12/03/2021
If you want to hear a legendary performer completely in his element, check out this epic eight-minute version of “Merry Christmas, Baby.” Elvis recorded it in Nashville during May, 1971 when his record company expected him to produce a gospel LP, a Christmas LP, and a pop LP as well as some singles, a grueling task that most performers would not put up with. Elvis had already undergoing marathon recording sessions in 1969 in Memphis and in 1970 in Nashville, when he would knock out 30 to 40 or so songs over a few days and generate the predictable suite of hold records, a feat that was unusual even back then and that now would be essentially unthinkable. By 1971 his record company seem to think that this was a reasonable studio schedule and they were ever demanding of new product. Personally, I think it’s one of the reasons why Elvis grew tired of the studio and for the rest of his life RCA had trouble getting him in there to make records, his final 1976 studio sessions actually being held in his den in Graceland with the sound pumped out to the RCA mobile recording truck parked behind the house house.
Anyway, Elvis’ voice was sometimes strained and wobbly during these sessions, compared to those from a year earlier (and even later ones) but he still laid down some extremely righteous stuff. There was also a lot that was mediocre by his own standards, if not worse, and you could tell that he was not inspired on a great deal of this material. Elvis had to _feel_ it, basically, and he just wasn’t feeling it. This is particular true of the music coming from the direction of the Christmas LP that - as much as he supposedly loved Christmas — he was apparently not really in the mood to record. Nashville in May is certainly not that evocative of Christmas. It was hardly the season, of course, and even his classic 1957 studio recording recordings came from later in the year (September); Elvis had a Christmas tree set up in the Nashville studio for this session and it still didn’t seem to help a whole lot. There are a few exceptions where you can tell he’s enjoying himself but this is definitely the standout recording and, as has been stated more than once, it’s abundantly evident that what he _really_ should’ve been recording was a blues LP.
Elvis left us very little in the way of basic Delta blues even though it was a formative part of his personal musical style and one of the underpinnings of what became rock ‘n’ roll, and just about everything he did was infused with blues and gospel no matter what the nominal genre. He actually did an awful lot of music that would be characterized primarily as R&B, even with his unique country and rock ‘n’ roll twists on it, but very little in the way of straight, basic blues, the kind of thing you’d hear in the Mississippi Delta and the kind of thing he grew up on. He was supposedly about to record a blues LP in 1973 but it never eventuated. That’s a real pity, because like the folk-oriented LP that he was well on his way to recording in early 1971 (including his take on Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain,” that’s one of my favorite songs that Elvis recorded) — until he had to be rushed from the studio for an emergency glaucoma procedure, not returning until May — a dedicated blues LP would’ve comprised part of a nice trilogy of ‘concept’ albums following in from the great 1971 release, “Elvis Country,” that was well received even by the extremely hard-to-please and iconoclastic hipster rock critics of the time.
Anyway, this is Elvis and the boys doing what came so effortlessly to them and doing it extremely well. It’s not a studio jam. Elvis was very fond of those and a few examples of such have escaped from these sessions, including recordings of Elvis messing around with Bob Dylan songs, particularly. That’s how it always worked, right from the beginning, spending a lot of time in the studio just messing around with the band and jamming on old rock songs or gospel songs or R&B songs, sometimes playing the same tune for (as recalled by his band members) up to 30 minutes or so and just attacking it from different angles.
It actually was a bone of contention when he went to RCA from the more down-home Sun records and ran into ‘the suits,’ who demanded productivity, and here was this young Elvis punk burning up precious and expensive studio time by amusing himself with jam sessions. They didn’t understand that this was how he worked and pretty much was how he _had_ to work (for one thing, it’s pretty much how it began for him, with him fooling around in the studio during a break with “That’s All Right” on July 5, 1954) and once he got it out of his system he would knuckle down and get to work and be far more productive than most recording artists once he did. Famously, some record executives walked in on his session when he was set to record “Jailhouse Rock” in the spring of 1957 and saw him jamming on gospel songs on the piano with his backup group; they tried to disrupt it and demand that Elvis get to work. His answer was that he walked out of the studio. When he came back they knocked out the soundtrack to the classic rock ‘n’ roll movie that includes some of the best rock ‘n’ roll ever recorded. The man knew how to work and how he needed to work. That was, as they’d say now, his process.
Unlike most performers, unless he had a particular song in mind, Elvis would usually show up at the studio and only then start to listen to demo records that people were pitching to him, something that most people recording would do well beforehand. Again, he seemed to need that spontaneity. There have been a whole truckload of Bob Dylan and Chris Kristofferson songs rumored to have been recorded by Elvis during the May, 1971 sessions (when he did lay down his version of Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through The Night”) and, to the extent that any of those rumors are true, they probably refer to songs that were not caught on tape and are lost to history, as were most between-takes gems. However with Elvis the engineers knew that they might capture something interesting so sometimes they’d keep the tape rolling.
The year before, in the same studio, they recorded Elvis jamming at great length on “I Got My Mojo Working,” mixing the lyrics up with another song, and they released an edited version of it on an LP in 1971. They did the same this time around with one of two long jams of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” that they edited down for an album released in 1973. The nine-minute jam they released in truncated form came out with various edits over the years and they found a second 11-minute jam on the same song from the next day not too many years ago. There’s also an incredibly beautiful but unfortunately very short snippet of Elvis singing Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” a ca****la, in the studio during these sessions, between takes of a song that he was supposed to record. If he had laid it down as a proper recording it would’ve been one of the foremost highlights from the entirety of 1971. There’s also been released a short runthrough of “Lady Madonna” that’s very tasty, that being a song that Paul McCartney described as his ‘Elvis’ song and, sure enough, it really suited Elvis and, again, it’s a real pity he never recorded it for real. On bootleg maybe 20 years ago a little snippet escaped of Elvis singing “Johnny Be Goode” in the middle of recording tunes for the gospel LP and then singing “The First Noel” with the key word backwards “Leon…Leon.” For me, for sure, this kind of studio tomfoolery is often the most interesting part of the whole thing but, not too coincidentally, when he set about to jam on songs just for fun he often showed us more of the real Elvis than we saw in some of the studio recordings that, especially when they were not really material much in line with his personal taste, constrained him far too much.
And so it is with “Merry Christmas, Baby,” this being an example of the former, Elvis completely at home with the kind of music that he loved and lived and breathed, nothing forced on him by some creatively-absent record executive or movie script or by an A&R man or some publishing deal. It’s a glorious romp and, unlike some of the songs during these sessions that he was eager to get through and be done with, they were in no hurry at all with this one. As was with some of the other jams that Elvis did in the studio and when rehearsing, I think there was some method to the madness, as well, in that you can hear him trying different vocal approaches to the song, especially on these extended jams, that’s probably both good vocal exercise but also keeping his mind agile in terms of interpreting a song. You can hear that especially obviously, at least as far as I’ve always seen, with “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”
This Christmas blues very much has a feel of a studio jam and once they get going you can tell that’s basically what it is even if they intended to record it. It was chopped down a lot and overdubbed for release in 1971 and has been released in several other edited forms in the years since, the most complete being the undubbed and unedited version that appeared on the “Memories Of Christmas” LP in the early ‘80s, that’s almost the entire recording as released here. At that point I didn’t have the 1971 Christmas album and my only reference was a very, very short edit of this song with overdubbed strings that appeared on the “This Is Elvis” movie soundtrack LP, but once I heard that undubbed and basically unedited version there was nothing that was ever going to be any better. This release, that basically includes just the introductory studio chatter (as with most such material, definitively showing definitively how Elvis his own producer in the studio, dating back to the days when that was almost unheard of) and a little bit more of the ending than what’s on that ‘80s Christmas LP, comes from a new box set that chronicles Elvis’ 1971 Nashville Sessions and includes alternate takes and the like.
At this point Elvis wasn’t recording with hIs regulator tour band in the studio except for lead guitarist James Burton (though David Briggs, who played keyboards, would show up in his touring band a few years later). Elvis calls out Norbert Putnam, the bass player (“wake up, Putt”), and James Burton during the course of the song, as well as singing that he was putting his diamond ring through Al’s mic, Al being sound engineer Al Pachucki. Again, this may not have actually been a jam, but it has all the hallmarks of Elvis and the band just jamming. After the 1971 Nashville sessions Elvis never again recorded in Nashville but he did record with his touring band on subsequent dates in Los Angeles and Memphis. The crew here in this recording is pretty much the same one that was with him in Nashville during the marathon sessions in June of 1970 and included some of the best session players in Nashville. I’ve always particularly liked the great Charlie McCoy’s harmonica playing on this track, but everybody is fantastic and they are in a real groove because, again, this kind of stuff just came to them naturally and this particular track, that they nailed in one take (again, really more a jam at heart than anything else) is testimony to what Elvis was capable of when he was just fooling around in the studio and doing what he actually enjoyed doing.
https://youtu.be/1Z8uJS6I-M0
www.lasvegaselvistribute.com
"Merry Christmas Baby" by Elvis Presley (Unedited Version)Listen to Elvis Presley: https://Elvis.lnk.to/_listenYDSubscribe to the official Elvis Presley YouT...
