just launched: a new elvis publication on medium!

Es­ti­mated reading time is 3 min­utes.

AS IF I WASN’T BUSY ENOUGH, I just launched my second pub­li­ca­tion on Medium. The title of the new pub­li­ca­tion is Elvis: That’s The Way It Was and, of course, it’s all Elvis all the time! “But,” you may be thinking, “doesn’t mem­ber­ship with Medium cost $5 a month?” Dinna fash your­self (look it up): This new pub­li­ca­tion will only in­clude ar­ti­cles al­ready pub­lished here on this blog.

In fact, it fea­tures abridged ver­sions of the orig­inal A Touch Of Gold ar­ti­cles in hopes that I can woo a few new readers back here. 

Here is the en­tire text of the in­tro­duc­tion to Elvis: That’s The Way It Was (be­tween the two album covers):

 

Elvis IGotLucky 600

I GOT LUCKY was re­leased on RCA’s Camden budget sub­sidiary, it fea­tured a sense­less hodge­podge of tracks pre­vi­ously re­leased on sound­track EP al­bums in the ’60s. De­spite it being a crappy col­lec­tion, it fea­tured one of my fa­vorite Elvis covers of the ’70s. I think the cover would have been more ef­fec­tive if the title was on the same line at the top with the RCA logo and Elvis’s name.

WE LAUNCHED our new pub­li­ca­tion Tell It Like It Was on Jan­uary 1, 2019, and it ad­dresses pop­ular music, pri­marily rock & roll from the ’60s. “We” are John Ross (my fa­vorite music blogger), Lew Shiner (my fa­vorite nov­elist), and myself.

We love the music (and the books and the movies and the styles and the girls girls girls) of that era.

We want to share our en­thu­siasm for the music of that era.

We know how to write about the music of that era.

We fig­ured that if only one-quarter of one per­cent (yup, a mere 0.25%) of Medium’s 60,000,000 unique monthly readers had any in­terest in the great rock, soul, and pop music of those years, then we’d have a po­ten­tial read­er­ship of 150,000. (If anyone reading this has their own “per­sonal” blog, you know how huge that figure is.)

Boy­oboy was we ever wrong!

While I do not claim to be a Paul Williams or a Greil Marcus or a Peter Gu­ral­nick, I am a good writer. I do lots of re­search and I do it well (and quan­tity isn’t even close to anal­o­gous with quality with research).

John and Lew are sim­i­larly af­flicted with the need for ac­cu­racy. We mine old data and we find new conclusions.

Few Medium readers seem to care.

John, Lew, and I started Tell It Like It Was filled with vim and vigor, which The Free Dic­tio­nary de­fines as ‘an abun­dance or ex­ces­sive amount of bois­terous, youthful en­ergy [and] en­thu­siasm.’ Given that our com­bined ages are ap­proaching the 200-mark, that alone is a no­table achievement.

Need­less to say, our en­ergy and en­thu­siasm are not so bois­terous at this point.

So what should we do?

Give up and cease pub­lishing Tell It Like It Was?

Heck, no! We are starting an­other music pub­li­ca­tion on Medium be­cause we be­lieve that Medium can be the mes­sage! (A bootleg Marvel No-Prize from 1966 to any reader under 30 who gets that reference.)

As a com­ple­men­tary pub­li­ca­tion to Tell It Like It Was, we have launched Elvis: That’s The Way It Was.”

 

Elvis IGotLucky Pickwick 600

When Pick­wick Records reis­sued I GOT LUCKY in 1975, they changed the cat­alog number prefix from CAL-2533 to CAS-2533, de­spite the album being in mono. They also changed the ti­tles on the front cover, using this highly styl­ized (and rather tacky) red script that de­tracts from the photo. “Oh. well,” I thought when first seeing it forty-four years ago. “What can you ex­pect from Pickwick?”

I ask this of you

If you are a dues-paying member on Medium, please take a few min­utes and visit the pub­li­ca­tion, check out a few of the ar­ti­cles, and leave comments.

And tell me that you are there as a reader of this blog!

To get to Elvis: That’s The Way It Was, click HERE.

 

Elvis IGotLucky 1500 black

FEA­TURED IMAGE: The photo that I se­lected as the fea­tured image for Elvis: That’s The Way It Was was taken from the album I GOT LUCKY. De­spite it being one of the most com­pli­men­tary photos of Elvis ever used on an Amer­ican record, it was not used on one of his reg­ular RCA Victor ti­tles but rel­e­gated to the budget RCA Camden imprint.

 

 

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