I'm assuming Elvis is a Democrat.
Unclear, but he seems to have leaned that way earlier and more GOP later (see his meeting with Nixon and rants against hippies.)
I'm assuming Elvis is a Democrat.
He doesn't have to become president, but he could become a very interesting Tennessee governor IMO.
yes I know. But the OP said what Records not what political office. lmao.Because this is AH.com and we don't do cultural TLs very much (with a few exceptional exceptions)! Best to bring politics into it somehow
Unclear, but he seems to have leaned that way earlier and more GOP later (see his meeting with Nixon and rants against hippies.)
He doesn't have to become president, but he could become a very interesting Tennessee governor IMO.
But what even suggested he wanted to go into elected politics?
http://rateyourmusic.com/list/schmi...rst_reviews_of_all_time__work_in_progress_/2/
[URL='http://rateyourmusic.com/artist/elvis_presley']Elvis Presley[/URL]
Suspicious Minds / You'll Think of Me (1969) [Single]
Rating: Unfavorable
"Elvis' single, on the other hand, is disappointing, because all the pieces seem to be there but it simply doesn't jell. It's not exciting...Elvis is not allowed to project. He's buried in some odd mix of strings, horns, and a female chorus...The vocal, usually double-tracked, is given more echo and more distortion than on any Elvis record I can recall, and this only adds to the generally muddy sound which in the end destroys the disc." (Greil Marcus, 10/18/69 Review)
On December 3, 1968, the NBC network premiered Elvis, a sixty-minute television special that featured Elvis Presley performing many of his best-known hits in front of a small audience. The '68 comeback special, as it is now referred to, was a tremendous success.
Though Elvis was only thirty-three when the show first aired, by this point he was widely regarded as a has-been - a relic from another age. "It’s difficult to recall just how far removed Elvis was, not simply from the pop mainstream, but from any degree of critical respect or even social recognition at that time," critic Peter Guralnick, author of several volumes about Presley, later noted.
Many critics would place the blame for Elvis' slow decline squarely on the unmitigated greed of Colonel Tom Parker, the former carnival barker that had been his manager since 1956. "Colonel Tom Parker, always a strange hybrid of W.C. Fields and Machiavelli, certainly seems to have been responsible for shutting down all his boy's cultural inputs and by the time Elvis went into the Army, they were virtually at zero," Mick Farren wrote in an extensive feature on Presley that ran in the 5/22/76 issue of NME. "No artist can survive without some kind of line to the outside world. Without that, artists stagnate and wilt into a welter of purposeless repetition...When Elvis came out of the Army he moved into an impenetrable cocoon. He also seemed to stop thinking. In his private world he gave the impression that his ambitions went no further than a constant stream of expensive toys."
And yet, the enormous success of the NBC special seems to have finally convinced Elvis that it was time to break out of his cocoon.
When Presley entered the American Sound Studio on January 13, 1969 - his first recording date in a Memphis studio in thirteen years (virtually all of his records since the Colonel took over had been cut in Nashville) - Neil Diamond was just wrapping up "Sweet Caroline." Three months earlier, Dusty Springfield had recorded "Son of a Preacher Man" (and the remainder of her Dusty in Memphis album) at American Sound. In fact, in the preceding eighteen months, the studio had churned out a whopping 64 chart singles. The house band that played on most of these recordings were dubbed the Memphis Boys, consisting of guitarist Reggie Young, bassists Tommy Cogbill and Mike Leech, keyboard players Bobby Emmons and Bobby Wood, and drummer Gene Chrisman.
Flush from this recent success, the Memphis Boys were actually somewhat blasé about the prospect of working with the King. "We'd been doing Neil Diamond just before Elvis came in, and he was a big deal to us," trumpeter Wayne Jackson later recalled. "We were thrilled about Elvis, but it wasn't like doing Neil Diamond."
Producer Chips Moman, owner of American Sound Studio, was equally wary at the beginning of the sessions. "At first I thought it wasn't gonna work," he admitted to Barney Hoskyns in 1985. "They were bringing in exactly the same kinda songs he'd been doing for years, whereas the only way it was gonna work was if there was a change of repertoire."
The core problem, it seems, was the Colonel's insistence that Elvis receive one-third of the composer's royalties of any song he chose to record. As you might imagine, this policy severely restricted the material that was available for Elvis to sing, the quality of the songs declined, and Elvis, in turn, simply stopped caring.
If Elvis had spent the preceding decade surrounded by sycophants, the skepticism of Chips Moman and his house band seemed to have had an invigorating effect, to say the least. "The American studio was the only place outside of Sun where Elvis encountered a producer who was able to challenge him," Peter Guralnick noted in 1999. Indeed, the ten-odd dates at American Sound in January and February of 1969 would prove to be Elvis' most productive recording sessions since he first entered Sun Studios fifteen years earlier.
"Like The Basements Tapes, the Memphis sessions served as a kind of 'grab-bag' – in this case for the multiple musical personae Presley had adopted throughout his career, from the raucous blues belter of "Power Of My Love" to the cod-gospel penitent of "Who Am I?", from the uptempo pop swaggerer of "Wearin' That Love-On Look" to the schmaltzy balladeer of "Don't Cry Daddy"," Barney Hoskyns wrote in the 1994 book Aspects of Elvis.
"["Suspicious Minds"] has come to be regarded as a classic pop single," he continued. "It's one of those over-the-top three-and-a-half minute melodramas of the "Everlasting Love" variety, a record which keeps lifting to another irresistible emotional peak...Elvis never sang so powerfully again."
Greil Marcus later called Elvis' performance in the '68 comeback special as "the finest music of his life." So it is especially surprising that Marcus - who adored Elvis and dedicated the most significant chapter of his first book, Mystery Train, to him - was let down by "Suspicious Minds" when he reviewed it in Rolling Stone. In retrospect, this single, Presley's first number 1 hit in seven years, was easily the most crucial track Elvis would release after 1956 - the record that conclusively established that he was still relevant and capable of conveying some genuine emotion after a million shitty movies.
Ed Leimbacher was equally dismissive of From Vegas to Memphis/From Memphis to Vegas, which he reviewed in the 12/27/69 issue of Rolling Stone. "This new double-record set is just mediocre," Leimbacher wrote. "First off, my copy at least has excessive surface noise - especially, of all things, on the Memphis studio-session disc. That session, by the way, resulted in 10 new numbers; but the secret spirit, the extra oomph, the right-up-front Presley baritone are mostly absent this time."
I guess "secret spirit" is in the eyes of the beholder, but to my ears, at least, Elvis hadn't sounded this inspired since the very beginning of his career. Many of the songs on the studio disc, in particular, stand among Elvis' most poignant, heartfelt performances. If only Ed had gotten a clean promo...
"Suspicious Minds" was #91 on RS's 500 greatest songs list.
It would also be interesting to see how Elvis would fit into the MTV era. Would he make videos? Would MTV even play them (VH1 and TNN definitely would)?
H could pull a Roy Orbison, or a Johnny Cash.
I'm not an Elvis fan but I am a big Queen fan but not a big fan of the song "Crazy Little Thing Called Love (Queen)" but I do think Elvis could've done a hell of a cover of this song.As above, really. Let's say he dies, of retires at aged 70. These are the songs he may well have covered IMHO.
In no real order
What a Fool Believes (Doobie Brothers)
Crazy Little Thing Called Love (Queen)
I Love Rock 'n' Roll (Joan Jett)
Eye of The Tiger (Survivor)
I Just Called to Say I Love You (Stevie Wonder)
Stuck With You (Huey Lewis)
I Think We're Alone Now (Tiffany) (yes I know!)
Sweet Child o' Mine (Guns and Roses)
Black Velvet (Alannah Myles)
(Everything I Do) I do for You) (Bryan Adams)
Believe (Cher)
Don't Look Back in Anger (Oasis)
Pure (Lighting Seeds)
For Those About to Rock (AC/DC)
Gimme All Your Lovin' (ZZ Top)
We Are the World (USA)
Your ideas?