JEFFREY MORGAN’S MEDIA BLACKOUT #640.283!

Elvis Presley – Fun With Elvis On Stage (RCA) :: Wherein the record company that gleefully gave the world Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music—a quadraphonic two album set consisting of nothing but over an hour’s worth of relentless shrieking atonal feedback—cheerfully compounds the fracture by also issuing for your listening pleasure this non-singing, non-dancing, all-talking monophonic two sided album which ain’t nuthin’ but a haphazard cut-and-paste forty minute audio collage of Elvis goofing around with his screaming audiences between songs.

As far as audio car crashes go, it’s kinda like listening to the Rolling Stones’ Get Yer Yas Yas Out! if that album contained nothing but the bantam singer’s banal banter. I mean, can you see any difference between Mick Jagger saying: “Ah think ah bust a button on mah trousers; hope they don’t fawl down” and Elvis Presley saying: “My belt’s falling off, my suit’s getting too big... You know what I can’t do? Get my belt tightened up.” Nah, I didn’t think so.

It reminds me of the time back in 1970 when I saw the Jefferson Airplane and Grace Slick kept asking if anyone in the audience had a safety pin because her red dress kept falling down and she—but I digress.

One thing you do have to give Elvis credit for is that he always appears lucid enough to know where he is and what he’s doing at all times, as witnessed by the following extraordinary moment when he stops the proceedings to candidly confess: “I don’t know what happened, folks; I just go nuts sometimes” before rhetorically asking: “You didn’t know you were coming to see a crazy man, didja?” and then concluding: “They’ll put me a straight jacket and take me away.”

SIZZLING PLATTER OF THE WEEK: Lindsay Buckingham – Seeds We Sow (Eagle) :: Lindsay sure don’t look none too happy on the album cover where his doleful demeanor is made manifest by the tense white-knuckle stranglehold death grip he has on his guitar. And while that may sound like a recipe for unbridled musical melancholia, the good news is that this is the most enjoyable and eccentrically ingenious melancholy album you’ll hear this side of Unca Lou’s Berlin or Unca Neil’s Tonight’s The Night or Unca John’s Fear. Bonus points for daring to transform the Stones’ saccharine “She Smiled Sweetly” into a deeper and far more dangerous realm of heartfelt desperation. Mmm-mmm-good!

Be seeing you!