The Kid Who Would Be King : Five-Disc Set of ‘50s Songs Shows Elvis’ Unique Power

RCA Records’ new “The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll” box set is a dream package for everyone who voted for the Young Elvis stamp.

The five-disc collection, which will be released today, is a historic package that brings together for the first time every available track that Presley recorded in the ‘50s: from “My Happiness,” the souvenir disc that he made for his mother in 1953, through “My Wish Came True,” the 1959 ballad that was the last of his 38 pop hits that decade.

Besides the more than 100 recordings that were released by Sun Records and RCA Records, the set features 27 rare or previously unreleased live numbers or alternate versions of such seminal Presley numbers as “Blue Suede Shoes.”

Most of these tracks have long been available on various Presley retrospective collections and the set carries a $79.98 list price, so it’s easy to think “The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll” is yet another example of RCA shamelessly recycling the Elvis catalogue.

But Presley’s role in the ‘50s was of such unprecedented importance in pop music that it’s fitting the material was brought together in a single collection--and the set serves the Presley legend well.

Even those who have heard all the hits will find new insights into Presley’s music and career--not only a sense of the creative momentum as he moved from youthful experimenter to confident artist, but also the struggle between Presley’s raw instincts and the goal of reaching a mainstream audience.

“The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll” is one in a series of projects marking the 15th anniversary of Presley’s death on Aug. 16, 1977.

Also on the way:

* “Elvis: The Lost Performances,” a 60-minute home video from MGM-UA that includes outtakes from two Elvis concert documentaries in the ‘70s, notably 10 minutes of rehearsal footage that shows a more informal Presley than we normally see in concert sequences. Due Wednesday, it’ll list for $19.98.

* FoxVideo late next month will release 11 of Presley’s movies--from “Love Me Tender” to “Tickle Me”--as part of a special collection that will sell for $14.98 each.

The Presley story is familiar by now: The 18-year-old, dreaming of being a singer, walks into Memphis’ tiny Sun Records studio in 1953 and pays $4 to make a souvenir recording for his mother.

While he’s waiting his turn, Marion Keisker, the studio office manager, asks Presley his favorite music style. “I sing all kinds,” Presley responds, according to the box set’s liner notes. When Keisker then asks him who he sounds like, he says, “I don’t sound like nobody.”

The words proved prophetic, as rock historian Peter Guralnick writes in the new RCA set’s illustrated booklet. Presley grew up listening to the rawness of blues, the fervor of gospel, the sentimentality of country and the smoothness of pop--and his ability to utilize all those strains is what gave him such emotional range and impact as a singer.

“The two songs that he recorded that day . . . attest to the fact that not only did he not sound like anybody else, there was an indefinable quality of yearning in his voice, a kind of unutterable plaintiveness that would have been nearly impossible to pigeonhole,” Guralnick writes.

Presley’s version of “My Happiness,” a much-recorded pop ballad from the ‘30s, opens the record, and you can hear traces of that yearning and the sensual intimacy that would characterize Presley’s best recordings. The key elements he would later add: energy and confidence. The other song Presley recorded that afternoon, an old Ink Spots hit called “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,” is available for the first time in the box set.

Presley’s voice impressed Sam Phillips, the owner of the tiny blues label, but it was almost a year before he invited the youngster back to the studio to try some recording. That decision, however tardy, would reshape pop culture for decades to come.

Working with guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, Presley spent a couple of days at Sun in what was intended simply as a rehearsal session. But they came up with a version of an Arthur Crudup blues number called “That’s All Right” that remains, after almost 40 years, an electrifying record.

Presley brought a sense of youthful self-affirmation and desire to the song, and that magnificent two-minute burst summarized, in a magical and accidental way, the sexual and social awakening of a postwar generation of teen-agers in this country and around the world.

Phillips--who would later help launch the careers of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame members Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Carl Perkins--was a key figure in the Presley story because another record company owner might have let the moment pass, not knowing what to make of the odd mix of blues and country. Phillips, however, encouraged his artists to be unique . . . and he realized this was a special moment.

There are Presley enthusiasts who feel that he did his greatest work at Sun before he went to RCA, where the label’s massive promotional muscle helped expose him to a national audience in 1956. Moving in the box set’s disc one from the Sun recordings to the RCA tracks, you do start hearing an emphasis--at least in many of the hits--toward a smoother, more accessible sound. But there is a continued rawness in many of the songs that were intended only as album tracks, not single recordings.

It’s almost as if Presley and his advisers worked on making the songs they envisioned as singles as smooth as possible within the rock context, and then just raced through the other songs, allowing the rawer instincts to dominate.

The most dramatic change is in the song “One Night,” an old R&B; hit. Presley recorded the song as written in January, 1957, the same day he recorded the cuddly “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear.”

Sample lyrics: One night of sin / Is what I’m now paying for / The things I did and I saw / Would make the earth stand still.

But that version was not released, probably being considered a bit too steamy for teen-age radio audiences. Instead, Presley returned to the studio a few months later and recorded the song with tamer lyrics. The change was from adult blues to teen pop-rock: One night with you/ Is what I’m now praying for/ The things that we two could plan/ Would make my dreams come true.

While he found new allies in songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller (who supplied him with some of his best material, including “Hound Dog” and “Baby, I Don’t Care”), it’s intriguing to think what would have happened if Presley had stayed at Sun and worked exclusively with Phillips.

Even with the constrictions, however, the bulk of the music in this box set remains extraordinary. There’s marginal stuff, but the heart of the collection represents the foundation of rock ‘n’ roll. Other artists--from ‘50s rivals Chuck Berry and Little Richard through countless forefathers--contributed to the evolution of the style, but Presley, despite the caricature that he would later become, remains the true king of rock ‘n’ roll.