There Goes My Everything

Upon reading the news of this release we were enjoyed to see another show from Elvis Las Vegas engagement running from January 26 - February 23, 1971. Not too many shows have been released yet, and those released are good shows “All Things Are Possible” , “Snowbird” and the FTD release “The Impossible Dream”.

Design

We can’t really say this release has a design. The cover almost looks like Elvis’ 1968 Comeback Special singing “TROUBLE”, inside only white paper and on the back of the booklet, Elvis during his acceptance speech for the Jaycees Award.

Content

The show has not been released on CD before, so we welcomed this audience recording when we posted the news on its release. After the (now) standard opening with “That’s All Right” Elvis delivers a few one-liners, or should we say one-word versions of “By The Time I Get To Phoenix”, “Love Me Tender”, “Loving You” and “Jailhouse Rock” before slipping into “Can’t Help Falling In Love”.

Fortunately that song isn’t the closing theme during this engagement. With Neil Diamond's “Sweet Caroline” we get a good performance although Elvis slips a few times with the lyrics. Due to the poor audio quality we can’t fully enjoy a strong “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” (which has a cut in the middle).

Elvis is in a good mood, and takes a while to get into “Polk Salad Annie”. Just like the previous song, Elvis still had the spirit to deliver a good performance. The same goes for the TCB band, the guitar sound sharp, the drums hard and the bass mean and low. Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B Goode” is part of the set list, not a segment during the band introductions.

Up next are two showstoppers; “Something” and “How Great Thou Art”, on which Elvis shows the diversity of his voice and his passion for music, especially on the last one. Fortunately he doesn’t mess around with reprises of the songs.

The remainder of the concert contains a great selection of songs with what become show standards like “Love Me”, “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, “Suspicious Minds” and “It’s Now Or Never” and oldies which still get the decent treatment they deserve. We even get a line of “Old Shep” and what sounds like a spontaneous “In The Ghetto”. The show ends with the “2001 theme”, “Snowbird” and “The Impossible Dream”. So we almost get an inversed show with “Can’t Help Falling In Love” at the beginning end the 2001 Theme at the end.

Conclusion

The quality of the concert made us finish the CD, if the concert was a s bad as the audio quality we would have thrown it in the bin after the opening riffs. This release is for the die hard collectors only.