Elvis Presley: Frankie And Johnny

ELVIS PRESLEY: FRANKIE AND JOHNNY (1966)

1) Frankie And Johnny; 2) Come Along; 3) Petunia, The Gardenerʼs Daughter; 4) Chesay; 5) What Every Woman Lives For; 6) Look Out, Broadway; 7) Beginnerʼs Luck; 8) Down By The Riverside / When The Saints Go Marching In; 9) Shout It Out; 10) Hard Luck; 11) Please Donʼt Stop Loving Me; 12) Everybody Come Aboard.

General verdict: Sending Elvis down the Mississippi in 1966 seems to have worked exactly the same way as sending him to the Middle East — out of time, out of place, out of style, out of taste.

Well, it is now 1966, the year of Revolver and Pet Sounds, and at least we are not in pseudo-Ottoman Empire time any more — no, we have been merely relocated to faux-1920s, an age of vaudeville, Dixieland, crooners, and gypsy dancing. Replete with Mississippi River boating, fortune telling, gambling, visions of distant Broadway, and a cheesy happy ending, the movie managed the amazing feat of nosediving its way through stereotypes of Americana in an almost as embarrassing a fashion as Harum Scarum did with its Oriental imagery — and, once again, the soundtrack masterfully fitted the crime.

The absolute majority of the songs here faithfully recreate the musical formulas of the Jazz Age, without making these recreations interesting in the slightest — this is not so much «retro» as it is a laughably cartoonish projection of everything that could be hot and provoking back in those times. Starting off with the title track, a big band cover of the old popular standard transformed from a murder ballad into a piece of fat glitzy pomp in which Elvis cannot even play the clown with sufficient conviction; and then descending into such abysses of vaudeville cheesiness as ʽPetunia, The Gardenerʼs Daughterʼ (the kind of song youʼd usually expect to be performed without oneʼs pants on) and ʽChesayʼ (wooh, Elvis as the suave gypsy seducer!), this pathetic collection loses any glimmer of hope at redemption.

Not that it even tries. You could try to expect at least something half-decent from the albumʼs single Pomus-Shuman contribution, but ʽWhat Every Woman Lives Forʼ is a fairly lazy and totally predictable slow doo-wop dance number with a message that must have been pretty questionable even back in 1966 ("what every woman lives for is to give her love to a man" — gee, talk about presumptuous generalisations). Joy Byers, who used to be relatively reliable on the previous couple of soundtracks, must have also been caught on one of her off-days, contributing the ballad ʽPlease Donʼt Stop Loving Meʼ which uses exactly the same chord progression as approximately 10,000 other love ballads and whose lyrics were thrown together in five seconds by a human equivalent of a modern day bot.

Perhaps the most embarrassing thing on the album is a mash-up of ʽDown By The Riversideʼ and ʽWhen The Saints Go Marching Inʼ, officially credited to Bernie Baum, Bill Giant, and Florence Kaye — apparently they used some sort of loophole because of those songsʼ presence in the public domain. Admittedly, Elvis isnʼt too bad when he is singing this sort of material, but the mash-up thing feels corny, the «credits» feel lame, and trying to spice an overall rotten collection with a brief reenactment of a couple well-known classics is a pathetic idea which can only be justified by the fact that non-pathetic ideas were not officially allowed in that season — like Harum Scarum, everything here seems specially designed to make The King come across as The Clown. Long gone are the days of King Creole, when he was able to — or, well, «they» were able to make these Southern motives come alive, be fun, vibrant, and occasionally provocative. In their place we now have this sorry bunch of unintentionally parodic clichés which no respectable lover of New Orleanian culture will ever mistake for the real thing — they are every bit as comfortable as the look on Elvisʼ face as he stands there tucked into his Gone With The Wind outfit and probably wishes theyʼd send him back to the army or something, instead.