A quarter-century after the death of Elvis Presley, aren't "All Selections Previously Unreleased" the scariest words RCA could possibly affix to yet another tombstone box? Yet there's a cumulative significance to this collection of 100 false starts, alternate takes, home demos and live performances from the most prolific corpse in the history of popular music. Rather than memorializing Presley as a wax museum icon, this uneven anthology serves to rehumanize him as a musical work in progress, presenting a chronological progression of surprises and flubs ("Elvis Bloopers," my wife calls them) that spans the arc of his career, as if offering an alternate history from a parallel universe.
Not surprisingly, the story that unfolds is more compelling than much of the music. How could it be otherwise? Let's consider what Presley authorized for release during the last two decades of his life, a good portion of which was (how can we put this politely?) absolute crap. Then factor in the outtakes and alternate tracks that padded some of his '70s releases to meet the contractual demands of three albums a year. (These days, a superstar with Presley's clout might reverse that ratio, delivering one album every three years.) Then there are the dozens of posthumous compilations that have previously ransacked the vaults, leaving the listener to suspect that only the absolute dregs remain.
Yet even the most suspicious minds will find it hard to resist the charge of this collection's live broadcast from a 1956 Little Rock concert. The seven-song performance lasts barely 20 minutes, but the aftershocks of its musical explosion continue to reverberate. Though the tape likely languished on the shelves because of sonic quality -- in this era of digital precision, it sounds like a crinkly cassette -- it bristles with an excitement that the decades have done little to diminish or to match.
"Presley just walked out on the stage," broadcasts DJ Ray Green at the start of the show, as though he's a sports announcer offering play-by-play. "We're going to have to wait and see what his first number's gonna be....He's giving his cues to the boys, he's winding up his legs and here he goes with 'Heartbreak Motel!'"
Elvis knows he's playing with dynamite, which he detonates with every shriek-inducing, hip-swiveling number and then defuses with the cocksure humor of his between-song patter. He jokes about "jungle music" ("Here's a song that's real popular around the nation...and some parts of Africa") and "my friend Little Richard" ("I've never met him, but here's his song," as he launches into "Rip It Up"). He belches to punctuate his intro to "Blue Suede Shoes" ("We've been doing this song for 25-30 years. It's not only sad, fans, it's downright pitiful") and proceeds to unleash "Hound Dog", which he had yet to record, as a show-stopper.
Any Elvis fan could reduce the dross of these four discs into one disc of gold. My selection could proceed from all of the Little Rock concert to encompass a salacious "Shake, Rattle And Roll", the achingly pure "Pocketful Of Rainbows", the rearrangement for celeste and steel guitar of "Can't Help Falling In Love", the honking sax of Boots Randolph on "King Of The Whole Wide World", the bark-stripped spirituality of the home-recorded "Hide Me Thou", the unsweetened "In The Ghetto", and a couple of the melancholy cuts from the mid-'70s that mourn the end of his marriage to Priscilla. Maybe I'd even include the title track, a dreamy duet with Ann-Margret, and then sprinkle in some studio chatter here and there for comic relief.
Yet the impact of an anthology such as this is cumulative rather than selective, a story of the choices made and the ones that weren't, of a singular stylist frequently saddled with hopeless material, of artistic bets hedged in case this rock 'n' roll fad didn't pan out, of the bleak cynicism when those vital connections between artist, audience and material were severed. Listening to these hundred tracks, you realize that what we think of as Elvis music is no less than the broad expanse of American popular music, and you hear how sad it can sound when a dream shatters.
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