Thank You Very Much - Fort Baxter’s Greatest Hits

The CD is a “Best of CD”, looking back on Fort Baxter’s history. Let's see if it is another historical release of this historical label.

Cover

The cover contains a few legendary Ford Baxter releases and liner notes looking back on the Fort Baxter history. On the cover and inside we find some good snapshots of Elvis, but for the front picture they might have used a more joyful picture of our man since it is a kind of “celebration” CD. Or isn’t Elvis too happy with this CD since it is a bootleg? On the other hand, it is a great shot.

Content

We are not too fond of “live collections”, but somehow this release isn’t that bad. The sound is good enough, although the quality of the two “new” tracks is a bit lesser. Fort Baxter released so many great CD’s that a compilation of the best can be worthwhile to a lot of people. Still it is very weird to hear the opening riff for “See See Rider” near the end of a CD (all tracks are in chronological order raging from 1969 to 1977).

But let’s focus on the “new” stuff, “Make The World Go Away” and “Something”. Both tracks are from 1971 (exact date unknown) and as stated before, in a lesser quality than the “older” tracks on this compilation. The first track is good, a driven performance. “Something” is something different. Elvis starts to mix up lyrics from the start of the song and after a huge feedback he starts to laugh. During the finale of the song he isn’t to serious either, and there is a very short reprise, not really clear is if it is abruptly ended on the recording or just ended by Elvis.

Content wise we can only say that there is not much new, 90% of it could have been made by ourselves if we had taken the time to make our own Fort Baxter compilation. But for those that missed some of the great previous Baxter releases this might be an interesting release to see which recordings exist (and of which some should have been released by BMG). You could consider this release to be a long Fort Baxter promo sampler.

Conclusion

For us buying the material we already have we can only conclude that both BMG and the bootleggers learned from each other. BMG came true with the Follow That Dream collectors label, releasing the kind of fan CD’s we only got from bootleggers before, and it seems that bootleggers start to release old material with a new cover like BMG use(d) to do. For us as fan the text on the cover of this release says what we wanted to say to Fort Baxter, ‘Thank You Very Much”, and we did so by buying this CD.