FROM HOUND DOG TO LOUNGE ACT

By RICHARD CORLISS

The 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.

The early stuff is still great. We are startled, on the amazing Blue Moon, by his trick of shifting, in a heartbeat, from saloon baritone to pants-too-tight wailing. We are reminded of his daring enunciation: all those words that suddenly began with h ("Hi want you, hi need you, hi-hi-hi love you") and his near Hawaiian avoiding of consonants ("Ya-hoo know Ah can be fou'/ Sittin' home all alo'"). Listening to his notorious rendition of Hound Dog on Milton Berle's TV show, we can hear gasps and giggles from the audience and feel the career-threatening danger of his burlesque moves, almost see his hip-level guitar wagging insolently like the first electric phallus.

Sadly, the pulverizing novelty of sexual danger was quickly domesticated, as the star jumped into mainstream show business. Within a year of his flash flame, he had segued from being Elvis to doing Elvis, playing him on TV and in movies. By the '60s, he was his own parody, stunt double, postage stamp--the first Elvis impersonator. In the new era of the singer-songwriter, hack tunesmiths were still handing him drab variations on Don't Be Cruel. The Beatles left him for dead; and his darling, deviant version of Blowin' in the Wind (from a Graceland basement tape) shows he didn't quite get Dylan. Elvis was Vegas before he played Vegas--the ultimate lounge act. His movie and music producers, and the Colonel, called the shots in what should have been Elvis' prime. He didn't rebel; he did it their way.

So what's left? A terrific crooner who was closer, in intonation, vocal virtuosity and care for a song's mood, to Bing Crosby than to any top singer of the past 30 years. The under-the-balcony tenorizing of It's Now or Never, the final detonation of pain and taunt in Are You Lonesome Tonight?, the choir-soloist power of the hymn He Touched Me--his voice breaking poignantly at the end of the hymn, as if he had just seen Jesus--these still thrill and haunt. So does his desire to please an audience of kids and grandmas instead of comfortably occupying a niche, as almost every pop star has done since.

Platinum ends with a speech Elvis made in 1971. Quoting Vincent Youmans' 1929 Without a Song, he says, "So I keep singin' the song." The impulse to sing raunchy, corny, beautiful songs trapped Elvis; and in that trap, as this set proves, he sometimes found triumph.

--By Richard Corliss