Why a Newsletter? (Elvis Presley (1956) and Crisis on Infinite Earths #1)
The Ramble
Welcome to the first of what I hope will be a weekly newsletter, where I can post all my random thoughts that have nothing to do with my main work, my podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, as well as occasional updates on my writing process for that.
For many, many years I had a blog, which I used to post to at first regularly and then semi-regularly, and I loved having a space to post my thoughts. Sometimes these would just be short notes, the kind of thing I now use social media for, but other times I'd feel the urge to write an essay or a short story.
But when my podcast became better known a couple of years back, I found that I suddenly had a lot of fans who wanted to know more about me, and I'm not actually someone who likes being known about. My blog, which by that point was down to a handful of posts a year, suddenly got a lot more traffic, and I decided to take it offline. Partly for my own privacy, but also because for example there were lots of links and comments about friends who had since transitioned, using their deadnames, which I didn't have time to go through and find and edit, and there were lots of essays I would simply no longer stand by. I didn't particularly want to have to spend the rest of my life defending some badly-thought-out badly-aged take on politics that I had in 2008 or whenever, so it was easy just to take the lot offline.
At some point I may restore just those posts I think still have some value, but that's only going to be a very small portion of the whole, and figuring out which ones those were would be a mammoth task in itself.
For a while after that when I had something to say that required longform writing, I would post it to my Patreon as a free-to-read post, and some people seemed to enjoy that. But I increasingly saw in the exit surveys people complaining that they were getting emails from my Patreon about something other than my podcast. Now, my Patreon was always set up to support all my work, in whatever form that takes, but the supermajority of the people supporting it now are only interested in my podcast, and it's no fun for them or me for me to act as if it were otherwise.
So I've decided to set up this newsletter. I will tell my Patreon backers about it once, and then post everything I want to talk about here. That will include political rants, book reviews, gig reviews, progress reports on how my research for new episodes is going, and so on.
There will be the option to pay for these posts should you choose, but there will be no bonus content for paying readers or anything like that here at the moment – I make more than enough money from my Patreon and don't need additional income, and I'm also very aware that I've got a lot on my plate and can't commit to writing stuff as often as I'd like, but I am very aware as a freelancer that getting more than 40% of your income from one source is a bad idea in case that source suddenly disappears. Currently I get ninety-five percent of mine from Patreon. So I'm trying to open up new ways of making money for myself, without putting my main work in danger.
And this is an important point I need to make – this is not something that will in any way make my podcast any less frequent. Rather the opposite. One thing I've found over the years is that having two projects to work on makes it much easier to get both done. Writer's block isn't really a thing (at least for me and many writers I know) in any real sense, but project block sometimes is – you can sit down and try to get started on writing on the project you're working on, and know exactly what it is you want to say and just... nothing comes out.
But if you work on another project, you can often find the words start pouring out, and once they're coming, once you're into the flow, you can switch over smoothly to the other thing you're working on and that will come just as smoothly too. It's a weird trick, but it's one that definitely works, at least for me. And I think one of the reasons I've not been as fast as I'd like at getting the podcast done is that I've been writing that to the exclusion of everything else for the last couple of years, as slowly my other writing projects have taken a back seat.
(I've been writing this post in chunks, alternating with the latest script for the podcast every fifteen minutes or so. It's worked very well.)
So I've decided I'm going to try to do a weekly email – don't hold me to this, I start more projects than I keep up with, and one reason I'm so concerned about making sure the podcast keeps going is it's proved to me I can do a long-form project and I would hate myself if I gave up on it. I've held back this email, in fact, until I've got the very delayed next episode of the podcast written and recorded, even though that means that some of the material in this one that I hoped would be timely is less so.
And the emails are going to have four sections.
The first section will be The Ramble – a freeform section about whatever I feel like talking about at the time. Could be a gig I've been to, could be a record review, could be something that's happened in politics that week, could be something about my writing process. It will vary from week to week.
Then at the end of that section, I'll include a Weekly Link – to something I want to point people to. because one thing that I miss about the old days of the world wide web before social media ate everything is the way people used to share links.
There will then be two more sections in each newsletter, at least for the first year if everything goes to plan, and they will be based on the two events that give this newsletter its name.
Ninety years ago today, as I'm writing this (so about two weeks ago as it's published, as I'm not going to put this up until the next main podcast episode is at least recorded), on the eighth of January 1935, Elvis Presley was born. The next month, in February 1935, the first comic book published by the company that became DC Comics was published. Both Elvis and DC Comics have been massive parts of my life, and to celebrate their joint anniversaries I've decided to do two year-long review series if I can keep them up.
For Elvis, I'm going to do something I've been thinking of for a while. I'm very familiar with Elvis' catalogue, but Elvis is one of the most repackaged artists of all time, and what I've never really done is listen much to his actual albums as opposed to things like the Complete 50s Masters, Essential 60s Masters and Essential 70s Masters box sets, or the expanded reissues of the albums with all sorts of bonus tracks, and I've mostly encountered these in semi-random order.
But I recently obtained a fifty-CD box set, (originally released in 1996 by BMG Netherlands) which has all of Elvis' studio and live albums, and all the compilations of non-album singles, as released during his lifetime, plus ten "Double Feature" CDs which collect songs from film soundtracks which didn't get album releases – many of his worse mid-sixties films only had an EP's worth of songs in them, and often these songs would be compiled into random compilations released on RCA's budget Camden subsidiary – those Camden compilations are not included. Also not included, thankfully, is Having Fun With Elvis On Stage, a dreadful collection that Colonel Parker put out when he thought he saw a loophole in Elvis' contract – RCA had him signed as a singer, but if the Colonel put out an album of just Elvis' rambling on-stage banter, that wouldn't be covered by the contract and so the Colonel could get all the money. Sadly for him he was wrong, and RCA quickly prevented him from selling it and put out their own version, but literally nobody in the world needs to listen to that.
I think it might be interesting to go through them, one CD a week, for a year, in the order they're in in the box (which is, roughly, chronological order, with some wiggle for the "Double Feature" CDs which jump about a tiny bit to fit the CD format).
This might, I think, give some idea both of what it was like to experience Elvis' releases as they came out in real time, and also of his growth (and periods of stagnation) as an artist. Neither will quite be exact – these are releases as they came out in album format, and so we'll only be getting to non-album singles when they get compiled; and on the other hand, Elvis wasn't an "albums artist" – he recorded tracks, not albums, and he would often record dozens of tracks at a time, which would only later be compiled into albums by other producers – Elvis' unit of artistry was the track, not the album.
But still, I think we'll find something of interest in the process of going through Elvis' albums one at a time.
And for DC Comics, they handily had a year-long project to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary, starting forty years ago this month. Crisis On Infinite Earths was one of the first of what is now a staple of superhero comics, the line-wide "crossover" series, in which all a company's heroes and villains team up to fight some new menace. In this case, the story was an excuse to rewrite the history of DC's fictional universe to make it more coherent. At least, that was the idea...
Crisis ran for twelve issues, one per month, but it also affected almost all the other comics that DC put out in 1985, with some comics just being what were called "red sky" crossovers – because the sky would be red in one panel and someone would mention it – but others having complicated plot interactions with the main storyline.
These issues ran from January through December 1985, but for complicated reasons due to the way that comics were distributed decades ago, they're cover-dated from April 1985 through March 1986.
So for the next year I will post a review of the corresponding month's issue of Crisis On Infinite Earths in the first week of each month (or in this case the fourth, as I've held this back until getting my podcast done), and then every other week I will review one of the other crossover issues – an issue of Batman or Swamp Thing or Superman or whatever – that came out that month. I might, after I hit issue twelve, continue looking at other comics that came after this.
Crisis on Infinite Earths was only a qualified success, as we'll see, but it was, for the time, a genuinely entertaining superhero comic – and it came at a point where DC was just starting to make some major changes to its line, including bringing on many new British creators who would go on to change the face of superhero comics. I became a fan of superhero comics a few years after Crisis, and as a kid I was specifically a fan of DC comics in particular, and for me the Platonic ideal of superhero comics will always be the material that DC put out between 1985, when Crisis started, and the end of 1993, when the Death of Superman storyline came out and brought an end to their imperial phase.
Not everything that DC put out then was any good, but Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol and Animal Man, Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle's Batman, the early issues of Sandman (which in retrospect are tainted by their writer's behaviour), Justice League International, and many more are genuinely good by any standards, while things like the "triangle number" era of Superman are ridiculous superhero soap-opera melodrama but done as well as that kind of thing ever can be – the kind of thing that reads like Great Literature to at least a particular kind of eleven-to-fifteen-year-old boy, as I was when I encountered those for the first time.
So this is formative material for me, and I think it will be interesting to look back on it. We'll see.
So that's this week's intro – now on with what I hope will be the regular features.
Weekly Link
This week, I'd like to point people to this video https://thedailytism.com/the-daily-tism-news/ by The Daily Tism. The Daily Tism, for those who don't know, is a satire site along the lines of the Onion, the Daily Mash and similar, but focused only on humour about autism and autistic people, and they recently released their first in what is planned to be a series of occasional ten-minute sketch shows (It's a Christmas special and we're past Christmas now, but funny is still funny). It's run by Sara Gibbs and Elsa Williams, two great comedy writers, and full disclosure – Sara is also one of my closest friends, and I've written a couple of guest pieces for the site in the past (though nothing for the video), but I'd be recommending this anyway. If you're autistic, like I am, you'll love it.
Elvis Album of the Week 1: Elvis Presley (1956)
Elvis' first album is a curious historical document of an artist in transition. Elvis had signed to Sun Records in 1954 and had released five singles on the label over a period of a little under eighteen months, the last of which, "I Forgot to Remember to Forget"/"Mystery Train", was reissued by RCA when he signed to that label at the end of 1955, and made number one on the country charts.
After that, and the massive success of "Heartbreak Hotel", his first single for RCA, RCA decided to put out an album which was made up, essentially, of outtakes. Five tracks recorded for Sun and left unreleased at the time – three country covers, an old standard, and an R&B cover – were included on the album, as were three tracks recorded at the session for "Heartbreak Hotel" (two cover versions of R&B hits and one new country song brought in by Hill and Range, the publishing company that Elvis was contracted with) and four tracks from a hastily-arranged follow-up session – covers of two recent hits, a song originally recorded by one of Elvis' favourite singers, Roy Hamilton, and a new pop-country song that Steve Sholes, the A&R man in charge of the sessions, had brought in.
So the album was a mixed bag. It effectively had four producers, though none were credited – Sam Phillips had produced the Sun sessions; Steve Sholes, RCA's A&R man, was nominally in charge of the RCA sessions; Chet Atkins, who was a session guitarist on one of the sessions, likely ran that session for Sholes – Atkins was one of the most important producers in the industry, while Sholes was an executive who was rather hands-off; and it's well established that Elvis generally ran his own sessions for the most part.
Yet it's generally considered one of Elvis' greatest albums, and one of the defining albums of the rock and roll genre. Even the artwork for it is important – the cover of the Clash's London Calling, among many others, is an homage to it. It was the first rock and roll album to make number one, it was a huge seller, and it regularly makes lists of the greatest albums of all time, and is generally ranked very highly among Elvis' work – vulture.com, for example, doing a ranking of all Elvis' albums, rated it as far and away his best.
However, its reputation isn't quite as good among Elvis' fandom – it's generally considered one of his better albums, certainly, but far from his best, and it's easy to see why – the album is essentially a summary of Elvis' live repertoire at the time, as a performer of primarily cover versions, before he started having hits with songs specifically tailored to him. These are generally cover versions of great records, and the problem is that a cover version of a great record very rarely transcends the original. With a couple of exceptions, these are not radical reworkings.
Now before I get into the song-by-song breakdown, I need to emphasise something – this was how the record industry worked in 1956. A lot of discourse around Elvis' work conflates these cover versions – released as album filler tracks – with the kind of recording that Georgia Gibbs or the Crew Cuts did, where they would remake an R&B record before it became a hit, in a near-identical version, and get the hit in its place. All the songs Elvis was covering had already been hits, and had had their success. Also, these were clearly album fillers – though in a strange decision RCA did, a few months later, release all twelve tracks simultaneously as six singles, none of which charted.
This was not, as some have portrayed it, some terrible act of cultural appropriation. It was just how every performer worked in the days before it became customary for popular performers to write their own material – everyone, of whatever race, would record cover versions of the latest hits in their own style.
In order to help people understand the comparisons I'm making, I've put together a Mixcloud playlist at https://www.mixcloud.com/AndrewHickey/elvis-first-album-the-originals/ with the original versions of the songs that Elvis covers on the album. To keep the flow the same, I've included Elvis' versions of the songs that are original to the album rather than cover versions.
The album opens with probably its strongest track, "Blue Suede Shoes". Elvis takes Carl Perkins' recent hit, recorded at the same Sun studios, and kicks it up a gear. Where Perkins' original has a stop-start intro – there are pauses after "well it's one for the money" and "two for the show" in the first verse which make it sound like he's counting down, but also makes the record less danceable. With Elvis, on the other hand, the pauses in the first verse are the same length as in the subsequent verses – there's an energy to the record right from the start, no buildup. Elvis and his band take the track slightly faster than the Perkins version, but instrumentally Elvis, Scotty Moore, and Bill Black stick relatively closely to what Carl, Jay, and Clayton Perkins were doing, though Black's bass is a bit more mobile, and Moore's guitar a little more flashy – they're recognisably the same kind of parts though. The main instrumental difference is in the drumming – Fluke Holland, on the Perkins original, is barely audible, just hitting the two and four very plainly, with more of the percussion on the record coming from the bass than from the drums.
But on Elvis' recording, DJ Fontana's drumming is right up front and centre, with him playing frenetic fills going in to the choruses (except, curiously, the last one, where everything drops down to Bill Black's bass, for a second).
The other major difference is Elvis' vocal. Where Perkins' is a laid-back humorous shrug, Elvis' is a blast of angry energy.
While Elvis' record is clearly modelled on Perkins', the result is an object lesson in the difference between an extremely good record and a great one. Perkins' record is a fun honky-tonk record that is in the upper tier of early rockabilly records, but Elvis' version blasts it away.
The second song, "I'm Counting on You", is a song that was provided to Elvis by Hill and Range, and which had never been performed before. Writer Don Robertson later said of it "When I finished writing 'I'm Counting On You' in my studio in North Hollywood, I played it over the phone for my New York publishers, Jean and Julian Aberbach. They liked it a lot and said, 'We think we can get you a big artist on that'. Jean called me about it a few months later. He was apologetic and said, 'We didn't get you a big name artist, but there's this new singer who everybody thinks is going to be really hot and his name is Elvis Presley'. I was very disappointed at the time because I was expecting a big name artist, not someone I had never heard of with a contrived stage name."
The song is not a highlight of the album. though it's by no means bad. It's a rather plodding country ballad, and there seems to be an air of "will this do?" about the entire performance. Floyd Cramer's simple triplet piano chords are echoed by the backing vocals (Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires, plus two of the Speer Family, a different gospel vocal group – Elvis had wanted the full Jordanaires group, who would back him on most of his recordings for the next decade or so, but RCA had wanted to use cheaper singers they had under contract, for these sessions by an unproven young performer. As with several of the RCA-recorded tracks for this album, the production team have tried to duplicate the slapback echo from Sam Phillips' Sun productions, but gone a little too far. It's a perfectly pleasant but unexceptional bit of album filler.
"I Got a Woman", the third track, is a cover version of Ray Charles' R&B number one from a year earlier, which in turn was based on the gospel song "It Must be Jesus". Elvis' version is recorded in the same style as his version of "Blue Suede Shoes", but with Fontana here simply keeping to a steady beat. It's a more countrified version of Charles' original, with an arrangement that's slightly more sophisticated than one might think at first listen – there are actually two basslines going on here. Bill Black's thumping, clicking, double bass is playing a standard country boogie part, though recording techniques mean it sounds more like a percussion part than an actual bass, while Cramer plays the more prominent tresillo bass line on a piano that's otherwise almost inaudible until the end – it's almost entirely a one-handed part.
The result is not a patch on Ray Charles' original, but it's a perfectly enjoyable record of its type, and would remain part of his regular live show for pretty much his entire career.
"One-Sided Love Affair" is another song that was brought in for Elvis rather than a cover version, this time apparently suggested by Steve Sholes. A completely nondescript country boogie, by one Bill Campbell (who appears to have written about three other songs, if they're by the same Bill Campbell as some sites suggest), this and "I'm Counting on You" show the start of a worrying trend – when Elvis was covering other people's records, he had impeccable taste; when he was picking songs written for him, he would also choose songs by great songwriters like Leiber and Stoller, Pomus and Shuman, and Otis Blackwell. But when songs were brought in for him to record at the suggestion of outside producers, or of Hill & Range, they would often be mediocre at best. "One-Sided Love Affair" is certainly not a bad record, but nor is it a particularly good one. It just... exists.
We then move back to 1954, to a recording of "I Love You Because", a country hit for Leon Payne in 1949. Elvis' version of the song, a gentle ballad, was cut at the same session at which his first single, "That's All Right Mama", was recorded, and had been put aside as not the right kind of thing for his first release. It's close to the material he'd cut on the two discs he'd recorded on his own for his mother – a popular sentimental ballad – and he performs it extremely well. The recording is in some ways a little shaky – Elvis, Scotty, and Bill were still sounding out each other as musicians, and Scotty's playing is a little too fiddly for the song, and Elvis' voice is nowhere near as confident as it would soon become – but you'd still never believe that this was the work of a teenage boy at his very first professional recording session. A minor highlight of the album.
We follow that with "Just Because", another Sun offcut. This was a track originally recorded in 1929 by Nelstone's Hawaiians, but Elvis' version owes more to the 1933 version by the Shelton Brothers, a country harmony duo of the kind Elvis' mother loved (she was a big fan of the Louvin Brothers in particular). He takes it at the same tempo as them, but where they're singing in a relatively bored-sounding close harmony, there's a humour and a sort of self-mocking anger in Elvis' performance. Elvis is clearly singing the song from memory – he gets half the lyrics wrong – but weirdly his semi-improvised take on the lyrics is much better than the "proper" version (though this may be my opinion partly just because Elvis' version was the one I grew up on, so it sounds "right", but it also sounds more like actual vernacular speech, more natural). A recording from shortly after his first single was released, with just Elvis, Scotty, Bill, and Scotty and Bill's former bandmate Doug Poindexter, this is an absolute highlight of the album, and one of the tracks where he absolutely improves over any earlier version and makes the track his own, and it's bizarre that this was left in the can nearly two years.
Sadly the same can't be said for Elvis' version of "Tutti Frutti". While it's nowhere near as bad as something like Pat Boone's version, and DJ Fontana's drumming has some real passion to it, Elvis was fundamentally just too restrained a performer to come anywhere close to Little Richard's joyous scream. He's copying Little Richard very closely, but it's just... polite. People sometimes accuse Elvis of copying his style from Black artists, and it's tracks like this that they're talking about, but fundamentally if this was all there was to Elvis, nobody would know his name. He's not a great fit for the material, and his heart doesn't seem to be in it. Little Richard's brand of R&B is just not the kind of thing that Elvis fit stylistically.
"Trying to Get to You", on the other hand, is an R&B song that Elvis absolutely made his own. Originally recorded by an obscure doo-wop group called the Eagles (not, obviously, the "Hotel California" ones), this was written by the great R&B songwriting team of Rose Marie McCoy and Charles Singleton, who together and separately wrote classics for Ike & Tina Turner, Louis Jordan, Nappy Brown, Big Joe Turner, Ruth Brown, and more. Elvis clearly actually loved this rather obscure R&B song, as he attempted it twice during the Sun sessions, both times, unusually for him, playing piano on the session. This recording is his second attempt at the song, from July 1955, and again had been left in the can despite being a truly great recording.
It might be, indeed, that this wasn't intended as a finished master take at the time – one of the things that distinguishes some of these Sun outtakes both from the tracks that were actually released while Elvis was at Sun and from the material recorded for RCA is that Scotty Moore's guitar playing on these tracks is both more inventive and more hesitant than on the things that saw release straight away. At times he sounds like he's soloing while Elvis is singing – and jazz solos rather than the country boogie solos he goes for when he's actually playing a solo intended as such – but that's all to the good.
This is one of the definitive Elvis tracks, and remained in his live set right up until the end – it appears on the very last album he recorded, the live album In Concert recorded two months before his death and released posthumously.
"I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry Over You" was originally recorded in 1954 by one of Elvis' vocal idols, Roy Hamilton, and in his version it was a pleasant but unexceptional slightly-swung R&B track, one that already sounded slightly outdated when it was recorded. Elvis turns it into an uptempo hillbilly boogie, dominated by Bill Black's walking bassline, with little splashes of piano from Shorty Long and some oddly jazzy drum fills from Fontana (who is not often mentioned for his contributions to Elvis' records, with people thinking of them primarily in terms of Elvis and with Scotty Moore a distant second, but who is the secret weapon on several of the RCA tracks here, having only joined the band shortly before these sessions). We're increasingly seeing a pattern here with the cover versions of truly great records being mediocre, as Elvis tries to stick too closely to someone else's template and performance, but with the covers of merely good records being much more interesting, as he reworks them into his own style. This isn't the best thing on the album by any means, but it's definitely in the upper tier of the tracks on it.
"I'll Never Let You Go, Little Darlin'", though, is an exception to this. Jimmy Wakeley's original record is a perfectly decent if unexceptional singing cowboy record a la Gene Autry, rather spoiled by some shifts in tempo from verse to verse, suddenly turning into an approximation of a tango at one point. Going by the rule of thumb above, Elvis' version, recorded during the Sun sessions, should therefore be great. And it's not terrible, and it does rework the song into something very different – a slow, aching ballad, with some Spanish-style guitar from Moore and plodding, single-note-per-bar verse bass from Black. And where the original shifts into a Latin feel, Elvis' version kicks up into an uptempo rockabilly track. It's a much more successful version of the transition that Wakeley has, precisely because it's a more abrupt change into a much more distinct style. In Wakeley's original it sounds a little like the band have just forgotten what they're meant to be doing half way through, while here it's a clear change, and one that's signalled by a change in Presley's vocal style.
But at the same time, the track sounds rather hesitant, almost like a run-through rather than a finished take. It sounds like an experiment towards the more successful version of the same idea he used soon after recording this on his version of "Milkcow Blues Boogie", released as his third Sun single, where he starts out the song as a slow ballad before stopping the track, saying "Now hold it, that don't move me, let's get real, real gone..." and kicking into an uptempo version.
The next Sun offcut, though, "Blue Moon", is the best track on the album, and possibly one of the best things that Elvis ever recorded. It's a quite astonishing reworking of a song that was already overfamiliar from decades of recordings by people like Connee Boswell (of the Boswell Sisters, who sang the song I use as my podcast's theme tune) and Mel Tormé, whose velvet-fog version had been a hit five years before Elvis' recording.
But Elvis's version is unlike any of them – and really is unlike anything anyone had done before or since. He strips the song down to almost nothing – Bill Black plays the famous four-chord "Heart and Soul" style bassline, Elvis strums an acoustic guitar so far down in the mix it's almost inaudible, and Scotty Moore uses his electric guitar as a percussion instrument, muting the strings to get a clip-clop clicking sound. Elvis cuts out the middle eight of the song altogether, so there's no release from the four-chord cycle, and he also removes the final verse. Where the song as written has a happy ending, with the protagonist now finally having "a love of my own", here there's only the first two verses, the verses about being alone and saying a prayer for someone. The prayer isn't answered, and instead the lyrics slowly deteriorate into wordless falsetto howls with occasional interjections of "without a love of my own".
And the falsetto is astonishing. Peter Guralnick compares it to both the falsetto of early doo-wop groups and to Slim Whitman's yodelling on "Indian Love Call", and there are definitely elements of both in there, but it's something else, something indescribable, and unlike anything I've heard before.
I was talking a couple of months ago with a friend (who stops reading anything as soon as his name is mentioned in it, so I won't) who asked me if I knew if Elvis' version of the song was based on any earlier version, and I said that as far as I know I don't, and he said "Well that, right there, is evidence enough for Elvis as a major artist, isn't it?"
And it's in an outtake recorded when he was nineteen and not released until eighteen months later.
And the album closes with one of the better close copies of a great record. Elvis' take on Jesse Stone's "Money Honey" is very, very, close to the original by Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters. Other than the absence of saxophone (because Elvis was nominally a country artist at the point he was signed, recording in Nashville, and so the instrumentation is country rather than R&B) and backing vocals (less understandable, as there were backing vocalists on other tracks he recorded in Nashville) the arrangement is largely modelled on the Drifters' version, and Elvis is once again modelling his performance on McPhatter's original – though he cuts out the semi-improvised bits at the end of the record – but he seems far more comfortable with this than with some of the other R&B covers. And indeed (spoilers for when we get to 1960) he seems to have generally been comfortable with McPhatter's material, with one of the better covers on the Elvis Is Back! album being of McPhatter's "Such a Night". It's arguably a slightly better record than the Drifters' original, though there's not much in it, and it depends on how much you prize originality, your opinions on to what extent Elvis' recording of this is cultural appropriation, and other factors that are not really in the grooves themselves.
And that's how Elvis' first album ends. A collection of recordings made in two different cities, over two years, with multiple producers, different lineups of musicians (though with the core of Scotty and Bill on every track) and some of it only questionably intended for release at the time of recordings, this would seem at first to be a sign that my idea of following Elvis' work in chronological order so I can see his artistic growth was probably a bad idea. But the thing is, this album, even though it's compiled in that manner, and even though it's the work of someone barely out of his teens (indeed someone still in his teens on some of the earliest recordings) does hang together surprisingly well, and gives a good sign of what artistic influences Elvis was drawing on as he went from being a moderately successful singer with a few country hits to being the most famous person in the entire world.
It's not a complete guide to his influences by any means – in particular there's none of the Southern Gospel on here that was such a big part of his upbringing, and you can't really see the love of light opera that would start to show through a little later – but the mixture of contemporary R&B and rockabilly made by people of his generation, light pop songs from the Brill Building, and cover versions of country music from his parents' generation is a pretty good idea of where his interests lay musically. Not everything he would go on to do in the next twenty-one years is here in a prototype form, but a lot more than you might think is.
What's really astonishing is that he emerged as a fully-formed artist. Even the least promising performances on here show him absorbing other artists' styles like a sponge, figuring out which of their techniques work for him, and putting his own spin on them. He was born with a great voice and good looks, but what's really astonishing about him is the way he used those in-built advantages.
Elvis often doesn't get talked about as a serious musician, in part because he was not much of an instrumentalist (though as noted he does play rhythm guitar or piano on every track here, and he would later play bass on at least one track – he was no virtuoso instrumentalist, but he was perfectly capable of accompanying himself) or songwriter. But his art, the art of interpreting a song, is a valid artform too, and this album shows him already seeming fully formed.
But he would get better. Much better...
Crisis on Infinite Earths #1
And here we're going to start our look at the DC Comics of 1985 with the first issue of Crisis on Infinite Earths. Crisis wasn't the first big linewide crossover a superhero comic company had put out – that had been Secret Wars, which Marvel had released shortly before this, as part of a tie-in promotion with a toy manufacturer, and which many in the industry said was rushed out when they heard about DC's plans. And Secret Wars was much more of a phenomenon in the general culture than Crisis was – I remember seeing Secret Wars branded toys at the time (I was about six when the series was released, and American comics themselves were almost impossible to get hold of) while I didn't hear about Crisis until several years later. But Crisis was the series that convinced the publishers that this kind of crossover was something they should repeat, and it was also the series that convinced comic readers that they could matter.
In many ways, the American superhero comics publishers have spent the last forty years trying to recapture this moment.
Crisis on Infinite Earths is a series that, from the outset, contained a major flaw in its conception, a contradiction that meant that it fundamentally had to be a failure at what it set out to do. But it was a spectacular failure, and one that is worth examining in detail.
Only a minority of my readers will be people with any familiarity at all with superhero comics, so a brief explanation is in order – although less of an explanation than would have been necessary a decade or two ago.
Nowadays, the concept of the multiverse is all over pop culture, with many people complaining about multiverse fatigue, but in the early 1960s it was a novel one, and a fun hook to hang stories for children on. And in 1961 Gardner Fox, a writer for DC Comics, came up with a fun one – Flash of Two Worlds.
You see, in the 1940s, All-American Publications (one of a small number of interconnected companies that merged to form DC) had published a comic about the adventures of a character known as The Flash – a man named Jay Garrick who had superpowers that allowed him to run superhumanly fast, and who dressed up in a costume reminiscent of Hermes to fight crime. He would sometimes team up with other characters like Green Lantern and Wonder Woman in a team known as the Justice Society of America, and was a relatively popular, but not massively so, character.
The comic book industry, and the popularity of superheroes, goes through peaks and troughs, and in the late forties the Flash's comics were cancelled, and in 1951 so was the Justice Society's.
In 1956, though, writer Robert Kanigher and artist Carmine Infantino came up with a new version of the Flash character. This Flash had similar powers, but a very different costume, and his secret identity was Barry Allen rather than Jay Garrick. Their new version of the Flash was a hit, and so over the next few years revised versions of some other old characters were created, like a new Green Lantern – Green Lantern was now a pilot named Hal Jordan who got his power ring from a dying alien, rather than Allan Scott, a railway engineer who got his ring's powers from a magic lamp.
These new characters were also popular, and in 1960 a new team was created much like the old Justice Society, featuring these newer versions of the characters. This team, the Justice League of America, was also a hit.
Up to this point, superhero comics had been solely aimed at young children, with the assumption that people would only read them for a handful of years and then move on to more adult material. But by the early sixties it was obvious that there were at least a small number of adults who still read them, and remembered the comics of the forties with some affection.
And so it was decided to do a story where Barry Allen met Jay Garrick and teamed up. To explain why there were two superheroes called The Flash who had both teamed up with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and others, but this had never been commented on, writer Gardner Fox (who had co-created the original Jay Garrick Flash and wrote this story) introduced a metafictional element. Barry Allen, you see, had been inspired to call himself The Flash by the comic book adventures of Jay Garrick, stories written by one Gardner Fox who said the stories came to him in dreams – but it turned out that Fox's dreams had been him tuning in to messages from a world on "another vibrational frequency".
Barry Allen managed to vibrate so fast that he crossed the barrier to this other world and met his counterpart, and the two had an adventure together. This was popular enough that it soon became a more-or-less-annual tradition for the members of the Justice League to travel to Earth-2 (as the world in which Garrick lived was known) to team up with the members of the Justice Society, their otherworldly counterparts. Some of these, like The Flash and Green Lantern, were totally different characters, while others, like Superman and Batman, who had continuous publication histories, were the same characters but older – the "Golden Age" versions of the characters, as opposed to these new "Silver Age" versions. Superman and Batman of Earth-2 had been around since the 1940s, so they were older and greyer, and Earth-2 Superman was less powerful than Earth-One Superman, because in the earliest Superman comics he'd not had all the powers he was given in later stories.
These worlds were soon joined by others – there was Earth-3, an evil mirror universe where all "our" superheroes had supervillainous counterparts and Lex Luthor was the only superhero, Earth X (originally intended as Earth [swastika] before a last-minute change) where the Nazis had won and the superheroes were fighting in an ongoing resistance... and when DC bought up other companies, like Charlton Comics or the characters from Fawcett Comics' Captain Marvel line, their stories were claimed to have occurred on other earths in the multiverse too.
This also allowed DC to do stories that they could never do with the main versions of the characters – Superman could get married, or Batman die, and it would be the "real" Superman or Batman, in fact the original ones who had been in the very first stories about those characters, but it would still not disrupt the status of the characters in their own comics.
And this state of affairs lasted for about twenty years, until DC made the mistake so many entertainment companies make. They started listening to the complaints of fans.
You see, in 1961, around the time the Justice League started and the Flash of Two Worlds story happened, a competitor to DC known as Timely Comics started publishing comics about a new superhero team, the Fantastic Four. That team had been a hit, and the company, which soon changed its name to Marvel Comics, added many more characters – Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, the Hulk, the Avengers, the X-Men, and many more.
Marvel's comics were soon outselling DC's, and the reasons in retrospect seem to be very obvious – they were a little bit hipper, had more exciting art, and had something closer to actual characterisation. In the sixties, the average Marvel title was simply better than the average DC title, and they gained a position of market dominance that basically never went away.
By the early eighties, a generation of new people were starting to work for DC Comics, and these people had two things in common that hadn't been the case for earlier generations – they had started out as fans of comic books before getting into the business, and they'd worked at Marvel in the seventies before moving over to DC. And so their idea of what made for good comics was grounded in Marvel's aesthetic rather than in what DC had been doing previously.
Now, these people were often very, very, very talented, and they revitalised DC's comics enormously, but they did this by making DC's early eighties comics more like the comics that Marvel had been releasing in the seventies. And they were looking at the comics like comics fans, and particularly like Marvel Comics fans.
And one of the things that Marvel fans liked about Marvel Comics was something called the "Marvel Universe".
In the early sixties, almost all the Marvel titles had been the work of a handful of creators, mostly writer/pencillers Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko and editor/dialogue writer Stan Lee. This meant that when a new title was introduced, or when an older character needed a boost, it made sense for a character to turn up in another one's comic. This had happened with DC of course, but without any consistency. With Marvel, though, most of the characters lived in New York and were written and drawn by the same people – they felt like they interacted, and things in one comic could be casually referenced in another (with a reminder from Smiling Stan to check out the issue in question, on sale now!)
And this was something the fans felt was missing from DC Comics. And they thought they knew the reason for that – this multiverse business. It was just too confusing. Nobody could possibly follow it! Which universe were characters even from?! Nobody could follow this stuff.
Now, as someone who read a lot of DC multiverse stories as a very small child, random stories reprinted in cheap UK reprints out of context, I can tell you that this is nonsense. Any small child could follow the stories, because there would be some dialogue from someone saying "It's Ultraman! He has Superman's powers, but he's from Earth-3, where they have supervillains instead of superheroes!" and that would get you up to speed just fine. Nobody was actually confused by this. Rather they had an aesthetic preference for stories taking place on one universe, with one consistent set of characters.
And so, for DC's fiftieth anniversary, it was decided that that was what they would be given. DC Comics would put out a twelve-issue series, featuring almost every character in their superhero universes – hundreds of them – and with ripple effects in every title they were currently publishing. And at the end of it, there would be one, consistent, DC universe, not a multiverse.
The tagline for Crisis on Infinite Earths was "Worlds will live, worlds will die and nothing will ever be the same" and that was certainly the case, as we see even in the first few pages of issue one, by writer/editor Marv Wolfman (with plotting assistance in these early issues from Bob Greenberger and Len Wein), penciller George Perez, inker Dick Giordano, and colourist Tony Tollin.
Wolfman and Perez were the team behind the most popular current DC comics, the New Teen Titans, but Perez was also the only person who could realistically have done this comic, simply because one of the things he was known for was being able to do crowd scenes with dozens or even hundreds of characters while making them distinct, and given that this story contains literally thousands of characters, including multiple variant versions of some of them, there was nobody else who could have done it.
Wolfman's dialogue and captions are very, very overwrought and melodramatic, but this also makes perfect sense for a comic about the death of an infinite number of universes, a comic with such scope that it starts with the big bang – for which Wolfman's captions lean to the Biblical:
"In the beginning, there was only one. A single black infinitude. ...so cold and so dark for so very long... ...that even the burning light was imperceptible. But the light grew, and the infinitude shuddered... ...and the darkness finally... screamed, as much in pain as in relief. For in that moment, a multiverse was born. A multiverse of worlds vibrating and replicating. And a multiverse that should have been one, became many." (Idiosyncratic punctuation as in original).
Over the next few pages we see people running screaming from something represented just as whiteness, as the blank page destroys a previously-unencountered universe, while one figure (who we later discover is a character named Pariah) watches, helpless. The story then switches to Earth-3, as the Crime Syndicate, the villainous counterparts of the Justice League find themselves at the end of their lives having to become heroes, trying to save the world they have been ruling as despots, and eventually sacrificing themselves heroically, while Alexander Luthor, that universe's only hero, sends his newborn son off into the void, in a manner clearly reminiscent of Jor-El and Lara sending baby Kal-El off to become Superman.
After this powerful opening, most of the rest of the issue is something of an anticlimax. A character known as the Monitor, who had been seeded in most DC comics with a panel or two for the previous couple of years, sends out his assistant Harbinger – who can split into multiple versions of herself and then reintegrate those versions into one – to gather together a team of superpowered individuals from across time, space, and realities – King Solivar, the king of Gorilla City, a city of sapient apes, from our present day; Dawnstar, a member of the thirtieth century Legion of Superheroes; Firebrand, a heroine from Earth-2, taken from the middle of World War II; Blue Beetle, from the Earth on which Charlton comics characters apparently live; the Psycho-Pirate, a supervillain with the power to control people's minds; Arion, a magician from Atlantis, from 45,000 years ago; enemies Firestorm and Killer Frost; and several more whose collections we don't see.
As it will turn out, most of these characters have little to do in the narrative that will unfold, and the main reason for them being collected (other than a big fight scene at the end, after they're all attacked by shadow demons whose purpose will be explained in a future issue, one of whom infects one of Harbinger's selves so that when she reintegrates there's a seed of darkness within her) is simply to show that this is indeed a crisis that will affect every world.
And this is, of course, the problem with this whole idea. For Crisis on Infinite Earths to work as a narrative – and it really does, if one is used to the melodramatic conventions of superhero comics of the 1980s, in which every character had to find an excuse to announce their names, powers, and relationship to the other characters as soon as possible to bring readers up to speed – it has to glory in the narrative possibilities of the multiverse. It has to be about why readers love that kind of story.
And despite many people now having multiverse fatigue, there is a lot to love about stories of multiverses. They're a storytelling technique which may now be overused, but which allow creators to tell stories from multiple different angles, and with multiple different points of view. They allow narrative possibilities that simply don't exist in any other form, and for us to see funhouse-mirror reflections of beloved characters, alternative paths a story might have taken. And for a genre that is – and certainly was at that time – geared primarily to the imaginative ten-year-old, the gosh-wow factor should not be underestimated.
The whole of Crisis on Infinite Earths is, it turns out, a love letter to the very thing it set out to destroy, and shows exactly why it should not have been destroyed at all. And it's so effective at that that it made it inevitable that the multiverse would eventually return (though it took much longer than anyone familiar with the cyclical nature of superhero comics might have predicted, and didn't make a full-blown return for twenty years).
Because before Crisis, it was perfectly possible to read most DC comics and not even really be aware that the multiverse existed. It was a driver for occasional stories, but it was never the focus of the whole line or anything like that. You could read years' worth of Batman stories at a time without ever coming across an Earth-2 version. If people had actually found the concept unappealing, as the prevailing wisdom then was, it would have been easy enough just to... not do any more multiverse stories, and otherwise carry on as normal.
Instead, they did a line-wide crossover with the multiverse front and centre, with the most popular talents currently working for the company driving it, and everything about the series tells you "this is why the multiverse is great, this is what storytelling possibilities it opens up, this is exactly why this is special and why it's something that should be celebrated" – precisely as it's shutting down those possibilities and making sure nobody can use them again.
Like Harbinger, infected with a shadow demon so that when she integrates herself the shadow demon's darkness can spread, Crisis contained the seeds of its own downfall. There was no world among the infinite universes where writers wouldn't read this and not immediately want to play, themselves, with the toys that Crisis was meant to be throwing away. But taken on its own terms, Crisis on Infinite Earths issue one is about as good as a 1985 superhero comic could get.
We'll look at Crisis 2 next month, but come back here in a week's time for Elvis' second album, another DC comic from 1985, and whatever else I feel like talking about.
