From Elvis in Memphis 9781501355387, 9781501355417, 9781501355400

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Track Listing
Acknowledgments
Prologue: From Elvis in Hell
The Cover: From Elvis in Burbank
Chapter 1: The Arrival
Chapter 2: The Great Advice
Chapter 3: The Promise
Chapter 4: The Funeral Procession
Chapter 5: The Tear-Stained Pillow
Chapter 6: The Departure
Interlude: From Elvis in Purgatory
Chapter 7: The Shaking
Chapter 8: The Backroads
Chapter 9: The Confession
Chapter 10: The Cotton Dress
Chapter 11: The Beautiful Bird
Chapter 12: The Vicious Circle
The Back Cover: From Elvis in Vegas
Epilogue: From Elvis in Paradise
Works Cited

Citation preview

FROM ELVIS IN MEMPHIS Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rockgeek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice A brilliant series … each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK) We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound​.c​om and our website at http:​/​/www​​.bloo​​msbur​​y​.com​​/musi​​cands​​ound​s​​tudie​s Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www​.facebook​.com​/33​.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

Forthcoming in the series: Band of Gypsys by Michael E. Veal Timeless by Martyn Deykers Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 by Colin Fleming Once Upon a Time by Alex Jeffery Tapestry by Loren Glass Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik The Archandroid by Alyssa Favreau Avalon by Simon Morrison Rio by Annie Zaleski Vs. by Clint Brownlee xx by Jane Morgan and many more…

From Elvis in Memphis

Eric Wolfson

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Copyright © Eric Wolfson, 2021 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wolfson, Eric, author. Title: From Elvis in Memphis / Eric Wolfson. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Series: 33 1/3; 150 | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “A discussion of one of the most influential 20th century performer’s most underrated album and the narrative it tells about Elvis and his relationship to home”–Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020029946 (print) | LCCN 2020029947 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501355387 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501355394 (epub) | ISBN 9781501355400 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Presley, Elvis, 1935-1977. From Elvis in Memphis. | Presley, Elvis, 1935-1977–Criticism and interpretation. | Popular music–United States–1961-1970–History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML420.P96 W68 2020 (print) | LCC ML420.P96 (ebook) | DDC 782.42166092–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029946 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029947 ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-5538-7 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5540-0 eBook: 978-1-5013-5539-4 1

Series: 33 3

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To my spouse, Annie, and to our children, Charlie, Elsie, and Trixie.

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Contents

Track Listing Acknowledgments Prologue: From Elvis in Hell The Cover: From Elvis in Burbank 1 The Arrival 2 The Great Advice 3 The Promise 4 The Funeral Procession 5 The Tear-Stained Pillow 6 The Departure Interlude: From Elvis in Purgatory 7 The Shaking 8 The Backroads 9 The Confession 10 The Cotton Dress 11 The Beautiful Bird 12 The Vicious Circle

ix x 1 13 25 39 49 59 69 77 87 93 101 107 115 123 133

C o n te n ts

The Back Cover: From Elvis in Vegas Epilogue: From Elvis in Paradise

143 151

Works Cited

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Side 1 Wearin’ That Loved on Look Only the Strong Survive I’ll Hold You in My Heart (Till I Can Hold You in My Arms) Long Black Limousine It Keeps Right on A-Hurtin’ I’m Movin’ On Side 2 Power of My Love Gentle on My Mind After Loving You True Love Travels on a Gravel Road Any Day Now In the Ghetto

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Leah Babb-Rosenfeld for fulfilling this life dream I’ve had for over a decade; thanks to Samantha Bennett for her invaluable ideas and insights along the way; and thanks to David Barker, for writing me back all those years ago. Thanks to Scott Sandage and Michael Witmore for their years of friendship and mentoring. Thanks to Greil Marcus, Dave Marsh, and Peter Guralnick, for their kindness in recent years, and to Jim Dawson for his kindness in years earlier. Thanks to Jerry Osborne for graciously allowing me to use so many quotes from his excellent work. Thanks to Robert Gordon, Allen Smith, Nigel Patterson, and Jenna Jachles for their ideas and support. Thanks to Sam Perryman, Cait Miller, and the entire Library of Congress Music Reading Room staff. Thanks to Chips Moman, Tommy Cogbill, Reggie Young, Bobby Wood, Bobby Emmons, Mike Leech, and Gene Chrisman for their beautiful music. And thanks to Elvis Presley, the once and always king of rock and roll.

Prologue From Elvis in Hell I guess everyone wonders what he’d do if he got lucky and got in front of the public and got real well-known. I remember I used to think about that, when I was driving a pickup truck in Memphis. I used to dream about being a success and wondered how my life would change if it should ever happen. Well, I can tell you how I feel about it now. I don’t feel a bit different now than I did before all this happened. I’m just like I always was. —Elvis, August 28, 1956.1 In 1968, Elvis Presley was worse than dead—he was irrelevant. After helping to establish rock and roll as a cultural force and becoming its biggest star in the 1950s, he now found himself eclipsed by the music. New artists like the Beatles and Bob Dylan blew the mid-1960s rock landscape wide open, proving it could have both a musical sophistication and an articulated consciousness. Elvis, once the epitome of the young and exciting rock and roll star, had become old and stale. Osborne, 70.

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Elvis wanted a chance to prove his vitality again, so he focused his attention on a comeback television special. His overpowering manager, Colonel Tom Parker, set up the show with the expectation that it would be a family-friendly holiday special featuring Elvis in a suit singing Christmas songs. For an all-too-rare time in Elvis’s career, he defied his manager’s wishes. Elvis saw it as an all-or-nothing bet that would either resurrect him as the king of rock and roll or leave him by the wayside as a relic. Elvis found a kindred spirit in Steve Binder, the young musical and variety show director who was hired to helm the TV special. Binder was initially wary of working with Elvis, who he was afraid might be completely out of touch, but he was soon won over by the singer’s charisma and outlook on the music scene. Binder worked with his partner, Bones Howe, to write a rock and roll special that featured both new songs and old hits sung in a more contemporary style. By mid-June 1968, rehearsals began in Hollywood. Soon after, Binder noticed Elvis looking out the window at Sunset Boulevard. Binder asked him what he thought would happen if he walked down the street by himself. He turned the question back on Binder, who replied that he didn’t think anything would happen. After a few days, Elvis decided to see if Binder was correct. “Now it all made sense to me,” Binder later explained. “I’m sure that Elvis thought he couldn’t go out in public because the Colonel had probably told him he would be mobbed and possibly all of his clothes would be torn off with fans trying to get a piece of them.” It was a test to see if the world had indeed moved on without him. 2

PROLOGUE

Elvis’s entourage began heading for the door, but Elvis only wanted Binder with him for his little experiment. Binder recalled: There were hardly any pedestrians on the street, but the traffic was building on the Strip. . . . It was a little awkward for both of us because we feigned some conversation about nothing particularly important. We were both waiting for something to happen. Cars were driving by, not even bothering to look at us. No horns were honking and no California girls were rolling down their windows to get a look at Elvis or scream out his name. A couple of seedy looking hippies almost bumped into us as they were heavily engaged in their own conversation. If Elvis still believed that he was too famous to walk down the street like a normal person, he was sorely disappointed. “After a few long minutes, I could tell Elvis was getting uncomfortable and restless,” Binder wrote. “Absolutely nothing unusual was happening. . . . A few more minutes passed before Elvis decided to take charge of the situation. He started waving at the passengers in the cars passing by. Still nothing happened. Elvis had enough and wanted to go inside.”2 Binder later held that if there had been any advance warning, there would have been mobs and stopped traffic, but in late-1960s Hollywood, everyone was too jaded to believe it was really Elvis, if they even noticed him at all. Binder, 14.

2

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Regardless of Binder’s speculations about the variables of their little experiment, the event had an effect on Elvis. For just a moment, he was reminded what it was like to be nobody. And Elvis worked hard on the special to make sure he would never feel that way again. *** “I can never forget the longing to be someone,” Elvis told a reporter in 1965. “I guess if you are poor you always think bigger and want more than those who have everything when they are born. We didn’t. So our dreams and ambitions could be much greater because we had so much farther to go than anyone else.” For Elvis, poverty wasn’t just a chapter in his past, but a condition that stayed with him, shaping his perspective for his entire life. By the time he broke through and peaked as a national star in 1956, he had spent over three-quarters of his life struggling to make ends meet. We take for granted that he was a rich superstar, but from his perspective, poverty and failure were the rule, and wealth and success were the exception. “I don’t know what it is,” Elvis once tried to explain to the Saturday Evening Post, “I just fell into it really. My daddy and I were laughing about it the other day. He looked at me and said, ‘What happened, El? The last thing I can remember is I was working in a can factory, and you were driving a truck.’ We all feel the same way about it still. It just . . . caught us up.”3

Guralnick, 119.

3

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Elvis defied the expectations of someone born during the Great Depression to poor white southerners. “Elvis had achieved what no white trash working-class male had ever dreamt possible: he was at once cool and sexually transgressive and a ‘country boy,’” writes Nancy Isenberg in White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. “No longer a freakish rural outcast, as in the past, Elvis was a ‘Hillbilly Cat,’ someone many teenage boys wished they could be.”4 Elvis was true to where he came from yet transcended his humble roots. It’s a bit strange now to think of Elvis as a country singer, but as a white person singing a kind of folk music, this was how he was first marketed and commercially consumed in the mid-1950s. Many of his early pop hits were smashes on both the pop and country charts. Elvis pulled the rare trick of staying true to his original audience while embracing a much wider one. Elvis’s humble beginnings haunted him, fearing it could all be taken away overnight. Instead of recognizing his hard work and unique talent, Elvis grappled with what has become known as imposter syndrome, missing the obvious signifiers of his own success and feeling like he was just bluffing his way through. From his first brushes with fame, Elvis sounds like he is living outside of himself, standing in disbelief about what is happening. “I’m afraid to wake up each morning,” he confessed to a reporter in 1956. “I can’t believe all this has happened to me—I just hope it lasts.”5 When given the Isenberg, 231. Bacon, 15.

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opportunity to credit talent or luck, he repeatedly chalks it up to the latter. “Well sir, I’ve been very lucky,” Elvis said before shipping off with the army in 1958. “I’ve been very lucky, and I happened to come along at a time in the music business when there was no trend. I was lucky, I mean the people were looking for something different and I was lucky. I came along just in time.”6 Compounding these insecurities was the fact that Elvis was the most influential performer in rock and roll history who essentially never wrote his own material. “I’ve never written a song in my life,” Elvis told a radio interviewer in 1956. “I wish I could. I wish I was like some of my rivals— Carl Perkins and Gene Vincent. Those guys, they’re pretty good songwriters. But me, I did good to get out of high school.”7 In truth, Elvis does have his name on about twodozen copyright registrations, but most of these are for arrangements of traditional gospel songs. The early songs on which he appears as a coauthor—including major #1 hits like “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Love Me Tender,” and “All Shook Up”—were all to give him a piece of the publishing as a reward for recording the song. This was a standard business practice in the 1950s, but the Colonel soon figured out it was more lucrative to have Elvis record songs almost exclusively from one publishing company, Hill and Range, from which they both received financial kickbacks. This is likely the scheme that Elvis refers to in an interview Osborne, 125. Osborne, 47.

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for Dig magazine, published mid-1958: “It’s all a big hoax. . . . I never wrote a song in my life. I get one-third of the credit for recording it. It makes me look smarter than I am. I’ve never even had an idea for a song. Just once, maybe.”8 A few months later, Elvis flatly admitted to an interviewer: “No. I never wrote a song myself. I probably could’ve if I sat down and tried hard enough, but I never had the urge.”9 Even in the 1950s, this was somewhat unusual. Most of Elvis’s contemporaries—including Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Buddy Holly—wrote much of their own material. Then when the Beatles hit America in 1964, the demand for professional songwriters disappeared overnight. Suddenly, rock artists were expected to be selfcontained hit factories that wrote, recorded, and performed their own songs. All of the other major artists of this period—Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and the Beach Boys—reinforced this trend, as has virtually every major rock artist ever since. This further alienated Elvis from the larger rock scene, aligning him more closely to earlier pop singers like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, who performed other people’s songs. Elvis’s genius wasn’t as a musician or a songwriter, but rather as a stylist who could put sounds together in a new and exciting way. Some would say that this isn’t a genius at all. There are many people—then and now—who believe that Elvis was merely a cultural thief, using his white race to cash in on Diamond, 10. Osborne, 133.

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African American music. For some, this was Elvis’s original sin and it can never be atoned. The truth, as always, is more complicated. In the summer of 1953, Elvis Presley was an eighteen-year-old truck driver who had just graduated from high school in Memphis. He sang and played guitar, and was looking to get noticed. Elvis went to make a personal recording at Sun Records, a storefront recording studio run by owner and producer Sam Phillips. On that day, Phillips was out and his office manager, Marion Keisker, was running things. She asked Elvis who he sounded like, and he replied: “I don’t sound like nobody.”10 Keisker was skeptical, but when Elvis did finally have his turn, recording an old Ink Spots ballad “My Happiness,” she heard something unusual in Elvis’s voice and secretly made a backup tape for Phillips to hear. Years later, Keisker explained her motivation: “The reason I taped Elvis was this: Over and over I remember Sam saying, ‘If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.’ This is what I heard in Elvis, this . . . what I guess they now call ‘soul,’ this Negro sound.”11 The difference between Phillips and Elvis, then, is that there were never any stylistic calculations on Elvis’s part. Elvis was simply doing what countless musicians have done before and since—finding his own voice by emulating the music he loved. This included African American rhythm and blues and spiritual music, but also white pop, country, folk, and Hopkins, 41. Hopkins, 42–3.

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religious music. He recorded a Bing Crosby song (“Harbor Lights”) and a country ballad (“I Love You Because”) before stumbling upon the jump blues “That’s All Right,” which forever set his course on rock and roll. For many, however, there wasn’t anything organic or earnest in this process. As a white man singing African American rock and roll, Elvis was a charlatan, period. These allegations against Elvis were nothing new. And even in his own time, Elvis was quick to point out and praise his African American influences. “A lot of people seem to think that I started this business,” Elvis explained in 1957, “but rock ’n’ roll was here a long time before I came along. Nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. Let’s face it: I can’t sing like Fats Domino can. I know that. But I always liked that kind of music.”12 This wasn’t just idle talk on Elvis’s part. When Elvis returned to live performing twelve years later in Las Vegas, he hailed Fats Domino to reporters as the real king of rock and roll.13 On one level, Elvis’s debt to African American performers can be taken for granted. In creating his own version of existing African American styles, Elvis was participating in a kind of racial appropriation that went all the way back to America’s first popular music, minstrelsy. “Elvis, like many others both before and after him, repositioned the minstrel as an all-around entertainer, not just a parodist of a certain

Robinson, 61. Guralnick, 353.

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group of people,” write Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor in Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music: Elvis wanted to be all things to all people. So he shucked off many of the most obvious signifiers of stereotyped blackness that previous minstrels had employed. . . . Elvis thus freed minstrelsy from much of its racist essence— his early RCA singles were high on the R&B charts, were played on R&B radio stations, and were bought by black Americans in large numbers. He made neither black nor white music but American music that could appeal to everyone on earth with a new message of youth, liberation, desire, and joy.14 Trying to find authenticity in rock and roll is a fool’s errand. Peel back the layers behind one singer or style and you find an endless hall of mirrors of white singers imitating African American styles, stretching all the way back to when the first slave ship arrived to the New World in 1619. In this sense, Elvis was just adding his voice to this conversation. “Elvis was great,” James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, wrote in his autobiography. “People still said he was copying, but he found his own style. . . . He was really a hillbilly who learned to play the blues. Cats complain all the time about white people learning music from blacks. . . . They shouldn’t steal it, but they’re entitled to learn it and play it.”15 While Elvis is often presented as an overnight sensation, he 156. Brown with Tucker, 166.

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made it through hard work and perseverance. It was only after years of crisscrossing the American South playing hundreds of shows that he was able to become something bigger than any rock and roll star before him. And one central reason for this was because Elvis was white. In order for rock music to breakthrough to a white audience, it needed a white star. Even Elvis’s own African American pioneering rock and roll peers recognized this. Little Richard once explained that white people like Elvis needed “to open the door for this kind of [rock and roll] music, and I thank God for Elvis Presley. I thank the Lord for sending Elvis to open that door so I could walk down the road, you understand?”16 Furthermore, Elvis wasn’t a faker like Pat Boone, who sang a Little Richard song like “Tutti Frutti” with the same corny blandness that he applied to any other pop song. Elvis worked hard to learn the blues and rhythm and blues idioms, and brought it together with country music in a new way through his music. Without Elvis, rock and roll may have been just another passing musical fad, peaking with Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” in 1955, and then going the way of calypso music and the mambo. The sheer magnitude of Elvis’s talent established rock and roll as a musical force in its own right, even if no one quite realized the full ramifications at the time. Elvis was able to succeed in part because he was a very charismatic singer and performer, which masked the battling inner-tensions and contradictions of both the man and his Dalton, 1.

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music. For much of his initial career, Elvis was beautiful to experience—movie star good looks, a tower of great hair, sexy dance moves, and, of course, one of the finest voices ever recorded. Girls wanted to be with him and boys wanted to be like him. At first he was dangerous and brooding, but by the time he entered the army, Elvis showed he was ultimately a good American boy who you could bring home to your parents. He was a rocker who could sing ballads, a sexually liberated performing artist who was a political conservative, a musical pioneer and a boy who stole the blues, a sinner and a saint. Elvis—both the man and his music—crossed seemingly impenetrable lines of racial, societal, and generational divides that allowed him to saturate into the culture to be all things to all people. He was an enormous figure onto whom people could project what they wanted to see. Which is to say that people used him as a screen onto which they projected themselves.

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The Cover From Elvis in Burbank I read in one magazine that I can’t play a note on the guitar, and in another, the same week, that I’m the best guitar player in the world. Well, both of those stories are wrong. —Elvis, August 28, 1956.1 After Elvis Presley and Steve Binder did their experiment walking down Sunset Boulevard, they got to work filming the television special in Burbank, California, just a few miles northeast of Hollywood. Elvis remained completely engaged in the project. At thirty-three, Elvis is fit, tan, and the best he’s looked in years. In the opening sequence of the show, he wears black leather pants and a black leather jacket, zipped up partway over a bare chest, a shock of red bandana tied around his neck, accenting his red guitar. At one point during the shooting, Elvis looks out, one hand resting on the end of his guitar’s body while the other hooks over the guitar’s neck, muting the strings. Behind him are black silhouettes of dozens of men in prison cells, an allusion to his iconic performance of the title song in 1957’s Jailhouse Osborne, 71.

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Rock. The difference here is that there are a lot more men and they all hold guitars. For the moment, they are frozen in various stances that are akin to early photographs of Elvis, when he was a young rockabilly punk strutting around with an acoustic guitar. Elvis now holds a Hagström Viking II electric guitar, its shiny red and black colors tying the whole thing together. Everything is backlit with cool red, as the floor becomes a watery mirror, dragging the background figures upside down into a fuzzy lake of fire. For a scene that implies so much movement, all is still; the only suggestion of motion is a slight blur of the neck and head of Elvis’s guitar, where it looks like he is trying to muffle its sound. From the long black chord that slips into the blackness framing the image, we can see that his guitar is plugged in. Elvis has the only face we can see in the picture. He is standing, looking up and out at a crowd that we cannot see, his hair big, black, and sculpted, with long, bushy sideburns that hug the edge of his cheekbone. His lips are closed in a quiet smile, while his eyes have a spark that magnifies the smile tenfold. Elvis looks proud, slightly eager, and satisfied, like a rock and roll David just before he threw that stone at Goliath. It is a face of a man who already knows the battle has been won. With the words “From ELVIS In Memphis” in the upper left-hand corner—the smaller text in white and “ELVIS” big bright yellow, all in the bold Cooper Black font (with a few decorative variations)—floating next to Elvis’s face, this image is the cover of Elvis Presley’s finest studio album. The photograph was taken while filming the opening segment of 14

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Elvis’s 1968 television special, officially titled Singer Presents . . . ELVIS (for the sewing machine company that sponsored it), but is now best known as “The ’68 Comeback Special.” After a year of upheaval, assassinations, and revolution, Elvis looked out to an enormous television audience on December 3, 1968, to stake his claim on the music he helped create but which had since left him behind. The program begins with a tight close-up on Elvis’s face, leering, “If you’re looking for trouble—you’ve come to the right place.” And you believe him. Elvis then kicks into “Guitar Man,” about a man who quits his job at a carwash to roam the country in pursuit of a musical dream. The singer hitchhikes on overloaded poultry trucks, sleeps in hobo jungles, and rides the rails. He travels from Kingston, Tennessee, to Memphis (where he “nearly ’bout starved to death”), and then on to Macon, Georgia, and Panama City, Florida, before finally joining the house band at a club in Mobile, Alabama. The song even holds a kernel of prophecy—“Guess who’s leading that five-piece band?”—as it predicts the five-piece band Elvis will be fronting in his next studio album. By the time he gets to the final verse about the crowds now coming to see him, Elvis sings with a fervor that borders on rage. We’re not even five minutes into the special and “Trouble/ Guitar Man” is already the best music Elvis has made in a decade. The rest of the program follows suit. Now that the rough story has been established—Elvis is a rambler, a displaced musical outsider in search of a home—the other segments flesh it out. He performs his old hits with full orchestration and newfound energy, he stops into a church to sing a medley of gospel music, and he goes through an 15

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extended sequence in a carnival fairway to sing some movie songs, before a coda of “Guitar Man” announces he’s going to hit the road once again. A stirring finale found Elvis dressed in white like a slicked-up preacher, singing a new song of hope called “If I Can Dream,” complete with soaring horns, strings, backing vocals, and a voice that blurred the lines between rock, pop, and soul; like “Guitar Man,” it too predicted the music he would soon make on his next album. The best part of the special was a stripped-down jam session, which was inspired by the music Elvis and his buddies made in his dressing room between takes. When filming in the actual dressing room proved too difficult, he and his friends sat in a circle surrounded by fans, playing songs and swapping jokes, accompanied by guitars and simple percussion instruments. “We weren’t trying to pick up any music awards or anything— just went out and had fun,” recalled Scotty Moore, Elvis’s original lead guitarist, who flew out for this segment with Elvis’s original drummer, D. J. Fontana. “And that’s the way it came off.”2 Fontana himself put it even more succinctly: “It felt like we were back home again.”3 The sound of these stripped-down sessions harked back to the music Elvis first made in Memphis at Sun—hard, lean, and determined. Sometimes he started a song and stopped cold after a minute or two, other times he doubled back to the same song two or three times, depending on how the mood struck him. This was among the freest music he would Clayton and Heard, 233. Elvis Presley: The Searcher.

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ever make, and these performances turned a great television special into a transcendent one. Through this music, Elvis resurrected himself—at the age of thirty-three, no less—as a prodigal son who found his way home. So where to go from here? Elvis went back to Memphis, where it had all begun. On January 9, 1969—one day after Elvis’s thirty-fourth birthday—Elvis sat in his Memphis home, Graceland. He was talking to Felton Jarvis, his staff producer at RCA Records, and various members of his entourage. Two of them, Marty Lacker and George Klein, were his friends from high school. Lacker worked as Elvis’s personal aide, while Klein was a popular disc jockey in Memphis. Both advised him informally throughout his career. Lacker and Klein each felt Elvis’s recording sessions were not doing him justice and saw a solution in a local Memphis operation called American Sound Studio, run by a guy named Chips Moman. Lacker remembers shaking his head “no” as he listed to Jarvis talking about Elvis’s upcoming recording dates at the RCA studios. “Elvis looked over at me and said, ‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’” Lacker later remembered. “I said, ‘I wish for once you would try working with Chips.’ I’d talked to him about it before, but every time he’d keep saying to me, ‘Well, maybe someday.’ So he said the same thing to me, ‘Well, maybe someday.’”4 A maid announced dinner and everyone left except for Lacker.

Sharp, 1.

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Luckily for Lacker, Klein was at the dinner table to reinforce his idea. Klein also recalled Jarvis continuing to talk to Elvis about his upcoming sessions, as the singer’s mood soured. Klein spoke up: “Elvis, just ten miles north of here is American Sound Studio, where they’re cutting the greatest hits in the world right now. . . . It’s a small funky studio with the kind of feeling I know you like. It’s not fancy, it’s not state-of-the-art, but they’re cutting fantastic records there. . . . With some great songs to work with at American, I know you’d have yourself some hit records, Elvis. It’s what you deserve.”5 After a long awkward silence, Elvis agreed. Lacker, who was still outside the dining room, remembers Jarvis came out to him and said that Elvis wanted to record in Memphis. Lacker popped his head into the dining room to verify this. Elvis said, “Yeah. But I have to start Monday night. You try to arrange it with Chips.”6 In Klein’s account, he remembers being the one who reached out to American Studio, as he knew Chips from the Memphis music scene. But Lacker recently had begun working at American Sound, so he had firsthand knowledge as well. In truth, it is likely that both men reached out to Chips. The key was to provide just enough suggestion to make Elvis believe that he had come up with the idea by himself. *** Klein with Crisafulli, 6–7. Sharp, 1.

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Lincoln Wayne “Chips” Moman (his nickname came from a love of gambling) was born in LaGrange, Georgia, in 1937, and hitchhiked to Memphis at age fourteen. He began his musical career playing in the touring band of one of Elvis’s Sun label-mates, Warren Smith. Chips then moved to Los Angeles in the late 1950s to play guitar for Johnny Burnette, and afterward toured with rockabilly legend Gene Vincent. When he returned to Memphis a few years later, Chips was central in the founding of Stax Records, scouting the label’s location and producing its first hit, Carla Thomas’s “Gee Whiz,” in 1960. But he was growing disillusioned with Stax and felt like the label was taking advantage of him financially. Meanwhile, a new generation of musicians coalesced in Memphis. Reggie Young, a guitarist from Osceola, Arkansas, moved to Memphis when he was thirteen, and joined the Bill Black Combo, led by Elvis’s original Sun Records bassist. When Young entered the army shortly thereafter, Chips filled in for him on tour, along with Tommy Cogbill, a guitarist and bassist from Brownsville, Tennessee, who came to Memphis in childhood. Another addition to the touring group was a young keyboardist named Bobby Emmons, originally born in Corinth, Mississippi, but who moved to Memphis as a teenager. Before long, Mike Leech, a young Memphis native bass player, was on hand to fill in for an ailing Bill Black. One of Black’s contemporaries was Stan Kesler, a songwriter and musician who cowrote Elvis’s early hit “I Forgot to Remember to Forget.” Kesler was mentoring Bobby Wood, a young pianist from New 19

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Albany, Mississippi, who moved to Memphis after high school. Wood sang for a popular local group called the Starlighters; Kesler secured Wood an audition at Sun, but Sam Phillips dismissed Wood as a Jerry Lee Lewis knockoff. Meanwhile, the real Jerry Lee Lewis’s touring drummer, Memphis native Gene Chrisman, sat in with the Starlighters and was impressed. When Chrisman learned that the Starlighters were looking for a new drummer, he gave his notice to Lewis that day. In 1963, Kesler wrote a song called “If I’m a Fool for Loving You” and helped Bobby Wood record it for Joy Records. The recording featured Wood on piano and vocals, Chrisman on drums, Young on guitar, and Leech on bass, and became a nationally charting hit. The following year, Wood released a self-titled solo album, which included both Chips and Cogbill on guitar. Wood also remembers Emmons contributing to the album, which, if accurate, marks the first time that the six principle musicians on From Elvis in Memphis recorded together—plus the album’s producer, Chips Moman. Soon after Wood’s solo album, Chips began setting up American Sound Studio, and recruited Young, Cogbill, Emmons, and Chrisman— each of whom were working studio musicians around Memphis—as his house band by the mid-1960s; members shifted and before long Mike Leech came into the fold. The slightly older Cogbill eventually took the role of bandleader and second producer under Chips. The group didn’t have a name, but they got one in hindsight while playing Nashville sessions after American Sound folded in 1972: “The Memphis Boys.” 20

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Mike Leech once set the scene of the core Memphis Boys group recording at American Sound in the mid-1960s: Reggie [Young], always messing with his guitar, amp, working on a certain tone, practicing his licks, quiet— hard to get his attention when he’s in that phase. . . . [Bobby] Emmons always looking in the control room for approval on his playing. If he got a grin or a nod from Chips, that’s what he worked for. . . . Gene [Chrisman] waiting patiently in the drum booth for everybody to get their parts together. Nothing to say, ready to roll. . . . [Tommy] Cogbill? A bit shy, especially about his playing. Accepted compliments shyly. You never knew what he was thinking.7 When pianist Bobby Wood permanently joined in the fall of 1968, Leech described him as a “Good solid player, would carry the ball on tempos, direction.”8 There was an instinctive sense in the playing of these six men that most bands could never master over a lifetime, let alone in a few short years. Between late 1966 and late 1971, the Memphis Boys recorded at least 120 charting hits; not a week goes by in this period that they do not play on at least one of the songs in the Billboard Hot 100—and usually it’s more, upward to 10 percent. Although they are often thought of as a soul outfit, they were versatile masters of popular music. Their sound adapted to the artist and song, spanning from the gritty pop-rock of the Box Tops’ “The Letter,” hard funk of Jones, 65. Jones, 165.

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Joe Tex’s “Skinny Legs and All,” wistful balladry of Merrilee Rush’s “Angel of the Morning,” smooth pop of B. J. Thomas’s “Hooked on a Feeling,” and sexy soul of Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man.” All of these songs were Top 10 pop hits by the time Elvis was working at the studio. Although American Sound Studio was busy, Chips always wanted to record with Elvis and was happy to make room. He moved some Neil Diamond sessions and booked Elvis for a ten-day stint in mid-January, later adding another fiveday session in February once things got going. This comes to roughly fifteen days of recording, of which three January dates were canceled when Elvis got laryngitis. This means that Elvis laid down thirty-two masters in twelve days (nineteen songs in January and thirteen in February), which arguably makes it his most productive sessions up to that point. They were successful too. Out of the thirty-two masters, four of them—a full 12.5 percent—were Top 20 hits. The songs were released on two full-length albums, plus various singles and album tracks across the next four years. It marked a historic homecoming: Elvis’s first professional studio sessions in Memphis since he had last recorded at Sun Records nearly a decade and a half earlier. If the Memphis Boys were nervous ahead of Elvis’s sessions, they played it cool. “Why no, I wasn’t scared at all,” Chips later remembered about Elvis coming to record. “He was just one more act.”9 Reggie Young echoed Jones, 202.

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the sentiment: “Were we scared? No. As a matter of fact, I know we were busy . . . we could see all the people we were recording . . . I remember thinking, ‘Oh, Elvis is gonna be here, cool.’”10 Bobby Emmons agreed: “We were not awed to distraction even with Elvis because of the stature of some of the artists we’d been cutting. We were glad we had gained enough fame that someone of this stature would seek us out.”11 But when Elvis actually arrived, it was a different story. “I said, ‘Well, Elvis coming here to get our sound, no use getting butterflies when he gets here,’” recalled Bobby Wood. “But, man, I knew when he was in the back parking lot! I just felt his presence. . . . It was almost like Christ was out there or something.”12 Others felt it too. “The night he got there and that back door opened, we were all taken,” says Young. “I thought, Lordamercy, that’s Elvis!”13 Elvis was magnetic, effortless, and cool, impressing people as jaded as the Memphis Boys before he even walked into their studio. Part of what makes Elvis’s greatest music— including From Elvis in Memphis—so successful is that this spirit comes through, pulling you into the performance. After spending years recording filler tracks for generic films with faceless musicians, he would now front a real band with

Jones, 202. Jones, 202. 12 Clayton and Heard, 236. 13 Jones, 202. 10 11

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years under their belt, many of whom had been playing as long as Elvis was a household name. As Steve Binder saw while making “The ’68 Comeback Special,” the Memphis Boys could sense that something had clicked inside of Elvis. He was now ready to engage as a creative artist. For the first time in years, Elvis walked into a recording studio and acted like he cared.

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1 The Arrival

You will never know how wonderful old Memphis is until you’ve been away for a while. —Elvis, January 1959.1 Elvis’s voice rings out strong and determined, with an edge of gruffness brought on by a cold he was fighting. “I had to leave town for a little while—” Reggie Young’s slick electric guitar bubbles around, answering his words, drenched in reverb. Gene Chrisman’s drums tumble in, setting the song’s funky rhythm, met by Mike Leech’s thumping bass. Only Bobby Wood’s piano waits in the wings, pouncing on the song’s breakdown in a gospel-style solo. The group plays cohesively, with Elvis stepping in the role of bandleader. RCA Records’ producer Felton Jarvis pays keen attention to Elvis’s mood; American Sound’s producer Chips Moman pays keen attention to everything else. Osborne, 133.

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Elvis owns the room like it is his room, and he fronts the band like they are his band. For many performers, it would take months to feel this assured in an environment, but Elvis is a natural. His ability to read a space, a group of musicians, and a song is uncanny. It is jarring to realize that only seven hours earlier Elvis had entered American Sound for the first time. “What a funky studio,” Elvis said when he first walked into the studio.2 “Funky” was a telling word, evoking both the soulful music that the place produced and the less-thanrefined condition of the building itself. American Sound was located at 827 Thomas Street in North Memphis, five blocks away from where Elvis went to high school. It lived in a brick box of a building in the middle of a five-lot strip mall. The studio originally shared one wall with a barbershop and the other with the Ranch House restaurant. George Klein remembers the neighborhood as “slightly run-down and a little on the seedy side—you didn’t fear for your life, but you made sure to lock up your car.”3 When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated a few miles away nine months before Elvis’s sessions, Chips and Tommy Cogbill camped out in the studio for days armed with guns. American Sound was a far cry from the kind of environment Elvis usually recorded in. The RCA Nashville studios were gilded palaces in comparison, state-of-the-art Guralnick, 328. Klein with Crisafulli, 192.

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recording studios safely tucked away behind a labyrinth of secure rooms and offices. American Sound’s front door led right to the studio. And most of the time, Chips didn’t even bother to lock it (although he tightened the security for Elvis’s sessions). The nearby restaurant’s garbage cans attracted rats that squeaked and ran across the rafters. Some claim that just before Elvis first walked into the studio, a rat fell off the roof and landed in front of him. Chips and the Memphis Boys were pleased to host Elvis, but they soon grew wary. After Elvis set foot in American Sound, he pulled out his smoking item of choice, a thin German cigar. Right on cue, several members of his entourage rushed to meet it with a lighter like a bunch of lackeys trying to appease their crime boss. As was his habit, Elvis was not alone. He arrived with his own producer, Felton Jarvis, and engineer, Al Pachucki, as well as close friends George Klein and Marty Lacker. Freddy Bienstock, an executive who specialized in finding material for Elvis, represented his Hill and Range publishing company, along with Bienstock’s employee (and Elvis’s close friend) Lamar Fike. Colonel Parker was served by the presence of his chief aide, Tom Diskin, while RCA vice-president Harry Jenkins represented the label. Members of Elvis’s entourage, “the Memphis Mafia,” were also there. “The only ones that weren’t fun were his guys, who tried to walk around with their chests stuck out,” remembered Wayne Jackson, leader of the Memphis Horns. “They were all tryin’ to talk to Elvis at once and we were tryin’ to get a job done. . . . All they wanted to do was entertain Elvis.”4 “There Jones, 207.

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was just too many people, and it was aggravating, I guess, on all sides,” Chips later recalled. “But I think they were kind of shocked when I stood up to them. They probably had never had anyone ask them to leave the studio before—but I did, and it turned out better for Elvis.”5 “Chips was a no-nonsense guy who always told it like it was,” Klein explained. “He was focused on getting great recordings of great performances of great material and had very little patience for anything getting in the way of that. He was never rude, but he was direct in a very Southern way.”6 Not that Chips was above his own admiration of Elvis. Perhaps sensing the import of the session, Chips called a friend to bring over his new Polaroid camera. Snapshots from the day show Elvis wearing a dark blue leather jacket, with a white-collared shirt framing a striped blue handkerchief tied around his neck, like the red one on the cover of From Elvis in Memphis. He has on white pants and black boots, with rings on his fingers. His hair is dark and coifed, with his trademark sideburns running down either side. Still fit and confident from the television special, Elvis looks like a god. There is one shot in which Elvis sits on a stool, fiddling with Tommy Cogbill’s electric bass, looking out blankly while the Memphis Boys flank him on either side. To the left of Elvis, Bobby Wood looks affable and rather boyish, his face still healing from reconstructive surgery after a nearfatal car crash. Mike Leech stands tall and youthful, with a Clayton and Heard, 238. Klein with Crisafulli, 195.

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mischievous smirk. Tommy Cogbill, the oldest member of the group at thirty-six, holds a look of a calm friendliness, despite his narrow-slit beady eyes. Gene Chrisman stands next to him in the back, his small stature hidden by the others and deep-set eyes framed by dark rings. To the right of Elvis, Bobby Emmons looks youthful and scholarly in his glasses and neat haircut, gazing to the side. Reggie Young stands tall and robust with his all-American good looks, arms folded in a confident stance. Elvis anchors the photograph as the star, but there is nothing to indicate that the men who surround him are anything special. Aside from the handsome Young, none of them are particularly striking or memorable. They maybe could be a pickup band at a blue-collar bar, but nothing more. The fact that these anonymous white faces are responsible for hot songs like for Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” and Wilson Pickett’s “I’m in Love”—let alone some of Elvis’s finest music—is surreal. Chips is not in the photograph, although he appears in another one from that night. Elvis sits on a stool with Cogbill’s bass looking outward for a moment, while Chips stands beside him wearing denim jeans and shirt with a black undershirt, arms folded behind his back with the touch of a formal pose. For his part, Chips was a bit nervous beforehand, wanting to make sure that everyone was ready, like an anxious party host. Just as Elvis’s first producer, Sam Philips, needed to provide an environment in which his artists felt free and unrestrained, so too did Chips need to ensure that all parties were primed for maximum possible success. Elvis was trying from his side too. Despite his entourage, he spent an hour saying hello and 29

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meeting all of the musicians and soundmen, taking the time to make a personal connection with everybody there. Elvis wanted to show that he was ready to roll up his sleeves and do some real work with these musicians he had sought out. “For all of us, it was the area of the country we lived in,” Young later reflected. “It’s the dead center between Delta blues and Nashville country. Some of the things we cut could have been country. All of the club bands played that way. If you blindfolded me and took me into a club and I heard somebody play that way, I’d know I was in Memphis.”7 *** Founded in 1819, Memphis was a unique city musically, reinforced by its location, forming a virtual straight shot with New Orleans and Jackson below it and St. Louis above it. This made it a popular route along the Great Migration as African Americans moved north in the early twentieth century, which in turn made it central in the geographical backbone of the blues. “But Memphis developed no single, identifiable blues idiom of its own,” writes Robert Palmer in his definitive Deep Blues. “Delta blues doesn’t seem to have gained much of a foothold in Memphis until the late thirties and the forties, when improved highways and the lure of wartime jobs brought Delta blacks into the city in great numbers.”8 When African American bluesmen arrived in Memphis, they soon made their way to Beale Street. “I found Beale Ford, xiii. Palmer, 227.

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Street to be a city unto itself,” blues legend B. B. King remembered when he first moved to Memphis as a twentyyear-old sharecropper from Indianola, Mississippi. “It was exciting seeing so many people crowded on the streets. So much activity, so much life, so many sounds.”9 Among the most memorable things King encountered there was “white people shopping the same street as blacks. This was new for me.”10 Two years later, King got his breakthrough as a deejay on the Memphis radio station WDIA, where he got his nickname “Beale Boy” King. WDIA was run by two white men, Bert Ferguson and John Pepper, but it was the first Memphis radio station to target African American audiences and hire African American deejays. “The radio station reminded me of Beale Street in this respect: It was a world apart,” King wrote in his autobiography. In the middle of a strictly segregated South, WDIA was a place where black and whites worked together. . . . I’m not saying it was perfect. Blacks couldn’t be engineers; we couldn’t actually spin the records. That was ridiculous and frustrating and made me mad. But the personalities hired by Mr. Ferguson—black deejays like Theo Wade, A.C. Williams, Hot Rod Hulbert, and Rufus Thomas—were told to be themselves. And they were. They set a style for deejaying that influenced radio all over the country, maybe all over the world.11 King, 98. King, 99. 11 King 115–16. 9

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Like Elvis Presley, B. B. King left rural Mississippi for the city of Memphis, where he found bright lights and hot blues. He also learned that Memphis wasn’t just a city to live in, but a home where you could make a name for yourself by working hard and embracing your own style, no matter how eccentric. In Robert Gordon’s loving portrait of the city It Came from Memphis, he describes how Memphis is a city of determination and perseverance where mavericks and iconoclasts like Sam Phillips and Chips Moman took the harsh realities of the city and forged music with staying power. “The forces of cultural collision struck thrice in the Memphis area,” Gordon writes, first with the Delta blues, then with Sun, then Stax. These sounds touched the soul of society; unlike passing fads, these sounds have remained with us. By definition, most of popular culture is disposable, but Memphis music has refused to disappear. In electrified civilization, even when stripped of the particular racial and social context in which it was born, what happened in Memphis remains the soundtrack to cultural liberation.12 Delta blues, Sun, and Stax. From Elvis in Memphis draws a line between these three like little else before or since. In 1954, Elvis took the music of a Delta-native bluesman, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s hit “That’s All Right,” and created a new sound at Sun Records; now a decade and a half later, he looked to rekindle that flame by teaming up with Chips Gordon, 6.

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Moman, who cut his teeth helping to get Stax Records up and running. From Elvis in Memphis tells the story from the other side of this music, a record that freely mixes blues, rockabilly, and funky soul in various degrees without ever staying too long in one sound, instead using them like words of a common language. The album is an inheritor of Memphis’s musical legacy and stands as proof that Memphis music was now simply American music. *** “Wearin’ That Loved on Look” was a new song by Nashville songwriters Dallas Frazier and A. L. “Doodle” Owen. It tells the story of a man who arrives home after a little while to find his world entirely changed. Ostensibly, it’s about a lover being untrue, but the story takes on new meaning with Elvis’s circumstances. Elvis sounds as though he is singing not to a person, but to rock and roll music itself—and what a mess it’s made since he’s been away. The singer finds filled ashtrays and dirty floors, not to mention a man with long bushy hair—a leftover from a threeday party. He only has contempt for this man, which seemingly aligns with Elvis’s own sociopolitical views. Elvis was never too political, though everyone seems to agree his default setting was as a conservative Republican. Elvis’s bottom line seemed to be that you should support the country and its president no matter what, but he certainly seemed more engaged by Richard Nixon than any other president in his lifetime. A year and a half after Elvis released From Elvis in Memphis, he famously met with Nixon at the White House. 33

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Elvis was disturbed by the counterculture and requested becoming a federal agent to combat illegal drug use in America. He even wrote a letter that provides a rare insight into his political mind: “The drug culture, the hippie elements, the SDS, Black Panthers, etc. do not consider me as their enemy or as they call it the Establishment. I call it America and I love it. Sir I can and will be of any service that I can to help the country out.”13 Elvis was always interested in the trappings of societal authority: guns and police badges. Elvis collected guns and, as his fame grew bigger and bigger, he began receiving honorary police badges from around the country. His holy grail was to get a federal narcotics badge, which he believed would give him the authority to help the government crack down on drug use. There is a sense of innocence that propelled Elvis in this strange chapter in modern American history, as he earnestly believed that he could infiltrate the hippies and fight the drug culture that he felt was threatening America (not to mention his own career). He saw himself like a double-agent spy, a superhero that could hide under a secret identity. This childlike quality undercuts the stark irony of the scene: Elvis, who would die an early death in large part because of his drug abuse, believed he could save America from its own drug epidemic. For Elvis, the late 1960s America was a battleground with rock and roll caught in the crossfire. “Wearin’ That Loved on Look” plays like a dispatch from the frontlines, Guralnick, 416 (emphasis in original).

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simultaneously addressing two different layers of home. There’s the home for the singer in the song, in which his lover has been untrue, but there’s also the home of rock and roll music, the genre in which Elvis was trying to re-stake his claim after being away in Hollywood for so many years. This latter home is symptomatic of the larger cultural chasm that Elvis references in his letter to Nixon: the conservative Americans who found their country overrun by a seemingly hostile and destructive younger generation. The music of Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead was in the air while Elvis recorded From Elvis in Memphis, but he had no interest in “the hippie elements,” despite knowing that he had to make some sort of change in order to not lose his way entirely. From Elvis in Memphis is very much a comeback album, looking to reposition its singer as once-again relevant. It’s telling that Elvis didn’t go off to San Francisco or London to make the album, chasing some fleeting trend in late 1960s popular music. As much as Elvis could be a musical chameleon, he was smart enough to know that he didn’t want to commit himself to music that he could not understand. By setting up shop in Memphis, he forced the new music to come to him, on his turf, and on his terms. The trick of “Wearin’ That Loved on Look” is its ability to take in both levels of home—the singer’s house in the song and Elvis’s place in rock and roll culture—and conjure a quick study in a few clever verses and a funky backbeat. The song sets the scene so effectively and poses its questions so shrewdly, you don’t even notice that no answers are given. It is a two-tiered portrait of a world in flux, a home unfinished. We are not told the extent of the lover’s unfaithfulness any 35

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more than Elvis knows if this song can help relaunch his career. Like the country Elvis described to Nixon at the end of the following year, the song feels like a standoff between the “straight” singing the song and the man with the long bushy hair. And there was another revealing element to “Wearin’ That Loved on Look.” Every time Elvis accused his lover of being untrue, he followed it with “Shoop-shoop, shoop-shoop.” He didn’t sing these words as much as he went through the motions of saying them, a phrase to be included simply as a formality of the lyric. Elvis distanced himself from the words, which reeked of old nonsense rock and roll like Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” (which Elvis covered on his first album in 1956) and LaVern Baker’s “Tweedle Dee” (which Elvis covered onstage in 1955). The word “shoop” was something found in old doo-wop and girl group records, and so its placement in “Wearin’ That Loved on Look” is intriguing. From Elvis in Memphis is Elvis’s first attempt to demonstrate the newfound artistry that exploded in mid-1960s rock and roll. And yet, on the first song of the album contains “shoop-shoop” right in its refrain, a fragment of a world that Elvis had conquered long ago, a reminder of how far he has come. “Shoop” is a throwaway word evoking a more pure and innocent time, a shadow of fun that now mocks the singer. So he disposes of it. At the same time, however, the recording of “Wearin’ That Loved on Look” holds a clue—not the answer, perhaps, but an answer—in its very sound. Built around ancient blues changes and propelled by some of the funkiest drumming to grace an Elvis song up to that point, “Wearin’ That Loved 36

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on Look” lets us know that this too will pass because the beat goes on. There’s a remarkable string of images in which the singer articulates his doubt in his lover’s faithfulness. He declares that if his lover ever loved him, then Bonnie and Clyde loved the law, birds can’t fly, he doesn’t like apple pie, and a tree can’t grow in Arkansas. Elvis did not write these words, but he believed in them enough to record them convincingly. One wonders what Elvis thought about the song’s inclusion of Bonnie and Clyde—a reference not only to the outlaw folk heroes of the Great Depression but also the 1967 counterculture film that shook the Hollywood establishment and helped make Elvis’s films look even more hopelessly obsolete. The irony is that Elvis used to be a cultural outlaw himself, defying the social mores of the day with a sexuality and attitude that made him as dangerous as a bank robber. By beginning the album with “Wearin’ That Loved on Look,” Elvis becomes a new sort of outlaw by turning the 1960s counterculture on its head and embracing a sort of counter-counterculture where the cleancut straight is the weirdo and the long-haired freak is the norm. In its own way, it was Elvis’s own version outlaw music, which is to say, a defiantly uncompromising music that lived outside the law. And it was a sound that could have only come out of Memphis.

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2 The Great Advice

I mean, everyone loves their mother, but I was an only child, and Mother was always right with me all my life. —Elvis, September 22, 1958.1 One of the last songs that Elvis recorded for From Elvis in Memphis was “Only the Strong Survive.” By the time he sang it in the early hours of February 20, he had been working at American Sound for over a month and felt musically unified with the band. The only change among the musicians was the absence of bassist Mike Leech, who left after Elvis’s January sessions following a cancer scare. Bassist and bandleader Tommy Cogbill stepped in to fill his place. Whereas Leech often played in an earthier, more driving style (best heard on Elvis’s “Suspicious Minds”), Cogbill had a more ethereal technique that explored the edges of the sound while still keeping it moving (best heard on Dusty Springfield’s “Son

Osborne, 124.

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of a Preacher Man”). But Cogbill was also a chameleon who could adapt his style to whatever fit the mood. For “Only the Strong Survive,” Cogbill spends much of the song playing a single note in sync with Gene Chrisman’s bass drum. It amounts to little more than keeping time, sounding out like a steady heartbeat. For all of the instruments and voices that circle around, Cogbill plays his bass like the calm in the eye of the storm, before joining the tempest with swirling cascades in the refrain. It is a perfect pop sound, and it represents American Sound at its peak. The magic of American Sound largely came down to atmosphere. In order to get great performances from artists, Chips and his crew presented themselves as friends and colleagues who could be partnered with as a team. Elvis’s camp noticed the change. “I saw a huge difference in the way they were cutting at American and the way that Elvis had been recording for the last ten years prior to that,” Marty Lacker remembered. “The difference was that Elvis would get in a room with all the musicians out in the open and that’s the way they’d cut. They wouldn’t record his vocal as an overdub. He’d cut a live vocal with the band. . . . With Elvis, he’d get out in the middle of the studio with them and lay down a live vocal.”2 According to Ernst Jorgensen’s Elvis Presley: A Life in Music, Chips played a crucial role in his studio’s methodology: Sharp, 1.

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[Chips] could be a patient listener, waiting, offering suggestions, corrections, or encouragement while the musicians worked together to find the essence of each song. Like many producers Chips preferred to record vocal tracks separately, which prevented leakage from other instruments and produced a track that was easier to mix. With the kind of eight-track board American had, all live recording was done on four tracks, leaving four more open for overdubs. The vocalist could sing along with the band as an arrangement developed, but it was with the understanding that this was a scratch vocal only, to be replaced later by a more perfect rerecording. Maintaining this degree of control allowed Chips to assemble every element himself, creating the individual sound that was the hallmark of the studio.3 Chips’s central role at American Sound gave the studio its Midas touch, and Elvis recording there was not going to be any different. At the very least, Chips’s approach would be different than Elvis’s usual sessions in Nashville. “Moman had more, what would it be, constructive criticism,” remembered Reggie Young. “He’d say, ‘You were a little flat there.’ I don’t believe Felton would ever had said that.”4 Wayne Carson, a songwriter in the American Studio inner circle who later cowrote Elvis’s “Always on My Mind,” remembered things even more bluntly when Elvis missed the mark: “Chips stood up and said, ‘Hey, this ain’t Jorgensen, 267. Ford, 207.

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no fuckin’ movie soundtrack. You need to sing that song!’”5 While Carson may be exaggerating, Elvis was being held accountable for the first time in years. *** No song took more work for Elvis to record at American Sound than “Only the Strong Survive.” Elvis ended up doing nearly thirty takes before Chips was satisfied, and there is evidence that further vocal overdub work was required. “Only the Strong Survive” is the only song on From Elvis in Memphis by African American songwriters—Jerry Butler, Kenny Gamble, and Leon Huff. Butler co-wrote the song in 1968, but the original inspiration was from when his girlfriend broke up with him in high school. He asked his mother for advice, who said: “Son, you’ve just started to live. There are more girls in the world, some better, some worse, some just as good, and a whole lot of lonely ones, looking for a good man like you.”6 The night before Butler sat down to write the song with Gamble and Huff, Gamble remembered saying to a friend on the phone, “in order to make it in this world, only the strong survive.”7 Butler grafted in his mother’s advice on to Gamble’s phone conversation, while Gamble and Huff supplied their signature hooks. When Butler released the song in early 1969, it became the biggest hit of his career. Ford, 207. Butler, 37. 7 Butler, 155. 5 6

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The fact that Elvis recorded it so late in his American Sound sessions suggests that they may have picked it off the radio. The Memphis Boys’ arrangement plays it uncharacteristically close to Butler’s original. Usually the group would find their own groove in a record, but “Only the Strong Survive” is a rare exception. Every key element of the recording—Cogbill’s single-note heartbeat bass riff, Young’s lush guitar licks, the calculated smacks of Chrisman’s snare drum, the backing vocal parts, the swirling strings in the break—is lifted from Butler’s original. But the Memphis Boys’ version is more gelled as a singular sound, feeling more organic than a mere fabrication. The chief difference, then, is the vocal. Although Butler was four years younger than Elvis, he sounds twice Elvis’s age on the recording. Butler sings with a hard-earned wisdom, his voice striking a balance between impassioned and slightly agitated, preaching the song like he was in church—half telling a story, half testifying to its significance. Elvis’s version plays Huck to Butler’s Jim, a young man grappling with an older man’s country. In Elvis’s hands, there is a looseness and excitement that is not as apparent when Butler sings it; where Butler has reached a conclusion, Elvis is still trying to convince himself of his. One of the elements that likely drew Elvis to “Only the Strong Survive” was its theme of motherhood. Elvis was unusually close to his mother Gladys, and was a textbook “mama’s boy.” When she grew sick and died in the summer of 1958, Elvis was destroyed, matter-of-factly telling the local newspaper that his heart was broken. During the funeral, Elvis nearly collapsed several times, and afterward, he sobbed hysterically over her casket. 43

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Tellingly, “Only the Strong Survive” was not the only song about motherhood that Elvis recorded at American Sound Studio. There was also “Mama Liked the Roses,” a new song by a young songwriter named Johnny Christopher, which finds Elvis at his purest level of schmaltz. It was originally slated to go on From Elvis in Memphis as the second to last song on the second side—mirroring “Only the Strong Survive” as the second song on the first side—but was bumped in favor of “Power of My Love.” Even still, “Mama Liked the Roses” had a surprisingly buoyant afterlife. Originally released as the B-side to Elvis’s Top 10 hit “The Wonder of You” in April 1970, the song made its bid for immortality on the budget version of Elvis’ Christmas Album (despite the fact it wasn’t technically about Christmas). The budget Christmas album has been a perennial holiday seller ever since and is currently the only Elvis album certified by the Recording Industry Association of America as Diamond, shipping over 10,000,000 units. It is thus Elvis’s best-selling album and the best-selling Christmas album ever. Therefore, going by album sales alone, “Mama Liked the Roses” is the best-selling song that Elvis cut at American Sound. Which means it’s also Elvis’s best-selling non-Christmas song of all-time. This is not only notable—it is also kind of bizarre. When we think of Elvis, we think of some of the most iconic songs of rock and roll—rockers like “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Hound Dog,” and “Jailhouse Rock,” or ballads like “Love Me Tender,” “It’s Now or Never,” “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” All of the songs were major hits both in America and 44

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around the world at large. “Mama Liked the Roses” was not a hit. It’s not even particularly good. It is a treacle exercise in the kind of music that made many rock and roll fans give up on Elvis in his final decade. Whatever cheesiness might turn off listeners to the song today, Elvis believed in it. He could hear through the cloying melody, syrupy strings, and maudlin lyrics. For Elvis, the song was a way to keep his mother close to him. And where “Mama Liked the Roses” likely reminded Elvis of his mother’s spirit, “Only the Strong Survive” likely reminded Elvis of her wisdom. Her opinion meant everything, going back to Elvis’s first serious girlfriend, a fifteen-year-old sophomore named Dixie Locke, who Elvis began dating after high school. When she first met his parents, Gladys showered her with questions as Elvis paced about. Afterward, Dixie remembered that Elvis “was so relieved, I think he couldn’t wait to take me home, so he could come back and say, ‘What do you think?’ to his mom. . . . A day or two later, I said something like ‘I wonder what your mother thinks . . .’ and he said, ‘Oh, you don’t have to worry about that, she thinks you’re neat.’ I knew I had her stamp of approval then.”8 Elvis loved his mother and the feeling was more than mutual. He had a stillborn twin brother, which made Elvis that much more precious in his doting mother’s eyes (“when one twin died, the one that lived got all the strength of both,” she was known to have said).9 He and his mother were sweet Guralnick, 72. Guralnick, 13.

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to the point of sickly. They had little pet names for each other and spoke in baby talk, a secret language of their own. Their bond was further reinforced by a stint Elvis’s father Vernon served in prison when Elvis was three years old. Perhaps in part because of this, Vernon never quite fit in with his immediate family. “I never saw him be unkind . . .” Dixie later recalled about Vernon, “but it was like he was an outsider, really, he wasn’t really part of Elvis and Mrs. Presley’s group. I mean, it sounds weird, but they had such a strong love and respect for each other, and I don’t think there was a lot a respect for him during that time. It was almost like Elvis was the father and his dad was just the little boy.”10 Before Elvis was anything in the eyes of anyone, he was everything in the eyes of his mother. One imagines that whatever greatness Elvis felt in himself to dream his way to a better life was instilled by his mother. Any self-confidence Elvis had was directly from his mother. On one very real level, everything Elvis did was for his mother—not for his fans, not for the girls, not for himself, but for his mother. Her pride in him and comfort of life was the engine that kept him going. As Elvis found fame, he bought her a pink Cadillac when she couldn’t drive and a new house with a pool when she couldn’t swim. When Elvis purchased Graceland in 1957, it was also for her, and it went without saying that his parents would live there too. It is little wonder that Elvis first lost his way artistically when she died on the eve of his stint with the army. “She’s all we lived Guralnick, 73.

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for,” Elvis told the local press after she passed away. “She was always my best girl.”11 A little over a year after Gladys died in the summer of 1958, Elvis was stationed overseas in Germany. A mutual friend introduced him to Priscilla Beaulieu, who was then a fourteen-year-old girl in the ninth grade. Despite her young age, they began dating almost immediately. After she came of age, they eventually married in mid-1967, and she gave birth to his only child, Lisa Marie Presley, before they divorced in 1973. One might be tempted to call Priscilla the love of his life, but in her memoir, Priscilla suggests otherwise. She remembers the first time she was alone with Elvis, and how as he first held her, he immediately started talking about his mother and how he wishes she could have met her. Priscilla then states matter-of-factly: “I was to learn that Elvis’s mother, Gladys, was the love of his life.”12 Priscilla may have captured Elvis’s heart (at least for a period), but when it came to Gladys, she never had a chance. After “In the Ghetto,” “Only the Strong Survive” is the most famous song on From Elvis in Memphis, and it is the only song from the American Sound sessions to regularly appear on major Elvis compilations without ever being issued as a single. To hear such a powerful singer convey such a powerful message—only the strong survive—makes for a memorable experience, but it is also fraught with irony. Because, as we know, Elvis did not survive. Listening to Guralnick, 474–5. Presley, 33.

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music is often an intimate experience in which it is tempting to believe that the singer is speaking to us directly through their song. When Elvis sings that only the strong survive, the song seemingly casts him as a sage who lived through it all, but the truth is that he would be dead well within a decade of recording it. The song tells one thing, but the man who sings it tells another. Elvis told a reporter a few months after Gladys’s death that “it wasn’t only like losing a mother, it was like losing a friend, a companion, someone to talk to, I could wake her up any hour of the night if I was worried or troubled about something, well, she’d get up and try to help me.”13 For an album that was very much a public act of returning home, “Only the Strong Survive” was about the familial support that could be found there. For Elvis, this meant his mother, which means that it meant everything.

Guralnick, 486.

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3 The Promise

That’s why I hate to get started in these jam sessions. I’m always the last one to leave, always. —Elvis, December 4, 1956.1 Elvis Presley was a night owl. He liked showing up for recording sessions in the evening, recording into the early hours of the morning, and then going home and sleeping into the new day. Not long after midnight turned into January 23, 1969, Elvis and the Memphis Boys recorded “Without Love (There Is Nothing),” a small epic originally recorded by one of Elvis’s vocal idols, Clyde McPhatter. Elvis pushes the song as far as he can, unleashing the full power of his voice in an enormous and operatic finale. It is a stately, accomplished performance, but ultimately did not make the cut for From Elvis in Memphis. What did make the cut was a song Elvis broke just into after “Without Love (There Is Nothing)” was completed, an old country song called “I’ll Hold You in My Heart (Till I Can Hold Osborne, 91.

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You in My Arms).” While “Without Love” was a big production with horns, strings, and backing singers, “I’ll Hold You in My Heart” was the only song on From Elvis in Memphis not to be sweetened with any overdubs. The master take—the only take—includes two short false starts at the beginning, which the producers left on the finished album; this only heightened the late-night casualness of the performance. It’s probably not too long after 3:00 a.m. Elvis sits at the piano and begins to pick out a tune, trying to get the musicians’ attention. “I said, I’ll hoooooold—” Studio chatter. Someone claps their hands twice, playfully mocking the rhythm. Reggie Young timidly fluffs a lick on his guitar. “I said, I’ll hoooooold—” Gene Chrisman taps out a rhythm on his drums, stopping it cold like a needle lifted from a record, stepping aside for Young’s guitar lick, now a little fuller, and allowing it to breathe. “I said I’ll hoooooold—” The musicians coalesce. Chrisman now plays through the measure and the rhythm is set, as Young’s guitar answers Elvis in a call and response, his lick fully realized, clearing the way for the song to continue. “—you in my heaaaaaart—” As Elvis sings the word “heart,” Bobby Emmons holds some wavering high notes on his organ, giving just the suggestion 50

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of church to the proceedings. By the time Elvis gets to the next line, Mike Leech’s bass ascends to meet him there, and the band members are in place. Elvis guides them masterfully with his straightforward piano playing and soaring vocal, as they work together to try and close in on the song and capture it. But there’s a problem—Elvis can’t get past the song’s bridge. So he goes over it again and again, the group doggedly keeping up with him like a band of brothers, while Elvis leads the way, circling around the song into the wee hours of the morning. Before Elvis recorded “I’ll Hold You in My Heart,” he came by American Sound uncharacteristically early to meet Roy Hamilton, who was recording there during the day. Hamilton was an African American R&B singer with an enormous voice that could blend gospel, blues, and pop with a quasioperatic force. Elvis loved Hamilton and covered several of his songs over the years, including Hamilton’s signature hit, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Multiple photographs were taken of Elvis and Hamilton, including a joyous shot in which Elvis is standing, while Hamilton sits at the piano. Both men are laughing. Given the overlap of these photographs and the other ones of Elvis with the Memphis Boys—Elvis is wearing the same outfit and fiddling with Tommy Cogbill’s same bass—it would appear that either the meeting with Hamilton was earlier than previously known, or, more likely, the majority of photographs were taken on January 22, and not on the first night of January 13, as usually reported. Elvis was a big enough Hamilton fan that one could imagine him calling on someone to find a camera to document the 51

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meeting. Of all the people Elvis posed with at American Sound, there are at least five images of him with Hamilton— more than anyone else. Then, in a gesture of artistic generosity and fandom, Elvis shocked everyone by giving Hamilton a song he was planning to record, a haunting ballad called “Angelica.” The song is about a man who assumes there will always be time to show his love to Angelica, but she falls ill, and he never gets his chance. While not too specific, the lyrics imply a coma or vegetative state, in which Angelica lingers in isolation. Hamilton at first demurred, but accepted the song on Elvis’s insistence. “Angelica” was Hamilton’s best song from his sessions and a minor hit for him. Six months after meeting Elvis, Hamilton suffered a stroke and lingered in a coma, eerily mirroring the song Elvis gave him. When Hamilton passed away, his manager, Bill Cook, told Marty Lacker: “I was sitting beside his bed, all of a sudden Roy raised up in the coma, said ‘Angelica, Angelica, I’m coming,’ and he laid back down and died.”2 If meeting Elvis ultimately had a strong impact on Hamilton, so too did meeting Hamilton for Elvis. One can hear Elvis reaching for Hamilton in his stunning version of “Without Love (There Is Nothing),” the first song he recorded after meeting him earlier that day. One can also hear some of this spirit carry over into his late-night one-take reading of “I’ll Hold You in My Heart.”

Jones, 209.

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“I’ll Hold You in My Heart” was first written and recorded by Eddy Arnold in 1947. Arnold’s version was plaintive and matter-of-fact; the standard country instrumentation of the day—guitar, lap steel, fiddle, and bass—kept things going at a light bounce, allowing Arnold’s vocal to lay out the simple lyric of devotion. It was just what his audience wanted. “I’ll Hold You in My Heart” was Arnold’s third #1 country hit and remained at #1 for a then-record twenty-one weeks. It also crossed over on the pop charts, and became something of a pop standard, covered by Eddie Fisher and Toni Arden. But Dean Martin’s version of “I’ll Hold You in My Heart” in 1965 broke the mold. Martin’s recording was dressed up in pearls and lace, built around an orchestra and an endless sea of backing vocals. What made his version so different was its hard swing, a combination of the drumming and Martin’s vocals. The drummer leaned into a blues shuffle, which, while not quite elevating it to rock and roll, gave Martin something to sink his teeth into. This was especially important for the bridge. In Arnold’s original version, the song simply slid from the verse into the bridge, but with Martin, the drummer pounds hard to build the energy. This allows Martin to go further with the melody, carrying it out and coasting across it, heightening the stakes. “That’s what he heard in Dean,” Sam Philips later recalled about Elvis’s lifelong admiration for the crooner, “that little bit of mischievousness that he had in his soul when he cut up a little bit—[that’s why] he loved Dean Martin’s singing.”3 Guralnick, 133.

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It is the Dean Martin version of “I’ll Hold You in My Heart” that Elvis hears in his head when he recorded the song at American Sound, but Martin’s version only begins to imply where Elvis will take the song. Martin’s reading feels soothing and a little sleepy; you could picture him singing it at the end of one of his cheesy television specials. Dean Martin provides a map of where the song can go, whereas Elvis charts the journey of where it actually takes you. A great pop song can tell you something, but a great pop performance can actually prove it. Elvis’s finest performances take you where he is in the song, pulling you into the record where he is. A singer like Dean Martin often has a detached sense of bemusement that removes the singer from the song, like the whole thing is just a story he is telling, a hat he is trying on for size. With Elvis’s best music, everything cuts to the bone. For a singer that recorded so much prefabricated Hollywood junk, the offhandedness of “I’ll Hold You in My Heart” is all the more powerful and striking. Elvis also makes a crucial change to Dean Martin’s version by slowing it down. This allows for space inside the song that Elvis uses to explore the implications of its seemingly simple lyrics. Elvis’s “I’ll Hold You in My Heart” is a study in atmosphere. Without any slick overdubs weighing it down, there is room in the sound—musicians in conversation with one another, all taking part in the instinctive ritual of recording popular music. The feeling becomes almost sacred, as though American Sound has transformed into a church. From a lyrical standpoint, both the Eddy Arnold and Dean Martin versions of “I’ll Hold You in My Heart” are identical. Elvis’s version is largely the same although he 54

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takes some liberty with the words, fitting them into his own mouth, stuttering them, shouting them, breathing new life into them. He begins unassumingly, lingering over the idea that he will hold his darling like she’s never been held before. In Arnold’s original, this line was cute; in Martin’s version, it was sexy. Elvis dares to take this trite line at face value, slowing it down, considering it, examining it, like each word is a torch song in and of itself. He then lets go, pledging his love like a sacred oath. And then comes the bridge about the stars up in the sky. Elvis soars in his first pass at it, riding the melody until it arches over the song, as though he and the musicians can reach the stars enshrined in the lyrics. He reaches back in his throat to finish out the bridge, which deposits him in the main verse with reenergized feeling. Elvis now sings his words with more nuance, at once bearing down on them while letting them dissolve into the night, like a young James Brown leaning into the microphone and looking out into the crowd to capture a female audience member’s attention. Elvis’s four final words are the most crucial: Please . . . wait for me. Gene Chrisman senses they are heading for another bridge as his drums open up the song, allowing Elvis to be completely unbridled, and the sound is stunning. Y’know, the stars, up in the sky YOU KNOW THEY KNOW The reason whyyyyyyy— Elvis pounces on the words “YOU KNOW THEY KNOW,” seizing them as though they hold the secret to the entire song. From this moment forward, the song shifts and Elvis 55

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allows himself to be free. He finds his way back into the verse, his words now like a man pleading for his life. “Oh, oh, oh, darling—please a-wait for me.” An anticipatory pause is felt in the music. This is the point at which the song usually ends, completing the structure of the Arnold and Martin versions. But Elvis, as the musicians sense, isn’t through with it yet. As he curves back for another swipe at the bridge, they instinctively meet him there. Elvis once again gives it all he’s got—YOU KNOW THEY KNOW— but then begins stuttering like a madman—“Cuz I’m away, I’m away, I’m away, I’m away, I’m away from you”—swinging his syllables into triplets, clapping his hands, and grunting, overtaken by the music. Elvis turns the song back into the bridge for a fourth and final time, singing the words beautifully, in a way that does justice to the song’s journey. Once again, Chrisman proves himself to be Elvis’s psychic other half, throwing in hard, snapping fills that help push the song into something even bigger while signaling what could be a finale. Elvis sings the final verse one last time, straight, like he’s back to where he started, like he’s gotten all he needs, like it’s time to go home. Everything suddenly winds down unceremoniously, as Elvis’s piano finishes without resolving its note, and the song doesn’t end so much as it neatly folds. It is at once a performance by professional musicians and something that feels entirely unfinished. The last sound you hear is Chrisman’s cymbal crash, fading into the silence. Like Elvis’s best music, “I’ll Hold You in My Heart (Till I Can Hold You in My Arms)” is one of those deceptively simple songs that contain endless contradictions just below 56

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the surface. Elvis is singing a country ballad to a blues shuffle, backed by some of the finest soul musicians in the world. And yet, it’s the pure white-bread pop of Dean Martin that Elvis hears in his head. There’s nothing in it that should work, and yet, it all works beautifully. More than any other song on From Elvis to Memphis, “I’ll Hold You in My Heart” evokes the music Elvis made at the sit-down concerts for “The ’68 Comeback Special.” Both are refreshing warts-and-all recordings, in which the music is allowed to exist on its own raw terms. And, in both arenas, Elvis is surrounded among—and encouraged by—his friends. There is a natural camaraderie in the music that gives it power. “I’ll Hold You in My Heart” may be sung by a solitary man but the only reason it works is because, like a rural church, it contains a small community. For Elvis, this was not only American Sound, but Memphis as a whole. Sun Records and American Sound were both storefront operations where one could pop in off the street unannounced. There was an inherent casualness to the music Elvis made in Memphis up to this point that sets it apart from the slick, big-city studios in New York City, Nashville, and Hollywood. “This is where it all started for me,” Elvis told a reporter after this session in what was heralded in Billboard as “the only recording studio interview granted by Presley since he joined RCA.” “It feels good to be back in Memphis recording.”4

Kingsley, 1.

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4 The Funeral Procession

I can’t explain what happens when the music starts. But I think you know. I think you know what it is to get all tied up in something, to get lost in it. That’s what singing and music does to me. It ties me up. It makes me forget everything else except the beat and the sound. It tells me more than anything else I’ve ever known, how good, how great it is just to be alive. —Elvis, August 28, 1956.1 The very first song Elvis recorded at American Sound was “Long Black Limousine.” The fact that he started with this song is astounding; it’s as if the Beatles’ first single was “I Want to Hold Your Hand” or Bob Dylan’s first electric recording was “Like a Rolling Stone.” Elvis simply hits the ground running. As a performer, Elvis’s gift was his sense of conviction, and this was something that transcended everything. When the material was good, and Elvis gave it his all, he made you Osborne, 72.

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believe what he was singing like few artists before or since. It is said that Elvis wanted to be an actor most of all—a real, respected actor like Marlon Brando or James Dean, as opposed to the cinematic joke he became—and somewhat ironically, you can hear it in his songs long before you can see it in his films. The Colonel’s focus on box office returns overrode any considerations made on art, so Elvis’s films were by and large musicals made on the cheap where he could comfortably headline and turn a profit. If Elvis wanted to throw himself into a serious role, the best place for him to do so was in the recording studio. “Long Black Limousine” was a song that had the quality to elicit this kind of a performance. Perhaps this is why it was chosen as the starting point. Elvis likely had known the song for years. “Long Black Limousine” was written by country singer Vern Stovall and his songwriting partner Bobby George in the 1950s. It was about a girl who leaves her small hometown and promises the singer that one day she will return in a long, black limousine. The girl keeps her promise, but there’s a twist—the long black limousine she comes home in is a hearse. In the song’s original incarnation, it was pure parlor music, a country weeper that wore its sentimentality on its sleeve. Country singer Wynn Stewart recorded the first version in 1958, but the first commercial release of the song was by Stovall in 1961. The following year, it appeared on Glen Campbell’s debut album. Various country artists recorded the song over the decade, including Bobby Bare, Merle Haggard, and Jeannie Seely. However, the only version to reach the charts was a saccharine reading by Jody Miller, which made #73 on Billboard’s country singles listing in 1968. 60

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That same year, O. C. Smith, an African American pop and soul singer, released a version of “Long Black Limousine” as the B-side of his million-selling smash “Little Green Apples.” Smith completely remakes “Long Black Limousine” after the plodding country versions. He slows the tempo and alters the chord structure to include a descending pattern that mirrors the song’s sinking feeling. Smith also nixes the white-bread harmonies of the earlier versions in favor of African American gospel-style singers who infuse the song with a sacred glow. It’s telling that despite the half-dozen or so major recordings of the song by white country artists, Elvis lifts his version from one by an African American soul singer. For those who claim that Elvis did nothing but steal the music of African American singers, “Long Black Limousine” appears to play like a case in point. Nearly every distinctive element of O. C. Smith’s version—from the larger aspects like the tempo and the chord structure all the way down to some of the instrumental flourishes and the trick key change before the last verse—is present in Elvis’s recording. For a song that evokes such a singular performance by Elvis, its foundation is a virtual carbon copy of another man’s recording. It seems counterintuitive that something copied can be heard as wholly original, but this is the effect of “Long Black Limousine.” This then turns the tenet on its head— Elvis’s performance of the song is singular not despite the fact that it copies an African American man’s version but because of it. Using this template of the song so unabashedly freed something in Elvis that allowed him to make it his own. Where some hear theft, Elvis finds freedom, an escape. 61

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One imagines that Elvis would have never found his way to this white hillbilly song had it not been reimagined by this African American soul singer. In this regard, “Long Black Limousine” echoes another song Elvis recorded in Memphis nearly a decade and a half earlier, “Mystery Train,” his final single for Sun. “Mystery Train” was originally performed by African American R&B singer Junior Parker, but it in turn appropriated a line from the white country group, the Carter Family, as its jumping off point. “Train I ride, sixteen coaches long” set the scene for a song about a girl riding a long black train that is never coming back. While the song was full of doom and otherworldly dismay, Elvis’s version raised the stakes. He sings the song like it’s an adventure, jumping on the train to see if he can turn it back on itself, cheat death, and escape. And then, right toward the end when the standoff seems to be a draw, you can hear Elvis cry “Whooo-OOOO–W’HOOOOO!” in a gesture of pure freedom; it is his laughter that can be heard as the record fades away. With so much going on musically, lyrically, and thematically, you could almost miss that “Mystery Train” is about a corpse. The same mistake could not be made for “Long Black Limousine.” In Elvis’s version of the song, death saturates everything. The first sound you hear is the tolling church bells, which set both the music’s pace and its sense of reverence. The music hovers around the singer, slowly, carefully, waiting to strike. 62

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The musicians begin to reveal themselves. Bobby Wood’s sympathetic gospel piano weaves its way around Elvis’s melody, anchored by Bobby Emmons’s organ, lying low like a conspiracy. At first, Gene Chrisman’s drums do little more than keep time among the tolling bells, while bassist Mike Leech is not yet heard at all. The music couches the singer as he watches the funeral procession, a long line of fancy cars in the little main street of his town. The words build implicit walls between city and country, rich and poor, success and failure. But for the singer, everything goes back to the girl being brought home to him. And then Chrisman hits a drum roll that shifts the song into an easy funk. Leech’s bass establishes itself as the record’s secret weapon, its restless lines pushing the song forward without ever distracting from the proceedings. The music fuels Elvis’s uniquely American singer, a small-town man who uses simple words to conjure quick, clear images. The song’s bridge provides the crucial missing information in telling sketches that read like tabloid headlines: the party, the fatal crash, the race upon the highway, the unseen curve. The girl could be Jayne Mansfield in 1967 or Grace Kelly in 1982 or Princess Diana in 1997. Elvis sings about how the girl is riding in a long black limousine, strongly, bravely, and is supported by a chorus of female gospel singers whose vocals push the song up to the next level—literally, as the song modulates to a higher key. The tension builds further and Elvis’s voice is forced into a tighter, more desperate register. And, as in his finest performances, Elvis more than rises to the occasion. He sings with the sentimentality of country, the grit of blues, and the soul of rock and roll, uniting them all in 63

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a singular style. With tears in his eyes, the singer watches the car with the finely dressed chauffeur drive by. And then he loses it. And I will NEVER, I’LL NEVER LOVE ANOTHER The singer declares these words with a conviction that jumps off the record and grabs you by the throat. When Elvis sings these words, you believe him; this is less the sound of a singer singing the lyrics to a song than it is a man living these words out. There is pain in his voice, but also anguish, fear, regret, and—to my ears, at least—a sense of romanticism. This is a young man from a small town, who presumably had little to show for his life except for the fact that he happened to have crossed paths with this girl who became a big star. They may not have known each other well, and she may have made her long black limousine promise to anyone who would listen, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that she said it to the singer, and that he believed her. There is a sense of something grander waiting in the wings, like when you watch a young guy and girl sparring in the early scenes of an old movie, knowing full well that they will end up together. It is a story about fate. It’s a bit like the emotional climax of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, when Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey learns what his wife, Donna Reed’s Mary, would be doing if George had never been born: she is seen as a bespectacled spinster, closing the library where she works. It’s a quietly profound statement about love. “Think, after all, of what the revelation of Reed’s spinsterhood actually means,” Scottish film critic Gilbert Adair posits, “of the unparalleled idealization of 64

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romantic love and fidelity which it implies: that marriage to another man would have been unimaginable for her even if Stewart had never existed.”2 A similar sense of finality frames “Long Black Limousine,” only instead of eternal love proven by never being born, it is proved by death. If the girl always seemed a bit out of reach to the singer in life, then her death merely seals this unrequited love in the most final way imaginable. And the singer’s response is equally final in its own way: her physical death sparks his emotional one. He is mourning for two. When you listen to the original master tape of “Long Black Limousine” the story changes. Elvis recorded nine takes in about fifteen minutes, all but two of which were false starts. At the end of the sixth take, the first complete run-through of the song, you can hear Elvis vamping over the end: “Whoa, shit—they’re with you in that long black limousine . . . .” He cracks a smile that breaks the word “that” right in two. But that’s just the warm-up. Two more false starts go by and Elvis is in the ninth take, the one that is heard on From Elvis to Memphis. Almost. Stripped of the glossy horns, slick backing vocals, and sweeping strings, the performance still cooks. Wood’s piano and Leech’s bass fall into their familiar places and Elvis’s vocal is instantly recognizable—that is, until he gets to the big moment. The singer looks through his tear-filled eyes and announces that he will never love another, Adair, 105.

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bouncing the words off of each other in an unfamiliar way, “I’ll never love another, ooooohhhh—” and then Elvis loses his place and chuckles at himself. And then: “shit, man.” He picks it back up and sees his way out of the song, but its most crucial moment is literally a joke. Set up to hit a grand slam, Elvis bunts. There is no tenth take. Producer Chips Moman presumably believed that the ninth take was close enough and had Elvis redub the vocal over the mistake on January 22, so that the laughter became a secret, unheard for decades at the center of the song. And yet, just like the laughter at the close of “Mystery Train,” the good-natured humor makes the song much more inexplicable. This means that the last part of the song Elvis recorded was the crucial moment in which the singer declares that he’ll never love another, repressing the humor with agony. In “Mystery Train,” laughter had been his proof of escape; here, it is trapped beneath the searing overdub. The long black train of carefree youth had turned into the long black limousine of sober adulthood. And between the two, Elvis was clearly more comfortable chasing youth than wallowing in the harsh realities of maturity. For the rest of his life, “Mystery Train” was a staple of his live shows, and he sang it roughly 100 times. But as far as I can tell, Elvis never sang “Long Black Limousine” again. It just hit too close to home. Part of what makes “Long Black Limousine” so striking is how it tells its tale from the perspective of a nameless person in a little town, a nobody. By doing so, the song underscores Elvis’s own humble origins. If things had gone differently 66

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for him, he would still be driving a truck and only singing when he could find the time. The song tells the American Dream from the other side, turning the spectator into the hero. He is singing to himself. But he is also singing to us. “Long Black Limousine” becomes even more complicated when you throw in the layer of the real world. For Elvis, the most famous performer of his time, to sing the song of an anonymous fan invites his audience to switch places with him. Part of the song’s power derives from it being sung in the second person, which allows us, the listeners, to play an active role in the song as the deceased star. We are the ones riding in a long black limousine, and we are the ones in death who receive the singer’s devotion. This allows for the unusual setting in which Elvis tells us that he will never love another. Yet in order for the song to work, we must be dead. The song constructs an entire reality that allows the listener to be at its center, but like a ghost watching its own funeral, we are a silent witness, an element that can be fully extracted without changing the weight of the proceedings. “Long Black Limousine” pulls off the neat trick of creating an environment that is simultaneously of active participation and of complete displacement for the listener. But for a modern audience, it is Elvis who is dead. He’s the one who left his hometown of Memphis to go to the big city, and eventually came home as a corpse. Elvis’s own death looms so large that it nearly overtakes the song. Death has a way of making even the most larger-than-life figure feel that much bigger, turning Elvis Aron Presley, the person, into ELVIS, the legend. “Long Black Limousine” exists somewhere between the two. 67

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All of these elements allow “Long Black Limousine” to take in the breadth of Elvis better than any other song he recorded. It is about the rich and poor, fame and anonymity, small communities and big cities. It is a love song to someone who is dead, a portrait of the American Dream delivered dead in stark failure. It is a white country song remade by an African American soul singer, who in turn had his arrangement stolen as the basis for an impossibly original performance. And it was recorded in Memphis like a dare, at the beginning of Elvis’s first studio recordings after his triumphant comeback. Like Elvis himself—and America itself—“Long Black Limousine” plays like a grand illusion, a gilded whole that far outstrips the sum of its contradictory parts.

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Am I in love? No. I thought I [had] been in love but I guess I wasn’t. It just passed over. I guess I haven’t met the girl yet, but I will. And I hope it won’t be too long, because I get lonesome sometimes. I get lonesome right in the middle of a crowd. —Elvis, August 29, 1956.1 During the all-too-brief time in which Elvis worked with the Memphis Boys, Elvis connected the most with pianist Bobby Wood. Like Elvis, Wood was born in rural Mississippi to humble means before moving to Memphis as a teenager. Both Elvis and Wood had fathers who worked hardscrabble jobs, and both saw music as a way out of a tough life they did not wish to emulate. And perhaps most importantly, both had very religious upbringings. Elvis and Wood’s friendship began early on in the sessions when Elvis was listening to demos of potential songs to Osborne, 79.

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record. The Memphis Boys were unimpressed and, unlike the session musicians who Elvis usually surrounded himself with, they weren’t afraid to say so. “George Klein came over to the organ where I was standing and asked me what did I think about the songs they had been playing,” recalled Wood. “I immediately told him I thought they were a piece of shit. He immediately turned to Elvis and said, ‘Bobby Wood said those songs are a piece of shit.’ I said, ‘Thanks a lot, George.’ That’s when Elvis started laughing his butt off. I think that kind of broke the ice, for us and Elvis.”2 Elvis knew a great song when he heard it, and that the vast majority of songs he cut for the last few years fell far below any mark of greatness. Bobby Wood’s remark made Elvis laugh because it proved they weren’t going to waste their time with any shit songs; it established the Memphis Boys as team players with Elvis who were looking to cut great music for great music’s sake. Elvis also laughed because it was so surprising to see an outsider speak to a member of his inner circle with so much gall, and he laughed because he knew Bobby Wood was right. These songs were shit. One of Bobby Wood’s trademark talents was playing a short intro on the piano that always fit the mood of the song. Perhaps this is the reason why Elvis once declared, “Bobby Wood is the most commercial piano player that I have ever heard.”3 Yet Wood’s only intro is performed on “It Keeps Right on a-Hurtin’.” Like “Long Black Limousine” just before Jones, 207. Wood with Wood Lowry, 91.

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it, “It Keeps Right on a-Hurtin’” is a country weeper, only it keeps its lowdown honky-tonk sound. The song was written and first recorded by Johnny Tillotson, a pop singer best known for his 1960 hit “Poetry in Motion.” After a few less successful follow-ups, Tillotson hit back with “It Keeps Right on a-Hurtin’,” a song as reflectively sorrowful as “Poetry in Motion” is mindlessly upbeat. Although “It Keeps Right on a-Hurtin’” was originally inspired by his father’s terminal illness, Tillotson wrote it as a boy-misses-girl love ballad. Tears are everywhere in the song—the singer cries themselves to sleep each night, sheds lonely tears into their lover’s pillow, and breaks down into a million tears when they see their lover pass by—in a way that subverts traditional masculinity roles by providing an outlet for a man to profess crying like a fool. Such an image is at odds with Elvis’s reputation as a hypermasculine male, best described in Sue Wise’s influential 1984 essay “Sexing Elvis”: “Elvis’s appeal is traditionally depicted as an appeal to young girls who, overwhelmed by his animal magnetism, were able to lose their sexual inhibitions and, albeit in the safety of a concert hall, ‘respond’ to being turned on by the male sexual hero,” while young men “identified with him and his supposed ability to ‘lay girls’ with ease and without consequence.”4 Wise, who describes herself as both “a feminist and an Elvis fan,” slyly observes that this

Frith and Goodwin, 392.

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narrative was constructed by heterosexual male writers, who seemingly projected their own desires onto him.5 Wise describes her experiences with a different Elvis, one that had nothing to do with rampant sexuality or lustful envy. “When I felt lonely and totally alone in the world, there was always Elvis,” she reflects. “He was a private, special friend who was always there, no matter what, and I didn’t have to share him with anybody.”6 Wise’s Elvis doesn’t fit into the broad characterizations that define Elvis the macho god, but it is no less real than any other fan’s construction. This more intimate Elvis can be heard in “It Keeps Right on a-Hurtin’.” The fact that it’s a straightforward country song speaks to Elvis’s own roots, and allows him to be more at home in the performance. More than any of his music in over a decade, From Elvis in Memphis brings out Elvis’s country roots. Wood takes the slick strings and orchestra arrangement of Tillotson’s original and demolishes it with a few honky-tonk chords on the piano. He sets the pace and the mood, opening the door for the rest of the musicians to take their places—Gene Chrisman’s easy country drumming anchoring the sound so that Tommy Cogbill’s swaying bassline and Bobby Emmons’s organ work almost subconsciously around the rhythm. But Wood drives the engine, his low left hand notes in sync with Cogbill’s bass, with his right-hand rhythm chords mirroring Chrisman’s beat. When the backing singers and strings arrive Frith and Goodwin, 391. Frith and Goodwin, 395.

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for the stop-time refrain, they emerge with a wholly organic feel; Elvis’s vocal is pure yearning pop. And yet, Elvis makes a few minor but telling lyrical changes. In Tillotson’s original, the singer says his lover’s pillow now holds “my lonely tears instead,” while Elvis alters it to the more interesting “my empty dreams instead.” There’s then a parallel part in the second verse where Tillotson sings about how his lover has broken his heart and set him free, but forgot her memories. Instead of singing these words, Elvis instead favors his altered “empty dreams” line a second time. In doing so, Elvis leaves out the best line in the song. On one level, Elvis’s music is about the promise of freedom and defying the limits that try to restrain it—whether it’s through gender roles, class mobility, or any other number of societal concerns. The idea that one can be set free by a broken heart seems counter to such an ideal, revealing a way in which freedom can actually be a kind of punishment. Only, Elvis forgets to include the line altogether. Is this because it describes a freedom that is less than a complete and total escape? Did it make him think of his own supposed artistic freedom at RCA, where he had spiraled into hackwork? Or is it that in the late hours of February 20, 1969, Elvis simply forgot all about the lyric and honestly believed it was a repeat of the first verse’s already-mangled line? For whatever reason, the notion of a departed lover would haunt Elvis for the rest of his recording career, resulting in some of his finest performances, such as “I’ve Lost You,” “Faded Love,” and “Always on My Mind.” By the time that Elvis cut “It Keeps Right on a-Hurtin’” in late February, he had already recorded the biggest crying song of his career 73

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the previous month. “Don’t Cry Daddy” was a new song by Mac Davis (who also wrote “In the Ghetto”) that expanded the typical scope of the country weeper into a family portrait. The song features Elvis in his most heartfelt mode, as the lyrics are sung from the point of view of a child giving his crying father a pep talk (“Together we’ll find a brand-new mommy”) and pleading with him to smile again. It’s maudlin stuff, but the understated music and Elvis’s mature vocals sell it by focusing on the lovely melody. This is all the more remarkable because “Don’t Cry Daddy” was one of the few songs for which Elvis did not provide a live vocal for the group’s performance. After Elvis blew out his already-ragged voice on the first few nights of sessions (“Long Black Limousine,” “Wearin’ That Loved on Look,” and “I’m Movin’ On” alone would have done anybody in, let alone someone who was already under the weather), Chips hastily arranged a few nights of backing sessions for the vocals to be added on top later. Ironically, this was the exact kind of recording style Elvis had come to American to escape, but with Elvis, Chips accurately felt that time was of the essence. The fact that “Don’t Cry Daddy” sounds just as natural as the other A-sides from these sessions—“In the Ghetto,” “Suspicious Minds,” and “Kentucky Rain”—is a tribute to the talents of both Elvis and the Memphis Boys. The net result was Elvis’s third straight Top 10 single from the American Sound sessions. One imagines that knowing he already had “Don’t Cry Daddy” in the can likely gave Elvis further confidence when he approached “It Keeps Right on a-Hurtin’” the following month. 74

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At some point after Elvis recorded “It Keeps Right on a-Hurtin’,” Wood was fooling around on the piano and Elvis sat down next to him. The two men chatted for a little while. Wood later recalled the conversation in his memoir, which is largely written in the third person: “They [Wood and Elvis] talked about going to church. They talked about living the Christian life. Elvis always had a strong desire to talk about his faith as well as his love of singing gospel music. Gospel music touched his soul. Elvis knew what the Christian life was supposed to be like . . . Elvis wanted to hear Bible truths.”7 One imagines that traditional gender roles were the kind of Bible truths Elvis sought to hear and believe in. However, in a song like “It Keeps Right on a-Hurtin’,” Elvis effortlessly— and unknowingly—flips such roles around. “Now, I know a man ain’t supposed to cry,” he sings in the recording, knowing that the entire song demonstrates otherwise. And yet he addresses it head-on, as one might say, like a man.

Wood with Wood Lowry, 89.

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6 The Departure

Well, at the time I started singing Colonel Tom Parker was managing Hank Snow. . . . And that’s how we got connected. I don’t know why Hank and my name were linked together so much ’cause actually we wasn’t connected in any way in business. . . . I just worked on some of Hank’s personal appearances. —Elvis, August 31, 1957.1 If the train is not single-handedly responsible for rock and roll, then it was an essential enabler of the music from which rock grew. In 1903, musician and self-proclaimed “Father of the Blues” W. C. Handy first encountered the blues at a train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, about three counties southwest from where Elvis was born thirty-two years later. Handy vividly recalled a ragged African American man pressing a knife to a guitar and singing “Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog.” He was baffled and intrigued by Osborne, 108.

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the sound, calling it “the weirdest music I had ever heard”; it turned out the man’s song referred to the junction at which the Southern and Yellow Dog railroads met.2 Six years later, Handy took the train to Memphis where he published some of the earliest blues sheet music, including “St. Louis Blues” and “The Memphis Blues.” Trains were a central motif in blues music. “Their engines, equipped with musical whistles, sang of escape routes to a wonderful free world somewhere else,” wrote folklorist Alan Lomax in The Land Where the Blues Began. Anonymous black musicians, longing to grab a train and ride away from their troubles, incorporated the rhythms of the steam locomotive and the moan of their whistles into the new dance music they were playing in jukes and dance halls. Boogie-woogie forever changed piano playing, as ham-handed black piano players transformed the instrument into a polyrhythmic railroad train. Boogie was just one of the sanguine, we’re-going-someplace styles that black folk musicians, unique among world composers of that time, created to express feelings of liberation the railroad introduced into life.3 Lomax knew that the train could be a literal means of escape, too. In part inspired by the field recordings Lomax and musicologist John Work III made of him in 1941, blues legend Muddy Waters caught a train to Chicago and took the history of the music with him. In records like 1948’s “Train Palmer, 45. Lomax, 170.

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Fare Blues,” Waters cut some of the earliest electric blues music, which laid the foundation for rock and roll music the following decade. Like rock music, trains are big, loud, and modern, restlessly barreling toward a new destination. Furthermore, the early rockabilly style forged by Elvis and his peers at Sun Records sounds like a train. The urgent acoustic rhythm guitar against the rumbling electric lead, propelled by the clickclack throttle of slapping the upright bass, chugged along like the iron horse; throw in some drums to emphasize the pounding beat—which was the final piece added in Elvis’s initial RCA sessions—and you have a high-powered locomotive machine. It’s no coincidence that one of the key proto-rockabilly hits was Hank Snow’s 1950 smash “I’m Movin’ On.” Born in Nova Scotia, Canada, a few months before the First World War broke out, Snow loved trains and idolized Jimmie Rodgers, whose yodeling cowboy persona as “The Singing Brakeman” helped establish country music’s sound and obsession with trains, just as the African American musicians Lomax witnessed had done for blues music. “I tried to copy Jimmie Rodgers—his diction, his way of handling lyrics, guitar playing, the whole works,” Snow later explained. “I was thinking of Jimmie when I wrote ‘I’m Movin’ On.’”4 By the time Snow released “I’m Movin’ On,” he had left Canada and found his way to RCA Records, which was then upping Dawson and Propes, 73.

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its game in the country market with a new state-of-the-art studio in Nashville. “I’m Movin’ On” was one of the first songs recorded there. RCA had their doubts and released the unremarkable “With This Ring I Thee Wed” as the A-side, but disc jockeys soon caught on that the hotter song was on the flipside. “I’m Movin’ On” remained at the top of the country charts for twenty-one weeks—tying the record held by Eddy Arnold’s “I’ll Hold You in My Heart (Till I Can Hold You in My Arms)” from 1947 (featured just three songs earlier on From Elvis in Memphis). “I’m Movin’ On” may have only featured four men hunched around three microphones—one for Snow’s vocal and acoustic guitar, one shared by the fiddle and electric lap steel, and one for the slapping bass—but producer Steve Sholes captured an enormous sound. The fiddle plays a rumbling, churning rhythm while the lap steel pulls away from it, simulating a train whistle. It’s a gloriously rich record in which the instruments find their own space without overcrowding Snow’s catchy, matter-of-fact lyric about a man hopping a train to leave an unfaithful woman. The instrumentation and the style may have been different, but songs like “I’m Movin’ On” proved that white country musicians could evoke the sound of a train just as effectively as their African American blues counterparts. With hindsight, “I’m Movin’ On” blazed the trail for Elvis’s own major success some six years later. Hank Snow was one of Elvis’s favorite performers, and Snow recorded the song at Elvis’s future label with Elvis’s future producer. After Elvis made his initial recordings at Sun, Snow met Elvis and gave him his first break, inviting the young singer to play on 80

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his segment during The Grand Ole Opry. The country elite was unimpressed, but to his credit, Snow still saw potential in Elvis and took him under his wing as an opening act in his package tour. Snow also introduced Elvis to his thenbusiness partner, Colonel Tom Parker. Some say that Snow directly turned Sholes on to Elvis for RCA and even arranged for the Hill and Range publishing company to have a nearmonopoly over the music Elvis recorded. It appears, then, that virtually every element of Elvis’s commercial breakthrough was either directly or indirectly engineered by Snow, with Elvis’s gratitude. “Regardless of whether or not he signed with our agency, as a special friend I hoped to get RCA Victor interested in him,” Snow remembered. “Elvis had faith in my ability to try to steer him in the right direction. His answer was, ‘Thank you, sir. From your lengthy experience, your personal guidance means a lot to me.’”5 In the negotiations that followed, Snow was subsequently double-crossed by Parker—“the most egotistical, obnoxious human I have ever had dealings with,” Snow later wrote—and found his half of Elvis’s management (and the cash he should have made from it) pulled out from under him.6 Snow was relegated to a footnote in Elvis’s success story, but “I’m Movin’ On” rattled on with a sound and attitude that prefaced rock and roll music. ***

Snow, 385. Snow, 391.

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Given Colonel Tom Parker’s central role in Elvis’s life and career, he is conspicuously absent from Elvis’s sessions at American Sound Studio. And yet, he is all over the circumstances surrounding the sessions, like the Wicked Witch of the West casting aspersions on Dorothy and her friends from afar. The Colonel approved the initial RCA studio dates that Elvis rebelled against by booking American Sound instead, with encouragement from Marty Lacker and George Klein. The Colonel oversaw the Hill and Range songs that were provided, which Bobby Wood dismissed as shit, to Elvis’s cackling delight. And, according to Lacker, it was the Colonel’s personal representative, Tom Diskin, who was the only person asked to leave the sessions. Lacker recalls Diskin phoned the Colonel to say that Elvis wanted to handle the song selection and publishing without him. “Give him all he wants,” the Colonel reportedly responded. “Let him do it and fall on his ass.”7 The fact that Elvis proved him wrong by getting some very real hits and arguably the finest and most productive studio sessions of his life was not lost on the Colonel. For him, it must have even more daunting that the last time Elvis rejected his advice and took his own career by the reins—in making “The ’68 Comeback Special” a rock and roll extravaganza instead of a tux-and-tails Christmas program—was just as spectacular of a success, and a defining moment in his career. If Elvis was ever beginning to think that he had outgrown the Colonel, it was now. Tellingly, Parker was already turning his attention to the next phase of Elvis’s career, Las Vegas, Jones, 213.

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in which he could call all the shots on location and price. The success of these shows reset the Colonel’s power in their dynamic, which arguably hastened Elvis’s demise. It was certainly far away from the music he made in American Sound, songs of hunger and freedom like “I’m Movin’ On.” To initiate “I’m Movin’ On,” Reggie Young picks out an elegant country lick on an acoustic guitar, and then strums a bouncy pattern anchored by Mike Leech’s bass guitar, where it is met by Elvis’s vocal. He sings of an oncoming train as the burden of proof that he has left his lover forever, while an electric lap steel plays in the background atmospherically like a lonesome whistle. The drums and guitar double down on the main chugging rhythm, hitting the boom-chick-a-boom groove of a hundred Johnny Cash 45s—and countless blues and country 78s before that. The singer pictures the day his lover will come back, but promises that he will turn them down again. Like the big eight-wheeler train he rides, he is set on his track, full-steam ahead. Drummer Gene Chrisman then hits his snare to shake the music out of its old-timey shuffle, and the song opens up in a remarkable way—the groove is now remade into a funky, modern rhythm, spiraling in different directions at once, the bass busily stretching out like a lead instrument to work out the limits of the sound, balancing the accelerated picking of the lap steel; female backing singers emerge from the ether, and horns reverberate, at once deepening the sound and signaling its temporary resolve. A honky-tonk piano helps to wind things down to the relative sparseness of the verse. This instrumental break marks the closest that From Elvis in Memphis approaches to the psychedelic music then in vogue, 83

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but they only get to the edge of it before retreating back into the safety of the past. At least until the end of the song, when they ride their freak-out train into the horizon. *** For all the attention that Hank Snow’s “I’m Movin’ On” has gotten for its prophetic rockabilly sound and sly train lyric, there is a third element that helped the song set the stage for rock and roll: a defiant attitude. The central action of the song is the singer leaving, best captured in the line about how he’s “through with you,” so “too bad you’re blue.” There is a thrill in this act of leaving, this sense of escape, which always seemed to elude the train songs that presaged rock and roll. In Muddy Waters’s plantation recordings from 1941, he longs to hop a train northward to escape his troubles; by the time he rewrites the songs as electric blues seven years later in Chicago, he now sings of missing his Southern home. The titles of his first single on Chess Records, “Feel Like Going Home” backed with “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” give away the game. Even the train songs of Snow’s idol Jimmie Rodgers masked a sad restlessness that appeared in songs like “Waiting for a Train.” Where Rodgers laments being stranded a thousand miles away from home, Snow uses his song to roll along a rollicking track. Compared to Snow’s “I’m Movin’ On,” the version Elvis cut for From Elvis in Memphis is stately and soulful. There is a sheen to the music Elvis recorded at American Sound that permeated the music, even in a song like “I’m Movin’ On,” which began as a 2:00 a.m. jam in the early hours of January 15. Elvis was then fighting his own throat, which turned 84

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into full-blown laryngitis the following day. But the spirit of the session speaks for itself—the group caught a steady train rattle that grew into a big, open sound. When Elvis overdubbed his final vocal a little over a week later, it was easy for him to lock on to the feel of the restless, defiant song. The fact that “I’m Movin’ On” was chosen over other more studied productions from Elvis’s American Sound sessions for From Elvis to Memphis speaks to the recording’s natural spirit. It ends the first side of the album in fine form, taking the listener through the story of a man who returns home (“Wearin’ That Loved on Look”), reflects on his family (“Only the Strong Survive”), finds a spiritual center in love (“I’ll Hold You in My Heart (Till I Can Hold You in My Arms)”), loses his love (“Long Black Limousine”), mourns the loss (“It Keeps Right on A-Hurtin’”), and then hits the road again (“I’m Movin’ On”). Elvis would never cut a better or more conceptually unified album side, and “I’m Movin’ On” is the exciting finale. Even after the years of bad blood between himself and Colonel Parker, Hank Snow always remembered Elvis fondly. “Regardless of all that was said and all that happened, I have two things in my possession that all the wealth in the world could never buy,” wrote Snow in his autobiography. One thing was “a huge picture personally signed by Elvis: ‘To Hank, my best to you and thanks for all the fun and good times—Your friend, Elvis Presley.’” And the other thing? “The other is the album in which he recorded my song ‘I’m Movin’ On.’”8 Snow, 391.

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Interlude From Elvis in Purgatory I’d just gotten out of high school and I was driving a truck. . . . I went into record shop and made a record for a guy, a little demonstration record. Well, the guy put the record out in Memphis. Memphis. That’s my hometown. You gotta be loose when you say it. “Where’re you from, boy?” “Memphis.” If I get any looser, I’ll just fall apart. —Elvis, August 1, 1969.1 By the time Elvis and Priscilla went on a ski trip to Aspen after the seven days of recording dates in January 1969, nearly all of the key songs from his American Sound Studio sessions were recorded: “Long Black Limousine,” “Wearin’ That Loved on Look,” “Don’t Cry Daddy,” “In the Ghetto,” “I’ll Hold You in My Heart,” and “Suspicious Minds.” To keep the momentum going, Elvis booked a second week of sessions in mid-February. With several hits all but assured, this second round had less at stake and felt more assured, a victory lap to the work begun a month earlier.

Osborne, 214.

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On the night of February 17, 1969, Elvis returned to American Sound to record a batch of new songs. All of the pressures felt on their first session day in January were long gone, and things got off to a looser start. Elvis had caught wind of the American Sound tradition to honor Chips by singing “This Time,” a Top 10 hit for Troy Shondell in 1961, which was the first big song Chips ever wrote. Elvis hardly knew the words, so he gamely kicked it into an impromptu version of the Don Gibson/Ray Charles standard, “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” Then it was down to business, as he and the band cut a solid version of a new song called “True Love Travels on a Gravel Road.” Sometime before 11:00 p.m., Elvis reached back to a song he had known for years, “Stranger in My Own Home Town.” Percy Mayfield, an African American singer-songwriter whose sharp writing earned him the nickname “The Poet of the Blues,” wrote the song a few years earlier. Mayfield’s hometown was Minden, Louisiana, but he left home for Texas, and later Los Angeles, to pursue music. Mayfield became best known for his 1950 #1 R&B hit, “Please Send Me Someone to Love,” but like many rhythm and blues performers of the era, he helped set the stage for rock and roll but was pushed aside once the new music hit. In 1964, Mayfield released “Stranger in My Own Home Town.” Like nearly all of his records from this period, it missed the charts, but Elvis heard it. This was the peak year of American Beatlemania, and Elvis’s first without a Top 5 US pop hit since signing with RCA. Mayfield’s song resonated. Mayfield built the original version of “Stranger in My Own Home Town” around a syncopated, gospel-derived groove not too unlike a cha-cha rhythm, and allowed his piano to play off of the steady bounce of the horns. Mayfield 88

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sings his song matter-of-factly, a truth that cannot be denied. He describes what should be impossible: a man returns to his hometown only to be treated like a stranger. Folks he’s known since childhood don’t want him around; his homecoming good intentions evaporate into estrangement. After an instrumental break, Mayfield expounds on his displacement with dry detachment in a bridge that further pleads his case. “Oh, there are some here that like me,” he allows. “But they are so very, very few.” The blues has been called a musical form built upon irony, teasing the listener with a juxtaposition between what is and what should be. When Mayfield sings of his almost biblical loneliness, he does so as an ironic gesture, turning it into a wry joke. *** America prides itself on the hometown community. We like to think of our hometowns as linked by “Main Street, USA”— the geographical coordinates may change, but the goodwill and pride are constants. A song like “Stranger in My Own Home Town” challenges these ideals and dares to conjure an America where a person is ignored, forgotten, and betrayed by the community that brought them into the world. Community meant everything to Elvis. He may have traveled far from his hometown roots of Tupelo, Mississippi, but he always kept two things constant in his mind that he learned from his community: the power of religion and the pain of poverty. Elvis’s rural upbringing in the Deep South during the Great Depression meant that these elements were two sides of the same coin. The power of religion helped one to dream beyond the pain of poverty, which in turn further fueled faith in religion. Elvis always swore that his big-city success wouldn’t 89

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change the small-town boy he was in his heart, but by the end of the 1960s, the temptations of Hollywood and his idle rich playboy life had taken their toll. If Elvis wasn’t fully changed by these, then his outlook was at least altered—and his art paid the price. He was a 1950s star who was trying to use an outmoded business model of professional songwriters and mainstream style to navigate a strange, new era dominated by self-contained rock artists pursuing music that rebelled against the mainstream establishment. He didn’t move through time as much as he existed outside of it. Part of what makes From Elvis in Memphis so exciting is that it finds Elvis making a fresh start on his own terms. In choosing to set up shop in Memphis, he was reaching back to the spark of his initial career, but he was no longer a teenage truck driver feeling his way through a new music that even he couldn’t have imagined. Now he was the biggest star in the world looking to once again stake his claim on his music, like a stranger in his own hometown. Elvis’s version of “Stranger in My Own Home Town” was the longest song he cut at American Sound. On the master recording, you can hear Gene Chrisman’s drums and Tommy Cogbill’s bass instantly united in a fatback groove, while Bobby Emmons’s organ hangs back. It’s up to Reggie Young to fill in the space with his electric guitar, but he is tentative at first, still feeling out the sound. Even Elvis is searching, chanting the words to himself, half off microphone. It’s not until Elvis starts singing and Bobby Wood’s gospel piano chording answers him that the performance gels; the vibe is further built upon by engineer Ed Kollis’s killer harmonica. 90

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If it sounds a bit loose and unfinished, that’s because it is. “Stranger in My Own Home Town” was recorded in one take, somewhere between a jam and a set number with rehearsed parts. You hear the song come together while it plays. There is more freedom in the sound if only because the musicians are not limited by the expectations of a finished performance. This allows Elvis to dig in, following the music as the music in turn follows him, growing into a fierce performance. But it was not as polished as most of the material on From Elvis in Memphis, so it was passed over for that album. “Stranger in My Own Home Town” was instead released in the fall of 1969, the highlight of the studio half of From Memphis to Vegas/From Vegas to Memphis. By this point, overdubs of both brass and strings were added to sweeten the song and hide the gaps in the sound. The horns announce Elvis like royalty and thicken the sound like a Phil Spector record, while the strings swirl like 1960s spy movie music, trying in vain to tame the performance, but only tempting its wildness further. If Elvis’s “Stranger in My Own Home Town” is a beast, then the overdubs are the gilded cage that it rattles around in. It’s glorious to hear the refinement of the overdubs play off the organic nature of Elvis’s performance. Elvis doesn’t so much rewrite the song as he omits a third of it. In Percy Mayfield’s original version, he sings two verses, followed by his wry bridge. Elvis’s version disregards the latter part of Mayfield’s original, opting instead to oscillate between the two main verses—the first one about being like a stranger and the other about coming home with good intentions— ruminating on them, playing them against each other, as 91

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though one more pass through might solve the riddle of how a man can be a stranger in his own hometown. And so, Elvis wanders back and forth in a gray world, over and over, until the fade finally brings it to a close. There is no resolution. “Stranger in My Own Home Town” stayed with Elvis. On July 24, 1970, less than a year after Elvis released the song on From Memphis to Vegas/From Vegas to Memphis, he was holding rehearsals with his Las Vegas band in Hollywood. Fooling around toward the end of a long session, he sings the titular phrase of a country song in a mock operatic voice—make the world go away—and then, as though completing the thought, begins to sing “Stranger in My Own Home Town.” He sings slower than the American Sound version and the band meets him by the end the first phrase, turning the song into a slow burn. Elvis stretches it out, but then adds his own lyrics: I’m goin’ back down, down to Memphis I’m gonna start driving that motherfuckin’ truck again Elvis turns the song around on itself and confirms why he was so drawn to it in the first place. His success has made him a stranger, and in order to regain his own hometown, he has to go back to being the eighteen-year-old truck driver who dared himself to walk into Sun Records. It evokes a sort of parallel universe in which he never entered Sun and spent his years trapped in the limits to which he was born. To paraphrase another poet (who wrote his own fair share of blues), “Stranger in My Own Home Town” shows how if there is no success like failure, then failure is no success at all. 92

7 The Shaking

I came out on stage and I was singing a couple of these rock and roll songs, and the audience got to hollerin’ and squealin’ with me . . . .And my manager told me, “Go back out there and do just what you been doing.” So I asked him, “What have I been doing?” And he said, “You been shakin’ all over.” —Elvis, August 29, 1956.1 The second side of From Elvis in Memphis begins with a crash. The Memphis Boys bear down hard on the opening chord of “Power of My Love” like it’s a battleground to be seized. The sound initiates a raw blues riff that forms the backbone of the song. Gene Chrisman’s bashing drums set the pace, as Reggie Young’s electric guitar steps out to lead the sound, with Ed Kollis’s harmonica spinning off of it. Like “Wearin’ That Loved on Look,” the first side opener, any introductory playing feels arbitrary, a means by which Osborne, 78.

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Elvis can get to singing. He moans wordlessly, looking for his moment to strike. When he does, Elvis commands the lyrics like they are directions from a Dionysian instruction manual: Aw, break it. Burn it. Drag it all around. The triumphant refrain promises his lover that “every minute, every hour” of his love will leave them shaking. Unlike the album’s first side, which can be heard as a sort of narrative, the second side of From Elvis in Memphis is more impressionistic and all about feeling, fleshing out a world that wills the first side into being. “Power of My Love” was written by the songwriting team of Bernie Baum, Bill Giant, and Florence Kaye. They had previously written Elvis’s last Top 5 hit before the British Invasion—the similarly sinful “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise” from June 1963—and contributed weaker songs to Elvis’s movie soundtracks ever since. “Power of My Love” had been kicking around for years, and it probably would have fallen by the wayside if not for the efforts of Freddy Bienstock, an executive at the Hill and Range publishing firm. Bienstock was born to a Jewish family in Switzerland in 1923, but immigrated to America just before the outbreak of the Second World War. His cousin was the cofounder of Hill and Range, where Bienstock worked his way up from the stockroom to provide material for the company’s most 94

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lucrative star, Elvis Presley. Although Bienstock initially disliked rock and roll, he proved adaptable and trained his ears to Elvis’s tastes. He played a crucial role in the 1950s to establish the relationship between Elvis and songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, whose songs “Hound Dog,” “Love Me,” and “Jailhouse Rock” were career-long anthems for Elvis. By the time of From Elvis in Memphis, Bienstock was somewhat of a relic, the personification of the outmoded songplugging practices that had contributed to Elvis’s decline. When George Klein told Elvis that Bobby Wood thought the songs initially presented for the sessions were shit, he was referring to the demo records played by Bienstock and his assistant, Lamar Fike. But if “Power of My Love” was among the songs rejected by Wood, Bienstock still believed in it. He kept pitching the song to Elvis, eventually getting his undivided attention and clinching the deal. It would be the only song from Bienstock’s catalog to make the finished album. Toward the end of the first round of sessions in late January, Elvis listened to the Hill and Range demos provided for him, along with Fike, George Klein, and Marty Lacker. Elvis was frustrated with the results, declaring, “I ain’t got any more good songs!” Lacker bravely spoke up and explained the songwriters didn’t need Elvis anymore: “There are lots of artists who write songs that sell a million records, but every time they come to us we have to send them to Hill & Range. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have heard the demos first on every hit song for the past twenty years.” Elvis ruminated on this angrily for a few minutes and then announced: “From now on, I wanna hear every damn song 95

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I can hear. If we can get a piece of the publishing, that’s just good business, but if not, I wanna cut it anyway.”2 This strategy was tested when Elvis cut his biggest hits from the sessions a few days later, “In the Ghetto” and “Suspicious Minds.” Freddie Bienstock and Tom Diskin, Colonel Parker’s right-hand men, pulled Chips aside to try to convince him to give them a cut of the publishing rights, indicating that if he didn’t, Elvis might pull out of the sessions. Chips was livid (“His eyes hollow out and his face pales,” remembered Mike Leech. “He was like that when we had the run-in with RCA”).3 Chips recalled: “I just blew up! I said, ‘Hey, there ain’t no more session!’ We had already done some sides, and I said, ‘You can take everything we’ve done so far, be my guest, and just get out my studio, ’cause there ain’t no more sessions!’”4 Chips remembers RCA executive Harry Jenkins stepping in and standing up for him, while Lacker recalls it being Elvis himself. Lacker says that when Diskin went to Elvis to complain about Chips, Elvis responded, “I know you’re just doing your job, but how about letting me and Chips handle the session.”5 Bobby Wood remembers Chips further asking Elvis to get rid of all the publishing cronies: “Elvis said, ‘You got it.’ That’s exactly how we started cutting all the hits.”6

Jones, 212. Jones, 213. 4 Clayton and Heard, 237. 5 Jones, 213. 6 Clayton and Heard, 238. 2 3

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Just like how walking down the street with Steve Binder was a wake-up call as to his popularity in the world at large, Hill and Range’s monopoly over the material he was given to record had the effect of removing blinders Elvis didn’t even know were there. Such revelations could make him look like a fool, and the last thing he wanted to be was a country bumpkin in a world of slick city conmen. With Colonel Parker’s proud background in the carnival circuit, it’s no small step to imagine Elvis feeling like a freak Parker collected money for people to ogle at. Part of the thrill of listening to From Elvis in Memphis is Elvis’s investment in the material. Elvis sounds focused, not just trying to entertain the listener, but to capture their attention and earn their respect. He is in it for the long haul, and hopes that his audience will be, too. *** Part of the reason why Bienstock put so much faith into a song like “Power of My Love” was because it tapped into Elvis’s sex appeal. Unlike the nuanced portraits and mature ballads that make up the rest of From Elvis in Memphis, “Power of My Love” alone taps into the raw sexuality that was part of what put Elvis over when he first broke nationally in 1956. Songs like “Hound Dog,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” and “All Shook Up” may have provided a place for his brooding persona on record, but paired with the visuals of Elvis’s gyrations, sneers, and shaking, they made his music unforgettable. Elvis was one of the greatest performers in rock and roll, a dangerous, exciting, and utterly captivating singer, whose 97

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edge from his mid-1950s peak was sadly blunted by his sterile film performances of the 1960s and phoned-in concert performances of the 1970s. From Elvis in Memphis is in many ways a homecoming album, reuniting Elvis with his home city and a more casual, down-home studio approach than he had experienced in a long time. “Power of My Love” evokes the sexuality of early triumphs, especially the early Sun recordings “Good Rockin’ Tonight” and “Baby, Let’s Play House.” There is a looseness in the performance—Elvis breaks into laughter during the initial master take, and you can still hear this through the horns and vocals that were overdubbed on top of it. Despite Elvis’s bravado, the initial reaction to Elvis recording at American Sound was received somewhat coolly in certain camps, such as some of the Memphis Horns, who overdubbed the brass sections on the album. Wayne Jackson, a trumpet player and leader of the Memphis Horns, remembered: “I mean we were thrilled about Elvis, but it wasn’t like doing Neil Diamond.”7 When asked to elaborate on this remark years later, he explained that “Neil Diamond was heavy,” while Elvis “had been doin’ stuff like ‘Teddy Bear’ and that was lightweight. . . . Elvis was not a top-chart rock and roll guy. All he did was those dipshit movies.”8 Among the songs that featured Jackson and the Memphis Horns was “Power of My Love.” Their horn charts helped push the song into a very soulful territory. Gurlanick, 329. Jones, 202.

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Yet for a modern rock song, “Power of My Love” had deep roots. Its central use of the term “shaking” reached back past Big Maybelle’s 1955 jump blues “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” (which Elvis covered in 1971), Big Joe Turner’s 1954 instant R&B standard “Shake, Rattle and Roll” (which Elvis covered in 1956), and Faye Adams’s 1953 proto-soul “Shake a Hand” (which Elvis covered in 1975), to even before rock and roll music itself, to Charley Patton, an African American Delta blues artist who died in 1934, eight months before Elvis was born. Nearly forty years to the day that Elvis released “Power of My Love” on From Elvis in Memphis, Patton recorded a song called “Shake It and Break It,” which plays like its blueprint. Charley Patton and Elvis Presley are more alike than they first appear. Both were born into poverty in rural Mississippi, and found their way with an acoustic guitar and a new style of music. Charley Patton didn’t invent the Delta blues any more than Elvis invented rock and roll, but each one was at the forefront of their respective genre, and the most famous figure at their peak. Both were legendary performers with a wild live act that pushed the boundaries of their community’s acceptance. But most of all, both men were masters of the entire realm of American music—hot blues, country tunes, folk songs, slow ballads, and spirituals. Both Patton and Elvis had a musical style that provided a clue to what older styles prefaced the new. For Elvis, this was jump blues and country bop; for Patton, it was pre-blues songster and hokum music. “Shake It and Break It” is a proto-blues relic, closer to a ragtime shuffle sung on street corners than the hard blues of a juke joint. Patton invites his lover to “shake it,” “hang 99

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it on the wall,” “snatch it,” and “grab it,” setting the stage for Elvis’s calls to “burn it,” “drag it all around,” “crush it,” “kick it,” “touch it,” and “pound it”; both songs dare their lover to “break it” and “twist it.” But Patton begins his song where Elvis ends his: shaking. Patton invites his lover to “shake it” at least half a dozen times in his song; Elvis doesn’t get to shaking until the refrain. In Elvis’s song, shaking is like an automatic reaction to his loving, a physical condition that cannot be denied. It is overwhelming and enormous—he claims his lover will be shaking “every minute, every hour” from the power of his love. The song works because Elvis, who is a master at intensity, sings “Power of My Love” as a lark. He distances himself from the dire lyrics of the song, bringing the performance just to edge of seriousness while just as quickly stepping back from it, laughing at how ridiculous it all is. “Power of My Love” reminded Elvis not to take himself too seriously. It provided him with a template for his famous sex appeal, which he could then step in and out of throughout the song, teasing his audience with the reading of a single line. Just before Elvis sang the master take of the song, he briefly broke into a song called “Walk Away,” which appears to be a snippet of Matt Monro’s 1964 hit of the same name (but is sung closer to Roy Hamilton’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone”), which makes Elvis laugh just before singing the master take. For a song that promises a love so overwhelming that you could never walk away from it, Elvis begins and ends it with an all-knowing smile on his face.

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8 The Backroads

I can’t help it—I just feel restless sometimes. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s that I’ve never been away from home and all my folks and friends for so long. I don’t know. But it’s a funny feeling. A lonesome feeling. I guess everyone’s felt it, sometime or another. —Elvis, August 28, 1956.1 From the moment that From Elvis in Memphis begins with a rock and roll Odysseus returning home after “a little while,” the album refuses to settle. Over the course of the record, people drive eight-wheel locomotives, ride in long black limousines, and soar like beautiful birds. Lovers leave, passengers move on, and clocks strike “Go!” There are places all over the map—some with names like Arkansas, Tennessee, and Chicago, but countless more that remain nameless: the little street of a small town, the stars up in the sky, the railroad track, a gravel road, the ghetto. The genres change Osborne, 67.

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freely between rock, pop, soul, blues, country, and folk, while the songs themselves take the form of ballads, torch songs, modern-day Tin Pan Alley tunes, and protest music. Unsure of his position in the greater American country, Elvis creates his own. In “Power of My Love,” Elvis reinvigorated his shaking sexual persona, but here, the restlessness went beyond the simple drives of lust and desire. It captured a sort of existential shaking, which is to say, shaking a leg down the road to a new and unknown horizon. No song on From Elvis in Memphis travels more, farther, or harder than “Gentle on My Mind.” The song already had clocked a lifetime of traveling before Elvis tackled it midway through his January sessions at American Sound. “Gentle on My Mind” was originally written and recorded in 1967 by folk singer-songwriter John Hartford. He later reckoned it took him about fifteen minutes to write, which helps to explain the tumbling, stream-of-conscious lyrics that pour out all over the song. It was far closer to Bob Dylan’s style than Hartford’s RCA label-mate Elvis, even though Elvis’s designated producer, Felton Jarvis, helmed Hartford’s record. Not long after Hartford released it, country singer Glen Campbell covered it and turned it into an instant standard. Within a year, the song would be sung not only by country stars like Roger Miller and Tammy Wynette but also traditional pop crooners like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, as well as soul singers like Aretha Franklin. Even with all of these different voices cutting “Gentle on My Mind” within a few months, Elvis made it his own. Of all of the versions, his was the slowest. Reggie Young picks out a figure on his electric guitar that sets up Mike Leech’s 102

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wandering bassline. The sounds hover and linger, finding each other as Elvis’s vocal ties it all together; Gene Chrisman’s drums won’t come in until after a full verse has passed. But in terms of the song’s instrumentation, this is organist Bobby Emmons’s show. He appears to be pulling double duty, first with suspended organ notes pitched somewhere between a lap-steel and a flute, before emerging from within the song with a chugging, oscillating buzz of what sounds like a Hohner clavinet. The same instrument would be routed through a wah-wah pedal later that year in the Band’s biggest hit, “Up on Cripple Creek,” and a few years later it would drive Stevie Wonder’s funk masterpiece “Superstition.” Here, the clavinet plays a more atmospheric role, weaving in and out of the proceedings like the proverbial mystic chords of memory. “Gentle on My Mind” is an unusual song for Elvis to cover for the same reason that it was an unusual pop standard—it is a wordy song, driven by verbose imagery that threatens to topple the music. Frank Sinatra tried to give the song a light swing, but gets uncharacteristically off-rhythm in the middle. Dean Martin’s faster and more playful approach was better, but even he can’t escape sounding ridiculous with the cascading flow of the verses. Elvis was never much for wordy songs, but he could pull them off with his typical aplomb, as proven by his performance of “Guitar Man” on “The ’68 Comeback Special.” Unlike “Guitar Man,” which was conceived as a country song and transformed into a rocker, “Gentle on My Mind” is a country/folk song through and through, and Elvis wisely sings it with a subtle touch. It is too introspective to coast off the momentum of its lyrics. 103

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When you listen to the earlier versions of the song from John Hartford’s on down, each one plays like a love song, focusing on the lover who fuels the singer’s journey, the home that eventually will be reached. Elvis’s version is different—he is more focused on the journey than the destination. He understands the song well enough to know that even once the singer returns home to the lover, he will then turn around and leave again. In Elvis’s hands, “Gentle on My Mind” plays like a travelogue. When the song opens with the image of the knowledge that the singer can leave his sleeping bag rolled up behind his lover’s couch, it provides a rare moment of peace in a song that cannot settle down. The singer journeys not only through the space of the countryside—such as the wheat fields, junkyards, and highways that pass by in a single line—but also through time, playing the past against the present until the two become a reverie. “Gentle on My Mind” echoes a song he recorded at American Sound the following month, “Kentucky Rain.” It was a new song by Hill and Range songwriters Eddie Rabbitt and Dick Heard, a demo of which was brought to Elvis by his close friend Lamar Fike, from the Hill and Range publishers. Elvis loved the song and wanted it for his next single, so Elvis and the Memphis Boys worked up a textured, powerful arrangement and it was held back from the studio album for its own release. Like “Gentle on My Mind,” “Kentucky Rain” is an itinerate travelogue, but is more focused; it could be sung by the singer of “Gentle on My Mind” later in life, once 104

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he has settled down—or, at least, has tried to. “Kentucky Rain” begins with the singer searching for his lover after going through a dozen towns in seven days. He doesn’t know why his lover has left, and neither do we; like the singer, we never find out. Instead, we follow him trudging through a series of evocative sketches that tell of the things he encounters along the way—trying to hitchhike in the rain, showing his lover’s photograph to old men outside a general store, sharing his tale of woe with a preacher man who gives him a ride. Throughout, the music is as dramatic as the story, scoring the song with starts and stops like ominous storm clouds that gather and grow, part for a few rays of light, only to gather and grow once again. With nothing resolved, the song ends on a hopeful note, as a preacher man leaves the singer with a prayer. Even though this was someone else’s lyrics, Elvis certainly would have appreciated its final appeal to faith. The ending of “Gentle on My Mind” is just as striking. The singer dips a tin can into a cauldron get soup in a train yard, like a hobo trying to determine where he will hop his next freight. The verse could have been penned by Woody Guthrie—it was a nod Great Depression-era hobo camps and drifters that were still a reality at the time Elvis was born. And like Guthrie, Elvis came by his restlessness honestly. “The energy you see when Elvis performed was the same energy he had off stage,” Priscilla Presley once said of her former husband. “He couldn’t sit still. If he had a conversation with you, his foot would be wiggling. His body language was like his musical language, rhythmic, pulsating, always moving. This style wasn’t anything he dreamt up 105

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to draw attention to himself. It was merely Elvis, a man in perpetual motion.”2 More than any other song on From Elvis to Memphis, “Gentle on My Mind” finds Elvis in perpetual motion, taking the journeyman persona he would further explore in songs like “Kentucky Rain,” until it resonated with wanderlust and beauty. This was the flipside of the physical restlessness found in “Power of My Love”—“Gentle on My Mind” captured a quiet, psychological longing that cannot be satiated. And one imagines that, like the singer in the song, even if Elvis did find some elusive peace, he was just as likely to get restless, turn around, and hit the road again.

Ritz, 136.

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9 The Confession

I also like the piano, though I guess I don’t play it exactly the way you’re supposed to. I just hit whatever keys look good to me. . . . Never in a performance or on a record though. I’m not that good. —Elvis, August 28, 1956.1 In the late hours of February 18, 1969, the second night of the second set of sessions at American Sound Studio, Elvis had just completed “Power of My Love.” He makes an announcement before beginning the second song of the night. “I-I-I tell ya, I’ll tell ya what,” Elvis says. “I-I’m gonna play piano.” “Elvis gonna play piano,” Felton Jarvis echoes, as though reiterating a proclamation by a king. Elvis’s friends at the studio applaud on cue and then Elvis and the Memphis Boys get down to business. Osborne, 71.

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Elvis has an old country song written by Johnny Lantz and Eddie Miller called “After Loving You” on his mind. He throws himself into the song, finding the blues buried deep within a seemingly cut-and-dry country ballad, and driving it as hard as he can. “After Loving You” first appeared as a B-side for country star Eddy Arnold’s hit “A Little Heartache,” in 1962, but airplay and requests made the song nearly as successful as its flip. Arnold’s version begins with some promising bluesy piano, but any hot feeling is squelched when his vocal enters. For a song that relishes in the sinful desires of the flesh, Arnold sounds smooth and dull. Elvis’s version of “After Loving You” begins sharply, with Reggie Young’s guitar playing driving riffs that echo Elvis’s piano, setting the pace for Gene Chrisman’s bluesy drumming to tumble in alongside Tommy Cogbill’s understated but rich bass part. Elvis leads the band with the music he hears in his head, stopping it cold after the introduction so that he can sing the opening declaration a cappella: “Now, after loving you—” he implores, as someone (perhaps Elvis) claps their hands underneath. As the band crashes back down on the first syllable of “loving,” the singer lays out the central problem: now that he has loved this person, he can’t do anything else. In the hands of Eddy Arnold, this was standard Nashville country fare, a hyperbole to capture his departing love’s attention, but you never believe he will shut down and stop living. Elvis dares to take the song’s lyrics at face value. There is desperation in his voice, a pleading that lets you know this is not just an empty threat. The song is his gesture to make his lover believe him only because he has already chosen to believe 108

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it himself. It is the song of a man who cannot go any farther— into the song, into his love, into himself. *** In 1956, Elvis was asked in an interview if he’s ever had singing lessons. “Nope,” he replied flatly. “I’ve never had a singing lesson in my life. No music lesson of any kind, in fact. I just started singing with I was a little kid . . . and I’ve been doing it ever since.”2 Elvis saw his music as something natural that did not come from any kind of training or formal education. The closest thing to training he ever received was from watching the choir at church. When Elvis was a toddler, his mother Gladys once recalled, “he would slide down off my lap, run into the aisle and scramble up to the platform. There he would stand looking at the choir and trying to sing with them. He was too little to know the words . . . but he could carry the tune and he would watch their faces and try to do as they did.”3 Despite these roots, Elvis himself strongly distanced his religious background from his music: “My religion has nothin’ to do with what I do now, because the type of stuff I do now is not religious music,” he told TV Guide with a rare flash of frustration in 1956. “My religious background has nothing to do with the way I sing.”4 So even though Elvis first learned to sing in church, he compartmentalized his secular and non-secular work as discrete entities. This is not so much Osborne, 67. Guralnick, 14. 4 Osborne, 53. 2 3

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about not taking his music seriously as it was about taking his religion very seriously. Religion was the basis of Elvis’s entire community, and banishment from it would have been unimaginable. So he downplayed the secular music as a lark, a joke that he sort of stumbled into. Take, for instance, what he told a Canadian journalist in 1957 just before the only concerts he ever performed on foreign soil: “I don’t know anything about music—in my line I don’t need to.”5 The next morning, The Toronto Daily Star ran a review titled “All Too Plainly Visible, Elvis Is Barely Audible,” which stated, “It goes without saying he has all the appeal of one-part dynamite and one-part chain-lightning to the adolescent girls; but to one like myself who is neither a girl nor adolescent, I could only feel he was strikingly devoid of talent.” Tellingly, the article ran under the heading “MUSIC (?) REVIEW.”6 There are scores of scathing reviews like these of Elvis from the 1950s, many far more vicious than this one. Yet the Daily Star’s review after the concert pulls Elvis’s quote before the concert into perspective. It was middle-aged critics who he faced that were trying to analyze him as they would a “legitimate” performer. They were used to smooth crooners like Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra who, for them, had recognizable talent. They were not prepared to deal with the likes of Elvis, who was essentially a self-trained folk star. And the fact that Elvis did not write his own material evoked Plummer, 1. Plummer, 1.

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comparison to a Crosby or Sinatra, which is to say, it put further scrutiny on the vocal and physical elements of his performances. For as we have seen, Elvis had no real interest in songwriting, so any autonomy he had with regard to the written song came through song selection. “I choose my own songs,” Elvis told Armed Forces Radio before leaving Germany in early 1960: I don’t think there’s anybody who can decide what I can do best, better than me. And I think it would be a bad mistake if I had someone else tellin’ me what to record, or how to record it, because I work strictly on instinct and impulse. I don’t read music. My taste might be a little different because I choose songs with the public in mind. I try to visualize it as though I’m buying the record myself. Would I like it? And I try to please the public, and I don’t think anybody could choose ’em for me like I can.7 Within a few years of saying this, Elvis essentially gave up on this approach, merely eating the Hollywood material he was being fed by the movie and music studio business. The only real exceptions came with his gospel music—albums like 1960’s His Hand in Mine and 1967’s How Great Thou Art—in no small part because he could largely choose the material himself, without any pushback about use in the plot of a motion picture or concerns about keeping his publishing house happy. Osborne, 151.

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Aside from his gospel music, Elvis’s role as a song selector largely went underground in the 1960s. Trapped by the commercial expectations of his industry, he sought refuge at his Hollywood home with a tape recorder. Among the tapes later found in Graceland was a recording of Elvis singing “After Loving You,” mostly solo, although some others (probably friends Charlie Hodges and Red West) chime in off-mic here and there, which was probably recorded at some point during 1966. So in the year that many consider rock and roll’s finest—featuring the trinity of the Beatles’ Revolver, the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, and Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde— Elvis was at home with his friends at a piano making parlor music that felt closer to 1866. It has a thin sound, with Elvis’s piano wavering underneath his tender reading of the lyrics. The stately, almost formal façade is only broken when Elvis clowns around in the last refrain, singing that his lover’s memory cannot be erased “by just another turd with a pretty face,” to crack up his buddies. But at the same time, Elvis is largely playing his piano like a rhythm instrument, with a few runs, which, while far from virtuoso, speaks to an ease he felt with the instrument despite his nervous announcement before the studio version of “After Loving You” some three years later. Surely the environment of American Sound gives him some confidence. Elvis knows that the Memphis Boys is as great a band as he will ever record with. Furthermore, he is at home, in Memphis, in a creative environment to make good music unfettered by studio release dates or movie soundtrack obligations. There is space to experiment here, and Elvis can try making some of the music he has only heard in his head. 112

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On the first night of this second set of sessions, he sings “Stranger in Own Hometown.” And on the next, he tackles “After Loving You.” When heard on From Elvis in Memphis, “After Loving You” finds its parallel in “I’ll Hold You in My Heart” on the album’s first side. Both are the third song on their respective side, both are songs first made famous by Eddy Arnold that Elvis recasts into something more extreme, and both are the only songs on the album not to contain any overdubbed strings, brass, or vocalists. And yet, the two could not be further apart. For one thing, “I’ll Hold You in My Heart” is far more successful than “After Loving You.” “I’ll Hold You in My Heart” was performed exactly one time at American Sound, and that performance—complete with the two false starts— is what you hear on From Elvis in Memphis. It is the sound of a song coalescing for the musicians while Elvis leads the way, the dispatch from a one-time excursion into a new world. “After Loving You” is different. It may have begun as an off-the-cuff jam, but Elvis and the Memphis Boys spent some time working out an arrangement. Over a few passes, the group nails down the sound, all propelled by Gene Chrisman’s authoritative drumming. The fourth take, which will be used for the master, still feels unfinished. Elvis’s vamping at the end (“I said I’m no good, I’m no good, I’m no good to anyone, to anyone, to anyone, to anyone . . .”) feels a bit forced, a reading that feigns enthusiasm instead of simply expressing it. But Elvis got what he wanted from the song, a full-band reading of it that, while far from the greatest song he would record at the sessions, was good enough to make the cut for the album. 113

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It was also better than nearly anything he recorded for his movies in at least half a dozen years. “He’d be at the studio singing until the early-morning hours and then return the next evening, full of energy and ready to start again,” wrote Priscilla Presley about the American Sound sessions. “His voice was in top form and his excitement was infectious. Each cut was more terrific than the one before. We’d listen to the songs over and over, Elvis yelling, ‘All right, listen to that sound,’ or ‘Goddamn, play it again.’”8 At American Sound, Elvis triumphed over his insecurities and found his footing once again as a recording artist. The joy in this music is just as palpable as the apathy that can be heard in his Hollywood music. The Elvis that we hear on “After Loving You” is the Elvis that he wanted to hear in himself—confident, self-assured, and leading the band to fully realize his vision.

Presley, 269.

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10 The Cotton Dress

I don’t know what I’m gonna do next. But I’ve experienced a lot of the different phases in life. I’ve experienced happiness and loneliness, and the wealthy side of life, the average side of life, not having anything . . . but not knowing what it’s like to have anything. —Elvis, August 1962.1 When Elvis returned for his second round of sessions at American Sound Studio on February 17, 1969, the first song he tackled was “True Love Travels on a Gravel Road.” It was a new song by Dallas Frazier and A. L. Owens, the same team who wrote “Wearin’ That Loved on Look.” But unlike the brash opening song on the album, “True Love Travels on a Gravel Road” was bittersweet, celebrating, as Abraham Lincoln once put it—borrowing a line from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”—“The short and simple annals of the Poor.” For Frazier, who was born in Spiro, Oklahoma, in Osborne, 185.

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1939, before relocating with his family to California a few years later, poverty was a real thing. “We were part of The Grapes of Wrath,” Frazier remembered. “We were the Okies who went out to California with mattresses tied on the tops of their Model A Fords. My folks were poor.”2 A. L. Owens, who was born in Waco, Texas, in 1930, similarly spent his entire childhood down South during the Great Depression. And yet, as a love song, “True Love Travels on a Gravel Road” is the happiest one on From Elvis in Memphis. After songs that experienced love with distrust (“Wearin’ That Loved on Look”), failure (“Only the Strong Survive”), longing (“I’ll Hold You in My Heart”), loss (“Long Black Limousine”), abandonment (“It Keeps Right on A-Hurtin’”), dismissal (“I’m Movin’ On”), lust (“Power of My Love”), and stubbornness (“After Loving You”), “True Love Travels on a Gravel Road” is a welcome reprieve from the frustration and pain. It may have a title that implies traveling, but it is a heartfelt paean to staying in one place. *** Elvis was not well-read enough to quote from Gray’s “Elegy” to account for his past, and like Lincoln, never left any lengthy autobiographical writing. But where Lincoln had his law partnerturned-biographer William Herndon to fill in the picture (or at least one version of it), Elvis had the liner notes on the back of his 1956 self-titled debut album. It was one of the first—and for my money, finest—things ever written about Elvis’s life. Hurt, 1.

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“Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis began singing for friends and folk gatherings when he was barely five years old,” the anonymous writer begins. All his training has been self-instruction and hard work. At an early age, with not enough money to buy a guitar, he practiced for his future stardom by strumming on a broomstick. He soon graduated to a $2.98 instrument and began picking out tunes and singing on street corners. After earning some money by working at part-time jobs, Elvis walked into a small recording company studio and asked to make a record, at his own expense. In a few months his first record was released and became an overnight sensation. . . . Following his graduation from high school, Elvis began an extended round of personal appearances and then signed his contract with RCA Victor. All that’s missing is the closing cliché: “And the rest, as they say, is history.” These words provide an almost offhanded articulation of the American Dream, the miraculous opportunities for those lucky enough to be born into a society in which upward mobility could break through class levels that were impenetrable in most other countries. “We were broke, man, broke, and we left Tupelo overnight,” Elvis once recalled. “Dad packed all our belongings in boxes and put them in the trunk and on top of a 1939 Plymouth. We just headed for Memphis. Things had to be better.”3 Elvis’s impoverished Kingsley, 17.

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roots were a key to understanding who he was, a scar that could be covered up, but never faded away. Elvis’s friend and hairdresser Larry Geller spent hours talking to Elvis about his deepest beliefs. At one point, Elvis invited Geller to take his pink Cadillac down to Tupelo so that Geller could see his childhood home to better understand where Elvis came from. Geller mentions how years after his pilgrimage, the home was renovated and improved to obscure the two-room shack that Vernon built with his own hands. What Geller saw was the original structure. “At the sight of the house’s old, worn whitewashed wood, its outhouse and outdoor pump, its dirt ‘lawn,’ I realized that a person living in twentieth-century America couldn’t possibly sink any lower,” Geller recalled. “The shack was so tiny, three people fitting inside of it, much less living there, seemed impossible. From then on, whenever Elvis mentioned his past, I’d recall that little house as it stood then and what it symbolized.”4 “I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House,” Abraham Lincoln once told his troops. “I am living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has.” Less than a century after Lincoln spoke these words, Elvis was living in his own big white house in Memphis called Graceland. It was telling that Elvis chose to build his home in Memphis. Despite his achievements in New York City, Nashville, and Hollywood, Memphis was the town that took him in when he was poor, and provided Geller, 75.

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the tools he needed to become a star. And Elvis never forgot that. *** “True Love Travels on a Gravel Road” is a country song about the peace that comes with humility. At its heart is a girl who stands by her man with no shame, even though she’s chosen a simple life over one of satin and lace. “I tried on one of her dresses and could tell that she liked soft materials on her skin, just as I did,” Priscilla Presley wrote in her autobiography about exploring a closet of dresses owned by Elvis’s beloved mother Gladys. “By the size of her dress, I knew she cared more about the feel of a dress than about fashion or style. She liked to dress simply and comfortably.”5 Elvis observed the same thing too. “Funny, she never really wanted anything, you know, anything fancy,” he once explained about his mother. “She just stayed the same, all the way through the whole thing.”6 She wore the clothing of someone who lives in the tiny shack of a cotton dress world. While the lyrics were straightforward, finding the best music to accompany them was not. The final version of “True Love Travels on a Gravel Road” on From Elvis in Memphis plays like a ballad, but it took Elvis and the Memphis Boys some time to nail the tempo. They first performed the song at a brisker pace like a Mersey-beat song, something akin to the quieter cuts on the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night album. Reggie Presley, 172. Osborne, 184.

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Young’s guitar is sweetly ornamental, picking notes around the chords, letting Bobby Wood’s piano fill in the middle, while Gene Chrisman drums steadily like a windshield wiper cutting through the rain. It’s the bridge that makes the song. Chrisman pounds his drums to build the energy as Elvis ad-libs “whoa-whoa-whoawhoa-whoa” in rising notes, like he’s ascending a staircase while singing a Ronettes song. Elvis then pushes the words until they become a storm warning. Beware of the golden streets where love is nowhere to be found, he warns—the true love can be found on the unpaved gravel road. Given a choice to ride the gilded highway, Elvis wisely opts for the backwoods country road. This early take of the song was effective enough, but Chips heard further potential. Through the control room speaker, Chips continues to mold the song gently, knowing that a harsh move might bring it all crashing down. “Step forward just a little bit,” Chips offers in his lilting Georgia accent that makes him sound uncannily like Jimmy Carter. Elvis continues the melody line after Chips cut him off (“That’s a little too slow,” he sings to himself). After a few more takes, they get closer to the final. Chrisman has scaled his drums back into flourishes instead of a steady beat, which opens up the song like a field. Instead of pounding the build to the bridge, Chrisman simply shifts gears like a sports car, guiding the song to a higher acceleration. The first time around, Elvis holds back, but the second time he still can’t resist singing the ad-libbed “whoawhoa-whoa” ascending line into the bridge. “Keep playin’ if it helps you,” guitarist Reggie Young tells Elvis. “But don’t—that one time in the middle is a little weird, really.” “OK,” Elvis 120

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responds immediately with deferential respect. “When was the last time anyone criticized Elvis at a recording session?” Ernst Jorgensen posits about Young’s remark in Elvis Presley: A Life in Music. “There was an awkward moment of silence followed by scattered, nervous laughter, but the tension passed quickly as they struggled on together through a number of takes, before finally getting a master.”7 Far from discouraging Elvis, moments like this helped fuel his greatness on From Elvis in Memphis. At Sun Records, producer Sam Phillips never had a master plan for Elvis’s sessions, they would just try out different things and evolve songs until they had something that worked. “Every session came hard,” remembered Marion Keisker, who helped Phillips operate Sun. “He never had anything prepared, and the sessions always went on and on and on . . . . It was a great spirit of—I don’t know, everyone was trying very hard, but everyone was trying to hang very loose through the whole thing.”8 It was a team effort by Elvis, his bandmates Scotty Moore and Bill Black, and Phillips. By the time Elvis made the jump to RCA Records, he was essentially producing his own sessions, running his growing band through takes, tweaking as he went along, capturing an elusive sound and spirit until suddenly it came together. Over the years, various musicians and producers came and went, but Elvis remained as the focal point of his recording sessions. At American Sound, however, things were different. Elvis felt like he truly had something to prove, and while his personality still comes through strongly between the Jorgensen, 276. Schilling, 56.

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takes, this is the closest thing to a team effort since his Sun recordings. Elvis, the Memphis Boys, and Chips are all in it together; if any one of them falters, the whole ship could go down. So they look out for each other and listen to each other, which forms some of the most collaborative studio recordings Elvis would ever make. The Memphis Boys fuel Elvis, who in turn fuels the Memphis Boys, forming a strong circle of sound with Chips at its center. On the full master take of “True Love Travels on a Gravel Road,” you can still hear Chips clapping it in, making sure the tempo is just right. It is, and the final version of the song is atmospheric. Young’s guitar is warm and rich like an organ and Chrisman’s sparse drumming in the verses clear the way for the melody. Tommy Cogbill’s bass hits only the essential notes to flesh out the rhythm section, although the hint of something bigger is still there. The swelling strings and backing vocals add texture like a movie soundtrack, while the song now smoothly transitions from the understated verse into the dramatic bridge like a magic trick. The contrast between the two sections mirrors the central contradiction of the song’s lyrics: the imagery of traveling on a road is used to prove the strength of feeling grounded in one place. Elvis understood that in order to become a star in the world, you have to leave home. For Elvis, this meant Memphis and the hungry, raw records he cut for Sam Phillips at Sun Studio. But by the following decade, he sleepwalked his way through an art that offered him no fulfillment. In coming back home to restart his journey, he was looking for something he had lost along the way—a real sense of self that had been devoured by the shiny streets of gold. 122

11 The Beautiful Bird

Good evening. My name is the NBC Peacock. —Elvis, August 19, 1974.1 “Any Day Now” doesn’t begin—it appears, coming at you all at once, a feeling that can no longer be contained. Strings swirl around the tight descending pattern of Reggie Young’s electric guitar, a spiral staircase enclosed in another spiral staircase; Gene Chrisman’s effortless drumming keeps the syncopated groove together, in lockstep with Tommy Cogbill’s prodding bassline, and then clears the way for horns to swoop in and take the lead like the last runner of a winning relay team closing in on the finish line. It’s fifteen seconds of the most exhilarating music on the entire album, and Elvis hasn’t even opened his mouth yet. When he does, Elvis finds a love song that is once all about movement yet frozen in a moment—a singer on the brink of their lover leaving them—as the song stands on the edge of a windowsill, beautifully flinching. Like much of From Elvis in Osborne, 276.

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Memphis, “Any Day Now” is a thoroughly mature work, both in its lyric and musical structure. It’s no coincidence that the four hit singles yielded from these sessions—“In the Ghetto,” “Suspicious Minds,” “Don’t Cry Daddy,” and “Kentucky Rain”—all reflected a growing maturity that matched Elvis’s audience. He was no longer a kid going crazy over a hound dog or boasting about his blue suede shoes. Instead, these songs spoke to a more sophisticated interaction with the greater world. The cool rush of Elvis’s early hits was more elusive here in these songs about inner-city poverty, love and betrayal, familial solidarity, and reconciling abandoned love. These songs had consequences. As a record of a major artist finding their place in a new sound, “Any Day Now” stands with the best of this new music. Perhaps this is why, when “In the Ghetto” was the first song released from these sessions in mid-April 1969, “Any Day Now” was chosen as its B-side. It proved the newfound maturity of the flipside was no fluke. Some cuts from these sessions took songs that Elvis could have sung a decade earlier and updated their style, but “Any Day Now” sounds like it could only come from the hard-earned experience of Elvis as a thirty-four-year-old man. Appropriately enough, Burt Bacharach, the main composer of “Any Day Now,” was also thirty-four years old when he wrote the song. Although Bacharach is best known today for his collaborations with lyricist Hal David, Bacharach initially spent as much time collaborating with lyricist Bob Hilliard. In 1962, Bacharach composed “Any Day Now,” one of the

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last songs he wrote with Hilliard before working with David almost exclusively. “Any Day Now” is a three-minute music tour-de-force, as Bacharach has composed a deeply textured song that reinforces the pathos of the lyrics. In his history of the Brill Building era, There’s Always Magic in the Air, Ken Emerson captures the musical sophistication at work behind what may sound like a straightforward pop song: “Shifting from major to minor chords, doubling and halving the tempo, leaping an octave, the music embodies both the singer’s agitation and the flightiness he fears in his lover.”2 Like the music, the lyrics capture an ever-fleeting wonder of beauty. It is the brave sound of someone holding on tighter while trying to convince themselves that it is past time to let go. Chuck Jackson, a young African American rhythm and blues singer with a few minor hits under his belt, originally recorded “Any Day Now” in 1962. Jackson’s version of “Any Day Now” is magnificent. It is probably the finest original hit version of a song that Elvis and the Memphis Boys covered on From Elvis in Memphis. Beginning with a syncopated beat that sounds like Ben E. King’s “Spanish Harlem,” Jackson’s rough voice cuts through the slick production and taps into the song’s ageless wisdom. Had someone with a more refined voice sung it, the record would have been bland. Jackson sounds like he is figuring out the words as he goes along, putting them out as a test, and then marveling at how onpoint those words are. Although Jackson was only twentyfive when he cut “Any Day Now,” he sounds decades older. Emerson, 169–70.

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And Jackson’s recording clearly resonated with listeners— making #2 R&B and crossing over to #23 on the pop charts, becoming Jackson’s biggest hit and signature song. When Elvis tackled “Any Day Now,” he had his work cut out for him. His version starts with a majestic rush— bigger, fuller, and faster than Jackson’s original. The main riff noodled on a single organ in Jackson’s version is now locked in place by an entire horn section. As Elvis’s vocal comes in, the horns subside, but the Memphis Boys keep the fury going—Chrisman’s tasteful and steady tempo with Cogbill’s racing heartbeat bass, Young’s reverb guitar answering the melody lines, and Bobby Emmons’s organ filtering over the sound like the falling blue shadows in the lyrics; by the next verse, Bobby Wood’s piano is right there with them, hammering away and giving deeper texture to the sound. It is truly a collaborative effort. Although the Memphis Boys are central to the recording, they are only one part of the record’s sound; the strings and the horns play nearly equal roles in shaping the sound. The strings heighten the drama with almost Hollywood overtones, while the horns infuse the song with the brisk excitement of a marching band. Perhaps no other song on From Elvis in Memphis utilizes the strings and horns as successfully as “Any Day Now.” Hearing the song’s three main sonic elements— the Memphis Boys, the strings, and the horns—go in and out of each other like a three-way conversation makes it all the more astounding that only one of these three elements—the backing band—was there when Elvis cut his initial vocal. With its lush production values, “Any Day Now” gives a hint of the music that Elvis will make in the following 126

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decade. In a little over a year, the over-the-top strings, brass, and backing singers of songs like “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” both featured in his early jumpsuit Vegas shows of 1970, take things to a level of schmaltz beyond his work at American Sound. Still, “Any Day Now” sows the seeds of this sound, which, by the turn of the decade, will become so campy that it defies Elvis’s reputation as a heterosexual god. If one looks closely, however, this paradox always has been there. In the chapter “Exhuming Elvis” in Queer Noises: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Music, John Gill considers Elvis’s legacy through a queer lens: A generous queer reading of Elvis Presley’s sexuality would be that, whatever sort of slob and monster he would turn into in later years, the Presley sign signified and celebrated sexual freedom, release, pleasure in the body. This wild and unchannelled energy was written into a heterosexual missionary position by heterosexual men with a vested interest in promoting that activity. This is not to say that Presley was a sexual radical—he called his elders sir and ma’am, joined the army, married young and later became a deranged and paranoid fascist—but that the rebellious sexuality he represented was promptly reined into line with the prevailing values of the 1950s.3

Gill, 87.

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The Elvis that Gill encounters may have had the potential to free the world sexually, but it was stifled almost immediately on impact. For Gill, early hits like “Heartbreak Hotel” (“an extraordinarily depressing blues ballad based on the real-life story of a man who checked into a motel to kill himself ”) or “Love Me Tender” (“possibly the most achingly poignant song about romantic longing in the history of pop”) don’t square up against hits like “Hound Dog” and “Jailhouse Rock.”4 (And Gill didn’t even point out that “Hound Dog” was originally written for a lesbian about a gigolo and “Jailhouse Rock” featured one male inmate hitting on another male inmate.) The point is that the queer Elvis was hiding in plain sight all along, way before he ever entered his more obvious camp descent into full-blown Hollywood musicals and schmaltzy Vegas concerts. The latter of these was where his camp legacy was sealed—the sequenced jumpsuit, the scarves, the cape, the works. In her essay “Don’t Cry, Daddy: The Degeneration of Elvis Presley’s Musical Masculinity,” Freya Jarman-Ivens hones in on this 1970s incarnation of the Elvis persona: “It is particularly these later images that have been adopted by Elvis impersonators in the years since his death, and the phenomenon of Elvis impersonation combines with the spectacle of the middle-aged Presley himself to allow a continued injection of camp into the sustained Idea-of-Elvis.” Even if Elvis himself wasn’t as campy as impersonators who followed him, Jarman-Ivens points to a “multivalent brand of gender—that which was always present in the fluidity Gill, 86.

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and performativity of gender in his earlier years” as an inciting incident for the broad interpretations of people who “do” Elvis.5 Elvis was irresistible to impersonate because he was close to being a parody of himself. For the last few years of his life, he crisscrossed America with his entourage of musicians, singers, and assistants, playing essentially the same set-list over and over to packed stadiums. A typical example is his July 4, 1976, bicentennial concert in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In theory, this has the trappings of being a profound American artist on a profound American day, but it plays like one more concert in his long slog through a year of mostly middling shows; only a performance of “America” (“Since it’s our Bicentennial,” Elvis notes) distinguishes it from any other night. He holds court, goes through the motions of his performance, and does it all while wearing his iconic “Blue Egyptian Bird” jumpsuit, the front of which featured a wild, beautiful bird. Onstage in Tulsa, phoning in his way through a revue of hits, Elvis is light years away from singing about the wild, beautiful bird of “Any Day Now” in Memphis. “Any Day Now” is like much of the similarly lush music Elvis recorded at American in that it goes to the edge of schmaltz but avoids this pitfall by the singer’s engagement with the material. Anyone can belt out an Elvis impression to a Karaoke disc— even Elvis himself, it turns out—but a song like “Any Day Now” requires the grace of a cat burglar. You have to act cool Jarman-Ivens, 168.

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and lay low until you find the perfect moment to strike— and then retreat back into the darkness as quickly as you appeared. Elvis’s vocal is all about his shading. He sings the words “any day now” tenderly, while punching key phrases— “you’ll be on your way,” “restless eyes,” and “blue shadows will fall”—that tell you everything you need to know, even as the lyrics slip back under cover of the sound. About halfway through the song there’s a remarkable passage in which the music parts like the Red Sea. The strings bring the music down like a setting sun, closing in on the Memphis Boys. Chrisman’s drums does little more than keeping time with Cogbill’s bass ringing through it like a pulse, Young’s guitar playing little ringing phrases, and Emmons’s organ quietly shifting the sound. The strings sweep back in to help guide the vocal. The words play like a soliloquy, the actor removing his mask to address the audience like in Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude. “I know I shouldn’t want to keep you,” the singer admits, before pledging to hold on to his lover “for dear life” as the strings play a minuet of chamber music behind him. The singer sees his way out of the break and begins the next verse in the same tone as the hushed soliloquy, before working his way back up to the big finish. The strings swirl, the brass boogies, the band rocks, the backing singers plead. And then Elvis gives it all he’s got. DON’T FLY AWAY— He cries, nearly choking on emotion: MY BEAUTIFUL BIRD—!

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The music fades away as suddenly as it appeared—there is simply no other way to wind this sound down into a believable close. Like the lover in the song, it soars away before we are ready to let it go.

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12 The Vicious Circle

I did “In the Ghetto.” I don’t know. I wouldn’t like to do all that type stuff. In other words, I wouldn’t like for everything to be a message, ’cause I think there’s still entertainment to be considered. —Elvis, February 27, 1970.1 A drumstick hits a snare-rim as you can just hear the soft squealing of fingers running across guitar strings—unless it’s the rats running along the rafters. Elvis stands on the floor of the American Sound Studio in Memphis, waiting, and we can imagine him lost for a moment in thought. He thinks about what it means to be a small boy born into the poorest rung of America, the land of the free, where the streets are paved with gold. He thinks about his own journey, and how timing, talent, determination, and luck all came together to overcome boundaries that seemed unconquerable. Now Elvis was on the other side of the story, Osborne, 225.

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back in his hometown, having achieved all of the wealth and fame he could have ever imagined and more, an American icon who just happens to be the living embodiment of the American Dream. And yet, we can imagine that his mind wanders. Sure, he has made it, but why him? What did he have that so many other impoverished young boys in America did not? Was he favored by fate or destiny? Or did he just simply dream bigger than anyone else? For no crowd is bigger than the one a young Elvis assembled in his mind while playing guitar alone in his bedroom because he was too shy to play on the front porch. Elvis’s lips part, and he sings four words to himself; the more the words sink in, the more his voice drifts into the silence. “And his Mama cries . . .” Elvis’s reverie is broken by drummer Gene Chrisman counting in the song with a quiet authority—“One, two, three, four”—and all is silent for a beat. It is late in the night on January 20, 1969, and they are about to begin the twentysecond take of “In the Ghetto,” and it will be the master. “In the Ghetto” was written by Mac Davis, a white country songwriter who supplied Elvis with some of the finest songs of his comeback period. Davis was born and raised in Lubbock, Texas, in the mid-1940s, where one of his closest childhood friends was an African American boy. “But he lived in a part of town, and I couldn’t figure out why they had 134

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to live where they lived, and we got to live where we lived,” Davis later recalled. “We didn’t have a lot of money, but we didn’t have broken bottles every six inches. It was a dirt street ghetto where he lived.”2 For years Davis was determined to write a song “where a kid is born, he doesn’t have a male parent, and falls into the wrong people and dies as another kid comes along and replaces him. It’s just a vicious circle. Long story short—I couldn’t find anything to rhyme with ‘circle.’”3 Davis did find a circular guitar riff that suggested a hook: “In the ghetto . . .” Originally subtitled “The Vicious Circle,” “In the Ghetto” opens on a cold, gray Chicago morning where a poor baby is born as his mother cries. We follow him as he grows up, hungry and playing in the street, where he learns to steal and fight. In desperation, he buys a gun and steals a car, only to be gunned down in the street as his mother cries. The song ends with one of the most powerful images in an Elvis song—a crowd gathering around the young man “face down in the street with a gun in his hand”—and as he dies, another little baby is born. The song had a strong, simple message, but Elvis was initially wary of recording it. Colonel Parker had conditioned him to avoid “message” songs at all costs, fearing it would fracture the audience that Elvis spent his career unifying. Elvis already had tested these waters in “The ’68 Comeback Special” with “If I Can Dream,” but that song was a somewhat Paulson, 1. Paulson, 1.

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generic (if powerful) plea for a better world. “In the Ghetto,” however, was explicitly about race and poverty. With the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis well within a year of recording “In the Ghetto,” race was a touchy subject for Elvis to address. Furthermore, American Sound was located adjacent to the Memphis ghetto, so that the song felt like a dispatch from the belly of the beast. Throw in the social unrest of 1968—such as the protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where “In the Ghetto” takes place—and you have a song that captures the social anxiety like a match in a powder keg. Elvis initially deferred, but George Klein and Marty Lacker—the same two members of his inner circle who take credit for Elvis getting to American Sound—also take credit for convincing him to record “In the Ghetto.” Klein remembers that he initially advised Elvis against recording the song, only having a change of heart after Chips resolved to give the song to another artist. Lacker remembers telling Elvis that if he “was ever gonna do a song with a message, this is the one,” and that it was Elvis himself who had a change of heart after learning Chips was going to give it to someone else.4 However it came about, Elvis would have the song for posterity. “In the Ghetto” is not just a great song or a great performance, it’s a portrait in miniature of American Sound Studio at work. All of which to say is that the Memphis Boys’ pop genius, if we can call it that, was providing exactly Jones, 209.

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what was needed to make a singer shine. In the second volume of Peter Guralnick’s definitive biography on Elvis, he writes about the recording session for “In the Ghetto”: “Throughout it all Chips, ordinarily perceived as an abrasive man, is nothing but gently understated and encouraging, playing the session, the session musicians, and the singer as if they were a single finely tuned instrument.”5 Listening to “In the Ghetto” evolve over the twenty odd takes is a study in nuance. To the casual ear, it sounds like they get it right out of the gate with the first take, but the sound is nowhere near where Chips wants it to be. And so, subtle adjustments are made along the way. “Play it again,” Chips announces before the second take. “Reggie, move the mic a little bit by the guitar, you might get the sound a little more.” Reggie Young obliges and we can hear him tinker with the circular folk riff, taming the tricky rhythm until he can control it on command. “That’s a little ragged, right in there,” Chips says, cutting off the band a little more than a minute later. “Use a piano chord in that part there where it’s slowing down, Bob.” Chips is now talking to pianist Bobby Wood, whose piano part is growing in texture with each new take. To illustrate what he means, Chips sings a little descending melody that is as beautiful in its own way as Elvis’s vocal: “da-da-da-da—dum-dum.” Meanwhile, in the third take, we can hear the other keyboardist, Bobby Emmons on organ, slip into the song almost right away and provide the warmth of a hundred glass-stained windows. An additional musician, John Hughey, can be heard honing his Guralnick, 332.

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haunting steel guitar parts throughout the takes; initially he took a backseat to Emmons’s organ, but with each subsequent pass, he establishes himself as a near equal, unleashing swirling sounds that haunt the song like ghosts. Well, the world turns. By the eleventh take, they have transposed the song to a higher key, which allows Elvis to really get inside the vocal. On the thirteenth, Elvis gives it his most impassioned vocal of the session, breathing new life into the lyrics by tapping into his own emotions—especially when it says the child needs a “helping hand,” leaning into the words until his voice cracks—that suggest more than just a hint of anger. As the guitar fades toward the end, Elvis gives a low and confident “Yeeeaaaah.” If Elvis was producing the session, this would be the final take. But Chips still hasn’t reached what he wants. So they keep on going, finding their way through, sometimes making small advances in their sound and confidence, sometimes retreating into false starts. “We’re right on it now, we’re right on it,” Chips announces just before the twentieth take. Young, still puttering with the guitar lick, stumbles upon a familiar tune. Elvis picks it up right away. “As those caissons go rolling along,” he sings. “Hot damn.” There is solidarity in this ancient First World War marching song, which was reworked to become the official anthem of the US Army as “The Army Goes Rolling Along” in 1956—the year Elvis was at the peak of his breakthrough fame, a momentum broken by the US Army less than two years later—but Elvis sings the original First World War “caissons” version. He keeps going, until his eyes meet Chips’s signal (“YUP!” says Elvis; “Rollin’!” says Chips), and it’s back to work. Elvis and the Memphis Boys then perform a version 138

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of “In the Ghetto” that is nearly identical to the master two takes later; the only difference is that Elvis’s voice is smoother in the final. Heard without the strings and backing vocals, the economy of sound produced by the little band is surprising. The arrangement is sparse and built around Young’s circular guitar figure—Mike Leech’s bass unpinning it like a shadow, Chrisman playing only the barest of drums, Emmons’s organ warming the song from within, and Wood’s subtle gospel piano filling in here and there—while Tommy Cogbill threw in some arrangement touches (Leech credits him with tympanis) and Chips watches over like a benevolent god. The overdubs enrich the finished version of the record— the strings that bend in and out of the sound, the backing vocals sounding like a gospel Greek chorus, the horns adding weight where needed—all of which orbit like heavenly bodies around Elvis’s vocal, now thickened with echo and full of conviction. For “In the Ghetto” is Elvis’s moment. His singing is effortless and the grace he brings to his role is easy to miss for all of its humility. Although we normally associate Elvis with flash and showmanship, “In the Ghetto” works because he simply lets the story tell itself. Elvis does this so effectively because he hears himself in the story. “I know what poverty is,” he once matter-of-factly told an interviewer. “I lived it for a long time.”6 Unlike the love Kingsley, 17.

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songs and rockers that make up the remainder of From Elvis in Memphis (as well as virtually all of his music up to this point), “In the Ghetto” has no love interest. In fact, the only other delineated person in the song besides the central protagonist is his mother. This packs a double punch for Elvis. Not only does “In the Ghetto” focus on an impoverished young man who struggles against an unrelenting outside world, but it also features the young man’s mother as the spiritual center of the song. Even though Elvis didn’t write these words, they have a poignancy that permeates his entire performance. As we have seen, Elvis was unusually close with his mother, Gladys. Their mutual devotion to each other went far beyond a typical mother-son relationship. When Gladys previewed his first film, 1956’s Love Me Tender, and saw the scene where Elvis dies, she became very upset. Elvis had to take a few minutes to calm her down and remind her that it was only a movie and he was fine. If Elvis’s mother could get so upset about a fictional depiction of his death, he could only imagine what she would do if she experienced his death in real life. It would destroy her, just as her death destroyed part of him. With the words “and his mother cried” as a central lyric, “In the Ghetto” forces Elvis to confront this several times throughout the song. Elvis is also forced to confront his own fears about anonymity. “In the Ghetto” is one of the most powerful songs on From Elvis in Memphis because, like “Long Black Limousine,” it allows Elvis to flip the script and step into the shoes of a faceless nobody. For while “Long Black Limousine” is a meditation on fame, “In the Ghetto” is about the perils of poverty. The protagonist of “Long Black Limousine” is from 140

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a small town and presumably lives modestly, but there are no signs of economic suffering. It is an everyday story, worthy of Norman Rockwell. The protagonist of “In the Ghetto,” on the other hand, lives in a world that is entirely defined by poverty. For Elvis, “In the Ghetto” cuts deeper because he knew poverty much longer than he knew fame. Even though Chicago is a long way from Tupelo, he understands in a very real way that the protagonist of this song could have been him. And yet, it wasn’t. Elvis was fortunate enough to move to Memphis, where he crossed paths with Sam Phillips, who worked closely with his artists to, as he once put it, “free him from whatever is restraining him.”7 In Elvis, Phillips found a new birth of freedom. Elvis broke free in early singles like “That’s All Right,” “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” “Milkcow Blues Boogie,” “Baby, Let’s Play House,” and “Mystery Train,” again and again—from the girls in the songs, from the segregated genres in his sound, from the confines of his birth, from any debts owed to the American land. He was able to escape his poverty through his art. The protagonist of “In the Ghetto” also makes a play for freedom—“The young man breaks away,” as Elvis sings— when he buys a gun, steals a car, and gets gunned down in the street. His attempt to escape is driven by desperation, and it is doomed before it even begins. Instead of allowing the young man to break out of the vicious circle in which he was born, he is killed by his gesture for escape. For a country that calls itself the land of the free, “In the Ghetto” was a cruel joke—an America that eats its own. Jorgensen, 11.

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“In the Ghetto” ends From Elvis in Memphis on a very ominous note. After an album all about the restless movement that can be found in the land, it was a harsh reminder of limits, a bitter end. Yet as the first single released from the album—and the first new music heard from Elvis’s American Sound sessions—the song also marked a new beginning. “In the Ghetto” was Elvis’s biggest hit since the early 1960s. It reached #3 in Billboard, as well as #1 in CashBox and Record World. It was his first Top 5 hit since 1965’s “Crying in the Chapel,” which was originally recorded in 1960. This also made “In the Ghetto” his first Top 5 hit of new material on the major American charts since “(You’re the Devil) in Disguise” in 1963, as well as his first chart-topper since “Return to Sender” earlier that same year. For the first time in years— since the Beatles and Bob Dylan redefined rock and roll— an Elvis song truly resonated. If it didn’t place him on the forefront of cutting-edge rock and roll per se, it repositioned him as a serious competitive artist, a real contender. “In the Ghetto” proved that Elvis still mattered—and that his music still had something to say.

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The Back Cover From Elvis in Vegas It’s very dry here in Las Vegas, ladies and gentlemen, and a lot of singers have a problem—course I was never a singer so I don’t have that problem. —Elvis, August 1, 1969.1 The back cover of From Elvis in Memphis is more notable for what it doesn’t contain than for what it does. So let’s begin with an inventory. Like all of Elvis’s 45 RPM single sleeves at the time, it featured a big color picture of him on one side (usually on the left, as it is here), and the title information with the relevant accompanying text over a bright color on the other (in this case, yellow). Often, the vertical split would be even between the Elvis side and the text side, but on From Elvis in Memphis it is clearly tipped to Elvis’s side, taking up seven of the LP back cover’s twelve inches. The text on the right-hand side reads “From ELVIS In Memphis” on top, with “ELVIS” about three times larger than the other words. Below the title is a track listing for each side, and underneath that is a picture of the soundtrack Osborne, 214.

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album to “The ’68 Comeback Special” with the words “FOR YOUR COLLECTION—ELVIS’ TV ALBUM” above them. The only other words on the back cover are RCA cataloging information and the copyright notice. On the left-hand side, Elvis looks affable and smiling, hair coifed in a perfect black shell. He is wearing a whitecollared button-down shirt with a collarless yellow jacket over it, his hands clasped together in a fist that just reveals the monogrammed “EP” cufflink on his left wrist. He sits on a stool wearing gray dress pants (after making it big, he swore to never wear blue jeans again), his right leg propped up. Elvis’s blue eyes echo the smile on his face, as well as the gray-blue background, mostly flat, save for a few shadows. There is nothing to indicate that this is a six-year-old publicity photo from Viva Las Vegas, taken during the summer of 1963. By the time that Viva Las Vegas came out in May 1964, the entire cultural landscape had shifted. In a matter of months, John F. Kennedy was assassinated and the Beatles invaded America. Psychedelic drugs, Vietnam, and the counterculture lay just around the corner. Although Elvis was still doing pretty well in the summer of 1963, his star was already slipping, and his only big hit of the year was the kitschy “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise.” But Elvis held on because there was no one else to really challenge him, and while he may have been past his commercial peak, he’s still doing well enough to give an earnest smile. So what’s missing from the back cover? A lot. There are no references to producers Chips Moman and Felton Jarvis. No 144

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mention of musicians Reggie Young, Mike Leech, Tommy Cogbill, Gene Chrisman, Bobby Wood, and Bobby Emmons. Nothing about the dozens of musicians who provide the brass (Stax Records’ Memphis Horns, led by Wayne Jackson on trumpet and Andrew Love on tenor saxophone), backing vocals (mostly Mary “Jeannie” Green, Donna Thatcher, Ginger Holladay, Mary Holladay, and Susan Pilkington), or the string sections (scored by American Sound in-house arranger Glen Spreen and/or bassist Mike Leech and played by dozens of orchestra musicians). The songwriters for each song are also left off, although they are included in the labels of the vinyl record itself. But one last big thing was omitted: any mention of American Sound Studio. Part of this is just the industry standards of the day. It was not yet a regular practice to list all of the credits on the album, although that was quickly changing. Motown Records had some of the finest studio musicians in the business, but no full-length album listed any of them until Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On in 1971. Even still, Chips prided himself in having the Memphis Boys listed on whatever finished product they created and Elvis’s camp’s refusal to do so was a bone of contention. If you wanted a contemporary photograph of Elvis, you had to get the limited edition of the album, which carried the bright red badge on its cover: “SPECIAL BONUS! FULL COLOR PHOTO OF ELVIS INSIDE THIS ALBUM.” These covers contained a newer photograph of Elvis, from the chest up, in a red shirt, unbuttoned toward the top to reveal a scarf like the kind he wore in “The ’68 Comeback Special.” His face looks slightly sullen, yet engaged. There is no big-toothed 145

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smile like on the back cover. Here, he’s just looking at you, his face thinner and showing the subtle lines of age. It was signed in the lower left-hand corner like a postcard, “Sincerely, Elvis Presley.” It is oddly appropriate that the From Elvis in Memphis back cover photograph is from Viva Las Vegas. When Elvis finished his recording sessions at American Sound, he was hungry to perform live again. Elvis said multiple times he wanted to tour the country and world, but the Colonel kept him on a short leash (probably because the Colonel, secretly a Dutch expat with no passport, feared leaving the United States in case he could not reenter). So where could Elvis go to start the next chapter of his career? He took a note from the likes of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and set up shop in Las Vegas. A typical quote from Elvis can be found in his first Rolling Stone cover story for the July 12, 1969, issue. “I don’t plan too far ahead, but I’m real busy for a while now,” he tells journalist William Otterburn-Hall. “I’ve got a date in Vegas, and maybe another film after that. Then I’m going to try to get to Europe, because I’ve always promised I would and I’ve got some good, faithful fans over there.” It is one of the few quotes Otterburn-Hall can get out of the tightly guarded star before Elvis is whisked away (the subtitle of the piece is “Elvis Talks But He Doesn’t Say Much”).2 As rock and roll’s first white icon, Elvis Presley didn’t really have a role model for aging gracefully in the music. African Otterburn-Hall, 1.

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American pioneers like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino all kept recording new music into the 1970s, although none of them had a major hit since the British Invasion. White pioneers like Jerry Lee Lewis and the Everly Brothers increasingly turned to country music. All of these artists toured, often to smaller crowds that matched their dwindling record sales, in a style that later would be codified with package shows of less-famous acts in the “oldies” circuit. Elvis’s massive fame set him apart from his peers. The Colonel was never going to let him tour a never-ending series of one-night stands, or abandon his mainstream pop styling for the smaller market of country music. Yet times were changing. Just as Elvis helped epitomize the young rocker— loud, dangerous, and sexy as hell—he was now in danger of becoming the archetypal aging rocker stretching their career far too long. And in time, he would do just that. When most people hear the words “Vegas Elvis,” they think of an overweight guy past his prime in an ill-fitting white jumpsuit descended into self-caricature. This stereotype obscures the truth. When Elvis first set up residence in Las Vegas, he was as fit as he had been in “The ’68 Comeback Special,” and the jumpsuit was still a year away (and the ill-fitting jumpsuit was even further away than that). He was actively engaged and hungry to reconnect with his live audience. The Colonel booked Elvis at the brand-new International Hotel in Las Vegas, but there was one problem—he needed a band. Elvis is said to have spoken to every musician he knew, from his original sidemen Scotty Moore and D. J. Fontana, to countless others. Some sources say that Elvis asked the Memphis Boys to accompany him to Las Vegas—if 147

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not all of them, then definitely the rhythm section—but they were happier doing their own thing in Memphis. In a 2001 interview with Chips, music historian Allen Smith asked whether the Memphis Boys were supposed to back Elvis in Las Vegas: “People talked about it, but it never came about because we couldn’t afford the cut in pay! None of us could go for what they paid.”3 Furthermore, Elvis’s recordings there only heightened the studio’s visibility, plus politics between Elvis’s camp and Chips’s camp would soon make any such project unfeasible. *** Elvis completed his work on his American Sound Studio in February of 1969, which resulted in the “In the Ghetto” single in April and From Elvis in Memphis two months after that. Toward the end of August, he played his first engagement in Las Vegas at the International Hotel. In midOctober, an album was released that split the difference between Elvis’s two biggest activities of the year: recording at American Sound and performing in Las Vegas. RCA issued a two-record set with a title so cumbersome it made From Elvis in Memphis sound like poetry: From Memphis to Vegas / From Vegas to Memphis. The former record was his first of many live concert discs, while the latter record was leftovers from the American Sound sessions. In a landscape recently transformed by Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and the Beatles’ “White Album,” it was Elvis’s first double-album. Smith, 1.

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Unfortunately, the double-album was not the artistic statement that the RCA powers-that-be may have liked. The live disc is the sound of a singer getting his footing in a new environment, making his way through filler (a limp take on “Johnny B. Goode” here, a Bee Gees cover there), all of which is weighed down by awkward stage banter that hasn’t aged well. The studio disc was better, but aside from a few standouts— namely “Stranger in My Own Hometown,” “You’ll Think of Me,” and “Without Love (There Is Nothing),” each of which is just as effective as the cuts on From Elvis in Memphis—they mostly sounded like the leftovers that they were. Chips, for one, was always adamant about there just being one great album coming from the sessions, as opposed to what happened: one great album and one that was less-than-great. Granted, From Elvis in Memphis was a tough album to top, even with songs from the same sessions. While he had peaks and inspired moments over the next eight years, From Elvis in Memphis would be his last great album. From Memphis to Vegas / From Vegas to Memphis never stood a chance. A little over a year later, RCA reissued the double-album as two: Elvis in Person at the International Hotel and Back in Memphis, and they have remained separate ever since. But by the time that those albums were released, Elvis was already well into his next phase as a jumpsuit-wearing Las Vegas entertainer. And when he wasn’t doing his old hits like “That’s All Right” and “Hound Dog,” or new ones like “The Wonder of You” and “Polk Salad Annie,” he was doing the songs on which he rebuilt his legend at American Sound: “In the Ghetto,” “Don’t Cry Daddy,” “Kentucky Rain,” and, most of all, “Suspicious Minds.” 149

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Epilogue From Elvis in Paradise I’d like to tell you something if I could. It’s always been said that a person cannot return to their hometowns, but you have disproven that theory completely. You really made it worthwhile. —Elvis, March 20, 1974.1 RCA Records generated a lot of buzz in the weeks leading up to the release of From Elvis in Memphis in mid-June 1969. On May 31, it was the top pick in the CashBox Album Reviews (“Everybody knows that Elvis returned to Memphis for recording, and now everybody can hear the results for themselves”)2 and it was an Album Pick of the Week in Record World (“Elvis Presley Went to Memphis and cut this funky new package here”).3 On June 7, Billboard declared, “Elvis returns to Memphis, where he began his sensational

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career, and the return is really an event. He’s never sounded better, and the choice of material is perfect.”4 That same day, the Associated Press ran a feature in scores of smaller newspapers: “Elvis Presley has a new album out and it’s quality country, ‘From Elvis in Memphis’ . . . . The best songs on the album—which is all very listenable—are the ones most country. ‘I’ll Hold You in My Arms’ is so remarkable we listened to it several times. There’s real depth to Presley’s voice, and feeling.”5 Four days later, Variety said that “Elvis Presley dishes out a tightly socked disk with adept Memphis backup and ‘down home’ flavor,” and singled out praise for “Long Black Limousine.”6 Not all reviews were glowing. “‘From Elvis in Memphis’ owes little inspiration to Sun Records or to Stax,” wrote Pete Johnson in the Los Angeles Times. “The rhythm section used on the album rarely gets off the ground, horns are scarce and generally insipid, the musical arrangements are Hollywoodish and the few simply-structured performances seem to spring more from laziness than deliberation on the part of the producer and arranger.” What saves the album for Johnson is Elvis’s voice, as he writes, “the move to Memphis seems to have freed him of the crooner image which has dulled many of his records.”7

Billboard, 51. Campbell, 49. 6 “Baez,” 72. 7 Johnson, Q35. 4 5

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The freedom in the music was also heard by Peter Guralnick, who wrote a lengthy and loving lead review for the Rolling Stone issued on August 23. Elvis’s future biographer pulls no punches: “The new album is great. I think it is flatly and unequivocally the equal of anything he has ever done. If it were made up only of its weakest elements it would still be a good record and one that would fulfill in many ways all the expectations we might have of Elvis.”8 He continues, later in the piece: “What is new, and what is obvious from the first notes of the record, is the evident passion which Elvis has invested in this music and at the same time the risk he has taken in doing so.”9 Guralnick’s review came over two months after the album’s release. RCA Records did not have official album release dates, but instead kept track of the date on which albums were shipped. Therefore, the release date of From Elvis in Memphis is generally given as June 17, 1969, only this is somewhat dubious since the album’s first appearance on a national US chart was ten days earlier (#84 in Record World). Within a fortnight, From Elvis in Memphis appeared in both Billboard and CashBox, and kept rising, peaking in all three magazines in overlapping two-week plateaus throughout the month of July. On July 5 and July 12, it peaked at #9 in CashBox; on July 12 and July 19, it peaked at #8 in Record World; and on July 19 and July 26, it peaked at #13 in Billboard. From Elvis in Memphis initially sold the same amount as “The ’68 Comeback Special” soundtrack, but the latter felt Guralnick, 34. Guralnick, 35.

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bigger because it came with the cultural moment of the huge hit television special. From Elvis in Memphis sold strongly enough to stay on the charts through the end of January 1970, receiving a Gold Record by the RIAA on January 28 for reaching over one million dollars in sales.10 To date, it has yet to reach the platinum mark of one million copies sold. If Elvis expected a Billboard #1 platinum hit, he had to wait until his next single. “Suspicious Minds” has one of the great openings in rock and roll. Reggie Young hits the opening guitar riff like water trickling through a stream, rolling back and forth with a precision that belies the naturalness of its flow; Bobby Emmons’s organ holds the organ chords like clouds streaking the sky above; Mike Leech digs into the earth with his pulsating bass; Gene Chrisman keeps the rhythm with the tip-tap of raindrops on the roof of his high-hat cymbals; only pianist Bobby Long waits in the wings, as he will add his own piano-chord layering once Elvis comes in. The music remains suspended in the air for nearly five perfect seconds, and then Elvis brings it all tumbling back down to earth. “We’re caught in a trap,” he begins. “I can’t walk out.” Elvis worries over these simple statements like they are undeniable facts that shape not only the song but also the world it conjures. The verses are tense and shaking, the oscillating guitar riff playing off the march-time drum, echoing the Worth and Tamerius, 536.

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song’s mismatched lovers. Then the drums shift things into a higher gear for the refrain, and the song transcends itself. Elvis sings his words with beautiful, desperate conviction— “We can’t go on together, with suspicious minds”—that pull everything into sharp focus. It is a lush, passionate sound that is so closely associated with Elvis, it is surreal to realize it was originally written and sung by somebody else at American Sound. “Suspicious Minds” was written by Mark James, a young staff writer at American Sound from Houston, Texas. James cut his own version of “Suspicious Minds” with the Memphis Boys the previous year—which is probably why the group was able to lock it down so efficiently for Elvis—but it was not a hit. James’s original version featured the singer harmonizing with himself in a voice that was smooth but tentative. He made the whole thing sound almost sentimental, but Elvis’s version changed all that. When Elvis took his first crack at it, everything was still wide open. And yet, so many of the musical elements were already in place that you might deceive yourself into thinking it’s the final version, until you hear Elvis get to a line in the second verse. In the song, an old friend stops by to say hello, and he asks his lover: “Would I still see suspicion in your eyes?” Or at least he tries to. In the first take, Elvis messes up the timing and says, “Would I still see, see, see, fuck you rider . . .” Elvis is alluding to the classic blues song “See See Rider,” popularized by “Ma” Rainey in 1924; it too was about suspecting a lover’s unfaithfulness. (Rainey’s song stuck— within a few years, Elvis would use it as the opener for all of his live concerts.) 155

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The next two takes were false starts. But then on the fourth take, he gets up to “Would I still see su—God damnit!” The fifth take: “Would I still see—God damnit, man!” The song had gone from being about getting caught in a trap to actually becoming a trap itself. What was it about the line asking if the singer could see still suspicion in his lover’s eyes that kept throwing Elvis off? Did it evoke filming Viva Las Vegas with Ann-Margret in 1963 and then coming home to Priscilla’s barrage of questions about their heavily rumored affair? Or another one of his many infidelities that began like a dare but ended in a broken promise? Maybe it was the way his mother Gladys first looked at the Colonel with distrust, while Elvis and Vernon were ready to go all in? Or perhaps he was a 34-year-old singer of a music he was on the cusp of outgrowing, wanting to prove to his fans he still had it, that he was still for real. Elvis and the Memphis Boys pull back into a little rehearsal, running through the timing. For the first time, Elvis nails the troublesome suspicion line. “Yeh,” Chips says emphatically when he does; Elvis comments that he needed some moral support. On the next take—the sixth—Elvis gets it, and his confidence grows. For the first time, they make it to the tricky bridge that slows down into a gospel feel before driving back into another verse. After an even finer seventh take, Elvis thinks he is done. “Got one more in ya?” Chips asks. “Yeah,” Elvis replies. He psyches himself up by blowing his lips, saying “motherfucker” faster than seems humanly possible, and grunting through some karate poses. And then they are off into the masterful eighth and final take. Elvis then added his anguished harmony vocals, and the 156

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final layers of the song were recorded: the backing singers provided their parts the following day, strings were added in May, and finally the horns were overdubbed less than twenty days before the single’s release. Part of the magic of “Suspicious Minds” is the cohesion of the record. Although the basic track was just Elvis and the Memphis Boys, the female backing singers providing support like a gospel chorus, the strings that strengthen the pathos, and the horns that counterpoint the bittersweet melody, all combining to a resounding whole. Compared to virtually any other song Elvis recorded up to that point, “Suspicious Minds” played like a small saga, far closer to a Phil Spector production like the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” or Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep—Mountain High” than, say, one of his earlier hits like “Return to Sender.” “I can’t tell you why he’s so great, but he is,” Spector gushed about Elvis in Rolling Stone a few months after “Suspicious Minds” was released. “He’s sensational. He can do anything with his voice. . . . He and Dylan I would like to record. Elvis can make some masterful records and do anything.”11 With all of the stylistic shadings that Elvis brings to “Suspicious Minds”—the driving rock of the verse, the soaring pop of the refrain, the confessional soul of the bridge—one wonders if Spector was thinking of Elvis’s newest hit when he spoke these words. And in fact, on the exact day Spector’s words were published in Rolling Stone—November 1, 1969—“Suspicious Minds” gave Elvis his first #1 Billboard pop hit since “Good Wenner, 1.

11

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Luck Charm” in 1962. It was also his last #1 Billboard pop hit in his lifetime. RCA Records shipped “Suspicious Minds” on August 26, 1969. On that exact same day, Elvis performed “Suspicious Minds” onstage during his dinner show at the International Hotel in Las Vegas. For these shows, Elvis ended assembling a new band, the nucleus of which—James Burton on lead guitar, Jerry Scheff on bass, Ronnie Tutt on drums, and Charlie Hodge on rhythm guitar and backing vocals—he kept for the rest of his life. By this point, they were nearing the end of Elvis’s one-month engagement and had tightened Elvis’s recent music into something harder, funkier, and faster than before. Burton’s guitar turns the central riff of “Suspicious Minds” into a Byrds song on amphetamines, and the band tumbles in, giving it a huge sound, powered by Tutt’s relentless drumming, Scheff ’s restless bass, the chorus of backing singers, and the strings and brass playing with the subtlety of an avalanche. Elvis scales the song like a mountain, climbing as it grows bigger and bigger, until he has conquered it. But the main part of the song—the tense verses, the triumphant refrain, the pilgrimage of the bridge—is an obligatory, if stunning, exercise as a means to get to the coda. Once there, Elvis and his band stretch out the song for close to five additional minutes. Using only a scant few lines—“We’re caught in a trap, I can’t get out”—Elvis creates an epic, building the song up until it is enormous enough to engulf you, only to shrink it back down

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into something that fits in your pocket. Elvis nimbly goes back and forth between the two with ease, daring the song to roar like a lion, only to tame it back into its cage like a kitten. Finally, Elvis fades it away for good, impressed at his own trick. Like many of his finest performances, you can hear him laughing at the end. Elvis had been stretching out the song to great effect since his residency began. His label decided that the single version of the song should reflect this, so they hired an engineer to overdub the International Hotel’s horn section and extended the recording so that it begins to fade away, only to barrel back unexpectedly, before fading away for good. It was their way of turning the song into something bigger (and over a minute longer) than a typical Elvis single; now it was a sort of mini-“statement” that found Elvis embracing the experimental spirit of the era. Elvis and the RCA brass may have thought the single charts justified it, but not everyone approved of this change. Glen Spreen, who wrote most of the arrangements for Elvis’s songs at American Sound Studio, including the original one for “Suspicious Minds,” was not impressed. “I mean, we laughed at it—let’s put it that way—when we heard the fade,” Spreen recalled to Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick. “You know, to do that kind of thing live, because the audience is there and they’re participating, they’re with him, that’s one thing, [but a record’s something else]. Gene Chrisman was probably the most vocal about the whole thing—he used very blunt words in describing what he felt. Bobby Emmons just had this blank, amazed look on his face, and we all just

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kind of went, ‘God, how can they do this?’ as it kept going and going and going. But we couldn’t do anything about it.”12 Guralnick further explains that for Chips, “it only confirmed all of his worst suspicions about the bunch he had been working with—the same people who had tried to take his publishing, had eliminated his credit, and now were trying to steal his sound. They were no better than amateurs in his view, turning an intricately worked-out production into a kind of audio joke, and the success of the record may only have been the last straw in the way of any kind of business relationship, though he continued to maintain good personal relations with Elvis for the rest of the year.”13 Chips could still see the suspicion in Elvis’s eyes. *** Elvis never set foot in American Sound Studio again. It is unclear whether this came down to a need for control on the part of Elvis, Chips, or the Colonel, but in truth, it was likely a perfect storm of mutual wariness between all three strong personalities. The studio closed in 1972 when Chips moved operations down to Georgia, and the building was torn down in 1989. A Family Dollar store now sits in the lot; all that remains of the American Sound Studio site is a historical marker put up in 2014. One side commemorated “AMERICAN STUDIOS” as “a cornerstone of the explosive Memphis music industry in the 1960s,” listing the artists who Guralnick, 358. Guralnick, 358.

12 13

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recorded there (Elvis is first), noting that “During its heyday, American produced 15 top 10 hits on the Billboard ‘Hot 100’ chart. Overall, more than 120 American recordings reached not only the pop charts but also those for the rhythm & blues, country, and even jazz.” The flipside of the marker commemorates “ELVIS PRESLEY AT AMERICAN STUDIOS,” giving a brief history of his sessions there: To revive his recording career, Elvis Presley came to American Studios in 1969. Spending much of the 1960s making movies, Elvis saw his status as a pop singer had faded. Seeking a comeback, he worked with Chips Moman and The 827 Thomas Street Band. Together they combined Elvis’ unique talent with American’s trademark blend of country, pop, and rhythm & blues. The collaboration worked. The sessions turned out such hits as “Suspicious Minds,” “In The Ghetto,” “Don’t Cry Daddy,” and “Kentucky Rain.” With music critics hailing these recordings as some of his best, Elvis quickly returned to the top of the charts. These seven sentences barely scratch the surface of the rich legacy of Elvis’s work with Chips at American Sound. Instead, they read like a tombstone for tourists. To truly appreciate the music, it must be listened to, and all the words in the world cannot begin to plumb the depths of a song like “Only the Strong Survive,” “Long Black Limousine,” “In the Ghetto,” or “Suspicious Minds.” Elvis’s commitment to these songs makes them timeless. And it is this commitment that—except for his gospel records—had been largely missing from his music for years. 161

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After nearly a decade in the Hollywood wilderness, he slid toward irrelevance, which echoed the anonymity of poverty he initially worked so hard to transcend. “The ’68 Comeback Special” threw down the gauntlet that reestablished him as a famous star, but From Elvis in Memphis marked the point at which Elvis proved he was still relevant. He didn’t need to chase the trends of psychedelic or progressive rock; he simply dug into his own sound with a newfound engagement with the material, thanks to the Memphis Boys, who met him halfway. It was no coincidence that From Elvis in Memphis was also the first time he recorded in his own backyard of Memphis since his days at Sun Records—after all, this was the city that first transformed him from an awkward, nobody kid into a rock and roll icon. Now, a decade and a half later, an older, wiser Elvis again found rare inspiration in a storefront Memphis recording studio. Elvis’s Sun recordings and From Elvis in Memphis are the twin peaks that define the scope of his career. Where Sun Records marked a beginning, as Elvis forged sounds together in a new way that would literally change the course of popular music, American Sound marks an ending. Elvis’s Sun singles were the sound of untamed youth, an experiment in sound and fury. From Elvis in Memphis picks up the story from the other side. The wildness has been tamed, the sound has been established, and the youth has matured. The result is a genuine artistic statement—the finest Elvis would ever make. For the remainder of Elvis’s career, his best music reached for the majesty of his American Sound recordings, but only rarely matched them, in songs like “The Wonder of You,” “Burning Love,” and “Always on My Mind.” The rest of the time, Elvis was largely sleepwalking through 162

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his 1970s recording sessions like he sleepwalked through his 1960s films. As an album of inspiration, talent, and vision, Elvis would never top From Elvis in Memphis. When Elvis first stepped into American Sound in early 1969, he was both a prodigal son coming home and a stranger in his own hometown. By the time he left a little over a month later, his status as a rock and roll legend—and artist— was assured. Elvis no longer had to worry about longing to become someone. He found himself by coming back home.

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Dalton, D. (1970), “Little Richard: Child of God,” Rolling Stone, May 28, 1970. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.rol​​lings​​tone.​​com​/ m​​usic/​​music​​-feat​​ures/​​littl​​e​-ric​​hard-​​child​​-o​f​-g​​od​-2-​​17702​​7/ (accessed January 25, 2020). Dawson, J., and Propes, S. (1992), What Was the First Rock ‘n’ Roll Record?, Boston: Faber and Faber. Diamond, D. (1958), “Dig Interviews Elvis Presley,” Dig, May 1958. Elvis Presley: The Searcher (2018), directed by Thom Zimny, Culver City: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, DVD. Emerson, K. (2005), There’s Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era, New York: Viking Published by the Penguin Group. Frith, S., and Goodwin, A., ed. (1990), On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, New York: Pantheon Books. Geller, L., and Spector, J. (1989), If I Can Dream, New York: Simon & Schuster. Gill, J. (1995), Queer Noises: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Music, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gordon, R. (1995), It Came from Memphis, New York: Pocket Books. Guralnick, P. (1994), Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, New York: Little Brown and Company. Guralnick, P. (1999), Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, New York: Little, Brown and Company. Guralnick, P. (1999), Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians, New York: Back Bay Books. Hopkins, J. (2010), Elvis: The Biography, London: Plexus Publishing Limited. Hurt, E. (2008), Dallas Frazier, Perfect Sound Forever, August 2008. Available online: http:​/​/www​​.furi​​ous​.c​​om​/pe​​rfect​​/dall​​asfra​​​zier.​​ html (accessed May 5, 2019).

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Isenberg, N. (2016), White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, New York: Penguin Books. Jarman-Ivens, F., ed. (2007), Oh Boy!: Masculinities and Popular Music, New York: Routledge. Johnson, P. (1969), “Popular Records: Voice Saves ‘Elvis in Memphis’,” Los Angeles Times, June 1, 1969. Jones, R. (2010), Memphis Boys: The Story of American Studios, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Jorgensen, E. (1998), Elvis Presley: A Life in Music, New York: St. Martin’s Press. King, B. B., with Ritz, D. (1996), Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B.B. King, New York: Avon Books. Kingsley, J. (1965), “At Home with Elvis Presley,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, Mid-South Magazine, March 7, 1965. Kingsley, J. (1969), “Elvis Home—Cuts 16 Sides,” Billboard, February 1, 1969. Klein, G., with Crisafulli, C. (2010), Elvis: My Best Man, New York: Crown Publishers. Lomax, A. (1993), The Land Where the Blues Began, New York: The New Press. Osborne, J. (2000), Elvis: Word for Word, New York: Harmony Books. Otterburn-Hall, W. (1969), “Elvis Presley On Set: You Won’t Ask Elvis Anything Too Deep?,” Rolling Stone, July 12, 1969. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.rol​​lings​​tone.​​com​/m​​usic/​​music​​news​​/elvi​​s​-pre​​sley-​​on​-se​​t​-you​​-wont​​-ask-​​elvis​​-anyt​​​hing-​​too​d​​eep​-6​​9906/​ (accessed April 22, 2019). Palmer, R. (1982), Deep Blues, New York: Penguin Books. Paulson, D. (2014), “Story Behind the Song: ‘In the Ghetto’,” Tennessean, July 18, 2014. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​. ten​​nesse​​an​.co​​m​/sto​​ry​/en​​terta​​inmen​​t​/mus​​ic​/st​​ory​-b​​ehind​​the-​​song/​​2014/​​07​/18​​/stor​​y​-beh​​​ind​-s​​ong​-g​​hetto​​/1284​​3649/​ (accessed April 17, 2019).

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Plummer, K. (2013), “Historicist: Elvis in Toronto, 1957,” Torontoist, April 6, 2013. Available online: https​:/​/to​​ronto​​ist​. c​​om​/20​​13​/04​​/hist​​orici​​st​-el​​vis​-i​​n​​-tor​​onto-​​1957/​ (accessed February 22, 2020). Presley, P. (1985), Elvis and Me, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Ritz, D., ed. (2005), Elvis by the Presleys, New York: Crown Publishers. Robinson, L. (1957), “The Truth About That Elvis Presley Rumor: ‘The Pelvis’ Gives His Views on Vicious Anti-Negro Slur,” Jet, August 1, 1957. Sharp, K. (2017), “Marty Lacker on Elvis’ 1969 Memphis Recording,” Goldmine, February 12, 2017. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.gol​​dmine​​mag​.c​​om​/ar​​ticle​​s​/ma​r​​ty​-la​​cker (accessed February 3, 2019). Smith, Allen (2016), “My 2001 Chips Moman Interview,” SOULFUL MUSIC, November 13, 2016. Available online: http:​/​/sou​​lfulm​​usic.​​blogs​​pot​.c​​om​/20​​16​/11​​/my​-2​​001​-c​​hips-​​ moman​​​-inte​​rview​​.html​(accessed April 23, 2019). Snow, H., with Ownbey, J., and Burris, B., The Hank Snow Story, Chicago: The University of Illinois Press. Wenner, J. (1969), “Phil Spector: The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, November 1, 1969. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​. rol​​lings​​tone.​​com​/m​​usic/​​music​​-news​​/phil​​-spec​​tor​-t​​he​-ro​​lling​​ston​​e​​-int​​ervie​​w​-825​​09/ (accessed March 2, 2020). Wood, B., with Wood Lowry, B. (2012), Walking Among Giants, Nashville: Dunham Books. Worth, F., and Tamerius, S., (1988), Elvis: His Life from A to Z, Chicago: Contemporary Books, Inc.

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Also Available in the Series

1. Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes 2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans 3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis 4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller 5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice 6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh 7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli 8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry 9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Prince’s Sign “☮” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos 11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard

12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo 13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz 19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes 21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno 22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi 23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks 24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….. by Eliot Wilder

A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese 26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken 27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes 28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven 29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper 30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy 31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis 33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. Nirvana’s In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar 35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti 36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal 37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth 39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns 40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard

42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel 55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle

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57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris 58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay 64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. Madness’ One Step Beyond… by Terry Edwards 67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol 70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles

73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent 76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin 77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton 86. Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem 87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Elizabeth Sandifer 89. Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall

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90. Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J.H. Dettmar 92. Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 97. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild 99. Sigur Rós’s () by Ethan Hayden 100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley

106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra 109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts 115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic 116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas 117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi 118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia 119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney 120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli

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121. Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero 122. The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker 123. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs by Eric Eidelstein 124. Bob Mould’s Workbook by Walter Biggins and Daniel Couch 125. Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night by Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton 126. The Raincoats’ The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly 127. Björk’s Homogenic by Emily Mackay 128. Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Lee Rubin 129. Fugazi’s In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross 130. Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony 131. Lou Reed’s Transformer by Ezra Furman 132. Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Peepshow by Samantha Bennett 133. Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel 134. dc Talk’s Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson 135. Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry

136. Odetta’s One Grain of Sand by Matthew Frye Jacobson 137. Manic Street Preachers’ The Holy Bible by David Evans 138. The Shangri-Las’ Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las by Ada Wolin 139. Tom Petty’s Southern Accents by Michael Washburn 140. Massive Attack’s Blue Lines by Ian Bourland 141. Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach by Roshanak Kheshti 142. The Wild Tchoupitoulas’ The Wild Tchoupitoulas by Bryan Wagner 143. David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs by Glenn Hendler 144. D’Angelo’s Voodoo by Faith A. Pennick 145. Judy Garland’s Judy at Carnegie Hall by Manuel Betancourt 146. Elton John’s Blue Moves by Matthew Restall 147. Various Artists’ I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen by Ray Padgett 148. Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope by Ayanna Dozier 149. Suicide’s Suicide by Andi Coulter 150. Elvis Presley’s From Elvis in Memphis by Eric Wolfson 151. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads by Santi Elijah Holley

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