Maybe all y’all Beatles/Elvis fans knew about this, but I think it’s pretty damned amazing that Elvis Presley covered the Beatles’ “Get Back” in 1970.
Maybe this was Elvis’s spoils of war moment–he’d finally outlived the Beatles as a force of rock, even if he was far less relevant than they were and continue to be. Or maybe he felt an affinity for them and wanted to show a little unity now that both they and he had outlived the decades during which they reigned. Or maybe he just knew a good tune that blended well with Doc Pomus’s “Little Sister.” Or maybe he was accusing them of stealing their riffs from his riffs, in the same way Bowie did in his BBC sessions when he quoted Elton John’s “Rocket Man” during a section of “Space Oddity.”
I dunno. To this day, I can’t decide whether I like the Beatles better, or Elvis. Sure, the Beatles were smarter, could actually write songs, and forged styles that are still being explored today, whereas Elvis is a photo on a menu at Johnny Rockets. But damned if he couldn’t sing far better than they ever could, and his Sun sessions also forged a path that I don’t feel has ever really been explored, even in these years of post-Rockabilly Boom, when you can find a guy with a pompadour under every muscle car who has Three Bad Jacks on his iPod.