_Five years after Elvis’s death, a bootlegger known only as “Richard” released a compilation of dubious Presley songs on a record label called Dog Vomit. The cover art of Elvis’ Greatest Shit!! is styled like the National Enquirer’s front page, with exclamatory banners that scream THE VERY BEST OF THE VERY WORST and 50,000,000 ELVIS FANS CAN BE WRONG!

At the center of the album cover is a blurry photo that ran in the actual Enquirer of Elvis in his casket, captioned “FAT DEAD PERSON…who once thrilled the world with such immortal songs as ‘Queenie Wahine’s Papaya’, ‘Yoga Is As Yoga Does’, and ‘There’s No Room To Rhumba In A Sports Car’.”

Vulture named Elvis’ Greatest Shit!! one of the “25 Most Historically Significant Bootleg Recordings,” likely for its thorough (albeit crass) cover design, for the press coverage it received, and for its longevity—the album has seen four reissues and a sequel. All but two of the tracks on the album come from the movies Elvis made between 1956 and 1969.

Presley spent over a third of his career starring in films; in the mid-1960s, he did little else. All told, he made thirty-one features, sometimes at the rate of three a year. Each of these films includes at least one Elvis song—a key component of Colonel Tom Parker’s scheme to doubly profit from both cinema tickets and soundtrack releases. Parker insisted from the jump that every Elvis movie be, in some respect, a musical, and then he arranged for Elvis to make as many of those musicals as possible.

While no Elvis movie is great, a few are quite good. Four of his films are time capsules filled with fun cameos from mid-century Hollywood (including Barbara Stanwyck, Charles Bronson, Kurt Russell, and the actors who played Morticia Addams and Uncle Fester, respectively). Ten more flicks are bad, but in that watchable, MST3K way. Another eight range from squirmingly awful to dead boring, and the few remaining are pretty much unwatchable—utter shit, if you will. But Elvis sings in every last one of them.

Even his nimblest screenwriters could conjure only a limited number of plausible reasons for Elvis to sing. You can’t be a nightclub crooner in every film, though Presley played one in eleven. If a club act wasn’t germane to the plot, he still had to croon—usually nine times within ninety minutes. “I feel like a goddamn idiot breaking into a song while I’m talking to some chick on a train,” Elvis told Priscilla Presley during the filming of G.I. Blues, and that was before the real absurdity even started. Years later, when a reporter asked Elvis about his film career, Presley lamented, “How can you find twelve good songs for every film when you’re making three films a year?…How can you enjoy it when you have to sing songs to the guy you’ve just punched up?”

By the time he’d fulfilled his final Hollywood contract obligations, Elvis had made nearly 250 soundtrack master recordings—over half his studio output. Why did Richard select these particular twenty-one movie songs out of the hundreds he had to choose from, and what makes them superlatively shitty? Let’s zoom in on a few of Greatest Shit!!’s tracks—some of them redeemable, some ironically appealing, and a few beyond repair.

TRACK 12:

“Can’t Help Falling in Love”

_A handful of Elvis movie songs are world renowned, and even folks who haven’t seen a frame of an Elvis flick can hum a few bars of them. These are the tracks that still get licensed for commercials; the kinds of inescapable melodies that underscore weddings, commercials, or scenes from Lilo and Stitch: “Love Me Tender,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Viva Las Vegas,” “Teddy Bear,” or “Return to Sender.” Richard includes just one of these canon movie songs on Elvis’ Greatest Shit!!—“Can’t Help Falling in Love” from Blue Hawaii—but it’s not the final cut of the classic ballad. Instead, Richard uses an interrupted studio take in which Elvis hits a false note while singing “darling, so it goes, some things are meant to be.” After flubbing, Presley mutters the theme of Richard’s project: “Shiiiiit…hot damn tamale.” That’s the only reason a titan like “Can’t Help Falling” would be part of this crappy affair.

A dozen other movie songs rival the best recordings Presley made: at Sun, in Vegas, anywhere. They come from noteworthy writers like Billy Strange and Mac Davis, who cowrote the country-fried “Clean Up Your Own Backyard” featured in 1969’s The Trouble with Girls. The year before, their rollicking “A Little Less Conversation” barely moved the needle when it underscored a groovy scene of Live a Little, Love a Little. Three decades later, the song played in the Ocean’s  Eleven reboot and became a global hit after a Dutch DJ remixed it. No Davis and Strange songs made Richard’s “shit” list.

Also missing are compositions by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, the songwriting team responsible for “Stand by Me” and “Yakety Yak” (not to mention “Hound Dog”). Leiber and Stoller wrote the title tracks of three early Presley films, plus a dozen more movie tunes. In Jailhouse Rock, Elvis sings their “Baby I Don’t Care” poolside in a chunky sweater, laughing and bopping his way through one of his best performances, celluloid or otherwise. Elvis loved working with Leiber and Stoller and vice versa, but the pair only lasted through King Creole because the Elvis Machine had little patience for their ambitions. The Colonel threatened them after they pitched an edgy musical adaptation of Nelson Algren’s Walk on the Wild Side for Elvis’s next project; the pair quit not long after. “We could have made fucking history, and those assholes only wanted to make another nickel the same way,” Jerry Lieber told Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick.

TRACK 3:

“The Bullfighter Was a Lady”

_Though Leiber and Stoller cut ties with Elvis in 1958, several songs they wrote for other artists pop up in Presley films. “Bossa Nova Baby,” originally recorded by the Clovers, was recycled for Presley’s umpteenth nightclub performance, this time in Fun in Acapulco. It’s a rollicking standout compared to the film’s other songs, two of which appear on Elvis’s Greatest Shit!!

Elvis belts “The Bullfighter Was a Lady” from his club stage as he woos a toreadora. This song comes from the minds of Sid Tepper and Roy C. Bennett, who are like Leiber and Stoller’s evil twins. They’re responsible for seven of the tracks on Greatest Shit!!—a third of the album. All told, the duo wrote over forty Elvis movie songs, often under grueling deadlines (and probably for hack pay, given the Colonel’s legendary scrimping). We’ll get to Tepper and Bennett’s more egregious offenses later, but “The Bullfighter Was a Lady” could be categorized as something other than shit.

Sure, its premise is bizarre: a bull named Pedro pines for the comely matador stalking him in the ring. And yes, the lyrics are awful (“Her red cape was wavin’, but Pedro was shakin’ / He wanted to date her that night”). This is an indisputably bad song, but Elvis sounds sharp at the helm of it, and the daffy, Technicolor world of Fun in Acapulco sets him up to perform the song with theater-kid suavity. There’s a similar charm to the other Greatest Shit!! track from Fun in Acapulco, “There’s No Room to Rhumba in a Sportscar.” Elvis sings this Fred Wise and Dick Manning tune while cruising with the chick matador in her roadster, no particular place to go. He suspects the automobile’s design will present lovemaking challenges: “When a little kiss I want to steal, I hit my head against the steering wheel. / Now I know the way a pretzel feels.” Clunky phrasing, sure, but wouldn’t such a tune fit into any Dean Martin rom-com of the era?

A dozen years after releasing his bootleg, Richard dialed back from labeling the songs on his Elvis compilation “shit,” deciding instead that most of the tunes were “bad, but they’re funny-bad.” “Funny-bad” is a long way from shit. Countless slapstick movies, vaudeville acts, and wacky sitcoms revel in the joys of funny-bad, of succumbing to a premise or rhyme scheme that at first glance seems too goofy to function. Some fans—including Richard, perhaps—found it jarring to see a once galvanizing figure like Presley go funny-bad. This former font of post-adolescent cool acting the grown-up idiot in a ditty about coitus interruptus ex machina. But labeling the song “funny-bad” means there’s still energy in “No Room to Rhumba”—a power, however cheesy, that amounts to something.

TRACK 6:

“Song of the Shrimp”

_And how could a song be shit if one of America’s most soulful folk musicians loved to cover it? After staying up all night “watching an Elvis [movie] festival on the tube,” the great Townes Van Zandt adapted a stupid tune from Girls! Girls! Girls! and then played it live for years. “Song of the Shrimp” is one of four Elvis movie numbers devoted to invertebrate seafood, along with “Crawfish,” “Clambake,” and “Do the Clam.” Richard splices those last two together for Greatest Shit!!, creating the mollusk medley nobody needed.

Another Tepper and Bennett gem, “Song of the Shrimp” is a calypso murder ballad about a young crustacean lured away from his parents by a deceptive ad in a shrimp newspaper. The verses end with the shrimp getting scooped up to become somebody’s po’ boy, and Van Zandt sings its noxious chorus in a sweet campfire croon: “Goodbye, Mommy shrimp. Papa, shake my hand. / Here come the shrimp boat for to take me to Louisian’.” Woof.

In 1994, Van Zandt told a guffawing London audience he had no idea why he was playing them the pescatarian tune. “This is a sing-along that nobody is required to sing along with,” he chuckled. “I don’t even know why I’m singing it…it gets worse before it even starts!” Though Elvis’s rendition of “Shrimp” ends (mercifully) after about two minutes, this Van Zandt cover stretches past the five-minute mark because he keeps stopping to monologue, berate the song, and laugh. He heckles himself as the verses roll by, the audience roaring. “This is the last time I’m ever singin’ this song,” he jokes. “I don’t need to put up with this sort of abuse!”

TRACK 5:

“Yoga Is as Yoga Does”

_When the Elvis movie soundtracks were released as albums, fans could buy them while ignoring the films where they originated. Sometimes songs from multiple films were combined into one release, or a movie’s songs would be rounded out with extra studio material unrelated to the film. Worse still, Presley recorded new album versions for most of his movie duets in which he took over both of the vocal lines. Take “Yoga Is as Yoga Does” from Easy Come Easy Go. On the track used for Greatest Shit!!, Elvis sings both sides of a musical dispute between a flighty bohemian and the treasure-hunting frogman who’s crashed her yoga class. But in the film, Elsa Lanchester—a two-time Oscar nominee who played the original Bride of Frankenstein the year Presley was born—takes the yogi’s part. Lanchester lifts the song as much as a turkey like “Yoga Is as Yoga Does” can be lifted. She floats around Presley, waving her arms, warbling, “I can see looking at you, you just can’t get settled!”

“How can I even move, twisted like a pretzel?” Elvis responds, wrenching his elbow behind his neck. A dozen yoga acolytes in leotards or loose pants roll around the singers, hyperextending at random intervals. It seems none of them had ever taken a yoga class, nor had the choreographer. The dancers attempt headstands with varying levels of success right around the time Presley rhymes the word “serious” with “posterious.” But when you hear “Yoga” on Greatest Shit!!, you don’t get this strange scene. It’s just Elvis in the recording studio, arguing with himself and sounding entirely checked out.

TRACK 17:

“Beach Boy Blues”

_When assessing the quality of an Elvis song, nothing matters more than Presley’s investment in the material. The truth is that he elevated unremarkable music throughout his career. The iconic “Viva Las Vegas” would never make it onto a compilation of crap, but when you separate Elvis’s jaunty performance from the song, “Viva” is a hastily written number with a cheesy orchestration that can barely hold itself together lyrically. Elvis probably disliked the Doc Pomus–penned tune because he gave 636 concerts in Las Vegas after making the film and never included “Viva” on a setlist. For the soundtrack, however, Elvis is all in. Check those cocky bursts of breath at the ends of his phrases: “I’m gonna give it everything I’ve got (ah). Lady luck, please let the dice stay hot (uh). Lemme shoot a seven with every shot—aaaah VIVA LAS VEGAS!”

“Beach Boy Blues,” another Tepper and Bennett inclusion on Greatest Shit!!, also benefits from Elvis’s charismatic attention. In Blue Hawaii, Presley delivers the lament from county lock-up after some luau fisticuffs. Elvis always knew how to bend a blues note, to tease a melody line along the backbeat, and here he does that while bouncing through uncool lines like “I’m a kissin’ cousin to a ripe pineapple / I’m in the can.” The forgettable song becomes funny and sexy and listenable. In this way, “Beach Boy Blues” mirrors the inherent dumbness of Elvis’s incarcerated classic, “Jailhouse Rock.” Lieber and Stoller wrote most of the songs for Elvis’s third film in one captive weekend (their impatient music publishers locked them in a hotel room). The lyrics are rife with trite rhyme and cliché, but Elvis sings straight down the middle of them in a tuneful, loaded-for-bear rasp. Just listen to the rock & roll commitment in his howling of the clunky line, “If you can’t find a partner use a wooden chair.” Workaday words like “partner” and “wooden” aren’t hip, but they sound so slick in Elvis’s mouth. It’s Presley’s switched-on presence—first in the studio and then on set—that boosted the number to its premium ranking on the American Film Institute’s list of great movie music.

TRACK 4:

“Confidence”

_Once you filter out the actually-good songs, the funny-bad songs, and the songs saved by Presleyan investment, only a handful of shit remains on Richard’s bootleg, and good luck making a case for any of it. “Confidence” from Clambake is a low-rent rehash of “High Hopes”—that Frank Sinatra ditty about a plucky ant (which John F. Kennedy used, with reworked lyrics, in his presidential campaign). For “Confidence,” Tepper and Bennett filched the tone and meter of the popular “High Hopes,” but their lyrics put a stalwart tortoise in place of the insect. Its chorus is just Elvis holding a note while spelling the song’s title: “With a ‘C’ and an ‘O’ and an ‘N’ and an ‘F’ / and an ‘I’ and a ‘D’ and an ‘ENCE.’” (Andy Kaufman played this song on The Mike Douglas Show for Douglas, fellow guest Carol Channing, and co-host Robert Goulet, who looked traumatized.) Elvis sounds miserable to the point of blacking out, but his backup singers—a gang of screamy kid actors—are the ones who truly tank the song.

Elvis singing with or to children is an express lane to Turd City. The Colonel and his Hollywood abettors were usually keen to make Presley films family friendly, but no movie song that includes kids is salvageable. Both “Datin’” and “Queenie Wahine’s Papaya” from Paradise, Hawaiian Style made it onto Elvis’ Greatest Shit!!, but let’s not forget the overlooked “Big Boots” from G.I. Blues, “Five Sleepyheads” from Speedway, or “Cotton Candy Land” from It Happened at the World’s Fair. This is to say nothing of the creepily flirtatious tunes that Presley sings to child actresses: the cringey “Your Time Hasn’t Come Yet, Baby” from Speedway and “Hey Little Girl,” an up-tempo crime from Harum Scarum.

TRACK 18:

“Dominick, the Impotent Bull”

_Many of the absolute shoddiest film tracks reference some species of critter: “Confidence” does, as does the godforsaken clam medley. And no animal tune is worse than the felony from Stay Away Joe called “Dominick, the Impotent Bull.” That’s the title as it’s listed on Elvis’ Greatest Shit!! because the song had yet to be released other than in the film itself. Elvis had struck a deal with RCA to otherwise bury the tune for his life entire. Richard must have unearthed “Dominick” from some bootleg studio footage, and then he took its title from the lyrics about a farm stud who refuses to breed: “Dominick! Dominick! Why are you stallin’? / Don’t you hear love callin’ to you? / Moo, moo, moo-ve your little foot, do.” In this rock-bottom mess of lyrics, music, and production, you can almost hear Elvis retreating from the mic like Homer Simpson into the shrubbery.

TRACK ONE:

“Old MacDonald”

_And now we have finally reached the nadir. When it comes to shittiness, none of the deeper tracks of Greatest Shit!! can compare to the bootleg’s opening number. Track One ticks all the shit boxes, really; it’s an uncool kiddie tune about an animal, hastily sung by an Elvis who seems not just bored, but burdened. Submitted for your disapproval: Elvis’s take on “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” recorded in 1966 for his twenty-fourth film, Double Trouble.

Both Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra recorded this public domain tune, which might have given Double Trouble’s producers the idea for a cheap track. But Sinatra’s take is a cheeky reinterpretation about one of the farmer’s “chicks,” and Ella Fitzgerald’s version is a big band masterclass. She makes the song a trampoline for her vocal pyrotechnics.

For Elvis’s troubling version, he was given neither a careful arrangement nor a clever rewrite. This Old MacDonald is a vengeful farmer who eats his animals when they “get out of line.” With every verse, another animal is slaughtered “with an oink-noink here, an oink-noink there, pigs everywhere in sight, and when those pigs got out of line, pork and beans at night.”

As the massacre continues, both the key and the tempo increase in an agitating fervor. Elvis lets his voice break, country style, for the first barnyard murders, but that break intensifies into a fearful plea as the song continues. His notes get frazzled to the point of fraying; he shouts without nuance, and you can hear the unhelpful grip of his tightened neck.

The song was quickly recorded in a late-night session that had been relocated from a studio to a cheaper soundstage after the producers opted to further defund Double Trouble. “You mean it’s come to this?” Elvis shouted, and quit the session in a fury. Engineers were forced to use an incomplete track, lousy with sound bleed, as the master. Priscilla remembers Elvis being “incensed for days” about the situation. “Man, it’s a joke and the joke is on me,” he told her.

By the time Greatest Shit!! debuted, Elvis the Joke was a known quantity—and for some, a delightful one. Critic Greil Marcus aligned the bootleg with “punk’s contribution to contemporary culture: a loathing that goes beyond cynicism into pleasure, a change of bad into good and good into bad.” What’s more, the decade-plus between Presley’s abandoned “Old MacDonald” recording session and the release of Richard’s bootleg had given the world multiple Elvises to process: the sexual powerhouse of the Comeback Special; the hunka-hunka prince of the early Vegas residencies; the overmedicated shadow still on tour; the legend gone too soon; and, eventually, the undead tabloid king. It seems that an icon like this one, whose career repeatedly crested and troughed, can be—and maybe should be—celebrated as simultaneously funny-bad and venerable. It’s fitting, then, that in the decades of Presley’s afterlife (and we’re now over forty years past Greatest Shit!!), fans can champion Elvis’s crappier moments in tandem with his electric ones. This post-Presleyan world allows any willing audience to hold the Elvis that galvanized 1950s youth culture alongside the Elvis who crashed the White House and badgered Richard Nixon for a DEA badge. Black leather Elvis on a pedestal right next to bedazzled jumpsuit Elvis. The fiery Elvis who ignites Jailhouse Rock beside the guy in Harum Scarum who croons the shitty “Desert Serenade” immediately after karate-chopping a leopard in the neck.

This story was published in the print edition as “Elvis’s Greatest Shit?”  Subscribe to the Oxford American with our year-end, limited-time deal here. Buy the issue this article appears in here: print and digital.