The boy really didn't look that different from any other sharecropper's son. He was roughly four years old, barefoot and dressed in a scaled-down version of his daddy's overalls. However, neighbours did notice one distinguishing feature. He would, it's said, often slip from his parents' side during services at the First Assembly of God church in Tupelo and drift towards the altar, drawn by the blues-oriented piano sound, the guitar playing of Reverend Frank W. Smith and the strange, transcendental power of the music. That boy was Elvis Aaron Presley, and it is no exaggeration to suggest that the journey Elvis began at that point not only helped change the course of popular music but also fired in his own soul an unassailable faith in music, which persisted for the rest of his life. Fast-forward 38 years to August 16th 1977 - the day he died - and we'll see Presley make another journey, this time towards his "gold" piano in Graceland as he sets down a glass of iced water and begins to play, "to unwind, before going to bed". He sings Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain, with its gospel-like finale: "someday when we meet up yonder/We'll stroll hand in hand again/In a land that knows no parting/Blue eyes crying in the rain" and thinks, perhaps, of his mother, who had long since slipped from his side, into a grave. And to whom he continued to address many of his love songs.
Those two images, of Presley past and Presley pre-death, highlight the fact that he did spend "a life in music", which probably makes the new 100-track, four-CD set of the same name (prefixed by the unnecessary, Platinum) the most perfectly-titled of his career - and one of the best, if only because it spans every phase of that 23-year career and features 77 "previously unreleased performances". In fact, if one set of CD's could be said to reassert Presley's incontestable right to the title "King of Pop", this is it.
There is no one in popular music who even touches the rim of the range of styles he tapped into and, in some cases, redefined. Rock, gospel, country, blues, folk, semi-operatic, Tin Pan Alley love songs and even an "Irish" tune or two; Elvis sings them all with that measure of self-immersion which is the hallmark of his art and makes his one of the most potent voices of our time. Even so, the opening track, I'll Never Stand In Your Way, does find the boy-king sounding uncharacteristically tentative, which is hardly surprising when you consider that it's a newly-discovered recording made by a nervous 19-year-old truck driver who, only minutes before, had parked his pick-up outside Sun Studio and then paid his four bucks to record this "demo". Songs of innocence, indeed.
Tentativeness also threads its way through That's All Right, Mama, from Presley's first recording session, though this out-take also proves that one of the most seminal singles in rock was no "accident", as has been claimed, but a conscious blending of the white country-pop, black blues and gospel influences that would soon lead to rock'n'roll. The second track, Blue Moon, pinpoints Presley's pop-country base while the next, Good Rockin' Tonight, stems from his absorption of jump-blues music. So it continues throughout all these CDs, thanks to a meticulous selection of out-takes and definitive recordings, which is marred only by the inclusion of irrelevancies like I've Got A Thing About You, Baby. Then again, rehearsal cuts of hits such as Promised Land more than compensate and are even better that those that were released, often because once the king fluffs a line he knows he's free to just go with the flow of the music, soar above all commercial constraints. So do his musicians, who slide into positively orgasmic mode on What'd I Say, prompting Presley to change Ray Charles' original lyric from "put on your red dress, baby, 'cause we're going out tonight" to "put on your red dress, baby, go on home". Spontaneous creativity, in its essence. But it's the "private" recordings that are the real treasures, such as the Bad Nauheim Medley, recorded in 1959 when Elvis was just another G.I. in Germany. It opens - believe it or not - with a boogie woogie version of I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen, an "Irish" song Elvis apparently learned from his fellow soldier, Irishman Mick Ryan. However, it's equally likely that Presley first encountered such songs courtesy of John McCormack, whose records he collected as a boy. Either way, the "Count" certainly would smile at the way the "King" ends this medley with a fragment of There's No Tomorrow, the Neapolitan tune based on O Sole Mio which Elvis would soon record as It's Now Or Never.
Presley's adolescent longing to be a bass singer in a gospel quartet, on the other hand, imbues his home recording of Dylan's Blowing In The Wind, transforming it into a prayer rather than the hollow warchant the song too often became. Tellingly, this track is preceded by the traditional gospel tune, Oh How I Love Jesus, which is precisely the kind of song Elvis sang to "centre" himself prior to recording sessions, according to the sleeve notes on this CD. That claim is verified by Elvis' "spiritual adviser" Larry Geller, who has also revealed that before recording his gospel album, How Great Thou Art, in 1966, Presley meditated in an effort to "be guided by that small, still voice within", a reference to their shared study of Kriya Yoga, the "ancient science that enables the seeker of truth to attain direct personal contact with God". Geller also suggests that as a result of his seemingly endless exploration of "esoteric philosophies, religions, teachings and arts", Presley embraced the notion of a non-denominational "God-force" though his base remained resolutely Christian. All this, I know, is not the image one normally associates with Elvis. Even so, spiritual yearning is the defining feature in his voice, though this element of his art is rarely addressed. At his best, as a vocalist, Elvis Presley was always drawn towards the altar, and aural evidence of that quest can be found in the out-take of How Great Thou Art and the chillingly desperate, extended version of his 1968 single, You'll Never Walk Alone.
The commercial failure of the latter deeply disappointed Presley who, nevertheless, made his "comeback" the same year with The '68 TV Special, ending the show with what is arguably his greatest recording, If I Can Dream. In this song the highest goals of all mankind are distilled into a single line, when Elvis sings: "as long as a man has the strength to dream, he can redeem his soul and fly". And how did the composition come about? Distressed by the assassination of Martin Luther King, which had recently taken place in Presley's hometown of Memphis, Elvis articulated his feelings on this, and similar social upheavals of 1968, to songwriter W. Earl Brown - who then set those feelings to music, culling a concept or two from King's I Have A Dream speech. This song is as close as Elvis Presley ever came to writing his own testimony and he performs it as though it was the last song he'd ever sing. The same is true of Danny Boy, which Elvis finally recorded in 1976 after a decade of rejecting fans' requests to do so, explaining it was one of his mother's favourite songs. However, by the time of this quintessential "home" recording Elvis himself was just a breath away from sliding into the grave alongside Gladys Presley, and sings the line "if I am dead, as dead I may well be" as though he knows it. And as though he is both becalmed and terrified by that knowledge.
HE certainly had reasons enough to welcome death. Too self-conscious about his weight and too paranoid to show himself in a recording studio, the boy who had once nervously parked his pick-up outside Sun Studio ended up demanding that RCA park a mobile studio outside Graceland so he could record in the privacy of his "jungle room" those demonic tracks, like Danny Boy, which filled his final albums and which close this box-set. Songs such as Hurt and For The Heart also mirror the disintegration of Presley's marriage, with the line "I can roll but I just can't rock" from the latter being particularly poignant given that, by this stage, rock's first great sex symbol "Elvis the Pelvis" was impotent because of drug abuse. But then, this is the sound of life turning in on itself, the soulcry of a man who has begun to yield to the death instinct, a tendency that was the antithesis of everything Elvis Presley had previously asserted through music, ever since those days back in church in Tupelo. Indeed, few pop performers had asserted the life force through their art to quite the same degree as Presley. Fortunately, these were not his final performances. Elvis did drag himself back out on to the touring circuit and was, on the day he died, due to bring his Travelling Salvation Show back to the masses. And so it continues, with the singer set to "top the bill" (via film footage) at that concert in Memphis to mark the 20th anniversary of his passing and destined to reach millions more with A Life In Music. Clearly, Elvis Aron Presley retains that remarkable ability to assert the life-force, above everything else. Even death. His "small, still voice" has not been silenced. And probably never will be.
