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Suppose is not the greatest song Elvis Presley
ever recorded but it is, for me, one of the most
underrated. At a time – the mid 1960s – when you can
almost hear the self-belief seeping from him on some
recordings, Elvis was unusually intrigued by this
quiet chilling ballad.
The song was neglected, even by RCA and producer Felton Jarvis, at the time.
Perhaps, as Ernst Jorgensen suggests, it was regarded as too similar in sound
and lovelorn feel to the 'comeback' single 'Indescribably Blue' which had failed
to do the business. Somehow, it didn’t make the cut for the soundtrack for
Easy Come Easy Go – too good for
its own good? – and then, in the kind of inverse quality control which typified
Elvis' career at that point, was cut from the film
Speedway too. Mercifully, though, it made
it onto the soundtrack album as the best of five bonus songs.
Suppose is written by Goehring and Dee. George Goehring famously wrote
'Little Donkey', while the song's co-author Sylvia Dee is famous – make that
notorious – for a song called 'Chickery Chick' about a chicken who brightens up
his life by saying "Chickery chick, cha-la, cha-la, chekala romey/In a bananika
bollika wollika…". Goehring never co-wrote anything else for Elvis, Dee had
co-written 'Moonlight Swim' for
Blue Hawaii with Ben Weisman.
Fortunately, George and Sylvia set all thoughts of farmyard animals aside to
write 'Suppose', a simple, plaintive, ballad, in which the narrator/singer is
left desolate, if not suicidal, by doubts over his love. It's the kind of
haunting number that feels as if it ought to be heard in a David Lynch movie.
Some fans have suggested this song may have inspired
John Lennon's
utopian anthem Imagine.
The evidence for this view runs like this: 1) in both songs, the singer runs
through a list of things that might not exist; 2) both numbers consist of a
singer, alone at a piano, contemplating another world; 3) both songs have many
lines that begin with a single repeated word – suppose or imagine and 4) the
phrase "it's impossible to imagine" is actually used in one verse of Suppose.
The timeline doesn’t rule it out: Suppose was recorded in the summer of 1967,
Imagine was recorded – and released – in 1971.
All of which add up to something greater than coincidence but not enough to
provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
The only way to solve this argument is to ask Yoko Ono flat out if
her husband was a proud owner of the soundtrack to
Speedway. But rock and roll's most
controversial widow is hardly likely to come straight out and say: "It's a fair
cop", as villains do in bad British TV cop dramas. We know Lennon was a big fan
of the young Elvis and, despite some well-publicized put downs in later years,
never lost his love for the King. His fellow Beatle George Harrison hadn't
stopped listening to Elvis by the late 1960s – even discussing how much he liked
the lyrics of Clean Up Your Own Backyard with an interviewer. So anything is
possible.
In the final analysis, the Imagine controversy doesn't matter. 'Suppose'
stands on its own as a hidden gem – one that, if you’ll forgive the plug, I
probably should have listed as one of his essential performances in my
Rough Guide to Elvis. Listen to the way Elvis pauses after "Suppose I
had no wish" and before "to be alive" – in a similar way to Lennon catching his
breath after "all the people". Elvis was the king of many things and on those
ballads he felt a spark of interest in, he was the king of phrasing.
Suppose was exceptional, when Elvis first recorded it, for being a song he
actually cared about. Listening to his private recordings from this period, he
sounds more soulfully engaged on songs like 'Dark Moon', '500 Miles' and
'Suppose' than on most of the songs he recorded between the 1966 'How Great Thou
Art' sessions and the 'Guitar Man' sessions in Nashville in September 1967.
If you haven't listened to it recently – or have never heard it – treat
yourself. Suppose is a more subdued performance than those with which he shook
the world, but it's as telling. It's one of a handful of songs that, like his
cover of Bob Dylan's 'Tomorrow Is A Long Time', hints at musical worlds he
never, sadly, got to explore. I'd recommend buying it on The Home
Recordings because it does offer you, as the sleeve notes suggest, an
insight into his musical soul.
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