Buoyed by news of the arrival of the Elvis exhibition at Londons O2, we began our Thursday with Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite, when The King wore the very eagle jumpsuit that was featured on TV this morning. On the evidence of this recording, though, the worldwide audience of one billion were witness on January 14th 1973 to a distressing diminution of The Kings powers, as compared with those fabulous Comeback Special performances just half a decade before. At Hawaii, the fire had largely subsided into schmalz, with pointless covers of songs such as My Way and even a dismal stab at the Fabs Something. Only Burning Love bristles with real intent across these four sides of vinyl. Next up on the Linn was the eponymous debut by Crazy Elephant (Major Minor, 1968), which sounded much like a cheap imitation of Vanilla Fudge, so we moved on to what proved to be a really splendid blues album by Dr Ks Blues Band (Spark, 1968), brimming with Jack Dupree-style boogie-woogie ivories, cool slide guitar and ace harmonica - all in all, very impressive, and pretty rare too. This was followed by one of Arethas bluesier outings, the excellent Soul 69 (Atlantic), before a first exposure to The Beach Boys Friends (rare mono copy, Capitol 1968), which in truth sounded like out-takes from the Smile sessions and failed to ignite, unlike Canned Heats Vintage Heat (Pye, 1970), a very brief album at around 25 minutes but one bristling with feisty blues covers by Bob Hite and the boys. Another bristling blues album was Climax Chicago Blues Bands A Lot Of Bottle (Harvest, 1970), a far more driving and aggressive effort than their Parlophone debut, featured recently. The pleasingly mellow strains of The Eagles 1972 Asylum debut were then followed by repeat plays of record one of Mans double outing Back Into The Future (United Artists, 1973), a reminder of the greatness of this hard-to-categorise Welsh outfit, enjoyed recently on a rarely seen piece of Beeb 4 video archive. Cant wait to get stuck into record two tomorrow. Lets end, though, by reminding ourselves just why He Was The King, as superfan Neil Young put it: https://youtube/watch?v=VL5d0leKh0o
Posted on: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 19:53:44 +0000