"Treat me nice, treat me good, treat me like you really should. 'Cause I'm not made of wood and I don't have a wooden heart" - so trills The King in a prissy tone over a stereotypical Bavarian oompah beat, pausing only to repeat it all again in German. Well while I sharpen my knives, I'll adopt the Scholastic philosophical method and build as strong a case for the defence as I'm able.1. 'Wooden Heart' is based on a nineteenth century German folk song (catchily titled the untranslatable "Muss i denn, muss i denn zum Städtele hinaus"), a fact that at a stroke explains the Teutonic overtones.
2.'Wooden Heart' is taken from the soundtrack of 'GI Blues', a film loosely based on Presley's own army years based in Germany. This was where he first heard the tune and it explains his interest in recording it.
3. In 'GI Blues', Elvis sings 'Wooden Heart' to a wooden female puppet in front of an audience of appreciative German children, which explains the lyrics quoted above of the lyric and the nursery rhyme tune.
Well that explains 'Wooden Heart' anyway, but it neither justifies nor excuses it - although I'm one of that rare breed of people who would willingly jump to Paul McCartney's defence for 'Rupert & The Frog Chorus' (c'mon, it's for the kids), I'm not at all inclined to cut Elvis any such slack for this misdemeanour. Why? Well McCartney's ditty can stand on its own two feet as a decent kids song outside of its animated backing; 'Wooden Heart' can't. It works ok-ish in the context of 'GI Blues' as a novelty interlude for those German kids to laugh along at as Elvis mugs it up with the puppet, but the film itself wasn't aimed at a kindergarten audience. 'GI Blues' is an Elvis film for Elvis fans and taken outside this contextualising framework, it doesn't work on any level. There's no hard wired demography it will appeal to save the fanatically and deluded fanbase, and while it might please those kids in the film, the humour in Presley's voice does not breach the fourth wall to grow legs of its own.
Shorn of the background detail of my points one, two and three, 'Wooden Heart' is a terrible song. It isn't the worst thing he'd put his name to in the sixties, far from it,** but coming from Elvis there's a crushing feeling of disappointment, at being let down badly by someone you excepted more from and terrible too to see the Memphis Flash's wings being clipped ever shorter by him acting the fool for mass consumption and simpering like a simpleton where once he roared.*
* The great silent film star Louise Brooks may have achieved great acclaim working in Europe during the 1920's, but in so doing she pissed off her American studios to such an extent that the only role she could land on returning home was playing third fiddle on the 'Overland Stage Raisers' bill after a young John Wayne and a ventriloquist's dummy called Elmer. Brooks promptly told them where they could stick such films and retired into obscurity for over thirty years. Presley had no such principles and would go on to plough this furrow to ever diminishing returns for years before coming to his senses toward the end of the decade. If only he had some of Brooksie's guts.....
** Worse examples include: "There's No Room To Rhumba In A Sports Car", "Yoga Is & Yoga Does", "Song Of The Shrimp", "The Fort Lauderdale Chamber Of Commerce", "He's Your Uncle Not Your Dad", "Dominic The lmpotent Bull" and "Queenie Wahine's Papaya". All of which have been usefully collated on the 'Elvis' Greatest Shit' bootleg from Dog Vomit Records.
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