You don't like hot-rod racing or driving late at night

Continuing my trip back through the 1959 album charts.

01/11/59 : A Date With Elvis - Elvis Presley


Well, it's taken us nine weeks, but we've finally bumped into Elvis or Frank - I've almost missed them! This is our sixteenth visit with The King - I'm sure it will be perfectly fine, if pretty inessential.

Yeah - perfectly fine, but pretty inessential is where we are. I liked "(You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care", "Is It So Strange" and "I Forgot To Remember To Forget" but overall the sound quality was surprisingly poor and the musicianship surprisingly basic - it's interesting to compare the skill level involved here with that shown by The Drifters backing Cliff. Elvis is obviously having a good time, but it's not a classic album of his for me. It's also only 23 minutes long!

We're at the bottom of the charts at #10 this week on his last week of a fourteen week run, with #4 being as high as he got - were we no longer under his spell? The top five this week were soundtracks from South Pacific, Gigi and My Fair Lady and Cliff Richard and Peter Sellers and there were no new entries or named women in the chart.

Wikipedia tells me this is a compilation album thrown together out of stuff he recorded quickly before he was drafted into the army in March '58, which is possibly why the sound quality isn't so great. The idea was to make sure that people didn't forget about him before he became available again in '60, but people saw through it and it didn't do as well as his earlier or later stuff.

"Customers also listened to" other Elvis albums - there are enough of them! This is all fine, but we've heard better from the lad.

25/10/59 - Another disappointing compilation
08/11/59 - An educational experience

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