Now-and-then music (2)

Then Music
Elvis Presley
by Elvis Presley
released March 1956
(RCA)

It would not be quite accurate to describe the advent of rock n’ roll music as one giant eruption. Instead, it was a series of tremors, each one more intense than the one preceding it. If this is true, then Elvis Presley’s first full-length recording after his departure from Sun Records marks the largest of these. The album single-handedly established the new rock n’ roll as something bigger than the limited regional appeal of rockabilly, mixing rockabilly—what Carl Perkins described as “a country man’s songs with a black man’s rhythm”—with elements of popular standards and R&B to create a music for town and country. Young people from hamlet to metropolis loved it, and thus rock n’ roll began its quick rise to chart dominance that would last, through various interpretations and revivals, until nearly the end of the 20th century.

It is tough (impossible, actually) to strip away the mythology surrounding Elvis Presley, which turns fifty years old this month, and just listen. It is equally difficult to remember now the culture and prevailing pop-music tastes into which this recording intruded. Presley’s music is now so familiar to us, but in the winter of 1956, in the months preceding Presley’s first RCA release, the music charts were dominated by the likes of Nelson Riddle, Dean Martin (whom Presley viewed as a role model of sorts), and The Platters. The formula—and it was very much a formula—for success was old pop standards stretched across schmaltzy orchestral arrangements, usually highlighted by an overworked string section. Much of it was musical treacle, not surprising given the exhaustion and trauma following World War II and the desire to return to “normalcy.” Bear in mind that this, too, was the great age of film musicals, which were nothing if not great escapes into an imaginary post-war normalcy that never quite existed in real life. They didn’t require or demand a lot thought or action, and more often than not, acted as “Mother’s Little Helper” long before the pharmaceutical version alluded to by The Rolling Stones.

Presley’s music was different. It recalled the hot, igneous days of the big bands before they cooled into the stony Nelson Riddle arrangements that dominated the early 1950s. It was, above all else, dance music, not decorous waltzes, but jigs, trots, and gyrations that needed no instructor and no lesson. And perhaps most distinguishingly, it was most certainly country come to town.

With Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes,” Elvis Presley begins in perfect fashion, bridging Presley’s rockabilly roots at Sun Records with what would become rock n’ roll. Perkins’ cut had dominated the charts in the winter of 1956, becoming the first single to top the country, R&B, and pop charts, and while producer Sam Phillips had added some uptown flourishes—such as substituting “cat” for “boy” (“go cat go”) and “liquor” for “corn” (“You can drink my liquor / From an old fruit jar”)—the song was essentially rockabilly. It just happened to be a rockabilly song with an extraordinary crossover appeal because of its near-perfect balance between R&B and hillbilly music. And it also gave Presley the template for his first RCA collection, an album that would push rockabilly ever further uptown and then leave it behind, exploding into a new genre.

Ironically, Presley’s biggest hits of 1956—“Hound Dog,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” and “Heartbreak Hotel”—are not contained on his RCA debut album (or the follow-up Elvis later that year) and were issued as 45s only (the tracks were added many years later when the albums were remastered), but that does not detract too much from Elvis Presley. For music lovers interested in the cauldron that produced such an influential and durable music as rock n’ roll, Elvis Presley is essential listening, and Presley—always the showman seeking to bring rockabilly to the Rat Pack audience (before departing from it altogether)—rarely cut loose after leaving Sun Records as he did during the two sessions that composed this LP.