ELVIS PRESLEY – "Crying In The Chapel"

Odd how folk seem to have problems with “Crying In The Chapel” (ahem, “tears of joy”) but not with A Love Supreme. I’m genuinely intrigued as to why that is. Maybe because Coltrane never suggests a subtext of seduction?

(btw, “CITC” was actually recorded for an Elvis gospel album – His Hand In Mine – back in 1960, so you could look at it as the straight man to “Are You Lonesome Tonight”‘s crying clown)

Indeed there was no Billy Graham overnight conversion for Elvis.

If you ever wonder why all Cliff greatest hits compilations miss out everything between ’68-’76 (apart from the Eurovision stuff) there’s a good reason why – the hits he had in that period were like a Mary Whitehouse/Festival of Light parallel chart career.

Oh God, yes Marcello … about fifteen years ago I remember laughing out loud in Gravesend town centre (a dangerous experience at the best of times) after discovering that in 1972 Cliff had scored a number 35 smash with a song called, ahem, “Jesus”. Its B-side, I discovered a decade on, was called “Good On The Sally Army”. Jesus Christ (literally).

Cliff was actually such a mate of the nation’s self-appointed religious fundamentalist censor that, when the Appeal Court found in favour of Channel 4 after Whitehouse had taken them to court for showing the film version of “Scum” (which of course was originally banned by the BBC), he is generally believed to have paid her legal costs. Enough, already!

the overlap between pop cheese and the outer reaches of jazz is marcello’s specialist topics mark!!

(i think a love supreme is v.boring but i am a notoriously shallow controversialist)

“Crying in the Chapel” seduces by confusing the difference between religious sentiment and the sentimentality of religiosity.

The Seekers, while ostensibly presenting a love song in “Another You,” actually sound more genuinely devout.

Doctor Mod

One of my frequent oracular pronouncements of the form “You cannot understand the Sixties unless…” goes You cannot understand the Sixties unless you realize that Elvis did not exist in the Sixties. He existed in the Fifties, Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties, and he exists in the Now (exists = is part of the popular consciousness). Well, perhaps I’ll give Elvis a slight presence in the early Sixties for his appearance in strange bio-anthropological documentaries about experimental attempts to create centaurs out of crustaceans, the strange species “teenager” being a missing link and anyway on the way out [along w/ centaurs] in favor of jocks and greasers and freaks). In any event, Elvis simply did not exist in the Sixties, except as someone who had made what were now condescendingly referred to as “Oldies But Goodies” and got airplay maybe once every six months, as an oddity, like old Griffith films. When people in the Sixties were faced with a dilemma, a choice, a puzzle, they did not ask themselves “What would Elvis have done?” Elvis was not a reference point, a touchstone, or an icon of The Contemporary.

The problem with my thesis (which is nonetheless correct, despite all counterevidence) is that there is the incontrovertible fact that Elvis continued to score hits in the Sixties. Who listened to them? Where were they played? Now, conventional wisdom is that you can be dead and have hit records, but you can’t be a popular nonentity, a relic, and have hit records, unless those records are remixes, duets, or disco novelties.

So, explain the Elvis anomaly.

Ian – that’s why I said ‘arguably’ and not ‘categorically’. That would have opened up a can of subjective worms we’d never escape from…

Tom, you should hear the Orioles’ original of this, I’m curious what you’d think of it. (I love it, it’s gorgeous. Don’t know the EP version very well and have no comment on it either way.)

Your correspondant entirely agrees with Frank. The Elvis of the 60s was a primitive form of hologram, secretly engineered under the cover of a spell in the Armed Forces. Ergo, he did not exist. And continued not to exist in the 70s.

Earlier – in fact shortly after King Creole came out, Col. Tom Parker had come to the mistaken opinion that the real Elvis was an unruly threat to God, man, and apple pie – and had him hidden away in a dark cave somewhere in Monument Valley, where he could keep an eye on him while he was making all those two dimensional movies with the hologram.

The real Elvis was only seen once after that, when his homies in the band managed to smuggle him out of the cave during the filming of the 68 Las Vegas special. Although most of the show was performed by the hologram, he was briefly lured off the set by James Burton (using a cheeseburger as bait) and locked in the dressing room. The real Elvis took his place and the rest is history: 20 minutes of strictly acoustic rock and roll that neatly defined what the hell all the fuss was about back in Sam Philips’ studio in Memphis all those years before.

Horrified by this un-American spectacle, Col. Tom promptly packed the real Elvis back off to the cave and he was never heard from again. Meanwhile the hologram was installed in a tasteless Southern mansion and fed a diet of cheeseburgers while a team of stylists worked round the clock to create the ugliest white suit in the history of fashion…

That Elvis was only outsold by the Beatles in the 60s shouldn’t be a great surprise. For the first third of the decade he was at his commercial peak, unstoppable, even though his output varied from Cosmic American Music (His Latest Flame, Little Sister, Mess Of Blues, Girl Of My Best Friend, She’s Not You) to Neapolitan blousiness (It’s Now Or Never, Surrender), to thin-aired echoes of his 50s pomp (Stuck On You, Good Luck Charm).

It was only with the universally loathed Do The Clam in early ’65, which the strongest diehard couldn’t make a stand for, that his star really dimmed. And then there was a total blackout as the singles (Puppet On A String, The Love Machine, Frankie And Johnny) became as uniformally cheap and tinny as UB40’s in the 90s.

Do The Clam was released only a year after the Beatles’ Ed Sullivan-aided assault on the King’s palace. His descent was rapid and complete.

As for Crying In The Chapel, it was telling that virtually all of Elvis’s best singles from this period were old album tracks (Such A Night) or unissued recordings (Ain’t That Loving You Baby) reheated to give some semblance of quality to his career. How did Elvis feel about this? Look at the cover of the Tickle Me soundtrack.

The stinkers from this period were possibly the lowest lows of any major artist’s catalogue – worse even than Dylan’s Self Portrait or Abba’s Pick A Bale Of Cotton – and are covered thoroughly on the Elvis’s Greatest Shit bootleg. But there are luminous, rare moments where you realise the non-hologram Elvis, the real singer, was still alive.

RCA’s 90s re-issues have made them easier to obtain but in the sixties they were deeply underground as they didn’t fit the Colonel’s cornball masterplan: It Hurts Me (flip of the godawful Kissin’ Cousins), Please Don’t Stop Lovin’ Me (quietly intense country-soul flip of Frankie And Johnny), the filthy Down In The Alley, and ghostly Tomorrow Is A Long Time (both ’66 recordings wasted as film soundtrack ‘bonus tracks’). If you’re at all curious, seek them out.

Marcello, there was also a version of “Blowin’ In The Wind”, which appears on a few compilations, including the “Platinum” 4CD set.

Blowin’ In The Wind sounds like an Alan Lomax field recording, with Elvis singing an odd harmony to a (non-existent) top line. Platinum is maybe the best Elvis career overview – a great version of The Sound Of Your Cry, too, which I’d never really rated before even though I loved the title.

Crag, where can we hear I Shall Be Released? It does indeed sound stunning.

Tom, I’m a confirmed Humanist, and almost violently anti-religion, but you want to hear Elvis’s 1968 45 of You’ll Never Walk Alone: it conveys his beliefs without mentioning JC, or crosses, or pews, with a stomach-clenching intensity that I never thought the song could inspire. It also destroys Roy Hamilton’s much-feted version.

Fun, fun and, um, fun: http://musicsoundsbetterwithtwo.blogspot.com/2011/07/everly-brothers-price-of-love.html Thanks for reading, everyone!

sacred music can take many forms but this sounds like a type of sedation. There’s little sense of the joy that Elvis talks about, more like anaesthesia