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Elvis Inside Loving You

November 03, 2003 | Book
It’s only a couple of months ago that "The Rock ‘n’ Roll Years", Volume 1 was issued, and now we already have a new Ger Rijff book! Is “Inside Loving You” a good successor to the insides of Jailhouse Rock and King Creole?

Design

If you are familiar with Ger Rijff’s books we do not need to say a word about it, you’ll know what to expect, and you exactly get that. For the others: just buy the book and you’ll know. Without kidding and without repeating ourselves too much, Rijff is one of those people that have that special magic touch when it comes to design. The book is well balanced, black and white pictures, colour effects and the lay-out make you pick it up over and over again. One complaint though: again no hard-cover, the book deserves it!

Content

This time Ger arranged Chris Giles’ (Elvis Shop, London) pictures of Loving You. Over 150 photos on about 130 pages, both coloured and black and white, and most of them unseen. This should be reason enough for any fan to run to the nearest (internet) shop and buy it. Disregarding the fact that quite some of the pictures are a bit grainy it is really worth the money. From late ’56 (Tupelo, last Hayride show), to the Loving You photos themselves and the little “scrapbook in the back”… it is just one pile of eye-candy.

The wonderful coloured pictures that covered nearly every Elvis-magazine a couple of years ago are included of course, next to some outstanding snap shot of Elvis on the set. We can go on and describe every picture individually, but we’ll leave it with one last remark: of course the photos are accompanied by a nice dose of memorabilia. To keep up with our "image" of being (too) critical, we did find something we can make a remark on, sometimes the background around the memorabelia hasn't been deleted completely.

The finishing touch of the book is once again delivered by Trevor Cajiao with an interview with Hal Kanter (that was published in The Man And His Music #49).

Conclusion

We can only answer the question at the beginning with a wholehearted “YES”. Thankyou, thankyouverymuch, Crew of four (Ger Rijff, Chris Giles, Jean Paul Commandeur and Trevor Cajiao)! If you are not convinced by this review, just open the book on the pages 100 and 102 and see for yourself.

The book is available from the For Elvis Collectors Only website.

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Tigerman-GB wrote on November 20, 2003
A very nice book indeed, a lot of which I had never seen before, in fact I only have one gripe about this great book & that is that in the inteview wih Hal Kanter he mentions a photograph where he stuck his head between Elvis' legs, I think that this picture exists it would have been a nice touch if it had acompanyed the interview so that readers a least see what upset the Colonel so much. As I said earlier this is a great book buy it & enjoy.