Like its companion release (
For LP Fans Only
),
A Date with Elvis
has left varying impressions on different generations of
Elvis Presley
fans. If you were around in 1959, the first thing you probably noticed was that it was the gatefold jacket, with lots of really cool photos inside and out of
in uniform. Hearing this album -- which contained not a word about where or when the music on it was recorded -- one would have been struck by just how raw and lively the music was, more exciting, in fact, than the music on his last pre-Army LP release, the
King Creole
soundtrack. As they had with
,
RCA
had assembled a "new"
album by reaching back to five of the best of his best
Sun Records
sides, augmented with a few songs left over from the
Love Me Tender
and
Jailhouse Rock
soundtrack EPs. The 1954-1955 recordings of
"Milkcow Blues Boogie,"
"Good Rockin' Tonight,"
"Baby Let's Play House,"
etc., with their lean textures, frantic sound, and
Scotty Moore
's slashing lead guitar, were a far cry from anything heard on
. It was the height of irony that the two "new"
Elvis
albums of 1959 gave national audiences their first real chance to plunge into the sound of the "old"
of 1954-1955, when he was known as "The Memphis Flash" and "The Hillbilly Cat." A few years later, during the mid- to late '60s, when some listeners started getting serious about
' music, and others, born too late to have been buying the records in 1956, started discovering his work for the first time, the word got out about
-- that these were the real article, at least as worthwhile as the first two
albums and the easiest way to get the King's early Memphis sides. By the second half of the '60s,
and its packaging had become irrelevant to 99-percent of rock listeners, but serious fans grabbed up copies -- even Rolling Stone magazine recommended
(especially their mono pressings) in the course of guiding readers through the already confusing maze of his releases. By the late '70s, when the
Sun
material had been gathered together in a more orderly fashion,
fell out of favor once again, and it has seemed superfluous since, for the most part, in terms of musical scholarship. But listening to it decades after its release, one is still hard-put to find too many albums that are more viscerally exciting. ~ Bruce Eder