ELVIS: "ON STAGE, FEBRUARY 1970"

Original Released as LP RCA Victor LSP 4362
(US, June 1970)

This was the album that made me “discover” the King. Until then I was more a Cliff & The Shadows fan and Elvis was just the guy who used to sing some nice songs in movies I had seen. It was early April, 1971, and I was enjoying some holidays in Johannesburg, S.A.. A theatre called “Metro” was showing “That’s The Way It Is”, a Presley show filmed by director Dennis Sanders and I went to see it just because the publicity announced the excitement of the “6 Stereophonic Channels”, something completely new in those days. When the session reached its end, the first thing I’ve done was to run to the nearest record shop and buy this album. And the day after I was again on-line to buy another ticket ...

"On Stage" was Elvis second live album. It was released in June 1970, almost one year after his triumphant return to perfoming and seven months after his first double album, "From Memphis To Vegas / From Vegas To Memphis", half of which had been his first-concert recording. As he began to consider perfoming again, Elvis realized that he could no longer depend wholly upon original songs generated by his publishing movies a year. Instead, he revisited some of his fifties hits, usually at a considerably faster tempo, while passing over almost all of his sixties hits. He rounded out the shows with his latest hits, other peoples’ hits and songs that held personal significance for him. Not since his earliest days had he incorporated so many cover songs into his act. Elvis wove these vert different songs into a new tapestry of American music. Six songs have now been added to the original program: “In The Ghetto”, “Don’t Cry Daddy”, “Kentucky Rain”, “Suspicious Minds”, “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and “Long Tall Sally”. In retrospect, we can see that Elvis was giving us his new vision of music for a new decade. Every one of these sixteen songs had some significance or meaning for him, and, as was always the case, he forged them into a uniquely personal statement. Six months after, by Christmas, appeared the second live album from the same shows. It was called, like the movie, "That's The Way It Is".