Word: balladic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...voice is thin, nasal, with a feminine vibrato and an attack of naked innocence. The song is a noble-masochism ballad called I'll Never Stand in Your Way; the singer is Elvis Presley, right around his 19th birthday. This primitive demo tape is among the treasures in RCA's four-CD, 100-song set Elvis Presley Platinum: A Life in Music. The package, eloquently annotated by Colin Escott and with 77 newly released tracks, means to scrape away the crust of camp idolatry from Presley's image and recast him as a powerful vocalist...
...deeply into pop pastiche since his 1982 off-Broadway hit, Little Shop of Horrors. The quintet of Muses, like Little Shop's black-thrush trio, tells the story, doing justice to the jaunty R.-and-B. inflections ("and then along came Zeus") of David Zippel's serviceable lyrics. The ballad Go the Distance, as pummeled by Michael Bolton, is the tune you'll hear coming from every radio, music store and elevator this summer...
...sophisticated New York City dinner guests with the story of how the widower Clyde courted the widow Gussie Lancaster, a childhood sweetheart who more than 60 years before had moved to California. Aaron, pressed by his wife, TV journalist Lesley Stahl (60 Minutes), has spun his tale into The Ballad of Gussie & Clyde (Villard; 176 pages...
...system. The three Beatles Anthology albums, which came out in 1995-96, were an exhaustive, exhausting exploration of the Fab Four's musical past, featuring the reunion of surviving Beatles McCartney, Ringo Starr and George Harrison with the one late Beatle, John Lennon, on a beyond-the-grave ballad, Free as a Bird, and the release of obscure tracks such as the fifth take of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band and the seventh take of Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite! By now, it seems, the Beatles' entire recording history has been exhumed and made public...
...BOOKS . . . THE BALLAD OF GUSSIE & CLYDE: Manhattan-based novelist and screenwriter Aaron Latham has written the mother of all Father's day's presents with this spare, beguiling tale (Villard; 176 pages; $19.95) of how his widowed father Clyde courted the widow Gussie Lancaster, a childhood sweetheart who more than 60 years before had moved to California. "Latham tells his 'true story of true love' in deliberate, prairie-flat language, strewing the landscape here and there with verbal posies and perhaps a few too many quotations from 17th century romantic poetry," says TIME's Jesse Birnbaum. "Still, the style...