Sweet Home Alabama
The new TNT Record importlabel announced the release of their second CD “Sweet Home Alabama” containing the recordings from the June 2, 1975 afternoon and evening shows. From the press-release:
Welcome to the second CD release by TNT Records. After a quick sell-out of our first title “Goin´ Back To Houston” and again with a little help from our friends at “Audionics” - probably the premium and still active label when it comes to rare recordings in best possible sound - we decided once more to pick two shows from “Tour Number 14” (May 30 – June 10, 1975). On this brandnew double-cd set (Release Date: January 15, 2013) you are going to hear both concerts Elvis did right after a couple of great “warm up”-concerts in Huntsville, AL. Elvis then went on for Concerts number 6 and 7 of “Tour Number 14”. Both shows took place in Mobile, Alabama. And the town went nuts for The “King”. As a matter of fact everybody had to admit that Elvis might have been the only entertainer in 1975 who was able to play a sold out crowd on a Monday afternoon! Both Mobile-Shows have been released before, the afternoon performance even came out by the legendary “Madison”-Label. Anyhow if you have missed the show´s first releases from approximately 10 years ago or if you want to owe them in even better sound than before plus exactly the way they were recorded (without the standard “2001 Theme / See See Rider” opening) you should not miss this great new double cd! You can also expect a great booklet full of photos and information including newspaper articles and original paperwork. Ask your local dealer for it, he should have it right in time around the scheduled release date for you!
CD1 – Mobile, June 2, 1975 A/S
01. Amen / I Got A Woman (incomplete) 02. Love Me 03. If You Love Me (Let Me Know) 04. Love Me Tender (with false start) 05. All Shook Up 06. (Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear / Don't Be Cruel 07. Hound Dog 08. The Wonder Of You (with false start) 09. Burning Love 10. Band Introductions 11. Johnny B. Goode 12. Drum Solo (Ronnie Tutt) 13. Bass Solo (Blues - Jerry Scheff) 14. Piano Solo (Glen D. Hardin) 15. School Day 16. T.R.O.U.B.L.E. 17. I’ll Remember You 18. Why Me Lord 19. Let Me Be There (with reprise) 20. An American Trilogy 21. Funny How Time Slips Away 22. Little Darlin' 23. Mystery Train / Tiger Man 24. Can't Help Falling In Love 25. Closing Vamp
CD2 – Mobile, June 2, 1975 E/S
01. Amen / I Got A Woman (incomplete) 02. Love Me 03. If You Love Me (Let Me Know) 04. Love Me Tender 05. All Shook Up 06. (Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear / Don't Be Cruel 07. Hound Dog 08. The Wonder Of You 09. Burning Love 10. Band Introductions 11. Johnny B. Goode 12. Drum Solo (Ronnie Tutt) 13. Bass Solo (Blues - Jerry Scheff) 14. Piano Solo (Glen D. Hardin) 15. School Day 16. Bridge Over Troubled Water 17. T.R.O.U.B.L.E. 18. Alfie (one liner) / I’ll Remember You 19. Let Me Be There 20. An American Trilogy 21. Funny How Time Slips Away 22. Little Darlin' 23. Mystery Train / Tiger Man 24. Can't Help Falling In Love 25. Closing Vamp
Elvis Presley’s 1974 Legacy Release
From the press-release:
RCA Records and Legacy Recordings, the catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment, will celebrate the 40th Anniversary of "Elvis Recorded Live On Stage In Memphis" with an expanded 2-CD release of the monumental concert experience featuring tracks left off the original album (because of the spatial limitations of vinyl), plus a wealth of previously unreleased material.
Disc 2 of the newly remastered expanded "Legacy Edition of Elvis Recorded Live On Stage In Memphis" presents, for the first time, a recently located recording of Elvis' complete concert "test-run" held for an ecstatic live audience on March 18, 1974, two days before his historic concert return to Memphis, where he'd last played live in 1957. The remarkable "test-run" performance was recorded in MONO, drenched in the reverb Elvis preferred, and provides new insight into the magic of Elvis.
As a special added bonus for Elvis aficionados, Disc 2 of "Elvis Recorded Live On Stage In Memphis" includes five intimate tracks (three of them previously unreleased) cut at the RCA Studios in Hollywood on August 16, 1974. Originally intended as reference recordings for an upcoming Las Vegas engagement, the performances—which include "Down In The Alley," "Good Time Charlie's Got The Blues," "Softly As I Leave You," "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" and "The Twelfth Of Never"—-provide a rare fly-on-the-wall glimpse into Elvis' consummate backstage artistry as he prepares these songs for concert.
The musicians backing Elvis on "Elvis Recorded Live On Stage In Memphis" include James Burton and John Wilkinson (guitars); Charlie Hodge (guitar and vocals); Duke Bardwell (bass); Ronnie Tutt (drums); Glen D. Hardin (piano); The Sweet Inspirations, J.D. Sumner & The Stamps, Kathy Westmoreland (vocals) with Joe Guercio and his orchestra.
"Elvis Recorded Live On Stage In Memphis" will also include a 24-page booklet featuring rare photos, previously unseen memorabilia, new liner notes, press clips and more. Following the artistic success of his 1973 Stax sessions and the global phenomenon of the "Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite" album and broadcast the same year, Elvis opened 1974 with a 15-city-tour routed to end in Memphis and a state-of-the-art concert recording.
"I wanted to record a live session in my hometown of Memphis," said Elvis at the time. "After all, this is where it all started out for me." Originally released on vinyl on July 7, 1974, "Elvis Recorded Live On Stage In Memphis" reached #1 on the country charts and featured "How Great Thou Art," the track that would bring Elvis his third (Gospel) Grammy win.
"Elvis Recorded Live On Stage In Memphis"
- Newly remastered album includes all concert tracks not included on original vinyl.
- Disc 2 premieres previously unreleased MONO "test-run" of entire concert recorded with a live audience at the Richmond Coliseum on March 18, 1974.
Also Sprach Zarathustra - See See Rider - I Got A Woman / Amen - Love Me - Trying To Get To You - All Shook Up (nicht auf Original-Album) - Steamroller Blues (nicht auf Original-Album) - Teddy Bear-Don't Be Cruel (nicht auf Original-Album) - Love Me Tender (nicht auf Original-Album) - Long Tall Sally / Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On / Mama Don't Dance / Flip, Flop And Fly / Jailhouse Rock / Hound Dog - Fever (nicht auf Original-Album) - Polk Salad Annie (nicht auf Original-Album) - Why Me Lord - How Great Thou Art - Suspicious Minds (nicht auf Original-Album) - Introductions (nicht auf Original-Album) - Help Me - An American Trilogy - Let Me Be There - My Baby Left Me - Lawdy, Miss Clawdy (nicht auf Original-Album) - Funny How Time Slips Away (nicht auf Original-Album) - Can't Help Falling In Love - Closing Vamp
Tracks CD 2 - 18.03.1974:
Also Sprach Zarathustra - See See Rider - I Got A Woman / Amen - Love Me - Trying To Get To You All Shook Up - Steamroller Blues - Teddy Bear / Don't Be Cruel - Love Me Tender - Long Tall Sally / Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On / Mama Don't Dance / Flip, Flop And Fly / Jailhouse Rock / Hound Dog - Fever - Polk Salad Annie - Why Me Lord - How Great Thou Art - Suspicious Minds - Introductions - Help Me - An American Trilogy - Let Me Be There - My Baby Left Me - Lawdy, Miss Clawdy - Funny How Time Slips Away - Can't Help Falling In Love - Closing Vamp
The August 1974 RCA Rehearsal:
Down In The Alley - Good Time Charlie's Got The Blues - Softly As I Leave You - The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face - The Twelfth Of Never
Elvis as a Teen?
Elvis Presley is one of the most photographed figures in music history. But in the nearly 37 years since his death, every significant picture of rock’s swivel-hipped pioneer has been widely seen. Or has it?
Wade Jones, 50, a lifelong Elvis fan from Mount Holly, North Carolina, has been “constantly looking at photos” since 1977, when he smuggled a tape recorder into one of Presley’s last concerts. And so in 2005, when the late Janelle McComb—a Presley family friend from Tupelo, Mississippi—sent Jones a childhood picture of the future king of rock ’n’ roll, Jones was dumbstruck.
“I had never seen that image in my life,” says Jones, who looked at the photo of a young teenager leaning on his bike—his head tilted back, his hooded eyes nearly closed in the Tupelo sun—and realized it was the first shot placing Presley (who would have been 13 that year, 1948) on the streets of his hometown. “Just his pose, and the fact that he was in a candid situation, surrounded by normal people, was kind of eerie.”
The image also appealed to a European fan, who paid $361.68 when Jones, partially obscuring the image to keep it from being copied, listed a print on eBay last August. The auction started an Internet buzz on Elvis-fan message boards. Graceland—Presley’s homestead—contacted Jones about acquiring the original. Media requests poured in. Some believed they’d pinpointed the exact location in the picture—West Main Street, near the Tupelo Hardware store where Gladys Presley bought her son his first guitar. Others denounced the photo as a fake; after all, Jones was the same guy who had once auctioned water from a Styrofoam cup that Elvis had used on stage in Charlotte, and later sent the cup “on tour.” Yes, admits the digital-sensor salesman, but that was all in good fun.
So, is the photo—published here, for the first time, uncropped—really Elvis? In the full-frame version, someone has written “Elvis” in script near the right border. But who? Janelle McComb, who died two months after mailing it, told Jones in a phone call that the woman who took the snapshot was on her way to the drugstore to drop off some film to be developed. She had one more exposure on the roll, and just asked Elvis, whom she knew, to pose. But Jones didn’t catch her name.
Billy Smith, Elvis’s first cousin, confirms that the boy in the photo is indeed his relative. Moreover, when approached by Vanity Fair, several Elvis experts attested to its seeming authenticity. British collector Tony Stuchbury, for one, said: “The body language matches. He put his head back like that in later years. I’ve seen pictures from vacations in ’69/’70 where he looks just like that. I’m convinced the photo is real.”
Roy Turner, the Tupelo historian who assisted Elaine Dundy in the research for her definitive biography, Elvis and Gladys, took one look at the picture and declared, “There’s no doubt in my mind that it is Elvis.” But the location eluded him. If it were Presley, the one person who would know the spot was 78-year-old Sam Bell, the last close friend Elvis made in Tupelo. The two were neighbors and constant companions when the Presleys lived for a year at 1010 North Green Street in a well-to-do black community known as the Hill.
“Yeah, I know that’s him,” says Bell, who is African-American. “That’s the way he’d be looking. That’s the way he’d be dressed. And the bike too, that’s what we rode, those type of bikes.”
Furthermore, he believes that that’s Presley’s mother, Gladys, keeping a watchful eye from the shadows. “Elvis wasn’t ever running around by himself,” recalls Bell, a retired personnel manager for a lawn-and-garden company, who often played and went to the movies with Elvis and their mixed-race group of friends. “If she wasn’t with him, shopping and all that, we were.”
But it’s the location of the photo that cinches the deal. The boy in the frame stands at the intersection of North Spring and Jefferson, the epicenter of black and white Tupelo. The establishments on the west side of North Spring—a pool hall, barber shop, and military surplus store—catered to a mostly black clientele. The businesses to the east—a grocery-and-seafood market, a furniture store—served white customers. Bell, who still lives nearby, remembers many Saturdays when the block was the busiest spot in town, where some shoppers arrived from the country in horse-drawn wagons. He points to a squat building, on the right, with what appears to be an outside service window: “That was a little cafeteria where you could go and get a milkshake or a soda, but the counter wasn’t integrated, so the blacks couldn’t go in and sit down.”
Elvis knew the neighborhood well. Not far from his gaze, on the opposite side of Jefferson, stands the Lee County Courthouse, where he regularly attended WELO’s live radio shows on Saturday afternoons, soaking up the hillbilly sounds of local idol Mississippi Slim, who encouraged the boy’s own singing and put him on the air. If he had ridden his bike a block or so east, down Jefferson, he would have arrived at Shake Rag, the impoverished local African-American community, where he first heard the low moan of the blues.
In the fall of 1948, only months after this photo was taken, the Presleys, deeply in debt and hoping for a brighter future, packed everything into an old green Plymouth owned by cousin Billy Smith’s parents, and left for Memphis. There, Elvis united the sounds he remembered from both sides of Tupelo’s streets. “He didn’t say, ‘We’re going to Memphis,’ ” Bell recalls. “He said, ‘We got to move.’ He was kind of sad. Didn’t really want to go.”
“What makes the photo exceptional,” insists Turner, the town historian, “is that it’s the only pictorial reference to Elvis’s years in North Tupelo, living in the historically black community.” Presley long talked about it, and biographers labor to document it. “Now,” he says, “we can see his story.”
What we also see—in that head cocked back and that youthful swagger, if the experts are correct—is, precisely, Elvis becoming Elvis.
Collecting Elvis Released today is volume 53 in the German Elvis Sammlung series, put out by De’Agostini and EPE. It contains a magazine, memorabilia reproductions and a mini-poster for “Viva Las Vegas”.
The book "Elvis Presley - La Musica E Il Regno (Guida Illustrata Alla Discografia Completa)" by John Robertson was released.
(Source: EPE / Elvis Collectors / Amazon / Vanity Fair / Elvis Club Berlin)