Elvis Shuffle: Notes Taken By Hand On Flight to Chicago

“Down in the Alley” – One of Presley’s hottest dirtiest songs. “We’ll have a ball down in the alley, just you and me.” Yes, sir, if you say so.

“I’m Gonna Walk Dem Golden Stairs” – Elvis Presley is at his most overtly manly when he sings gospel. A man totally at ease with himself, who he is and his place in the grand scheme of things. He is both impenetrable in the strength of his faith and totally vulnerable to God’s love at the same time. This performance is a masterpiece.

“Solitaire” – “A loonely man”. Who could imagine that the jiggly boy in 1955 could sing like this? No wonder people still have a hard time taking EP whole. They still feel the need to break him down, piece him apart, make him manageable, palatable. He is neither.

“Rubberneckin'” – Hot, funky, with a shrieking girl chorus which sexes him up even more. EP with a bunch of hot girls jamming. Opening number in his last movie, Change of Habit. Funky. Stop being so hot, Elvis. I can’t take it. Thanks.

“Stop, Look and Listen” – From Spinout. Pretty standard movie song, but he sings the hell out of it, roughing his voice up.

“Blue Moon of Kentucky” – his second single from 1954. Uncannily great vocals from this young young man. The song sounds like everything: bluegrass, rock, country, and Elvis. His voice floats and grunts and soars. Like I said: uncanny. And listen to Scotty jam on that bridge.

“G.I. Blues” – This particular recording is actually Take 5 of the song, with EP goofing off at the start singing, “And when Irish eyes are smiling”, which pleases me to no end. I don’t care what anyone says. I love every second of this song. EP sounds like he does, too. He sells this song from the “heels of his GI shoes”.

“If We Never Meet Again” – Elvis at his gentlest and most open. A soft whispery falsetto. His control of his vocal instrument is second to none.

“Money Honey” – A live recording from 1956 during his disastrous Vegas gig. The audience is totally quiet during his performance. It is strange to hear Elvis sing without cheers and screams. “Money Honey” is a perverse performance from him, joyfully perverse. Aching hiccups, screaming high notes filled with ache and need, bringing to mind all kinds of dirty subversive scenarios. But the live performance lacks the interaction of the audience and you can feel the weirdness in the band, like, “Is anyone out there?” The emcee comes on at the end, “Elvis, take another bow. We wish him farewell.” More like “Good riddance”. Until 1969. Who has the last laugh?

“Girl Went Next Door Went a Walking” – From the album released after his time in the Army, Elvis Is Back. There is something special about this album. He had been working on his voice during his time in the service, pushing it, exercising it, and it shows. This is a singer.

“Mine” – from Speedway. This is Elvis, the superb and passionate crooner, a perfectly controlled beautiful vibrato, holding back on the higher notes, creating an ache of want in the listener. It’s melodramatic. It’s confidently romantic. It’s Dino-inspired.

“Thanks to the Rollin’ Sea” – Elvis as happy fisherman in Girls! Girls! Girls! My taste is unconventional. I love his performance in this ridiculous song. He rollicks with it. I get excited any time I hear it. He’s having fun with his gorgeous voice and what it can do.

“Maybelline” – a live performance from 1955 at the Louisiana Hayride. My recording of it has Elvis introducing the song, and he stutters in an almost debilitating way. He has to actually stop speaking, the stutter is so bad. And then when he starts singing, mayhem in the crowd.

“Hands Off” – Elvis at home in 1960, playing a boogie woogie piano riff, people laughing and singing along. Elvis’ piano playing always makes me laugh. It’s rudimentary but so enthusiastic, keeping that beat going.

“Judy”: Boogie woogie underbelly, crooning voice with a country ache in it. A good example of Elvis Presley’s ease with a mix of styles. I also can’t get enough of his falsetto.

“The Fair’s Moving On” – Elvis in the best voice of his life. In “The Fair’s Moving On”, his voice soars, there is nowhere it cannot go. He keeps the country twang on the song’s edges, but there’s R&B in his phrasing. He kills me here. His commitment.

“The Lady Loves Me” – Charm and heat distilled to its purest essence. Elvis and Ann-Margret. You can hear them both smiling in their voices.

“We’ll Be Together” – Listen to his phrasing. He was all about phrasing, psychotically obsessed with phrasing. Listen to how he sings, “We’ll beee to…..gether …” He also easily moves from chest voice to falsetto, no easy feat for a male singer. The last note is superb.

“Can’t Help Falling in Love” – From the Aloha From Hawaii event. Except for a couple of tracks, Elvis sounds “off” in this concert. The breath isn’t there, that seems to be the main thing. His voice lacks the oomph of the giant breathing apparatus he normally had. He’s singing, but he needs the chorus behind him to be his breath. Suddenly, though, at the end end of this song. Elvis kicks into crazy gear. His voice is NUTS.

“I Got a Woman” – live recording, from Hirsch Center, Louisiana Fairgrounds, Shreveport, December 15, 1956. Mayhem. You can barely hear him in this track the screams are so loud. It’s thrilling. The band is so sparse behind him, but the energy … it vibrates through the air to this day.

“Mean Woman Blues” – The song was obviously used in Loving You a couple of times. “She kiss so hard she bruised my lips / Hurts so good my heart just flips.” Imagine being 15 or 16 years old in 1956/57 and hearing that. Bruised lips? Elvis was a makeout king. One of his girlfriends around this time said she had to start wearing foundation around her mouth due to the rawness inflicted on her mouth from Elvis, and don’t even get me started with how hot that image is.

“Can’t Help Falling in Love” – A cluster! This is from Elvis’ Madison Square Garden concert in 1972. His voice sounds stronger here than in the Aloha concert. The arrangement of the song (horns, backup singers) is pretty damn strong. Elvis sings it like the classic it is.

“I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone” – a live recording from a 1955 Louisiana Hayride performance. This really shows Scotty Moore’s easy genius. Listen to what HE’S doing underneath Elvis’ vocals. You can hear the screams of the girls, you can hear Elvis and the band laughing during the bridges.

“Without Him” – recorded in 1966. Elvis at his most sincere and holy. A traditional arrangement, this would fit in in any church service. The “passivity” of the lyrics is actually the strength of the faith. Elvis sings actively, always. “But with Jesus, thank God I’m saved.” He freakin’ means it. When the chorus joins him fully, Elvis responds by going deeper and higher into the song. I love this performance.

“Catchin’ on Fast” – from Kissin’ Cousins. Dumb all around. (Elvis needs to “catch on” to how to kiss? On what planet?) Groovy guitars, boring horns, and tinny-sounding drums, you can see the challenges Elvis faced with grabbing such weak material by the horns and justifying the song’s existence. He rarely fails.

“A Thing Called Love” – Elvis Presley as Biblical patriarch. Voice low and smooth and beautiful. All man.

“Clean Up Your Own Backyard” – from Trouble With Girls (which I have written about before). A bit of a didactic song, fitting in with the late 60s when the movie came out, but Elvis is sexy, confident, and grooves on with his female backup singers. It’s a great song for him.

“Wolf Call” – from Girl Happy. Dumb on many levels. Entertaining on all levels.

“The Girl I Never Loved” – from Clambake. Elvis was nervous in the beginning of his career about singing ballads. He didn’t know what to do with his body during slow songs. He got over that. This is a very good performance (vocally, and also acting-wise in the movie). Please listen to how he sings the buildup: “Oh, I’m lonely. Oh, so lonely.” His heart on his sleeve and in his voice. This is what I mean when I talk about “showing up” fully in these movies he was embarrassed by. Everyone was upset making Clambake. It was not a happy shoot. Listen to his performance of this song. He redeems the entire movie.

“Help Me” – country-gospel. It makes me wish he had done more duets. I’d love to hear Elvis take the harmony line for once, although it’s always nice to hear his ease at collaboration in the few duets he did.

“If That Isn’t Love” – from the awesome Promised Land album. Gospel song in the midst of honky tonk, blues, ballads. Elvis did not distinguish. He did not separate himself out into compartments. He sings the hell out of this song. Nothing like Elvis singing gospel. Nothing. I am grateful to him for how much of it he left us.

“Is It So Strange” – In the summer of 1956, Elvis’ girlfriend June Juanico (more on her here) suggested to him that he should sing “Is It So Strange”. She was always pushing him to do ballads, she heard something in his voice, a potential for real deep feeling, that she felt he wasn’t utilizing yet. In the “Million Dollar Quartet” session on December 4, 1956, it’s interesting to hear him mess around with it, knowing that he and June talked about the song so much only a couple of months before (and by that time, they had broken up). He then recorded it for real in January of 1957, and June, in her book, describes the strange swooning heartachey feeling she got when she first heard it on the radio. Ouch! Even without the touching backstory, this is one of my favorite performances from him. It works on me on a really deep level. I am a grown woman living in 2011 but something about the openly yearning ache he puts into the song makes me time travel back to 1957, or at least back to my first teenage romances, and falling into what it is like to kiss someone … for hours … and hours … the innocence of it, the sweetness of it, the excitement of it. There’s a heartbreak in the song, as though he knows that youth will pass (even though he was only 22 when he recorded it), he knows the love will die, it already is dying as the song moves along. The song is romantic, sexual, intimate, and sad. How on earth did he capture all of that?

“It’s a Long Lonely Highway” – Written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman (Elvis recorded a lot of their stuff for the movies), “It’s a Long Lonely Highway” opens Tickle Me. Elvis sings it like gospel. He sings it with abandon. I love this performance.

“Without Love” – Classic Elvis. Perfection of expression and intent. Personal. It’s fun to listen to him go where the song leads him. A swoon of total commitment. It starts slow, and then …. explodes.

“When the Saints Go Marching In” – from the now-famous “Million Dollar Quartet” session, with Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash in December 1956 at Sun Recording. A group song, loosey-goosey, passionate, unforced. Like a good old revival meeting, with everyone jokingly singing off-key on purpose at the end.

“Life” – One of Elvis’ grandiose ballads with overly complicated lyrics: “Matter formed and broke the curse of nothingness …” The Book of Genesis in song form with a hippie-dippie flute providing accompaniment. Only Elvis could sing this song.

“I’m Coming Home” – Recorded in 1961. Rough edges smoothed off him here, post-Army, but I like Elvis without the rough edges. He can do anything. I love the sex-pot Elvis with the raspy down-in-the-gutter voice. I love when he launches me into a private world of alleys and bruised lips and dry humping in the back seats of Cadillacs. That’s what many of his songs call to mind on purpose. But he wasn’t a one-trick pony. You can hear Dino in his phrasing here.

“Rip It Up” – Up there with my favorite Elvis Presley recordings. Best played at top volume as you drive to the beach with all the windows down, sipping on iced coffee.

“Guitar Man” – an important song in the EP songbook, it being the hook for the 1968 NBC special. You can hear Elvis’ love of the song in the recording. Improvisation: “Show ’em, son!”

“Power of My Love” – Outrageously sexual, one of his most blatant tracks. He’s having a blast tapping into his Sex Beast Chakra.