Op deze dubbelaar kun je de originele songs horen die ook te vinden waren op de LP's "On Stage" en "In Person At The International Hotel", aangevuld met bonustracks. Elvis was in deze periode in topvorm! Don't Cry Daddy komt uit de LP "Greatest Hits Volume 1", Kentucky Rain was al eerder te vinden op de 8LP box "Elvis Aaron Presley" en Long Tall Sally op de re-elease van "On Stage" uit 1999. I Got A Woman, Jailhouse Rock, Don't Be Cruel, Heartbreak Hotel en Baby What You Want Me To Do komen uit de 2CD set Elvis In Person (FTD Records), Reconsider Baby en Funny How Time Slips Away waren al te vinden op de 3LP set "Collector's Gold".Er is bij deze set ook een informatieve tekst en fotoboekje waarvan de tekst werd geschreven door Ken Sharp, bekend van de boeken "Writing For The King" en "Vegas 69". Opvallend is de rehearsel van de Wonder Of You. Elvis speelt in dit nummer met de tekst. Een deel van deze opname was eerder te beluisteren op de 4-cd box Platinum, een uitgave uit 1997. Maar nu dus de complete track.
By By L. Kent Wolgamott / Lincoln Journal Star, Mar 26, 2010
Guitarist says King lives on
Ask James Burton about Elvis Presley, and the guitarist gets straight to the point.
(c) The Daily Oklahoman (Paul Southerland)
"He was an incredible musician and singer," Burton said. "It was God's gift. Everything he did was so natural. He wasn't a great guitar player. But he was like the drummer in the band - he kept the rhythm. The guy, to me, had perfect pitch. He could start singing one of his songs out of the blue and it would be in the key he recorded it in. It was incredible."
Burton, one of the great guitarists in country and rock 'n' roll history, played with Elvis for the last nine years of Presley's life.
After working in recording sessions that started with "Viva Las Vegas" - "They said, Watch Ann-Margret and when she gets real sexy, throw some hot licks in'" - Burton was asked to put together the band for Elvis' return to live performance at Las Vegas' International Hotel in 1969.
While seen by some as a low point in Elvis' career, the Las Vegas shows were far from that. The spirit, intensity and pure entertainment of those engagements can be heard on "Elvis Presley: On Stage," a just-released two-disc set that combines live recordings from shows in August 1969 and in February 1970.
The 1969 disc finds Elvis doing his '50s hits and then-current singles. On the other disc, he's expanded the repertoire to include the best songs of the day, such as The Beatles' "Yesterday," Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" and Tony Joe White's "Polk Salad Annie."
"Elvis loved the Vegas shows," Burton said during a panel at the South By Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas. "He loved playing with the big orchestra. But his main love was the small rhythm section behind him. He was very close, he played very tight. He had a strong powerful voice, and we had a strong band behind him."
The Vegas orchestra and Presley's touring group, known as the TCB (Taking Care of Business) Band, were well rehearsed. But Burton said there was no way to fully prepare for an Elvis show.
"You had to pay attention to him," Burton said. "He was kind of like Jerry Lee Lewis. ... You just had to watch him on every song. Sometimes he'd stretch out a song. Sometimes he'd stop in the middle of a song. He might have a solo. He might not."
Surprisingly, Burton said, Elvis and his band rarely had monitors, making playing even more difficult.
"We played so many shows and I couldn't hear anything," Burton said. "All I could hear was screaming. I stood next to the drummer and sometimes couldn't hear the drums. I could hear my amp and that's it."
(c) The Daily Oklahoman (Paul Southerland)
Presley generated even more of a frenzy in the 1950s, drawing hundreds of screaming teens to his shows and mobs when his entourage stopped anywhere.
"Whenever anybody saw a pink Cadillac with a big bass strapped on the top, they knew Elvis was in town," said Wanda Jackson, who toured with Elvis in the mid '50s and was "his girl" for a little more than a year.
Jackson was an aspiring country singer when she met Presley. He gave her advice that changed her life, making her the Queen of Rockabilly.
"He told me, Look at the record sales; it's the kids buying the records. You need to record songs that appeal to them,'" Jackson said. "No one wrote rock 'n' roll songs for girls back then. There weren't any girls doing it besides me."
After seeing her versions of "Fujiyama Mama" and "Let's Have A Party" turn into hits, Jackson said, "I thought, Wow, Elvis did know what he was talking about.'"
On Aug. 16, 1977, Burton and the TCB band were in a plane to Portland, Maine, when the pilot got a call telling him to return to Las Vegas.
"We couldn't figure out why Elvis would cancel the tour," he said. "We had to stop in Pueblo, Colo. That's where we were told that Elvis had passed. It was a very sad time. ... A lot of things went through my mind, losing such an incredible person."
But Burton emphasizes Elvis continues to live on through his music: in arena-filling performances that the TCB band continues to give, with Presley shown on a big screen. And in a new Cirque du Soleil troupe in, appropriately enough, Las Vegas.
(c) The Daily Oklahoman (Paul Southerland)
Preserving legacy of Elvis
For two decades, Ernst Mikael Jorgensen has been working with an artist he never met: Elvis Aaron Presley.
The producer of remastered recordings, boxed sets and single-disc Presley packages, Jorgensen is an expert on all things Elvis and a man passionate about his work preserving the music and continuing the legacy of the King of Rock 'n' Roll.
"I'm really a man on a mission," Jorgensen said. "The challenge for me is to get people who have bought 30 No. 1 Hits' to dig deeper."
Jorgensen grew up an Elvis fan in Denmark in the 1960s, finding himself drawn more to Elvis than the English imitator who was just as popular in Europe at the time.
"I thought Elvis was much hipper than Cliff Richard, just like I thought the Stones were much tougher than The Beatles," he said. "In much of Europe, Elvis didn't catch on until the '60s. In my country, you couldn't buy Elvis records before the end of 1968."
(c) The Daily Oklahoman (Paul Southerland)
In 1988, Jorgensen, by then a record producer, joined BMI, the company that at the time owned RCA Records and controlled Elvis' recordings. He was assigned to the Presley reissues: "I remember when I started out, thinking, That will be fun for a year,'" he said.
Twenty-two years later, Jorgensen is still working with Elvis' music, intimately familiar with the 711 official masters in the RCA/Legacy vaults and the few additional recordings that don't belong to the company.
After scouring studios and storage rooms and following rumors of lost recordings, Jorgensen said it is unlikely that any "new" Presley recordings would ever be discovered.
"The hope of finding something we haven't heard is very slim by now," he said. "If we did find something, like a live recording of a '50s show, the condition of the recording itself would very likely be poor, the material having deteriorated. And it would only be of interest to 5,000 or 10,000 hard-core collectors."
Asked to choose his favorite Presley record, Jorgensen hesitated, then replied:
"My favorite to illustrate the point as to why Elvis, to me, was one of the greatest singers - it wasn't just that he was a great singer, it was his ability to take a song and make you believe it - is Are You Lonesome Tonight?,'" Jorgensen said. "If you read the lyrics, you're not going to believe it. But with Elvis, you believe it. He's telling you, from the heart."
In evaluating Presley, Jorgensen said, it's important to remember that he wasn't a songwriter. Nor was he simply stealing from the black blues and R&B singers he heard growing up in Memphis in the late '40s and early '50s.
"He didn't write Norwegian Wood' or Purple Rain,'" Jorgensen said. "He was a singer. What he was able to do was take songs and make them his own and make people stop and listen to the song again even if it had been around before. Elvis didn't rip off Arthur Crudup. He added some feel to the song you couldn't detect in the original. It wasn't like Pat Boone doing a white' version of Little Richard."
During an hour-long phone conversation, Jorgensen talked about the ups and downs of Presley's career, acknowledging, for example, that his '60s movie soundtracks were often loaded with dreck, such as "No Room to Rhumba in a Sports Car."
"They did three a year. Let's say there were 10 songs on each; the writers had to come up with 30 great songs a year," he said. "That didn't happen. Elvis gave in. He was made to honor his commitment. He told people he hated his movies. But he showed up. They were locked into it."
In 1968, Presley had his "comeback" in an NBC-TV special highlighted by a performance with a small combo while clad in now-iconic black leather.
The next year, he returned to live performances at the International Hotel in Las Vegas. Some of those shows and some from 1970 are captured on "On Stage," a two-CD set issued last week.
"I think he chose the wrong place to stage his return," Jorgensen said. "It wasn't hip. But if you listen to the two Las Vegas albums, they were probably one of the peaks of Elvis' career. He hadn't played in the '60s, really, and he came back and he was like a wild animal on stage. I think he felt on top of the world from when he started in 1969 through 1971."
"On Stage" is the second major Presley reissue in the past few months. In December, "Elvis 75 - Good Rockin' Tonight," a career-spanning four-CD boxed set, was released to mark what would have been Presley's 75th birthday on Jan. 8.
The year's other new Presley project is "Viva Elvis," a Cirque du Soleil Las Vegas production that explores Presley's life and reworks some of his music.
"It's a different slant," Jorgensen said. "The music was produced from scratch with his vocals. It's a little bit like A Little Less Conversation' from 2002."
Jorgensen said another Presley reissue is likely in the fall, although he didn't specify what it would be.
Regardless of what comes out this fall, Jorgensen said he would continue his mission to expose Elvis' music not only to fans who found Elvis while he was alive, but to the generations who have come of age since his death in 1977.
"I look at history and I see how young kids are listening to Louis Armstrong or Charlie Parker or Miles Davis," he said. "Over time, record sales will be on a sliding scale, but there will always be interest in who Elvis was. There won't be millions going out. Kids today are interested in Elvis.
"We'll be making Elvis records for a long time. I think Elvis will be important and his story will be told for the rest of this century, without a doubt."
Danielle Keough, de dochter van Lisa Marie Presley acteert op dit ogenblik in een film aan de zijde van niet minder dan Orlando Bloom. Met als titel: The Good Doctor. Dit wordt de eerste film van Danielle waarin ze een leidinggevende rol zal spelen. Haar eerste bijrol kreeg ze in de film "The Runaways" die op 19 maart in Amerika première gaat.
James aanwezig bij het derde Crossroads Guitar Festival 26 juni 2010
James aanwezig bij het derde Crossroads Guitar Festival 26 juni 2010
Eric Clapton is bezig om voor de derde maal hrt Crossroads Guitar Festival te organiseren op 26 juni 2010. Circa 30 gitaristen hebben zich al aangemeld, waaronder James Burton.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 2/5 - (2 Stemmen) Tags:James aanwezig bij het derde Crossroads Guitar Festival 26 juni 2010
06-03-2010
Elvis Presley: A love affair
Elvis Presley: A love affair
For better or worse, Elvis Presley and Las Vegas formed a bond in business and in pleasure that endures
Las Vegas News Bureau
Priscilla and Elvis Presley at their wedding at the Aladdin in Las Vegas.
John Katsilometes interviews long-time Hilton employees about their experiences with Elvis for the hotel's 40th anniversary on July 2, 2009.
He enjoyed Vegas tremendously because this was the only town you could do 24 hours a day, Esposito says. But he was always concerned about whether Vegas would ever like him.
It wasnt until the 1963 filming of Viva Las Vegas that the entire city began to fully embrace Elvis. The cast and crew were everywhere the UNLV gymnasium, the Flamingo swimming pool, the Tropicana skeet range.
The big turnaround for Elvis in Vegas started with Viva Las Vegas because tourism increased tremendously after he made the movie, Esposito says. He felt good because he was respected.
The film was capped off by the title song, in which Presley serenaded the bright light city gonna set my soul, gonna set my soul on fire.
His link with the city was cemented when he exchanged wedding rings with Priscilla Ann Beaulieu in Prells suite at the Aladdin in May 1967.
They chose Vegas because it was an easy place to get married quick, says Esposito, who served as best man. It was discreet.
After the Elvis-Priscilla honeymoon came his much longer honeymoon with Las Vegas a historic seven-year run at the International-turned-Las Vegas Hilton from 1969 to 1976. The shows revived Presleys career as a live performer while injecting new life into a city that had been searching for the next great act after the breakup of the Rat Pack.
Elvis was more than ready to appear before a live audience in Las Vegas for the first time in 13 years, even if he didnt realize it at the time.
He was very excited that people came out to see him but he was a nervous wreck when he first walked onstage, Esposito says. He had been so concerned about being accepted again, and he had tears in his eyes when he was accepted.
International owner Kirk Kerkorian inked the deal with an initial $100,000-a-week contract, and Presleys image was plastered on billboards and bus placards all over town. Elvis, wearing his trademark jumpsuits, sold out 837 consecutive shows over the seven years after opening in July 1969. Performing two shows a night for two months each year, he sold more than $164 million worth of tickets in todays dollars to 2.5 million fans, engraving rock n roll into the citys landscape and proving that a casino showroom could make money.
Elvis gave back to local charities, allowing them to share in the proceeds of souvenirs that were sold in the hotel lobby.
This transformation, from unappreciated Las Vegas performer in 1956 to beloved superstar, had everything to do with the fact that Elvis had become about the same age as his audience and had developed a persona befitting a showroom, College of Southern Nevada history professor Michael Green says.
When he came back in 69 he came back with glitz, and thats what Las Vegas entertainment is all about, Green says. He was also in his 30s by the time he came back to the International and much closer to the age group of the people who came to see his show.
Presleys affair with the city began to sour a little toward the end, even as fans continued to jam the 2,000-seat theater. Rumors began circulating about his increasing reliance on painkillers, amphetamines and other drugs. In his penthouse suite, he had whipped out a handgun and shot at the television and the chandelier.
His rapid weight gain became noticeable. He looked tired and the quality of his stage performances began slipping. He canceled some of his Hilton engagements because of health issues.
On Aug. 16, 1977, barely eight months after Elvis left the Hilton building for good, he died at his Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tenn. He was only 42.
About 150 mourners gathered outside a Las Vegas mortuary to pay their respects at a service that featured Presleys music played through large speakers. One fan complained that she could find no expressions of sorrow from Strip hotels.
But when the city adopted its What happens in Vegas mantra, Las Vegas again embraced Elvis.
He is a good way to reach back to the old days to someone who was naughty in his youth, to someone they couldnt show from the hips down on TV, Green says. It fits in with Vegas being naughty.
The tourists who want to share in Las Vegas love affair with Elvis usually make several stops around town.
A visit to the eight-home street of Elvis Presley Court doesnt usually rank high on the list. He never lived there. But Elvis has a star on the Strips Las Vegas Walk of Stars, made possible through a $15,000 contribution from the Viva Las Vegas! Elvis Presley Fan Club.
Fans may lament the closing of the Elvis-O-Rama museum a few years ago, but the Imperial Palace has the Kings Ransom Museum, featuring his jewelry, stage and film wardrobe and his 1977 Lincoln Continental. Elvis in black leather lives in wax at Madame Tussauds at the Venetian.
The Mecca, though, is the Las Vegas Hilton, where guests are greeted by a life-size bronze statue of The King. The hotel is planning an Elvis fan festival for July.
It has been a steady flow of people who want to see where Elvis performed, Hilton marketing and entertainment boss Rick White explains. They want to look at the stage, and they come in all age groups.
Cirque du Soleil's Viva Elvis show is a tribute to the life and music of Elvis Presley.
Photograph by: Ethan Miller, Getty Images for Cirque du Soleil
Midway into Cirque du Soleils latest eye-popping Las Vegas production, Viva Elvis, theres a segment saluting Elvis Presleys love affair with Hollywood.
Its an upbeat, thigh-slapping, ersatz Western number in which one of the troupes dancers, outfitted as a movie cowboy, spins a lasso that keeps expanding until it seems to take in half the stage at the Aria Resort & Casino, where the show had its glitzy premiere Feb. 19.
Impressive as that was, it underscored how the Canadian company cant get a rope around the mythic figure that is the King of Rock n Roll.
All the signature Cirque elements are here: breathtaking acrobatics, dazzlingly inventive sets, joyfully inspired costumes and imaginatively reimagined music the bulk of it derived from Presleys recordings.
Julie Aucoin/Cirque du Soleil
Cirque du Soleils Viva Elvis at MGM CityCenters Aria.
But Cirques creative team set a standard for itself, and others, with the Beatles-driven Love show just down the street, which is not easily equaled, much less surpassed. That venture not only taps the musical spirit, but also reaches to the magical soul of the Fab Four, something that Viva Elvis aspires to only fleetingly in paying homage to pop musics other titanic figure.
Love brought the Beatles to Las Vegas without a hint of schlock, a mission apparently impossible with Elvis, given that his association with Sin City virtually defined the contemporary notion of pop-culture kitsch.
Cirque might have attempted to ignore that aspect of his career, but instead embraces it, and often in witty, mostly affectionate ways.
Ultimately, however, Viva Elvis is skewed more toward fans who are captivated by the cultural excess of Graceland than those most drawn to the startling power of his best music.
The show, for which tickets run $99 to $175, unfolds roughly chronologically, and incorporates lessons learned from Love in the lively deconstructions and reconstructions of nearly three dozen of his studio recordings. Presleys vocals are often detached from the original instrumental backing and paired with a live band that belts behind his voice with considerable gusto.
Cirques smart move from the outset was bypassing the use of any male singers for live renditions of his songs: Several numbers that are rendered anew are sung by female cast members, occasionally in duet with the Kings own disembodied voice.
But Viva Elvis doesnt spend a lot of time trying to explore the mystery of Presley. It prefers to celebrate the public figure, and it does so with great affection, if not always with meticulous attention to historical accuracy or cultural credibility.
The shows use of the character of Col. Tom Parker as narrator paints him as a sympathetic father figure With Elvis, he announces fondly, every day was an adventure! overlooking the self-enriching career and life direction the onetime carny gave his most famous client. Elvis put Las Vegas on the map! the Parker character intones without a hint of irony or even self-serving bluster, a statement with which fans of Frank Sinatra might take issue.
It also gives equal weight and value to both his fallow Hollywood years and his creatively explosive 50s period, when he truly left the world all shook up.
One of the few times the show taps the pathos and tragedy of Presleys life story what makes that story so emotionally rich is in the delivery of One Night.
Instead of the ribald R&B number that Elvis transformed from One Night of Sin into One Night With You, its rendered here as a disarmingly graceful ballad, sung by a woman in contemporary tank top and jeans as she watches two men athletically working their way around a gigantic guitar-shaped metal framework suspended from above.
The men are dressed identically in the standard-issue teenage boy uniform of the 50s: white T-shirts, cuffed blue jeans and black oxford shoes, representing Elvis Aaron and his twin, Jesse Garon, who was stillborn.
At the end of the number, while Elvis scales the neck of the guitar climbing toward the heaven-bound headstock, Jesse drops from one of the bottom rungs into a pit below, one hint at the personal loss that haunted Presley throughout his life.
Theres also a gorgeous and moving aerial pas de deux in which two members of the troupe float effortlessly through the air to accompany the weightless sound of Elvis vocal on Are You Lonesome Tonight?
Among the other individual set pieces, Got a Lot O Livin to Do takes an audio clip in which Presley expresses his youthful passion for comic books as the foundation for a fanciful trampoline workout for acrobats fitted in various superhero- inspired costumes. Bossa Nova Baby incorporates a nerve-testing, chair-balancing act full of characters in garish 60s hipster duds.
The two most striking numbers are the military-based treatment of Return to Sender that follows film footage of Presleys 1958 swearing-in as an Army private, and an electrifying reinvention of the iconic Jailhouse Rock movie production number.
The show goes on to reference his fairy-tale wedding to Priscilla Beaulieu, as well as their tempestuous life together minus any allusions to the birth of daughter Lisa Marie.
Elvis Presley became the single most influential pop musician of the rock era by unleashing an innate genre- and colour-blind talent that let him transcend his dirt-poor origins and achieve a previously unimaginable level of worldwide success, a story that still resonates powerfully because of the way that success fuelled the excess that ultimately led to his downfall.
Cirque du Soleil clearly loves Elvis tender, but in the end, Viva Elvis never lets him step off the mystery train.
