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-By Piers Beagley
The highlights include the well-known; Jerry Lee Lewis’ burning ‘Don’t Be Cruel’, Johnny Cash ‘I Forgot To Remember To Forget’ & Roy Orbison’s slight rockabilly take of ‘Trying To Get To You’. This is a great opportunity to compare Orbison’s & Elvis’ two parallel SUN recordings as it truly demonstrates how magnificent & important Elvis was in changing the future of popular culture – Elvis really did put the SEX into music! The ‘collectable’ highlights however have to be the rather more obscure tracks like Canadian Chris Clark’s lovely Motown version of ‘In The Ghetto’ (great to hear a female blue-eyed-soul version of this great track) or British Rocker, Duffy Power’s excellent harmonica-wail of ‘Lawdy, Miss Clawdy’. And Little Richard’s blistering ‘Money Honey’ leaves you wondering if a studio engineer was even involved in the recording since it is such a wonderous mess! Albert King’s blues take of ‘That’s All Right’ is damn good too – and also reminiscent of the other Beale Street blues great, B.B King. Anyone who names their son "Link Elvis Wray" deserves our attention and Link Wray’s 'Love Me Tender’ is very faithful to Elvis and very sweet indeed. It is said that Elvis invited Link Wray to Graceland in the 1950s sometime after his 4-million selling single "Rumble" became a massive hit. (EIN Note - Sadly Link Wray died aged 76, November 5 2005. Go here for more info). In a very different vein ‘It’s Now Or Never’ by ETA ‘El Vez’ is corny, over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek & Mexican to boot! With Mexican-Mafia related lyrics, ("It's Now or Never, please no more gangs, People are dying, don't you understand"), along with The Godfather Theme & Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie Mae’ thrown into the mix, this is a whacky as you can get! MOJO’s Editor-In-Chief, Phil Alexander, rightly remarks, Click here for Mojo Magazine Spotlight. Tracklist – |
