R&R1003
1981
Elsewhere I once said
Sometimes Youtube lets you down. There are all these recent performances of people doing their classics from decades ago, lacking the power of the original. Yet to the uninitiated, and to the future, these pedestrian geriatric videos will become what we were excited about.
It's recently struck me that for Elvis this actually happened before the internet. Since the 80s, Elvis impersonators have all gone for the rhinestone jumpsuited 70s Vegas Elvis. If that's all Elvis had been nobody would ever have paid any attention to him.
Several years ago I went off on one about precisely this point.
The thing that gets me is that all the Elvis impersonators are 70s Elvis in flared catsuits and shades.
Elvis hit so hard because he was a fiery pioneer. This was a guy who went round in a pink shirt and bolero jacket - clothes that'd draw flak in contemporary cosmopolitan environments - when he was an unknown teenager in the postwar Deep South.
Elvis took all the dark, brooding libidinous rhythm and outsiderness of the blues and added the tension that only white culture's repression can generate. This incendiary hybrid is the basis of rock n roll. Elvis served it up with explosive sexuality and dynamic power that swept away all that came before it.
The young Elvis' swaggering kinetic energy is impossible to imitate. So feeble unimaginative twats devoid of talent do an 'Elvis impression' by putting on a rhinestone studded romper suit and going uh-huh-huh. It makes Showaddywaddy look like authentic rock n roll.
The prevalence of these half-arsed half-brained tosspots shifts the popular notion of what Elvis was. We've seen so much of this that it's come to be the first image in our minds when his name gets mentioned.
Just like Grease, this lame light entertainment disconnects us from the fire and fury, the passion and drive of rock n roll. A social revolution is morphed into predicatable entertainment, mild amusement at stale cliches; everything rock n roll came to save us from in the first place.
Look at this and tremble, then. It's straight outta Brooklyn from 1981, one 12 inch slab of clear vinyl, two teeth-gratingly clumsy disco medlies of Elvis songs.
Gregg 'The King' Peters doesn't bode well at first glance. I couldn't help noticing that he has two Gs in the name just like the marginally less wrong Old Gregg, and even on the badly photocopied sleeve he looks nothing like Elvis. Then the needle hits the plastic and he ritually slaughters Presley classics in the manner of a Vic Reeves pub singer with the added tremolo of a man driving a tractor sideways over a rutted field with lead weights tied round his conkers.
Their claim to be 'on long play' is immediately undermined by the bold capitals on the cover saying EXTENDED PLAY SINGLE. Mind you, small mercies and all that. Ten minutes of this crime against ears is twenty minutes too long. An actual LP of this bowel-tremblingly inept cackfest is an unthinkable abomination that was edited out of the draft of the Book of Revelations on grounds of decency.
Catalogue number is RR-1003, implying it's the third record from Reelin and Rockin. What the hell else had these taste-free fuckers released?
Of course, it could be a ruse like they do in the porn movie industry of making something appear good enough to warrant a sequel. If you call your movie Transsexual Horse Lover 2 (a real title, by the way) it implies there was an earlier one that was so good that they made another.
Incidentally, is that a transsexual who loves horses? Or a lover of transexual horses?
Frankly, a bestial transsexual or indeed a transsexual horse could do a better Elvis record than this.
download The King On Long Play - Rock Songs (9.7MB MP3)
For those masochists among you for whom this isn't painful enough, leave me your email address and I'll send you the MP3 of the even worse B-side, a 5 minute long 126bpm medley of Elvis love songs.
