My Review of Joel Gilbert's ELVIS FOUND ALIVE

In 2010, Joel Gilbert set out to prove that Paul McCartney is dead.  Now, with Elvis Found Alive, he sets out to prove that the King of Rock and Roll isn’t.

Actually, proving that seems to have been the easy part.  In the film’s first few minutes, with nothing more than a box of heavily but insufficiently redacted Freedom of Information documents, Gilbert and his film crew trace Elvis Presley to a modest, suburban home in which he has apparently been living for quite some time under his longtime alias “Jon Burrows.” 

What was probably hard was verifying the details that the interview subsequently granted by the outed Presley.  Speaking in shadowed profile (the better to protect the anonymity he has been enjoying as a member of the federal Witness Protection Program), Presley supplies a two-hour narrative rife with so many cultural and political footnotes that only an intrepid and indefatigable researcher could have fact-checked them all.

About half of Presley’s tale, the part covering his official lifespan, will be familiar to most rock-and-roll fans.  The latter half, however, not only connects many well-known Presley dots (his incessant performing and Col. Parker’s gambling debts, his Memphis Mafia and the actual Mafia, his identification with Captain Marvel, Jr., and his choice of stage apparel) but also supplies many new and even more explosive ones, including but not limited to Presley’s role in Bob Dylan’s conversion to Christianity, his role in stopping the Weather Underground, his failure to stop the ascension of either its leader Bill Ayers or Ayer’s close friend, Barack Obama (or, as Presley prefers to call him, “Barry Soetoro”), and the conditions under which he’ll make yet another comeback.

But for all of the answers that the film supplies, it raises at least one troubling question.  Present among Gilbert’s crew is the actress Celeste Yarnall, Presley’s co-star in his 1968 film Live a Little, Love a Little, and her on-camera reunion with her former screen partner is touching indeed.  Unfortunately, no one asks her why on July 2, 2010, she married a man named “Nazim Artist.” 

In light of his declaration at one point in Elvis Found Alive that Presley considers himself Jewish, it’s a question that someone--perhaps Gilbert in his next documentary--should definitely investigate. 

My 2011 Illinois Entertainer Reviews: N-P

WILLIE NELSON & WYNTON MARSALIS FEATURING NORAH JONES

Here We Go Again: Celebrating the Genius of Ray Charles

(Blue Note)

Classy but in touch with their roots, Wynton Marsalis and his jazz quintet are the ideal musicians to recreate the vibe of a vintage Ray Charles gig. And NYC’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, where this album was recorded, is exactly the kind of place Charles would be playing today were he alive. But it would be hard to find singers less worthy of “celebrating” his impassioned soul-gospel vocal style than Willie Nelson and Norah Jones. At least Nelson is comfortable with the material. Jones, on the other hand, except maybe on “Makin’ Whoopee,” is doing well even to sound fully awake. Thank heaven then for Marsalis, who, singer though he isn’t, keeps the evening interesting with vocal turns on “Hit the Road Jack,” “Busted,” and “What’d I Say.” 

PRAXIS
Profanation: Preparation for a Coming Darkness

(M.O.D. Technologies)

One good thing about avant-garde noise is that it never really sounds dated, which is especially fortunate for this apocalyptically roiling space-metal funk album by Bill Laswell (bass), Buckethead (guitar), and Brain (drums). First set to come out in 2005, it wasn’t released until 2008 and then only in Japan. Has it been worth the wait? Fans of Iggy Pop, Serj Tankian, and Mike Patton, each of whom makes a cameo, will probably think so. But it’s the recently deceased Rammellzee who steals the show. “I was reading the Bible backwards and upside down as usual,” he deadpans in “Revelations Part 2.” “And I came across a passage that said, ‘Loop-loop-de-loo.’” The music sounds upside down and backwards too--that is, when it doesn’t sound backwards and upside down.

ELVIS PRESLEY

Young Man with the Big Beat: The Complete ’ 56 Elvis Presley Masters

(Sony Legacy)

One probably shouldn’t encourage this kind of thing.  If this box does well, you just know that Sony will release one dedicated to every year of Elvis’s corporeal career, right up to Fat Man with the Big Sideburns: The Complete ’77 Elvis Presley Masters.  But if you’ve got $100 to spare, you really could do worse than to splurge on this five-disc set.  Yes, the alternate takes and live cuts on Discs Three and Four are as comically superfluous as the interviews on Disc Five are heartbreaking: The world was his oyster, only he didn’t know that clams sometimes slam shut.  But if the nearly two studio hours of Discs One and Two were all that Elvis recorded, his status as rock-and-roll’s greatest singer would still be secure. 


My Illinois Entertainer Reviews: Q 

Tom Jones: Praise & Blame (2010)

To quote Chrissie Hynde, it must be Christmas time.

First, Nina Hagen--as harrowingly frightening a space cadet as has ever been coughed forth by a black-hole--makes an honest-to-God (no pun intended) gospel album.

And now Tom Jones.

Yep, that Tom Jones, the Vegas stalwart most famous for his tight pants, chest hair, and panty-bestrewn mic stands.

Actually, it’s not the first time a Sin City heartthrob has put his hand in the hand of the man who stilled the water. In 2003, Englebert Humperdinck released Always Hear the Harmony: The Gospel Sessions.

It wasn’t very good.

Jones’ Praise & Blame (Lost Highway), however, is.

For the most part.

And the stud is seventy!

And he doesn’t dye his hair!

And Englebert Humperdinck does!

But before continuing to praise Praise & Blame, let's get the blame out of the way. Jones’s voice was never on a par with that of his fellow Vegas attraction, Elvis Presley. And the fact that Jones’s versions of “Didn’t It Rain,” “Don’t Knock,” and “Burning Hell” are characterized by roadhouse-rockabilly arrangements reminiscent of Presley’s “I Got a Feeling in My Body” (the Dennis Linde-penned gospel barn-burner that showed up on 1979’s Our Memories Of Elvis Vol. 2) only makes the contrast more apparent.

More blame: Jones doesn’t sing as well as Bob Dylan (whose “What Good Am I?” opens the album), Billy Joe Shaver (“If I Give My Soul”), Mahalia Jackson (“Didn’t It Rain”), or Blind Willie Johnson (“Nobody’s Fault but Mine”) either. His voice is too stentorian, belting where a caress or a love tap would do. But thus has he always been. And anyway his not singing as well as Prince didn’t hurt (much) the version of “Kiss” that he recorded with the Art of Noise in 1988.

Back to the praise: Jones does at least as much with his vocal instrument as Nina Hagen does with hers. Both are limited, but both, when brought to a boil by gospel fervor, can provide the spark it takes to get a fire going. I mean, that’s how it is with God’s love.

You want to pass it on.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah. I had a friend in high school named Emily. She was madly in love with Tom Jones, even though he was old enough to be her not-so-great grandfather when she drove ninety miles to see him (on a school night no less) in concert in 1978. She somehow got backstage and not only met her Welsh idol but also got a photo of him signing the white dress she had worn to the show. I know because she proudly showed the photo around. (And I’m pretty sure she deserved to wear white if you know what I mean. A seventeen-year-old’s boldly declaring her love for Tom Jones in 1978--when all the hip chicks were slavering over John Travolta circa Saturday Night Fever and Grease--was akin to wearing a chastity belt.) I thought she was, you know, a little weird. But she was also nice--and pretty when she wore contacts instead of black-rimmed librarian glasses. And on some level I made a mental note that if Tom Jones was good enough for Emily, he was good enough for me

Now he's giving me that old-time religion.

Which, come to think of it--seeing as how the name of one of his biggest hits was “Delilah”--was only inevitable.

Next in the series: Wayne Newton!

You read it here first.

(More on Praise and Blame: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/tom-jones-a-new-peak-for-the-voice-of-the-valleys-still-hitting-the-heights-2040064.html)

(Nina Hagen: http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2010/07/nina-hagen-personal-jesus-2010.html)

Elvis Speaks! (1985)

(As published in the February 8, 1985, issue of my university's newspaper, The Daily Athenaeum ... )

A Golden Celebration, Elvis Presley (RCA). Hi, I'm the ghost of Elvis Presley, and I want your money ("that's what I want"--oops, sorry, that's someone else's song, er, well, all of my songs were someone else's songs, weren't they? Hyuck, hyuck.)

Anyway, back when I was the proud inhabitant of that famous Elvis body with the wigglin' hips (before it got all fat and bloated, you know the one), I sang some meeeean songs, yes sir, songs like "Hound Dog" and "Blue Suede Shoes" and "Don't Be Cruel" and--what? Oh, you already own those. Well ...

I'll bet ya my Uncle Clem and all my non-famous cousins (who are still jealous, I swear) that you don't have these versions of my songs, the ones right here in this brand-new six-record set with my human face embossed in gold on the cover. Honest, gang, this is essential stuff!

Like on this one record here you can hear me singin' on both The Milton Berle Show and The Steve Allen Show (great names they gave shows then, don'tcha think?) in 1956. The girlies (they're "Mama" and "Auntie" to y'all now) are screamin', and the recording sounds like peachickens scratchin' their claws across peachicken-sized blackboards so's you can hardly bear to listen and--what? Whaddaya mean you've heard better sound on second-hand copies of Velvet Underground albums? That was low ...

Anyway, on Sides Five through Seven you hear me knockin' 'em dead at (are you ready?) the Mississippi-Alabama Fair & Dairy Show! That's right, me live from Tupelo, Miss. amid nothin' less than pigs and cows. Why, you can practically taste the Red Man. You can go ahead and clap now.

On Side Eleven you get "Collector's Treasures--discovered at Graceland, date unknown." Well, I know the date, but I'm not tellin', haw, haw. Truthfully, though, I hid those "collector's treasures" ("My Heart Cries for You," "Suppose," and "Write to Me from Naples") so's no one would ever find 'em. Why? Listen and learn.

So, all in all, you get (count 'em) six mono LPs, one air-brushed photo of me in my prime and suitable for framing, six versions of "Blue Suede Shoes" and "Hound Dog," five of "Love Me Tender" and "Don't Be Cruel," and four of "Heartbreak Hotel." I know you already have those songs, but you don't have these versions! Besides, there's more songs too. The price? Uh, well (giggle, giggle), it's $49.99. Why do you ask?

A Valentine Gift for You, Elvis Presley (RCA). Then there's other new record of mine, all fit and ready to give your sweetheart on Valentine's Day. It's got a smiley picture of me on the cover, and the record itself comes in red plastic. You know, red--the color of cupids, those little paper hearts, and the gooey cherry filling inside the candy that you have to give that day. So buy it.

What's on it? Well, it's got "Are You Lonesome Tonight" on Side One and "Can't Help Falling in Love" on Side Two. What? The other songs? Well, there's "Tomorrow Is a Long Time" and lots of other songs I did but no one cared much about. I guess it's 'cause they're so mellow and sugary and all. But it's great for snugglin' up with your honey on the ol' fourteenth of February, right? Right?

Rocker, Elvis Presley (RCA). If you don't want any of my other new records, at least buy this one. There's no hocus-pocus: no glossy photos, no rare studio screw-ups or anything. There's just music and lots of it. Heck, it's even on black vinyl.

It's called Rocker 'cause that's what I was before I went into the Service (and what I sat in a lot after I came back, but that's another story). All in a row, here's what you get: "Tutti Frutti," "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," "Rip It Up," "Jailhouse Rock," etc., etc. Get the picture? No oozy slow songs or nothin', just good ol' shakin', rattlin', and rollin' from the King (whose ghost I so proudly am). Shoot, my "Tutti Frutti" is lots better than Pat Boone's and almost as good as Little Richard. That about says it all.

So while I do want your money, I need your love. Buy one or all of these records 'cause to know me is to love me. (Poof!)

Illinois Entertainer Reviews 2009 (Part I)

I published twenty-nine reviews in the Illinois Entertainer in 2009. Below are four long ones.

GEORGE HARRISON
Let It Roll: Songs by George Harrison
(Capitol)

Two diametrically opposed camps have formed in response to this compilation. One wishes it had been two discs and included all of Harrison’s best work (his Traveling Wilburys songs included) and that the songs had been sequenced less haphazardly, both to reflect the trajectory of Harrison’s development (or at least his career) and to make for a less sonically jarring listening experience. The other camp says nuts to such cavils: Harrison’s catalog oozes greatness no matter how you slice it, and to refuse to enjoy nineteen examples from it simply because they’re not sensibly sequenced or the nineteen one would have preferred is as petty as Harrison’s Wilbury partner Tom.

What neither camp has mentioned is the effect of eleven of this collection’s seventy-eight minutes being taken up by Harrison-sung Beatles songs (“While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Something,” “Here Comes the Sun”) from the Concert for Bangladesh. Now, how many Beatles songs are on The John Lennon Collection or Paul McCartney’s Wingspan? None. Why? Because no one needs reminding that Lennon and McCartney were in the Beatles and because Lennon and Mcartney had enough fab solo material not to need Fab padding.

No one needs reminding that Harrison was a Beatle either (especially not with both “All Those Years Ago,” his Lennon tribute, and “When We Was Fab,” his Beatles tribute, on Let It Roll). So including the Bangladesh cuts while leaving off actual Harrison hits such as “Crackerbox Palace,” “This Song,” and “Love Comes to Everyone” implicitly diminishes his solo-artist stature.

The Bangladesh cuts also look like bait intended to convince owners of The Best of George Harrison (1976) and Best of Dark Horse 1976-1989 (1989) that they need Let It Roll too. But many Harrison fans had hoped Let It Roll would be was the single-disc Harrison best-of to end all single-disc Harrison best-ofs. Instead, its mix of hits, misses, redundancies, and obscurities makes it seem more like a teaser for a forthcoming box set.

Let It Roll does provide one useful service: It rescues 1985’s “I Don’t Want to Do It,” a Bob Dylan cover and one of Harrison’s finest singles, from the Porky’s Revenge soundtrack. And, as one might expect from an album containing “My Sweet Lord,” “Give Me Love,” and “What Is Life,” the tunefulness seldom lets up. But it needn’t have let up at all. Next time, somebody please get this right.


JEFFERSON AIRPLANE
JANIS JOPLIN
SANTANA
SLY & THE FAMILY STONE
JOHNNY WINTER
The Woodstock Experience
(Columbia/Legacy)

Amid the spate of fortieth-anniversary Woodstock product, these five two-disc sets by acts who performed that long-ago weekend at Yasgur’s farm stand out. Listing at $19.98 apiece, each one comes with an original, and in most cases classic, 1969 studio album (no big deal, as those albums are already available separately), original packaging and a poster (a medium-sized deal), and a live disc containing that act’s entire Woodstock set (a big deal indeed, as the various Woodstock soundtracks contain only excerpts).

The five acts are, not surprisingly, those to whose catalogs Sony has access. They’re also acts who were at or near their respective peaks at the time. So besides strong studio albums (Janis Joplin’s I Got Dem Ol’ Kozmic Blues Again Mama!, Santana’s Santana, Sly & the Family Stone’s Stand!, Johnny Winter’s Johnny Winter), one gets live albums that both hold up on their own and function as a looser, more stoned mirror image.

But the set to get if you’re only getting one is Jefferson Airplane’s. Comprising Volunteers, which keeps getting better with age, and a live set including “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit,” it’s almost enough to erase the memory of the Airplane’s eventual morphing into Starship.


ELVIS PRESLEY
Elvis 75--Good Rockin’ Tonight
(Legacy/RCA)

You remember Elvis Presley. He was the Michael Jackson of your parents’ (and your grandparents’) generation, except it was rock’n’roll and not pop of which Elvis was king, A-list actresses and not pre-pubescent boys he was accused of bedding). He was a performer so talented he couldn’t help shifting pop-cultural paradigms every time he lifted his voice in song or swiveled his hips in actual or simulated heat, a one-man entertainment Mount Rushmore, replete with the requisite four faces (mid-to-late-’50s hillbilly-rebel Elvis, early-to-mid-’60s Hollywood-cornball Elvis, mid-to-late-’60s comeback-Vegas Elvis; early-to-mid-’70s increasingly stoned-and-corpulent Elvis).

Yep, that Elvis, and in case you couldn’t tell from the title of the latest installment in the cottage industry that Elvis box sets have become, the King would’ve turned seventy-five in 2010 if he hadn’t taken all of his daily drugs in a single dose thirty-three years before. So the Elvis 75 half of the title makes sense; the Good Rockin’ Tonight part, however, could use some tweaking. While there is plenty of good rockin’ to be found among the one hundred songs (on four discs), there’s some of the richest gospel, soul, and reified schmaltz ever committed to tape as well.

Speaking of the one hundred songs, it seems at first that there could’ve and should’ve been a dozen more. Obviously, the compilers liked the “one hundred” concept, but with forty-two minutes of total unused disc space, one wonders why such under-anthologized Presley highlights as (in no particular order) “(You‘re So Square) Baby I Don’t Care,” “Moody Blue,” and “I Got a Feelin’ in My Body” (an obscure but definitely “good rockin’” mid-’seventies gospel number) to name just three.

Then you realize that it’s hard to name many more than just three. Memorable alternate versions of two tracks that are included come to mind (the un-remixed “A Little Less Conversation,” that live “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” in which he spends half the song cracking up), and maybe a few judiciously selected minutes from Having Fun wth Elvis on Stage.

So maybe one hundred songs is just right. Certainly, it would be hard to improve on Discs 1, 2, and 3--which hit every highlight of the Sun years, the pre-Army years, and the post-comeback Memphis years. What’s surprising is Disc 4. Even with financial, physical, and emotional disaster looming on the horizon, the King could still, on a good night, out-sing, and often out-rock, any other mortal entertainer.


PRINCE
Lotusflow3r
(NPG)

Call it a sign of the times, but from the chaos leading up to 1998’s Crystal Ball (which was pressed only after 50,000 fans had “requested” it then mailed to them after it became available in stores) or the disorder leading up to 2007’s Planet Earth (which Sony refused to distribute in U.K. music stores after a prominent U.K. newspaper included pre-release free copies in its Sunday edition), Prince has been making news for over a decade now more for the way he releases music than for the music itself. And Lotusflow3r, the first album by a major talent to be sold exclusively at Target, is no exception.

Priced at a surprisingly wallet-friendly $11.99 (or about the price of a McDonald’s dollar-menu double date) it’s really two Prince albums (Lotusflow3r and MPLSoUND) with Elixer, the debut of Prince’s latest butter-melting protégé Bria Valente, thrown in. Not that Elixer is a throwaway. “Everytime,” the mid-tempo love song that pops up halfway through, may be the most gorgeous composition to which Prince has ever affixed any of his many names, diffusing a radiance that could almost make one swear the other nine songs aren’t really just more of the high-gloss, soft-core discotheque fodder that Prince has long had his many ladies in waiting eating from his hand.

In fact, with the exception of the “Crimson and Clover” cover on Lotusflow3r (and maybe “Colonized Mind,” Prince’s latest shout-out to God), “Everytime” is more show-stopping in its luminous simplicity than any of the new Prince recordings on the other two discs are in their kaleidoscopic funktionality. The problem isn’t that he no longer has talent out the wazoo but that he apparently has more wazoos than most mortal listeners have ears.

Whereas the prolific output of Elvis Costello or Ani DiFranco often looks like headlong self-indulgence and Bob Dylan’s, Neil Young’s, and Van Morrison’s like roads less travelled, Prince’s voluminous output, for all its hyperkinesis, suggests a more static metaphor: that of lavishly furnished, exotically perfumed rooms where the party never ends and Viagra-besotted satyrs chase young things around the casting couch shouting, “I got a box of chocolates that’ll rock the sox off any girl that wanna come my way” (MPLSoUND’s “Chocolate Box)--rooms with lots of trapdoors but no windows, the latest additions to a luxury hotel where you can check in anytime you want but you can never leave.