Elvis Presley's "The Last Farewell": A Consideration.

 
I have been listening to nothing but Elvis Presley since last October, but out of all of the songs in his catalog (& I've listened to them all), I don't think I've listened to any as much as "The Last Farewell." According to my iTunes Library, I've heard it some 75 times, although that doesn't count times where I listened to part of it but got interrupted before it finished. I imagine the number is closer to 100.

I am not sure why that is.

There are songs that draw you in for obvious reasons--their melody, arrangement, instrumentation, etc.--but this is not one of those songs. It is a fair-to-poor Elvis song off of a fair-to-poor Elvis album, the cumbersomely-titled From Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee, which was a polite way for his label RCA to name it He Is So Disillusioned, Unmotivated, & Depressed, We've Moved The Recording Equipment Into His House, But He Still Barely Uses It. Even Elvis-obsessed aficionados usually dismiss it along with the disappointing music at the end of his career; most treatises on Elvis fail to mention it at all.

When Elvis recorded "The Last Farewell" in February 1976, it was in his first night of recording sessions in the "Jungle Room" of Graceland. By that point, he was generally disinterested about anything relating to recording or producing music, but "The Last Farewell" seemed to be an exception.

Sometime in the summer of 1975, Elvis got a 45 of the song, originally written & recorded in 1971 by the English folksinger Roger Whittaker. Although the song was never much of a hit, it got some airplay some 4 years after its initial release, & was re-released. To date, it is one of the few songs to sell over 10 million copies worldwide.

"The Last Farewell" was not the greatest song ever written. It was maudlin & cliched, telling the tale of a nineteenth-century British maritime soldier returning home on a ship to England to fight in a war. Whittaker's vocal was competent, but not outstanding, & the production values were cheesy, even in the world of 1970s easy listening radio. Still, there was something unique that Elvis heard in it, & he listened to it over & over again, some 20 times a row, trying (& failing) to get his then-girlfriend Melissa Blackwood to appreciate it. "I just kind of like that song," Elvis told her.

He seemed anxious to cut his own version of it, & it was one of the first songs he tried in the Jungle Room. But, as Peter Guralnick described in the second volume of his definitive biography of Elvis, "the musicians were no more able to grasp its fascination than Melissa had been." They worked their way through the arrangement, largely basing it on Whittaker's original--the soaring strings & synthesizers, the dramatic musical flourishes, the small army of backing vocalists, only adding more of each, as though to mask the song with orchestration & flash.

For a man whose finest music sounds utterly timeless--say, "That's All Right," "Mystery Train," "Heartbreak Hotel," "Hound Dog," "Suspicious Minds," & "Burning Love"--Elvis's cover of "The Last Farewell" is painfully dated. The production values sound like they were conceived in Rick Wakeman's head & the tone is much closer to adult contemporary pop than rock & roll. If not for Elvis's vocal, you'd think it was tailor-made for a Reprise-era Frank Sinatra.

Lyrically, it was one of the strangest things Elvis ever sang. The song is sung from the perspective of a British soldier heading back to his home in England in the nineteenth century; Elvis may have not always been the best match for his lyrical content (just check out "The Edge Of Reality" or "Raised On Rock"--or better yet, don't), but the idea of Elvis as a colonial-era British sailor is bizarre to the point of distraction. Indeed, hearing Elvis sing about returning "safe home again to England" where he "shall watch the English mist roll through the dell" is kind of ridiculous. & thrown into a musical score that sounds like it was written for a PBS Nova special, it is rendered even stranger.

Despite all of this, in the subdued, melancholy context of From Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee, the song jumps out to the listener with its tender refrain:

For you are beautiful

I have loved you dearly

More dearly than the spoken word can tell.

& again:

For you are beautiful

I have loved you dearly

More dearly than the spoken word can tell.

When Roger Whittaker sang these lines, he did it solo, singing just behind the beat to give it a slight swing (or as much as a Roger Whittaker song can swing). Elvis, on the other hand, keeps the melody directly on the beat & sings with a small entourage--most noticeably his frequent co-harmonizer, Charlie Hodges. It is the one part of the sea-inspired song that actually sounds like a sea-shanty, & it is the part that will stick in your head long after the song has ended, more saccharine than sweet, more cloying than beautiful.

If you listen to it enough times, you might notice that it sounds oddly familiar, & indeed, I find that it sounds just like the refrain of James Taylor's "Carolina In My Mind," originally released a few years before Whittaker's "The Last Farewell":

Can't you see the sunshine?

Can't you just feel the moonshine?

Did Whittaker accidentally lift the melody from Taylor? Or come with it on his own? & did Elvis, who knew James Taylor from covering his "Steamroller Blues" as part of his Aloha From Hawaii concert, hear this familiarity as well? If one connects the dots, a song like the down-home celebration of "Carolina In My Mind" is far closer to the kind of music Elvis liked to cut: All-American, country music-tinged anthems, unabashed with no irony. Did Elvis hear this song about British naval history & catch a melody at its center that brought everything home to the good ol' USA? If so, the vessel he sails is rooted in Carolina.

Perhaps this is what Elvis heard when he listened to it endlessly & tried to get his friends & band-mates interested in it, even if he couldn't exactly articulate why. I just kind of like that song.

If nothing else, it was all worth it if only because it allowed him to sing these lines, which hide in plain sight at the center of the song:

I have no fear of death, it brings no sorrow

But how bitter will be this last farewell?

As with any song that Elvis liked, he put his stamp on the music, which is to say that he sung the words like he meant them. Just as the melody of the refrain raised questions about its meaning for Elvis, so too does the lyric of the verse. Was he drawn to "The Last Farewell" because it was a rare song that looked death in the face but didn't flinch? As he was spending his days in bed & gaining weight on a diet of deep-fried food & prescription drugs, was it a statement about his current living condition (or lack thereof)?

& for us, as listeners, to hear Elvis sing these words, buried at the heart of an otherwise forgettable song on an otherwise forgettable album, what does it mean? They sound brave, but also offhanded, & ultimately prescient.

Furthermore, they are directly followed by the refrain:

For you are beautiful
I have loved you dearly
More dearly than the spoken word can tell

The fact that Elvis often called his audiences "beautiful" in his 1970s concerts towards the end of his life only seems to reinforce the idea that he is singing directly to us, his audience. & in so doing, it is the only love of his life that has stayed true through his musical career.

The song itself ultimately becomes a last farewell--& with all of its messiness & imperfections, it's a bitter one.

The Last Song Elvis Presley Ever Released.

On July 19, 1977, Elvis Presley released Moody Blue, a somewhat slipshod album of recent singles, live recordings, & a few new studio recordings.

Within a month, he was dead.

One of the new studio recordings was a solid, if unremarkable, read-through of Jim Reeves' crossover country smash from late 1959, "He'll Have To Go." The other was a new song written specifically for Elvis by Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice, called "It's Easy For You." It closed the album, & as fate would have it, his living recording career.

"It's Easy For You" was recorded on October 29, 1976. At the time, Chicago's "If You Leave Me Now" was the Number 1 song in America, having recently displaced Rick Dees' "Disco Duck (Part 1)." Stevie Wonder's Songs In The Key Of Life was in the midst of a 13-week reign atop of the Billboard Album chart, establishing itself as an instant American masterpiece. & somewhere in the basement of his Graceland home in downtown Memphis, Elvis Presley was pacing around, showing off guns, & talking about spirituality--doing everything but cutting a song. He finally got down to it, starting these last sessions with "It's Easy For You," which might imply that he was more interested in it than the others.

Exactly 23 years & 1 day before the release of "It's Easy For You," on July 18, 1953, a young Elvis Presley was chomping at the bit to record, going into Sun Records to make an acetate of "My Happiness"--for his mother's birthday, he claimed (it was in April). Everything was fresh, & new, & open, & you can hear it in the recording, which resurfaced in the early 1990s. It is the closest thing we have to knowing how Elvis sounded before he was Elvis.

But by the mid-'70s, recording had become such a chore for Elvis that his record label RCA set up a professional studio in the basement "Jungle Room" of Graceland; all Elvis had to cut a record was literally go downstairs. He instead chose to spend most of his time in his bedroom.

Elvis's later years have been both over-analyzed & completely lost in a haze of drugs, laziness, & missed opportunity. "Mark now, the supreme Elvis gesture," wrote Greil Marcus in "Elvis: Presliad," the final essay in his 1975 book, Mystery Train.

He takes the stage with a retinue of bodyguards, servants, singers, a band, an orchstra; he applies himself vaguely to the hits of the past, prostrates himself before songs of awesome ickiness; he acknowledges the applause & the gasps that greet his every moment (applause that comes thundering with such force you think the audience merely suffers the music as an excuse for its ovations); he closes with an act of show-biz love that still warms the heart; but above all, he throws away the entire performance.

Mystery Train was the first serious cultural study of rock & roll, & "Elvis: Presliad" is still the finest thing anyone has ever written about Elvis Presley. Marcus uses the above description passage to juxtapose a study into his early singles at Sun Records, which at the time was relatively unknown to the mass audience. (RCA rectified this the following year with Sun Sessions, a long-out-of-print LP that is so influential that it made #11 on Rolling Stone's 2004 list of the 500 Greatest Albums Of All-Time.) The whole essay deserves to be read in full, but for these purposes, I will skip ahead to the ending:

All in all, there is only one remaining moment I want to see; one epiphany that would somehow bring his story home. Elvis would take the stage, as he always has; the roar of the audience would surround him, as it always will. After a time, he would begin a song by Bob Dylan. Singing slowly, Elvis would give it everything he has. "I must have been mad," he would cry, "I didn't know what I had--until I threw it all away."

& then, with love in his heart, he would laugh.

I quote this passage at length because I can't help but wonder if someone--or, more specifically, a young Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice--had read this essay before writing "It's Easy For You" a year later.

"I had a wife, & I had children," Elvis sings in the bridge, "I threw them all away."

My ears perked up--what is going on here?

* * *

"It's Easy For You" is a weird song. Its verse is in the form of a romantic country ballad & its bridge takes on a now-dated disco rhythm; the song then pushes itself out into a series of slow triplets that seem to be lifted from the "smile is my makeup I've worn since my breakup" couplet of Smokey Robinson & The Miracles' classic "The Tracks Of My Tears." But where Smokey's song is effortless, "It's Easy For You" feels more like 3 songs cobbled together, one melancholy, one funky, & one over-the-top. Once I learned that it was Webber & Rice who wrote this--they would later pen Phantom Of The Opera, Cats, & Evita--the latter part fit into place: It was pure musical theater.

Adding to the song's strange vibe is its lyric. Elvis may have recorded 2 completely different songs called "Fool" (1971's "The Fool" & 1973's "Fool"), but never before has he sounded like such a complete loser. His later-period music is littered with songs about parents lamenting being separated from their spouses & young children--just check out "You Gave Me A Mountain," "Separate Ways," & "My Boy"--it was clearly a realm that Elvis was more than comfortable in. Given his own recent separation & divorce from his own wife & daughter, this overwrought music seemed to provide a genuine outlet for his emotions.

But "You Gave Me A Mountain" finds strength in God, "Separate Ways" looks ahead to a better future, & "My Boy" seems to have a happy ending in which the singer decides to stay put after all. In other words, they each find hope.

In contrast, "It's Easy For You" is void of any such hope.

It is the tale of a man who is left with absolutely nothing, having left his wife & children for a woman who now is no longer interested in him. She all but shrugs him off, blithely suggesting he should just go to the family he abandoned. It may be his song, but she clearly has always had the upper-hand.

The song's finest & most poignant part comes towards the end: "If you ever tire of the good life," Elvis sings, "Call me in a year or two." He sings it with a sweet nostalgia, as though he is thinking of his own rags-to-riches story. Only now the tables are turned--he's the one living the good life, but it is also he who has grown tired of it.

For by the time Elvis recorded these words, he was divorced from his wife, away from his daughter, & cut off in his own world, living somewhere between laziness & irrelevance. It sounds less like a song than a return back to the nothingness from which he had come.

* * *

But perhaps most odd is the song's opening lines: "You may not think that it's over, but I have a different point of view."

Just like how Hank Williams' final single was "I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive" & Kurt Cobain's final studio release of his lifetime was "I Hate Myself & I Want To Die," the last song that Elvis Presley ever released is seemingly framed by a simple message: It's over.

So it turns out that Greil Marcus was half right--there was indeed the act of throwing away, but there was no laughter.