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):
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.”
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.
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.
Mystically liberal Virgo enjoys long walks alone in the city at night in the rain with an umbrella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig who strives to live by the maxim, “It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.
I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a college dropout (twice!). Occupationally, I have been a bartender, jewelry engraver, bouncer, landscape artist, and FEMA crew chief following the Great Flood of ’72 (and that was a job that I should never, ever have left).
I am also the final author of the original O’Sullivan Woodside price guides for record collectors and the original author of the Goldmine price guides for record collectors. As such, I was often referred to as the Price Guide Guru, and—as everyone should know—it behooves one to heed the words of a guru. (Unless, of course, you’re the Beatles.)