Elvis At RCA Studio C Hollywood Celebrated On A Double LP Set
5 CD set for obsessed completists
If you were a suburban white kid of a certain age and remember when Elvis appeared, seemingly from outer space, everything in your world changed (unless your parents were into Black music). Of course there was an Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen, and Milton Berle show "pre-reel" that you may have caught, but this person looked and sounded like no one else you'd ever seen before on television and it didn't appear to be an act. Even when Elvis goofed around on one show or another doing outright burlesque moves, they didn't register since you had no idea what burlesque was. The visceral, raw energy connected even to pre-teens. Parents who squealed at Frank not that many years earlier complained about the pimply faced kid on the cover of Life Magazine. He had a string of indelible hits from "Hound Dog" to "Don't Be Cruel" and "All Shook Up" and if you were shaken, moved to cop the attitude, the hair, the pout.
It was almost over for kids when Elvis got drafted but after his March 1960 discharge he released Elvis Is Back and appeared on television with Frank Sinatra. This was Elvis for grown ups though most kids saw his movies as pathetic and everything they were not liking even if they didn't yet know why. Then The Beatles arrived in '63/'64 and again shook things up and we all knew why Elvis was bogus. Even his 1968 comeback television special, didn't erase the artifice good as it was.
Put it all in retrospect and the greatness that was Elvis shines through as it did in Baz Luhrmann's Elvis biopic starring Austin Butler. And it shines through here too in this compilation of 1972 and 1975 tracks compiled, interestingly enough based on a recording studio—RCA's historic, spectacular sounding Sunset Boulevard Studio C where so many rock and soundtrack classics were recorded (the previous North Vine location was equally deserving). Here's where the Monkees put down tracks, Jefferson Airplane and The Rolling Stones' sonic oddity Aftermath. The 1972 masters are one side A, the 1975 masters on side B, and '72 outtakes on C, '75 on side D.
The material was compiled and released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Today originally issued May 7th, 1975. The '72 tracks include "Always On My Mind", "Burning Love" and Kristofferson's "For the Good Times". You can find the tracks online if you're at all interested in this album, which though fun still goes down like the Landau roof on a '70's era "land yacht". Great players at work here—Elvis's touring band, not studio musicians— including Ronnie Tutt on drums both in 1972 and 1975, Emory Gordy on bass, and of course James Burton on guitar.
While there's excellent documentation of each track's recording date, chart position and the original record on which it was found, along with a great deal of other useful information, there's no annotation putting this set in perspective other than to note that it "complete(s) Sony Legacy's series of remixed masters and outtakes without additional backing singers, horns and strings."
So that's all I can tell you about it other than that Mr. Ross-Spang did an outstanding job of avoiding 'revisionism'. First play was enjoyable and there were no jarring sonic surprises. The Memphis Record Pressing pressings were outstanding. Of course it was pressed in Memphis!
Two LPs of this material is just enough to return some of us to a very, very different time in America, when the male culture at large was growing sideburns, donning cartoonish bell bottoms, and sporting colors that just a few years earlier would have been seen as "fruity". That odd transition appeared pathetic to most Boomers then, because trying to get "hep" was rightly seen as a losing cause done badly. We didn't say it then because the phrase hadn't yet been invented but "hey stay in your lane" would have covered it. On this set, though Elvis left his lane, and adorned some ridiculous get ups as seen on the back cover here and the music sounds like opera compared to the rock music of that time, he still managed many platinum and gold hits.
