The chirpy flute/piccolo melody that echoes the chorus kind of grates, though. Still, this version of “Can’t Help Falling In Love” made #4 in the UK anyways, likely thanks to the Van McCoy arrangement’s relentlessly lively rhythm section.
The LP this came from, 1976’s Fabulous, wasn’t the group at their peak it was the first album of theirs to fail to hit the US R&B Top 20, and as classic soul goes it’s a few notches down from the magnificence of their self-titled ’71 debut and its hits-for-days status that made it unlikely but effective material for hip-hop producers. So here’s the only cover on the list released during Elvis’ lifetime, and that makes something of a difference here: Is there anything in this performance that doesn’t sound 100% sincere and unburdened by self-awareness? Are the Stylistics, one of the more underrated Philly Soul vocal groups of the ’70s, even making a big deal about the fact that they’re covering a song popularized by The King™? Nah, it’s just a good platform for Russell Thompkins Jr.’s falsetto, tempo-tweaked for Bicentennial-grade disco purposes, still on point and good to groove to. It stands as one of the songs he popularized that’s actually kind of difficult to do snottily or kitschily by default, even if examples definitely exist, and here are ten versions that do what they can to reclaim the unsullied, purely musical side of Elvis that we might otherwise have a difficult time even seeing.
Fortunately there’s “Can’t Help Falling In Love”, the Blue Hawaii standout and #2 US hit that seems like the last gasp of Great Elvis before he started really coasting. (That, and his death torpedoed RCA’s promotional efforts for Harry Nilsson’s pretty-damned-good 1977 album Knnillssonn, which is some bullshit.) I’ve grown to recognize what Elvis actually accomplished as a singer - what bits of American hauntology could be found in his Sun recordings, the less kitschy, more alluringly human stuff hinted at in Mystery Train (both Marcus’ and Jarmusch’s), the actual visceral oomph of both his early prime and his peak comeback stuff (1969’s From Elvis In Memphis, for instance, has jams for days).īut it’s still kind of tricky navigating all this stuff when it comes to figuring out what other musicians are trying to say through Elvis’ voice. All these editions of Gotcha Covered, and finally, it’s time to ask: How do we deal with Elvis, really? The man died shortly before I was born, so even as a longtime music dork I mostly knew him as a legacy, a shadow, a ghost: the man whose unexpected death struck up a wave of hapless conspiracy theories, grotesque impersonations, and exploitative nostalgia that superseded his impact as an actual artist for just about everyone who wasn’t at the ideal age to find out just what he meant before the rot set in.
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