Elvis Fridays #3: Dreaded Nirvana

I didn't set out for Elvis Fridays to be a request feature, but neither am I going to turn them away, since it saves me having to do much thinking, which is problematic at the best of times, but lately...

Anyway, John Medd has an appropriate suggestion to kick us off this week...

I'd like to think you can find room in your heart for Dread Zeppelin - fronted, as I'm no doubt you're aware, by Tort Elvis. 



A seamless merge of Heartbreak Hotel with Led Zeppelin's Heartbreaker. Great stuff - just what this feature (and my doctor ordered) for turning my Friday frown upside down. Where have they been all my life?

And if that weren't enough, here's Rigid Digit again - clearly not content with Guest Posting yesterday, he wants to make it two days in a row...

May I point you in the direction of this chap?

He's sort of doing what you would think Elvis in the 90s/00s would've done - taking popular songs of the moment and Elvis-ifying them.

Whole Lotta Rosie - Pretty Vacant - Come As You Are - Sweet Home Alabama - Take Me Home Country Roads (to name but 5).

Now this guy I do remember, and I even have a copy of his 1998 debut album Gravelands, from which comes this...



OK, what about that other Elvis?

My favourite Costello album is Punch The Clock. It's a little less bitter than the albums that preceded it... and a little less clever than the albums that would follow it. It's rarely cited by critics as one of his best, probably because the production by Clive Langer & Alan Winstanley pitched Elvis closer to the pop arena (of 1983, at least) than ever before or after.

Lyrically though, this is Costello at the height of his pun-pop powers as far as I'm concerned...

I was committed to life and then commuted to the outskirts

With all the love in the world

Living for thirty minutes at a time with a break in the middle for adverts

But it's a wonderful world within these cinema walls

Where a shower of affection becomes Niagara Falls

And you wish she could step down from the screen to your seat in the stalls

But if stars are only painted on the ceiling above

Then who can you turn to and who do you love

I want to get out while I still can

I want to be like Harry Houdini

Now I'm the invisible man

My head is spinning round faster and faster

Here I stand on the edge of disaster

I'm shattered like a piece of crystal porcelain or alabaster

Crowds surround loudspeakers hanging from the lampposts

Listening to the murder mystery

Meanwhile someone's hiding in the classroom

Forging books of history

Never mind there's a good film showing tonight

Where they hang everyone everybody who can read and write

Oh that could never happen here... but then again it might.

Those last couple of lines seem more appropriate now than they were back then.



As for the other guy... well, I've posted a couple of tracks from his later years over the last couple of weeks, so it seems an appropriate time to go back to the beginning. Here's his debut single, from early 1954, when rock 'n' roll was just getting going. His voice changed a lot over the years, but the purity was there from the beginning. The song was originally recorded 8 years earlier by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudrup, although certain of the lyrics were originally written and recorded by Blind Lemon Jefferson back in 1926. Elvis always was a big music fan.