999,923: Elvis Presley - Yoga Is As Yoga Does

Why do humans create? To leave our mark on the world? To communicate with our fellow beings what we can’t fully express through social interaction? To tap into the deepest truths of our baffling existence? Well, if it’s any of those, I don’t know how anyone ever creates anything, because the stakes are so impossibly goddamn high it’s no fun anymore. So then, which is the more interesting piece of art: a consciously crafted attempt at a major statement by someone whose truths are neither as deep nor as significant as they suspect? Or something tossed off quickly by someone who knows their craft but is not really inspired, instead squeezing something out of their subconscious, like a half-expected fart of yet-unknown pungency, because forces beyond their control dictate that something must be produced? Unless you have not seen the song title above, you know what my answer is going to be. Often, the truly baffling miscalculations happen when people are trying to create something that will make money, but have no personal connection to the ideas they come up with.

Elvis Presley’s movie deal was running out by the time of 1967’s Easy Come Easy Go, and everybody involved was half-assing what was already a half-assed project to begin with. (So, quarter-assing.) Elvis’ character here is a singer (go figure), but also an ex-Navy diver who knows about a sunken ship full of treasure. He meets this chick who’s a go-go dancer and a freaky beatnik (in a stunningly accurate depiction of the counterculture in 1967). But somehow she also knows (or does?) something that Elvis needs to go recover this treasure, and I’ll be damned if I can remember what it was, just from the brief period I spent reading plot summaries of this movie to figure out where the hell this song fit into it. Anyway, I guess they meet in yoga class, or something. It’s a classic chicken-egg scenario: did they write this song to fit the yoga scene that was already planned for the movie, or was the yoga scene written to accommodate this pre-existing song about how silly and funny yoga looks to a simple country-rooted man of the people like Elvis? Like the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know. What is certain is that nobody here is burdened by an attempt to create great art. The stakes are low. The budget is low, nobody is all that interested in the project, just fucking write something and get it over with. And so we get this indelibly asinine novelty song that rhymes “take this yoga serious” with “pain in my posterius.”

Surrounding circumstances being what they were, it’s arguable that this moment is the absolute nadir of Elvis’ career, so much so that the following year he made an unequivocal return to the music that made him famous. And for that, “Yoga Is As Yoga Does” is far more memorable than the many more nondescript tunes Elvis recorded for his movie soundtracks. Interestingly, the version that appears in the movie features vocals from the yoga teacher (played by Elsa Lanchester) on a good share of the lines, while Elvis handled everything on the version issued on the soundtrack recording. Listen to the two different versions posted below, and pretend you are studiously comparing alternate takes of jazz compositions to hear the instructive differences in the players’ solos.