Fort Baxter 2204
MGM studios, Culver City, Ca., July 16, 1970
Track Listing:
Stagger Lee/I Got My Mojo Working/I've Lost You/Stranger In The Crowd/The Next Step Is Love/You Don't Have To Say You Love Me/Sweet Caroline/Yesterday-Hey Jude/I Can't Stop Loving You/It's Your Baby,You Rock It/Crying Time/Ghost Riders In The Sky/Runaway/It's Now Or Never/Peter Gun Theme/Love Me/One Night/All En El Grancho Grande/That's All Right/Twenty Days And Twenty Nights/Patch It Up/Cotton Fields/Sylvia/Stranger In The Crowd/How The Web Was Woven/I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen.
Review:
This is the latest from Fort Baxter and for many many reasons this is a very disappointing one too. Indeed several of the tracks on this CD was already dispersed on the Baxter Profile vol.1 & 2 and Electrifying, so as the cover states we are ending up with " over twenty minutes of previously unreleased material " out of 1.14'46", it isn't much.
The back cover of the inner sleeve mentions that we are dealing here with an inferior sound quality, which is true, however that CD would had been much more interesting if released as such several years ago. We don't have have much surprises left after we've already heard the best tracks on the CD like; Stagger Lee, That's All Right (bluesy version), Cotton Fields and others.
It's true that we are getting over some twenty minutes of previously unreleased including " Runaway ", "It's Now Or Never " and " Sylvia ",but there's a slight problem, the former is strictly instrumental while Elvis is completely off-mike on the other two, although very enjoyable I still feel a little bit cheated on my twenty minutes of previously unreleased material.
The cover states that this is the complete July 16th 1970 rehearsal, well it could be but according to Joe Tunzi's book " Elvis Sessions II " some songs are missing, songs like; Tomorrow Never Comes & Guitar Man, maybe these were very very short or so distorted that it was better to discard them. I'm really wondering why the sound engineers never really noticed that Elvis microphone was overloaded!!??Some small red needles were certainly hitting the high end red zone on their sound desk, and nobody has been able to correct this until the very end, hopefully all these July and August '70s rehearsals weren't all recorded in such a lousy manner.
This CD is mostly recommended to all the fans who don't have most of the tracks, or else to the completist out there, if you enjoy ONLY great sound quality, then stay away from it.
