Seventy years after his epochal debut That’s All Right invented, or at least popularised, rock’n’roll, this colossal collection – 111 tracks across five CDs (or debatable highlights on a two-LP edition) – gathers everything Elvis Presley ever recorded in his home town. It’s a rewarding retrospective, not dissimilar in breadth and depth to the kind revered visual artists get at major museums.
It runs from his early, savant, sex-driven emissions, through his responses to freakout levels of fame, on to his final, intimate Graceland grabs for grand emotion. Suspicious minds might ask if it’s anything more than yet another Elvis cash-in, but its scholarly diligence will satisfy those who just can’t help believing. The latter titanic track alluded to there is the major omission, which shows the problem with defining a box set by geography.
But there’s so much of both historic importance and physical energy here that to quibble would be to clutch one’s pearls at the young Elvis’s hip rotations. The Sun singles and RCA LP start the fire, with Baby, Let’s Play House still throbbing like a badass.
By 1969, In The Ghetto emblemises his era of seeking and achieving gravitas, while the Stax 1973 selections showcase an underrated phase, ranging from the effortlessly motoring (Promised Land) to the magnificently maudlin (My Boy). The Homecoming Concert spits out comets like Polk Salad Annie, the Graceland ‘76 trophy cupboard carries you way on down. To try to be iconoclastic about this immortal gold would be twerpish.
