Elvis

As my life progressed it reached a few important junctions and here’s one of them.

Elvis Presley entered my life in 1963 when I saw the film ‘It Happened At The World’s Fair’ at my local ABC. It wasn’t that I was unaware of his music, his 45s were always being played on the radio, “Wooden Heart” had swamped the airwaves, as had “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, but he just hadn’t clicked with me for some reason. So imagine my surprise when after just 90 minutes my tastes in pop music completely changed, for up to that point I had been a big Adam Faith fan. The original soundtrack album for said film was soon playing on my fidelity record player, quickly joined by a couple of Golden Record collections, but I mainly purchased the movie soundtracks, including  ‘Blue Hawaii’, ‘G.I. Blues’ and ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’ Plus the EP’s ‘Kid Galahad’ and ‘Follow That Dream’, however I still didn’t appreciate the raw sound that he had generated in the 50’s, not yet anyway. I was a 60’s Elvis fan and loved albums such as “Pot Luck with Elvis”, “Elvis for Everyone” and “Something for Everybody”. I homed in on the many film soundtracks, particularly ‘Fun in Acapulco’. I really enjoyed his movies and it’s only now that I realize just what ‘quickies’ some of them were, just take a look at ‘Harem Holiday’ for one!  I loved the new Memphis albums when they were released, but didn’t even listen to any of the many ‘Live’ albums that appeared as I think I expected the audience to be a distraction, but was I so wrong, many of those live performances were truly incredible. It was not long after this that I joined the Elvis Presley record club, never  to never miss a new vinyl release. It was around this time that I’d discovered just how brilliant those early years of Elvis were and purchased “Elvis”, “For LP Fans Only”, “A Date With Elvis” and “Elvis is Back”. So by 1970 I had become an all round  Elvis fan. I had all of his LP’s, EP’s and 95% of his singles and even a couple of HMV 78 rpm’s, so when I sold my whole vinyl collection, there had probably been around 200 all told. I have replaced all of the Elvis LP’s with CD’s and still continue to enjoy them all. You can imagine my delight to find that we held the 8mm & 16mm rights to many of the Hal Wallis productions and my joy at acquiring the rights to ‘Tickle Me’, another favourite. In 1977 the Daily Mirror contacted us within days of his death in order to ask about his Hal Wallis movie ‘Blue Hawaii’, which was to be the star prize in a competition it was about to feature in the popular tabloid!  Check out Life & Time post #5 for a more detailed look at my tastes in music. I may not be able to tell you where I was or what I was doing when the news broke of  Kennedy’s assassination, but  I’ll never forget the details of where I was when I heard Elvis was dead and of my shock and disbelief!! [ It was a Tuesday and I’d just returned to the shop at 171 Stourbridge Road, after projecting a film at a working mans club. I was living over the shop and Derek had dropped me off and had headed home. As I was about to mount the stairs to the first floor the phone rang in the shop and thinking it was Derek or Anne with some query I’d answered. It was Colin Malin, he was almost in a panic and he’d past on the news that Elvis Presley was dead!]