When Elvis Was The 'King'

DVD REVIEW

American Classic Albums: Elvis Presley, Elvis Presley, 1956, American Classic Productions, 2001



Over the past several months I have spend more than my fair of time investigating the effect of the career of Elvis Presley on my generation of ’68, and on me personally. That has entailed listening to some CDs and looking at old footage provided in various DVD compilations. One such documentary, hosted by Jack Scott, traced Elvis’s rise in the key year of 1954, the ‘dog days’. The present documentary breaks down a classic Elvis Presley (that is the title, and really all that is necessary as a title) album of 1956, his breakout year. The year he moved from Sam Phillips Sun Records to the big time, RCA Records.

This DVD is part of a series on classic American albums. I am not familiar with the others in the series yet but based on this introduction these efforts seem to be labors of love. Here we have the expected ‘talking heads’ dissecting the meaning of each song, some anecdotes from various and sundry performers and music historians interspersed with very illuminating footage of Elvis’s progress from Southern regional phenomena to national (and international) rock star at a time when the youth of my generation were desperately in need of a jailhouse breakout figure.

The highlight here is a very interesting discussion about Heartbreak Hotel, a song that whose depressive lyrics would seem to be out of sync with what Elvis was trying to project (including here are also various takes on Elvis’s performance of the song on television at different times). This segment makes a very strong case for Elvis’s emergence as ‘king of the hill’ in 1956. Whether he continued that role later is a separate question but 1956 was his year, and his alone. This little album also contained a very well thought out and performed mix of ballads, black bluesy numbers (Shake, Rattle and Roll), a little country, a little gospel. In short something any record producer would die for. If you need to know the history of rock and roll, or a slice of it anyway, this documentary is for you. If you just want the music grab the Elvis Presley CD, with both hands.