Just like a choo-choo train that's gotta keep a-chugging

Continuing my trip back through the 1965 album charts.

24/01/65 : Roustabout - Elvis Presley


There really is no escape from the lad - this being his eighteenth appearance (I'll soon have to start using numbers) and it's another movie soundtrack, so it's unlikely to be great.

It's not great, but it bounces along nicely and probably works perfectly well as a movie soundtrack with a paper-thin plot linking them together somehow. And with eleven tracks in twenty minutes it doesn't stay around long enough to get tiresome - some might view it as a bit of a rip-off, but I'm sure the fans were happy enough being ripped off. I have to admit I quite liked "One Track Heart" but I struggle to imagine the album gets too many listens these days.

We're at #12 in the charts this week on his last of a four week run, with three weeks at this position being as high as it got. The top five this week were The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Val Doonican, The Kinks and The Bachelors and there was one new entry in the chart for the Jim Reeves best-of (#19).

Wikipedia doesn't have an awful lot on the album - it was his ninth soundtrack album and whilst it did get to #1 in the US, it was his last soundtrack album to do so and he didn't have another #1 album until 1973. Which suggests that at least some people were getting tired of being ripped off - hopefully most sane people have an upper limit to the number of identical sounding Elvis soundtrack albums they need. There's also an interesting section about the Elvis films in general - he was paid up to $1 million plus 50% of the profits for them. They really were churned out, with as little as three weeks to shoot the films and two weeks to write and record the soundtrack - "It was interlocking self-promotion, causing one MGM employee to remark that the movies "didn't need titles. They could be numbered. They would still sell"".

And sell they did, but there is at least some evidence that the obsession is slowly fading by this time - I still shudder when I imagine how many Elvis albums I'll end up listening to though. This isn't the worst, but that doesn't stop it being utterly inconsequential and unnecessary.

17/01/65 - Wtaf is this?
31/01/65 - Dated, but well done

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