"Suspicious Minds" in the showroom; look what I found...

[ForrestGump]

Elvis live from Las Vegas in August of 1970. :D

For yoo-fore-eye-see!

:*

[Bunny]

1. That is one of my all-time favorite Elvis songs.

Did I ever tell you I had a cat named Elvis? This was back in the early 80's. That was a cool cat - dumber than a bag of rocks, but cool nevertheless. How's it going, Forrest? :hi:

[ForrestGump]

6. Of course, if the name is Elvis, it's gonna be a cool cat

:D

The Chinese refer to Elvis as "The King of Cats," after all!

Hi! :hi:

It proceeds not-so-badly hereabouts, and I'm going to work tonight (after a few days of downtime...finally got some sleep this morning, at least) so I'm hoping I'll channel even a fraction of Elvis' mojo. I hope that your days are going far better than not-so-badly and, in fact, are couldn't-really-be-better! :hug:

[Guava Jelly]

2. I also love Dusty Springfields version

of suspicious minds.
But this is my favorite elvis tune

[ForrestGump]

7. I haven't heard her version, that I know of

But I bet it's good. She was like a female Elvis, vocally. :headbang:

[ScreamingMeemie]

3. Oh. My. God!

I love you Forrest! :hug:

[ForrestGump]

8. I love you, too, baby!

But there's not much I can do about it right now... :D

(okay, I'll quit stealing Elvis' lines)

He never did "Always On My Mind" live, but here's a clip that includes a bit of footage of Elvis recording the song in a Hollywood studio in March of 1972, and home movies of his family. :loveya:

[ScreamingMeemie]

18. Thank you Forrest!!

Funny thing, I had Elvis on the player all day today. :loveya:

[merh]

19. If I'm not mistaken, some of that footage was taken when he

was here on the Coast, they say he loved to vacation here, he would stay at the Gulf Hills Resort and I think that boat ride was out on the gulf. Hell, he played clubs here on the strip before he became famous.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3cyhhE1xVA&mode=related&search=

[ForrestGump]

21. Hi!

:hug:

Nope, that footage from the boat was in 1969, in the Bahamas (I think it was the Bahamas, anyway). Most of the rest of the vacation footage is from Hawaii, in 1968 (I think in May, not long before he did the TV Special and about four months after Lisa Marie was born). Elvis was at Gulf Hills in the summer of 1956, with Biloxi girl June Juanico and there's some home footage from his time there that shows him fishing, waterskiing, and just hanging out...about the last taste of relative normality he ever had, right before he shot Love Me Tender, went on the Ed Sullivan show, and bought Graceland.

:hi:

[merh]

28. I'll take the word of the Elvis expert

(though I swear, that one shot is Gulf Hills - if only I could do a capture from the video x( )

It's so good to see you friend :hug:

Keep the music alive :loveya:

[ForrestGump]

32. That music's never going to die

:D

Coming up on 30 years since Elvis died and, as Mojo Nixon told us all long ago, Elvis is still everywhere. There are other great performers and great singers out there, but nobody ever was like Elvis and I honestly don't think the like of him will pass this way again.

:hug:

[ForrestGump]

4. Got one for buddhamama, too!

A medley of "Little Sister" and "Get Back", basically an onstage jam, from the same engagement (same show, actually), with Elvis playing his Gretsch electric guitar. It's the first time he did that medley live and the only time he did it during that engagement (he started doing a tighter, shorter, more rehearsed version of it in 1971...on this night he broke away from the setlist, picked up his guitar, and started doing some songs he didn't normally do).

It's an outtake, not officially released, and is a window burn or whatever with the time running below the frame -- it's among footage that 'escaped' the vaults in recent years. Some of the visuals feature gaps (for this documentary the filmmakers used big Panaflex cameras that were bulky and didn't hold much film, so they did their best to cover each performance by using multiple cameras...the people who made the second concert documentary on tour two years later used lightweight portable cameras and communicated via radio headsets) but it gets the idea across.

[buddhamama]

24. thanks, Forrest

i'll be checking it out a bit later. The "Suspicious Minds" one too. have a good day/night. thanks again. :)

[ForrestGump]

36. Thanks, little mama!

:*

Had a good night but sleep's eluded me, maybe 'cos I finally caught up so well a day ago. Gonna try to head to slumberland for a few hours, anyway, now. I hope that your day -- already afternoon there! -- is magical. :hug:

[u4ic]

5. I like your version

even better...:loveya: :*

[ForrestGump]

9. You're a good

fiancée, among many other good things. :D

[u4ic]

11. Please wish your fiancee

good luck - I have an apartment viewing tonight; if I get it, I can get out of the lousy place I'm in now. :bounce: :bounce: :bounce:

[ForrestGump]

13. Good luck!

My most positive thoughts go with you. So I'm looking forward to good news when I get back (in return, I'll try to actually answer my mail). :D

:hug:

Go get it!

And don't be afraid to employ The Eyebrow, if it comes to that... :yourock:

[u4ic]

20. Keep the good vibes coming...

I won't know until Monday...I need all the help I can get! :hug:


I had to be charming tonight...if they refuse me, however, then they'll have to deal with The Eyebrow...:scared: :scared: :scared:

[ForrestGump]

22. I will!

You got 'em good, good, good good vibrations coming all weekend long, and then some. :loveya:

And what do you mean that you had to be charming? C'mon...it's a natural state for you. :D

But, still, it's always good to have a secret weapon in your arsenal, up your sleeve to deploy as a doomsday device of last resort...such is the (much whispered about, often debated, fear-striking) Eyebrow. :scared: :scared: :scared:

[u4ic]

38. Thanks!

:hug:




(though, admittedly, my very, very secret weapon is The Eyebrow, coupled with The Look...)
:scared: :scared: :scared: :scared: :scared: :scared::scared::scared::scared::scared::scared::scared::scared:

[ForrestGump]

10. Holy shoot...

I was just toodling around on that infernal youtube thing (I try to avoid it!) and found more unreleased footage -- I hadn't seen this one before (I've got copies of some of the purloined footage, but not that much) and it kind of blew me away, especially the ending (shown from two different angles). I've never seen him end a song quite like that. It's "Patch It Up", a song Elvis recorded in the Nashville studio in June of 1970 and did a couple of times in the subsequent Vegas season -- this one's from opening night. He did it in place of "Suspicious Minds" that night and he attacked the backup singer as he did in that song in the clip above.

I love that fringed jumpsuit, too. Classic.

This is the kind of thing those DUers who so readily dismiss '70s Elvis as being a "fat, drug-addled self-parody" need to see.

Dammit...I gotta get to work! :D

[johnnie]

14. Cool

Never seen that one before.

[ForrestGump]

16. Always loved that song, too,

no matter that most of it's repetition of the same lyrics. :-)

He was a god back then.

[johnnie]

12. My favorite footage of that one

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzG1yRdRH8M

I'm sure you have seen this one Forrest, but this rocks. He throws the coat, and falls on his knees..lol. It's great.

[ForrestGump]

15. I love that one, too -- as soon as you said the bit about the vest

and knees I knew what you meant. :D

I don't know who the two fools are on that page who stated the clip's from Hawaii in November '72 -- it's from Vegas in August, 1971, shot from the balcony on silent 8mm film.

I love the extended karate endings he did to this song in 1971 and 1972, too, though they only captured a little bit of it in this clip. Cool stuff! That crane stance is a classic, too, at the end of the song, and not how he usually ended it.

By coincidence, that's what I was planning to wear tonight, a 'Cisco Kid' vest and pants with a puffy-sleeve shirt and gold belt. Rock 'n' roll!

[merh]

17. Wow, that was one hell of a show

the man had fun, didn't he!

thank you sir! :hug:

[ForrestGump]

23. He sure did! Speaking of which....

you might have this -- it's on the recut That's The Way It Is DVD -- but here's Elvis in rehearsal on stage a few days before opening night in August, 1970:

Mary In The Morning ("You can't say big-ass...")

And this is really cool -- some of the recently-leaked outtakes from Elvis On Tour, including rehearsals from late March of 1972 (done right after the sessions that produced "Burning Love," "Always On My Mind," and a few others, in the same studio), a conversation with the film's director after the reharsal (Martin Scorsese worked on this film, too), and footage from on the road in April, 1972, most of it unreleased. There's a little high-quality fan-shot footage of Elvis at Madison Square Garden on the June tour, too. The clip ends with Elvis in Las Vegas, on July 30, beign presented with a gold record for the live album recorded at madison Square Garden on June 10 -- RCA put the album out in record time, as basically a rehearsal for the 1973 Hawaiian satellite concert (I think they had it on the streets a week afetr the concert, while Elvis was still on tour), and it went gold very, very quickly. This video piece also includes the storied outtake of Elvis relating a sexual liason of the night before, not knowing there was a live mic aboard the limo, and then breaking into "What A Friend We Have In Jesus." :D

Elvis in 1972

It's a pretty nice little montage that someone edited together.

[ScreamingMeemie]

25. I am watching these and getting all teary.

:cry:

[ForrestGump]

26. You want to talk about crying?

My face is all wet from watching "How Great Thou Art" from the last tour. The man's voice was incredible, but it's also the last tour, you know...and he's in such sad shape. The concert this came from (June 19, 1977, Omaha, NE) was a bit of a disaster relative to Elvis' usual outings, with Elvis very obviously sick, but somehow he pulled this song out of himself as if he put all the energy from the whole show into that one song. It was incredible -- if you heard or saw the rest of the show, which was very sad, you'd not believe how he rallied for this song. The effort was inspired, and inspiring, though he should not have been up on that stage -- he gave many great performances in 1977, but he'd have been better off just taking at least half the year off. It might have saved his life. Two days later, in Rapid City, SD, he was in much better shape and gave a stronger concert, and they used footage from that show for most of the posthumous TV special. On the last two dates of the tour (June 25 in Cincinnatti and June 26 in Indianapolis) he was really going for it and looked at least 20 pounds slimmer and was far more energetic and seemed younger -- in this clip he is swollen, from oedema, more than anything else, but just a few days later his face and hands were vastly less puffy and his midsection trimmer.

They'll probably never release this footage officially, because they're very conscious of Elvis' image and there's already more than enough making fun of his weight and health problems (pigs) at the end of his short life, but if you look beyond his physical deterioration and listen to the voice and the power of his commitment to the song, this is one of Elvis' shining moments, regardless of the fact that he was a dying man by this point:

How Great Thou Art, 1977

I'm still springing a leak here. Sad, sad story. But his voice held right to the end. In fact, male voices tend to hit their peak between 40 and 50, as I understand it, and his voice was just getting stronger and stronger. Makes me wonder what might have been, if he'd only survived the '70s.

I don't know about you, but I need an antidote -- back to happier days for some outtakes from the 1968 TV special:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IT1_BFOMN4">Trouble with "Trouble"

:hug:

[ScreamingMeemie]

27. Thanks for that...

the outtakes are wonderfully funny. I bookmarked those.

When you watch "How Great Thou Art" it is almost as if he is singing his own send off. :(

It bothers me very much that so many "people" use the stills from that concert to poke fun of him. In my mind he was always handsome. I was talking to my cousin Cheri, who is a HUGE fan, and to this day it breaks her heart.


:hug: :loveya:

[ForrestGump]

34. Speaking of funny...

:D

...I saw this clip (compilation of released and unreleased footage to try to recreate one of the April 1972 concerts filmed for Elvis On Tour), that's about ten minutes long, and a minute or so into it Elvis is shown singing "Love Me" with a black bra on his head -- of course, I thought of you:

April 9, 1972 LingerieFest in Virginia

:D

Yeah, Elvis was a good looking man right to the end, but -- sometimes more obvious than others (that night in Omaha it was too obvious) -- he was not a well man. When he was less swollen, especially, it was easy to see that it was still Elvis, albeit older and heavier (not that this is unusual, and in 1977 the age of 42 was far 'older' than it is today...also, now 60-year-old rock stars are not unusual but, as in most things, Elvis had no precedents in that respect). Even in that clip there're a few moments when his expression changes and the years and his physical distress melt away for a moment. He was only really in truly bad physical shape for about a year and half, maybe -- he was carrying extra weight for a while before that, but still seemed vigorous and outwardly fit -- and even then he had months at a time when he lost weight and regained energy. What irks me even more than people characterizing Elvis as they do -- quite apart from the inherent scumminess of making fun of someone's physical condition or weight -- is that he was, for most of his life, a very robust and trim man, with phenomenal good looks, and most of the pigs who put him down for his weight or whatever in the last couple of years of his life could only wish they had a fraction of his looks or charisma and, further, if they're adult Americans they're more likely than not toting around at least 30 pounds of excess themselves, and living under far less pressure than came with being Elvis Presley.

And he got to wear 'donated' bras on his head, too. :-)

:hug:

[merh]

29. thanks

:) Great stuff

:hug:

[speedoo]

30. I have to say.....

that while the Vegas Elvis was great, the 1956 Elvis is the one who makes me incredibly sad that he's gone...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdmNx3_0oEE

[ForrestGump]

31. Elvis in the '70s gave not just some stellar performances but some

iconic touchstones now scattered all through popular culture but, yes, Elvis in the '50s changed everything. It's hard to understand, now, just how hated he was by many for that, too. He never set out to be a rebel but, in being himself, he was set for a collision course with The Establishment (even pre-fame he wore flashy clothes, a lot of pink, wore mascara and eye shadow and had his hair done at a beauty salon -- these were brave actions in crewcut Memphis in the early '50s).

That's a great performance of "Don't Be Cruel." And, man, was that cat ever good looking...

This one, right here, is what really did it -- Elvis' rendition of "Hound Dog" (almost a month before he recorded it in the studio) on the Milton Berle show on June 5, 1956:

"Sex maniac"

Over 40 million people saw this, live, in color for those who had color TVs (unfortunately, it looks like the color recordings they were starting to keep at this time vanished, so all that's left are b&w kinescopes), and Elvis was crucifed for it. Today it may be hard to understand why but this was 50 years ago and it was all very different than today. He really was torn apart in the media, and everywhere else. He was just doing what he wanted, but in doing so he brought pure sex into the happy medium of TV and into everyone's homes, and the racial issues that accompanied his music and his crossing of the color barrier was not insignificant in its effects on the burgeoning civil rights movement and its opponents.

The closest I can come to imagining just what kind of impact this had, bursting through the TV into all those Eisenhower-era living rooms is to watch the entire show (complete with commercials, that are pretty funny to see today -- the two Berle shows Elvis was on have long been bootlegged but I think they're legitimately released now or soon will be) and just see how Elvis stands out, like a searing presence, amidst the variety acts that fill out the rest of the program. Watch that show and, even for people like me who were not born 'til the '60s or later, it's possible to get some grasp on just what an impact he had. Did you see this show when you were a little kid?

Maybe not feeling and knowing what that was like is why some -- trendy iconoclasm and hipsterism aside -- so readily diminish Elvis' influence on musical (and world) history and claim it overrated. These naysayers would do well to listen to the words of the Beatles, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, James Brown, and whoever else they do actually appreciate because, to a man, all of these performers state categorically not just Elvis' impact on their career choices but his impact on everything. John Lennon said that before Elvis there was nothing and Bob Dylan said that hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail, for example. I wasn't there, when it all happened, but even retroactively I can see what a momentous cultural struggle it became when big-time fame hit the young Memphian in 1956, with 21-year-old Elvis the accidental rebel at the center of it all.

I wish there was more concert footage and recordings of Elvis from the '50s, because what little is out there is breathtaking. Maybe, one day, they'll come up with the canned short film from 1955 that captured a Cleveland performance by Elvis while he was still with Sun Records, just before he signed with RCA and just months away from "Heartbreak Hotel" being released...that would be incredible stuff.

[speedoo]

33. I have a handful of moments in my life...

that I can recall as though they happened an hour ago. Hearing about the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK, for example.... most, if not all of those my age have the same experience.

Another of mine is the first time I heard Elvis sing "Heartbreak Hotel". It was in early 1956, on a sunny, crisp Saturday morning in Brooklyn. I went to a friend's house to hang out... he was a very interesting guy, always exploring new things and very very intelligent and free.

So he comes running out of his apartment building, with his portable radio, and screams at me: "Listen to this, man!!"... and it's Elvis singing "Heartbreak Hotel". I had never heard anything like it, of course. And as a very impressionable 13 year old, it's fair to say that moment had a permanent impact on my life of listening to, and enjoying music.

I should go back to that street one of these days and say a silent prayer to Elvis. I know exactly where it is... exactly where I was standing.

Another such moment was, about six or seven years later, when I was in college. Another interesting guy played a Jimmy Reed LP for me. I had never heard the blues before, and now there is almost never a day that goes by where I don't listen to some blues.

Anyway, thanks for reminding me how great Elvis was. The reaction to him in the 50's was driven by fear, as you probably know.

[ForrestGump]

35. Thanks for that!

I'll never know. I can only imagine based on the landmark moments in my own life -- the deaths of Elvis and John Lennon were my youth's 'JFK' moments, for example. It's really hard, now, for someone like me to imagine what it must have been like to hear "Heartbreak Hotel" for the first time. I remember the first time I heard it, but it wasn't the same because, by then, what Elvis set in motion and was a prime player in had diffused into just about every genre of popular music that I heard when I was growing up. It's sort of akin to how, when I saw Psycho for the first time, I felt almost let down a little (I thought it was brilliant, but it didn't live up to its legend for me) because what Hitchcock pioneered in that film had long since become part of the common language of film and TV by the time I was a viewer and retroactively diminished and made more predictable the original for those of us seeing it on TV 20 years after its release.

"Heartbreak Hotel" is a song many of us have heard a great many times, but if we really listen to it, not as Heartbreak Hotel with all the associated historical baggage but as just a song...well...what the hell is it? It is a strange song. The executives at RCA were aghast at it, even though young Elvis was very confident that it would be a hit, and they really didn't want to release it...it was even suggested that they'd bought the wrong Sun Records star, because Carl Perkins' "Blue Suede Shoes" was out by this time and was getting attention. But, somehow, that odd song resonated with enough people that it went to the top of the charts. I mean, is it blues? Country? Pure pop? What the heck is it? It's Elvis, when it comes down to it. It defies description. A lot of stuff around Elvis did that, and still does. :-)

[speedoo]

39. I understand exactly what you are saying.

When you talk about the impacts of Heartbreak Hotel and Psycho. I had never considered before you mentioned it, that I was fortunate to experience both through my own eyes, ears, etc., without the "baggage" as you so aptly put it. And the same is true of other great rockers, like Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Carl Perkins and Ritchie Valens... all of whom I saw live, not too long after my Elvis epiphany.

Not that I want to make you envious, or anything. ;-)

Anyway, I never saw Elvis live... he got to be too big, too fast for me.

[bridgit]

37. sweet...

:-)