Elvis has to be the ultimate rock and roll cautionary tale. At heart, he was a simple country boy who just wanted to play music and make a few records, but he quickly fell into the grasp of a greedy manager and an entourage of moochers living off his money. This album opens with a blast of Blue Suede Shoes which certainly got white American teens jiving, but for every rock and roll banger there’s a bunch of maudlin torch songs or plodding country numbers. A bigger problem is that the version of Tutti Frutti on this album doesn’t have any of the in-your-face energy and attitude of Little Richard’s original. Adding it all up, you are getting less than half an hour of cover songs that are not quite as good as the originals, but they just happened to catch the zeitgeist and open the door for rock and roll to reach the predominantly white mainstream audience. Blue-suede-shoes-tastic!