Elvis Presley, Elvis 75 – Good Rockin’ Tonight

This 100-song extravaganza, released a month before Presley's 75th birthday (January 8, 2010), is not all the Elvis you could possibly want: there's way too much out there for any normal person to take in completely. But anyone seeking a decent understanding of the enormity of the man's musical facets, and is confused or flustered by the enormous number of compilations, overviews, box sets and best-ofs, has found their ideal road map. There's a lifetime's worth of great music on Elvis 75— his and yours.

What's probably most impressive is that it's still possible to listen to this most overexposed of pop-culture figures and hear his artistry as plainly as ever. The early Sun Records singles are some of the most mythologized music ever recorded. But in the verve and snap of "Mystery Train," "That's All Right (Mama)," and especially "Blue Moon of Kentucky," you can still hear Elvis, guitarist Scotty Moore, and bassist Bill Black reaching for something beyond themselves. It's not even that the trio melded black and white music in ways no one else quite had — though they did; it's that they sounded weirdly ageless, and still do. Much was made during the '50s about rock and roll coming from outer space. Even if you're familiar with their original country and R&B sources, the Sun songs even now are uncanny enough to effortlessly evoke that sense.

The minor hits from the early RCA years might sound fresher than the bigger ones due to a half-century's worth of ubiquity, but that doesn't make the likes of "My Baby Left Me" or "I Was the One" any less striking. When he lands square on "Hound Dog" and "Don't Be Cruel," the monster two-sided hit that ate the 1957 charts for breakfast and spit out the bones, it's hard to imagine there being other outcome. He was out to prove that he really could sing anything, and the rawness of the earlier work gave way to a smoother, more mature style, particularly once he got out of the army in 1960. But the reason Presley could put over songs as disparate as the mature, low-down, bluesy "One Night" and the "O Sole Mio" gloss "It's Now or Never" is because he threw himself into them whole. Putting his image aside, it's amazing to hear how utterly passionate a singer he was. Even in the midst of his soundtrack-hell period he could blaze out a gem like Bob Dylan's "Tomorrow Is a Long Time" (recorded in 1966 for Spinout, the requisite Elvis entry in Harry and Michael Medved and Randy Dreyfuss's Fifty Worst Films of All Time book), one of the most deeply felt performances in either the singer's or songwriter's catalog.

Everybody knows about Presley's 1968-69 comeback. In truth, some of the comeback-era stuff is a little gauche to modern ears: the caring-liberalisms of "In the Ghetto," in particular, have dated badly, though Presley sings it well. And while the Memphis-ness of the sessions are their historical selling point (Elvis going back to his roots and all), the arrangements of "If I Can Dream" and "Memories" are pretty Hollywood — and not Hollywood in its greatest era, either. None of that matters a whit when it comes to the triumphant "Kentucky Rain," "Only the Strong Survive," and especially "Suspicious Minds," whose false fade-out, windswept strings, Western-theme horns, and female-chorale backing vocals work supremely, because they're up against the most desperate, driven singing Elvis ever did.

If Elvis took on the late '60s on his own terms and won, the '70s were more problematic. His music became looser, which signaled both comfort and a letting go of the reins: it's no coincidence that the tightest performance on the set's final quarter, "Burning Love," is also its best, by a lot. His return to the stage, represented here with a tongue-in-cheek version of James Taylor's "Steamroller Blues" ("I'm a cement mixer, a churnin' urn of burning funk" — cue baritone sax blat), had its moments too. But he grew grotesque vocally as well as in other ways toward the end: on "Hurt," from 1976, a year before his death, he sounds like he's swallowing his own tongue even as he hits heroic notes. That song also features one of the spookiest spoken-word segments you'll ever hear, climaxing with "I still love you so" delivered in a sepulchral whisper. It's as if he knew the end was coming. It's the real climax of Elvis 75; certainly, it has more to tell us than the misconceived JXL remix of "A Little Less Conversation" that actually finishes it off.