DEH wrote: ↑Thu Aug 12, 2021 8:11 pm
Elvis was not a "album artist". He didn't think of albums that way. He didn't look at albums the way Led Zeppelin or Jimi Hendrix did. He didn't pose for album covers after the movie years. Not his thing.
To me, that’s just a cop out and the usual defence mechanism kicking in. He was obligated by contract to deliver x number of albums per year - he made two brilliant albums in the early 60s (Elvis is Back & Something for Everybody) and finished that decade off with probably an even better album From Elvis in Memphis. You could add Back in Memphis too.
It is irrelevant whether he wasn’t an album artist in the truest sense - he knew what made good music and when it was needed like when the income stream started to drop off in 1968, and he went to American and produced the goods. And although the Nashville 70’s recordings possibly did not have the edge to the ‘69 recordings, (subjective of course) there was still some stellar material in there. But once 1970 had gone, he had started to lose interest, resulting in poor albums like Now and Fool. He didn’t record enough material so RCA were forced to cull together albums from whatever material was sitting on the shelves. Only Elvis with his lack of interest could approve an album entitled Now released at the start of ‘72 yet which included tracks from two and three years earlier. And one of those would have probably remained on the shelf forever had RCA not been desperate.
You don’t have to be an album artist to know what is going to make a reasonably decent album - you do however have to take an interest in what the record company is putting out or take a real interest in what you are recording so that the record company has got decent stuff to put out in the first place.
Basically, by 1971, Elvis got into another rut and became lazy like he did with Hollywood and the films, but this time, it was with the non stop touring. The only difference was that unlike the Hollywood years where income started to drop off through lack of record sales and bums on seats in the cinema, which drove him to make better records again, and start touring, in the 70’s he was just happy to go out on non stop tours where there was a guaranteed income, so making decent records was not uppermost or important in his mind. Perhaps had the stadiums been half empty, it may have encouraged him to look at making decent music again and releasing great albums. After all, he had proved that at certain times during his career, he could make and release a few great albums as mentioned above.
