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Elvis The Concert Years 1969 - 1977
Author: Stein Erik Skar
Published in hardback by Flaming Star, Norway
ISBN 82-994278-0-0
You know you have an excellent publication in your possession the moment you first take hold of "Elvis The Concert Years 1969 - 1977": it is well bound and has an air of quality about it that you cannot fail to miss. The dust jacket is beautifully designed, with a fine photo of Elvis printed on about a quarter of a dark blue background in which the name "Elvis" can just be discerned; the title of the book makes up the rest of the front of the dust jacket. Opening the book you find high quality paper has been used for both text and photos, both of which are well printed, though there is a tendency to excessive redness in some photos. But what an excellent selection of photos!
As the title of the book implies, it covers the years 1969 until 1977, concentrating on the tours and seasons that Elvis undertook during this time. There is some general background information, too, but this is, thankfully, limited: anyone buying this book will already have this knowledge, so it would have been silly to present it yet again.
The book was originally written in Norwegian and published in Norway in 1992. This English-language edition is therefore a translation, but the contents have been updated and expanded for this 1997 edition. The quality of translation is, like other aspects of the book, high, and only very few language errors and misprints creep into the text and, strangely enough, these tend to be in the reprints of the press reports. It would seem, however, that the publishers did not possess an English-language hyphenation routine, as some word-splits are very strange indeed!
Each individual tour and season is described with an account of Elvis's preparations, his health, and anything especially remarkable leading up to and during the tour/season; photos from some of the performances for each tour/season accompany this description, resulting in a plethora of images, mostly in colour, an absolute goldmine for concert fans — more than sixty different stage outfits are reproduced! In addition, most tour/season entries are followed by a number of contemporary press reports, providing an excellent source of reference.
But this is not all! At the end of the book, author Skar has included lists of all numbers performed during each tour or season, including one-liners, as well as a list of all accompanying musicians and vocalists, together with a chronological overview, offering the date, location, and attendance figures for each of Elvis's performances during the period covered by the book. Note, however, that the lists of songs and musicians cover each tour/season in general and not by individual performance.
"Elvis The Concert Years 1969 - 1977" is a book to be enjoyed: it can be read from cover to cover or simply browsed through at random. It is produced in the "coffee-table" format and will indeed grace any coffee-table, though it probably won't be left on the table long enough to get stained! Buy it, enjoy it; I am sure you will not regret it!
David G. Neale
Copyright 1998
email: david.neale@euronet.be