths in rock to follow. Evidently the only careers in popular music he saw around him that could compare were Sinatra. But Sinatra changed popular singing, he didn’t change the world. Elvis became bloated and lazy and dissatisfied because what’s a boy to do?
Elvis of the 50s is iconic because it holds out a possibility of living. Elvis of the 70s is iconic because I think many of us have our bloated Elvis moments, where you think, how did it come to this? Why is my body rebelling against me? Where was the promise I had? What does all this effort mean? And yet you carry on singing and karate-kicking and mumbling witticisms and finding the whole thing sad and absurd and extraordinary. And I love Elvis for that.
Didn’t Presley want to be Dean Martin (and Nick Tosches’ Dino is in its vanishing, breezy way a better Elvis biography than the Guralnick epic)? But instead of drifting into contented non-existence (or anti-existence) he was basically a terrified coward, a Parker patsy, a carnival barker’s free ride, a performing well let’s not even go there.
Seventies Elvis fetishisation is basically glorified necrophilia – it is a characteristic of decaying middle aged males to want to fetish/glorify/iconify decaying middle aged males because they can’t handle the prospect of saying no, or fuck you, of throwing away that security blanket of the past even though they know it will end up strangling them (and because they’re afraid of death but anyway) – and of course because Elvis is a conveniently dead icon that also makes him a puppet and we can make him do, say or think anything that suits us.
You see, I see the reality of “how did it come to all this?” etc. but like Nadal on Sunday I refuse to accept “reality.”
Though nominally a rocker, “Way Down” has practically nothing to do with the music Presley helped birth 2 decades previously. Slick and unthreatening with a pulsing pseudo-rhythm and synth brass stabs which always remind me, funnily enough, of Eno’s “Backwater” released a few months later(a deliberate crib?) it’s much more contemporary-sounding than any of the rock’n’roll revivalists operating in the 70’s and features a suprisingly involved performance from Elvis, who by this final stage in his career was putting much more effort into his ballad work, his ‘rock’ tracks from the period often sounding forced or even begrudged.
Strange, though in many ways appropriate for Elvis’ send off to have been a rocker, which, in a glitzy pseudo-disco way “Way Down” nominally is,rather than one of the mournful, heartbreaking ballads which had became much more his stock and trade by the end of his life. WaCertainly “Hurt”from the 2nd last album From Elvis Presley Boulevard for example is a better record than Way Down and much more in tune with where he was at, musically and spiritually speaking, during the last half decade or so of his life but
DOH!IGNORE MY PREVIOUS COMMENT- ROUGH DRAFT ACCIDENTLY SUBMITTED-FINAL DRAFT FOLLOWS!!
Though nominally a rocker, “Way Down” has practically nothing to do with the music Presley helped birth 2 decades previously. Slick and unthreatening with a pulsing pseudo-rhythm and synth brass stabs which always remind me, funnily enough, of Eno’s “Backwater” released a few months later(a deliberate crib?) it’s much more contemporary-sounding than any of the rock’n’roll revivalists operating in the 70’s nodding more towards ABBA or ELO than recreating the Sun Studio sound.Even more suprisingly it features an involved performance from Elvis, who by this final stage in his career was putting much more effort into his ballad work, his few ‘rock’ tracks from the period often sounding forced or even begrudged. Here he sounds jolly, a different man from the sexual animal who emerged from Memphis in 54 (even the chuckle on “Way Down” mentioned above sounds a million miles from the leering grin heard towards the end of 1956’s “Baby Lets Play House”)but still like someone ejoying themselves for once.
As such its a pleasing twist of fate that as the current single at the time “Way Down” happened to be the track that gave him his posthumous ‘tribute’charttopper,rather than one of the mournful, heartbreaking ballads which had became much more the stock and trade of his singles output by the end of his life.Although hardly an example of him at his best its a much more apt swan song than, say, the hollow bellow of pain that was his late 76 hit “Hurt” which, as Dave Marsh once commented, upon hearing didnt suprise you that he had less than a year to live when it was recorded, rather that he lasted that long afterwards.
Although “Hurt” is a much more powerful and moving record,and much more in tune with where he was at, musically and spiritually speaking, during the last half decade or so of his life “Way Down” works better as a curtaincloser because it makes us think more of the Elvis we’d like to be, or like to hang out with- the fun-loving dude with the golden voice and charm by the bucketload- rather than the tragic fallen angel his more typical 70’s work evokes.
Elvis left the building, despite all the odds, sounding confident, comfortable with his past and his present and with a spring in his step. I cant think of a more fitting send-off.
re #31
It’s more complex than necrophilia. You couldn’t fuel a thirty year industry on pure irony. It’s not just saying he’s fat and rubbish. It’s also acknowledging that 70s Elvis was also magnificent. Some of his seventies recordings really do stand up to the most exacting scrutiny: Burning Love, Promised Land, Faded Love, Tomorrow Never Comes, I Washed My Hands in Muddy Water, Polk Salad Annie, etc. And we need to remember that the ballooning weight gain was only visible in concert for the last 18 months of his life. In the earlier 70s he looked pretty good. Well, as good as a man can in his mid-thirties wearing a rhinestone-encrusted jumpsuit. (Comp. Van Morrison in The Last Waltz…)
Asking ‘How Did It Come To This?’ is, of course, a way into appreciating reality, even if you choose to go all Vegas and defy it too. Recognising reality doesn’t mean submitting to it. And I’ll stop there before I get all Theodor Adorno on yo’ ass.
Re#31- Surely the fetishisation of Lennon/Morrison/Cobain/Garland/any dead performer who’s form of demise is a major part of their legend could be described as “basically glorified necrophilia”. However I love Presley’s 70’s work simply because it moves me deeply. To me, at its best, its Soul Music in it’s finest and purest form. I’m too young to remember Elvis so the past he embodies is one I didnt experience. However like any human being who’s lived a few decades I’ve had my share of emotional turmoil and as such Elvis’ ability to convey these feelings in such a raw and geniune way in his late recordings connects with me on this gut level. The whole jumpsuit-hamburger-thangyewverymuch-dying-on-the-john-in-a-big-nappy thing is an irrelevance. The iconography of an artist can certainly add to one’s enjoyment of their output but at the end of the day its the quality of the music that counts.
Good call re:Space. Such a tragedy that if anyone thinks of the name now they think of the none-more-irksome Beautiful Neighbourhood bunch. Any idea what became of them?(the Magic Fly ones i mean, not the other lot.)
No, it’s easy to fuel any long-term industry on necrophilia and misplaced lamenting (again, see Wimbledon, but that’s another story), Gracelands as trailer park Lourdes etc. because it’s easier to luxuriate in the squalidity of the decline of others (which is let’s face it ALL seventies Elvis – so much projection has gone onto that “body” it should be called the National Film Theatre) than celebrate their peaks, i.e. when they were LIVING and ECSTATIC, and extend that into your own life.
Analyse his seventies output as much as you want, but in the end you’ll have to acknowledge that you’d exchange all of it for a split second of “Don’t Be Cruel.”
Funnily enough, his late 50’s pop stuff is probably my least favorite aspect of his work. I love the Sun stuff, think a lot of the 60’s singles stand up well as great tracks of their period(sure, theres the whole awful “Dominique the Lonely Bull”type soundtrack stuff from this time but thats easy to ignore-BMG seem to have managed it with their reissue campaigns) and i’ve already made my feelings clear on the 70s.
The trouble with tracks like “Don’t Be Cruel” for me is the contrast between the terrific sneering sensiousness of Elvis’ lead and the godawful cod-barbershop backing of those bastards the Jordanaires-listen on Hound Dog to how Scotty Moore’s brilliant solos are ruined by having their grotesque smug cooing plastered over the top. At its worst its almost like Never Mind the Bollocks if it were produced by Jeff Lynne..
Out of interest, whats your thoughts on Suspicious Minds, MC?
The main memory I have about Presley buying the farm concerns the reports that he wasn’t actually dead, leading inevitably to “sightings” of the King. In fact I’m pretty sure I spotted him myself stacking shelves in Safeway in Wrexham. Do any other Popular pilgrims have any sightings experiences of Elvis that they would wish to share?
With regards stiffs to come, I recall when John Wayne hit the snooze button and I broke the news to a guy at work called Dave, who thought I was winding him up, as he was a great admirer of The Duke. Another fellow called Vince (who was nothing if not a hippy pothead – the very prototype for Neil from “The Young Ones”) came drifting past at that point…
“Hey, Vince,” I called out. “Dave won’t believe me. John Wayne’s dead, isn’t he?”
And Vince responded in a perfect impersonation of the great man’s drawl: “He sure is!”
I cracked up.
Dave didn’t.
“Suspicious Minds”? Last lease of life, still on the leash, surrendering reluctantly to his doom, dawn of the seventies – it all fits.
re: #37
My point was about irony, not misplaced lamenting, but fair enough. If it were possible – and it isn’t – to weigh up music in the manner you suggest, no doubt Don’t Be Cruel would outweigh much of the seventies material. But also the seventies material would not exist without Don’t Be Cruel, so it’s a meaningless question. I’m saying something simpler: that 70s Elvis is more complex that the fat Vegas burger-botherer of popular contempt. Not that controversial and it doesn’t entail knocking the 50s Elvis either.
Mind you, I think the popular idea that he was a serious bolt of pure sexual energy who drifted into parody is precisely the wrong way round. Elvis was a miraculous, dangerous ironist, who crossed boundaries of race and gender and class, all with a wink and a smile, who unfortunately drifted into taking himself very very seriously.
I think that Elvis was rock’s Baldrick who thought that irony was a metal like silvery and goldy.
“Elvis was a miraculous, dangerous ironist, who crossed boundaries of race and gender and class, all with a wink and a smile, who unfortunately drifted into taking himself very very seriously”
This all seems highly unlikely.
“No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones, in 1977…” (The Clash, written in 1976.)
I was in my room at my mother and step-father’s house in Harpenden, listening to Peel during a thunder storm. He reported the news as “unconfirmed reports are coming through”, then confirmed the rumours a few records later. Within the same announcement, he explained that he wasn’t about to go rushing down to the archives to pull out Elvis’s old records, as that always struck him as “ghoulish”. Instead, he paid a brief, somewhat curt tribute (albeit pointedly to the Elvis of the 1950s only), and carried on the show.
Down at the Vortex club on Wardour Street, which had become the de facto punk hangout since the initial (if temporary) closure of The Roxy in Covent Garden, crowds of cluelessly spiked-up Johnny Come Latelys actually cheered the news, prompting fresh-faced new Sniffin’ Glue contributor Danny Baker to take to the stage and passionately berate them for their gormlessness (later written up in an article for what I think was the last ever edition of the fanzine, and I also seem to recall that Baker later named the incident as one of the final nails in the coffin for the original spirit of 1976, and a sign that it was time for all right-thinking people to bail out).
Posthumous marketing not being the finely honed reflex response that it has since become, I was shocked when “Way Down” leapt up the charts the following week, and keenly aware that it wasn’t particularly being bought on the strength of its musical merits. In which case, it’s strange how posterity has recast this record as a serendipitously apt last hurrah, as this exceptionally fine thread has already made clear.
“Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me you see” – Chuck D, 1989.
And to me neither, I’m afraid (although I acknowledge his influence etc etc, and Tom’s final sentence above absolutely says it all). Then again, I am partial towards certain chunks of late 60s/early 70s Elvis, particularly “Suspicious Minds” and especially the truly spine-tingling “I Just Can’t Help Believing” (recorded live, and to my ears more of an ensemble piece than anything else).
But then again, the rough pub on the corner of Thurland Street was pumping out the “Glory Glory Hallelujah” bit from “American Trilogy” at chucking out time last night, just as I was walking back from White Denim’s raw, instinctive, spontaneous, galvanising, energising, neck-scruff-grabbingly FANTASTIC gig at the venue up the road. And to be honest? It just sounded pathetic.
Is “Presley’s” bar/pub still going, on the TottCtRoad?
Yes, but under the name of the Rising Sun.
The tragedy of Presley’s “American Trilogy” is that, unlike Mickey Newbury’s original, he can’t/won’t let it lie at “All My Trials” (and that was the whole quiet point of the exercise in the first place); he can’t resist the big finish and the flag waving.
Still, if anyone’s ever seen Freddie Starr doing “American Trilogy”…
Or indeed, “The Unknown Singer” i.e. PJ Proby, on OpKnox…
Blimey, yes.
#43
American Trilogy (and the path that led there, which includes the far superior, but still overserious, In the Ghetto and If I Can Dream) is certainly the sound of someone taking themselves too seriously.
Did they cross all those borders with a wink and a smile? Yes indeedy. Just watch that scandalous performance of Hound Dog that got him banned from the waist up: he’s joking with the audience, he’s parodying himself, you can hear the audience laughing… and when he does the half time semi-encore of the song, the laughter comes in gales. This is not to say it wasn’t also very sexy and original and so on, but he was also aware of what he was doing. Not just a dumb form boy.
And did he cross those boundaries? Well race, yes obviously – witness the people who thought he was black first time they heard ‘That’s Alright Mama’, but many other obvious things – but also gender. Read the critics who fulminated against Elvis: when they complain that he was ‘bumping and grinding’ and making moves ‘hitherto confined to the burlesque runway’ the complaint here is that Elvis’s outrage partly consists in behaving like a woman.