Song of the Day

Today is the 30th anniversary of Elvis' death, at age 42.. On that day, my family was in Nashville, where he died. We had this huge camper on this huge truck and we were roadtripping from Phoenix to North Carolina to visit my eldest sister. I was 10 at the time, but I recall it being a really fun trip.

I listened to parts of at least 100 Elvis songs to find one that was interesting, but not on his "hit" list. I was looking for a specific song that I heard on the sat radio recently, but can't recall it's name. This one reminds me of something the Doors might have done. Basically, I just gave up finding the perfect song and this one will have to do.

The thing I noticed listening to all these songs, is that Elvis recorded a huge number of songs.. and most of them were really bad. The songs from the 50's and 60's had really horrible mixing as well. It was obvious they were wanting to highlight Elvis' voice, but the instruments were far too subdued. That was mostly fixed by the 70's. Of course, his "gospel" period was a horror of really bad songs that fundis bought up by the truck-load.

Frankly, Elvis was a badass. He really was a hell of a singer. His weakness was not doing what he wanted instead of letting other people push and pull him to his death.. and a lot of really bad songs.