Review by Trevor Cajiao - Elvis: The Man And His Music
Destination USA, the first disc of which contains a soundboard recording of the September 4 1972 dinner show from Las Vegas - or at least was supposed to.
Due to a monumental cock-up on the mastering front, the opening ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ / ‘C.C. Rider’ segment has been replaced by the same numbers from the March 1 1974 Tulsa show on FTD‘s Sold Out! release from last year! Boy, that’s some error. Replacing two tracks from a 1972 concert with two from a 1974 concert really takes some doing! It's certainly a step up from using an incorrect take (as has happened in the past), that’s for sure.
FTD have, however, produced corrected discs so contact your favoured dealer if you've already bought a copy and need a replacement.
The show itself has been out twice before: first as I‘ll Remember You (Rock Legends) in 1998 (wrongly dated as being from August 15 1972), then again on Madison’s A Hilton Double Shot! in 2009. There’s a slight improvement in the sound here but there's still a lot of tape hiss and it’s far from a dynamic performance - more of a workman- like show with Elvis rather subdued for the most part. But that's hardly surprising. He was coming to the end of this particular Vegas season and, due to the fact that an extra 3am show had been added earlier that day, this was the fourth performance he’d done in twenty-four hours - with the final show of the season just a couple of hours away. Bloody ridiculous.
A second disc features further live (RCA multi-track) and rehearsal (amateur cassette) recordings - all of which are previously unreleased. RCA first dipped into the cache of February 1972 Vegas tapes (only selected songs were captured - no complete shows) for the ‘An American Trilogy’ single, followed by the inclusion of ‘It’s Impossible’ on 1973’s Elvis LP. Nothing else was issued during Elvis’ lifetime, but since then, several items have turned up on a variety of releases.
Destination USA gives us a further five to add to the tally. No “new” titles, of course, and yet another end-of-show ‘Can’t Help Falling In Love’ is neither here nor there. Best of them is undoubtedly ‘A Big Hunk O’ Love’ a solid, lively reading of one of his best rockers. The others - ‘Never Been To Spain’, ‘You Gave Me A Mountain’ and ‘An American Trilogy’ - are all solid enough, but there’s little (anything?!) to set them apart from the wads of other versions we already have. Nice sound, though.
The quality of the eight August '72 rehearsal tracks (recorded on a cassette) varies between poor and fair, some of them in lesser quality than similar recordings from the same period heard on the previous FTD releases Stage Rehearsal and 3000 South Paradise Road. There's little decipherable chat between numbers, but if you’re prepared to listen carefully you’ll hear him messing about with the lyrics to ‘My Way’ - (”I say it clear, that you’re a queer, of this I'm certain") and singing the opening lines of ‘Carry Me Back To Old Virginia’ over the intro of ‘The Wonder Of You’. He also has fun with ‘Steamroller Blues’, but in all honesty there's little that will make me want to revisit this disc in the future.
The whole package is based around the first pilgrimage to the States by the UK Fan Club, who took 250 of its members to see Elvis in Sin City - which he acknowledges during the September 4 show. The accompanying booklet is crammed with photos from the time, as well as memories from many who were there, including well-known fans such as Anne E. Nixon, the late Rex
Martin and Rita Overhead, plus Radio Luxembourg’s Tony Prince (shame the audio of this brief backstage interview with Elvis wasn’t included too) and Fan Club President, Todd Slaughter.
Sadly, a lack of proofreading and fact-checking results in a few errors. For example, the Sonny King photographed with Elvis, Jimmy Durante and Jack E. Leonard is listed as being a wrestler. In actual fact, he was a Vegas lounge singer. Sonny King the wrestler is... black.
