Previous Page May used to be the month where Elvis would return to Nashville to lay down sixteen or so modern hits to be compiled into his next big LP and hit singles. Those days were memory now, however. Now he was back in Hollywood, after only two months back home, laying down a dozen old-timey showboat songs for a movie set in the Victorian Era. Frankie and Johnny featured Elvis playing a Riverboat Gambler (literally) who has a falling out with his girlfriend over his aforementioned gambling problem. As the classic song from which the title is based implies, Frankie (the girlfriend) shoots Johnny, but unlike in the song, Johnny lives; the safe and toothless movie had a safe and toothless ending. As for the soundtrack, there’s a little more pep to many of the tunes, but apart from the title song (which is easily the best movie title song since “Blue Hawaii,” and really felt like a parallel-dimension outtake from the King Creole sessions), there’s not much to hang your hat on. The affectionate ballad, “Please Don’t Stop Loving Me” comes close to being worthy of the man, but it suffers from Elvis’s voice being forced to sing in a way that betrayed where his vocal range actually was in 1965. Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content Though those two tunes were the extent of, what you’d call “actually good songs,” it was still two fairly good songs on an Elvis album. That’s two more than could be found on the soundtrack for Harum Scarum…or Paradise Hawaiian Style. Elvis’s final Hollywood trip to Hawaii would bring out the hands-down, absolute worst album the man ever recorded, not counting the album entitled Having Fun With Elvis On Stage (Google that and roll your eyes at the extent to which Parker would go to make a buck). Not only are there no good songs to be found here, but other than the title song, which is at best merely “not offensive,” everything else is insultingly poor. We haven’t reached rock bottom yet (“Old MacDonald” is still a year away) but we can see the outer-rim of it with “Datin’.” And then there’s the song that was probably hoped would be the big romantic ballad of the production, akin to “Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” or “Puppet on a String.” But “This Is My Heaven” can’t come close to measuring up to either of those. It’s a flat, repetitive, monotonous slog and you will feel every second of its too-long runtime. Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content With all of his soundtrack work done for the year, there was still one more album that RCA was prepping for release. It would be marketed as Presley’s first studio album since 1962’s Pot Luck, but Elvis hadn’t stepped into a studio to record anything for it. The album was a grab-bag of songs the studio had lying around, some previously heard in movies (but not released on vinyl) and some “brand new” in the sense that they were recorded as far back as 1955 but were never released. Elvis’s last time in a Nashville recording studio only produced three songs, and two of them (“Ask Me” and “It Hurts Me”) had been issued as singles. Only “Memphis, Tennessee” was genuinely new. The biggest problem with the album is there wasn’t enough triple-A quality material to fill a whole record, so some movie songs that weren’t good enough for soundtrack release had to be tossed in…and if a movie song isn’t even good enough for its own soundtrack you know you’re not getting prime beef here. The album was entitled, very generically, Elvis For Everyone! That’s a really desperate exclamation point, too. When they used one on the Elvis is Back! album it was earned; his return had to be shouted over the sounds of screaming Presley fans. Now his new album had to be shouted over the sounds of screaming Beatles fans. And yet, despite its hit-and-miss material, parts of the album shine, particularly the tracks from days when he had more passion and better material to work with. The standout is “Memphis, Tennessee” (written about in the previous article) but there are other gems to enjoy. A cover of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” never saw the light of day because Elvis was never satisfied with it, and maybe in 1958 it would have been considered a lesser track; in 1965 it was at least bouncy and fun without leaving you feeling insulted afterward. The too-short but very smooth ballad “I Met Her Today” missed the cut for 1962’s Pot Luck, which is a shame as it’s better than many of the songs that did make it onto that album. And even though “When It Rains It Really Pours” was as old as the Sun Studio days, it’s probably the second-best cut on the record, and had a vibrancy and energy that put his modern work to shame. Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content Unfortunately, despite being promoted as an anniversary/celebration album, the record was really only a desperate attempt to milk a few more dollars out of whatever material RCA could get their hands on. And the public didn’t buy it…literally: it was the first Elvis album to sell fewer than 300,000 copies during the decade. At this point, it was apparent to everyone at RCA, as well as to Col. Parker that Elvis’s standing with the public was in free-fall. In fact it was known by RCA before they released the album; Elvis’s struggles to remain relevant as a musician, and the dearth of studio releases since 1962 were why RCA released the album in the first place. As the New Year approached, more soundtracks were set to be recorded, more movies were set to be made, and unless something changed, Elvis was going to find a new “career low” in 1966 to outdo the low 1965 brought on.
