The King of Rock and Roll is in the building...

 

 

The real tragedy of Elvis Aaron Presley was that he was a brilliant musician who gradually lost everything that made him brilliant to become a pre-packaged commodity.

 

Take a song like “Blue Christmas.” I probably don’t even need to embed the original version of it. You can immediately picture in your mind the over-produced RCA version with backup singers crooning in the background while Elvis sings suggestively “I'll be so blue thinking about you.” Just mentioning it probably evokes images of hi-fis in rec rooms playing LPs while kids sit on the shag carpet.

 

But here’s a clip from from the live performances in Elvis’ 1968 comeback special. Elvis is jamming with his original bandmates and he plays “Blue Christmas”. It suddenly sounds like a totally different song to the one we know. It’s little jingle of a song to be sure, but one that’s played bluesy and gutsy. And Elvis is having a ball doing it.

 

It’s as far away from the hi-fi with the shag carpeting as you can imagine. This is cool Christmas music.

 

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