Elvis was hunched over, almost down on his knees. He seemed shaken—like he’d been touched by a little of what he had been searching for in his spiritual readings. He happened to look up, he saw me looking back at him, and a beautiful smile spread across his face. He knew I’d seen something special. Now, if Red or Charlie had been standing where I was standing, they would have gotten that smile. If Elvis had turned his head the other way, one of the session guys would have seen it. But it just so happened that I caught his eye and I saw the smile and got to share that moment. And that moment will stay with me forever. As a guy working for Elvis, receiving that kind of smile was even better than getting a motorcycle from him.
Elvis may have treated the studio as his sanctuary, but many involved in the Elvis-business did not treat it that way. One of the regulars at the studio card games was Freddy Bienstock, the representative of the Colonel-sanctioned Hill and Range Publishing Company—owned by Jean and Julian Aberbach—through which all of Elvis’s material was supposed to be supplied. The Colonel was especially proud of his dealings with Hill and Range, which had set up a pair of separate publishing firms for Elvis, Elvis Presley Music and Gladys Music. Since Elvis had signed his first RCA deal in 1955, the Colonel and Hill and Range had overseen a lucrative system in which Elvis got a piece of the publishing of every song he recorded. And at first that system worked fine—in the fifties and early sixties songwriters generally had a low profile in the music world and were willing to do anything to get a song recorded by a star, including giving up a huge share of songwriting royalties. But in the era of the Beatles and Dylan, the songwriter was the star, and top writers were no longer willing to give anything away.
Elvis had a great sense of what songs would work for him, and early in his career he had picked most of the songs he wanted to record. There was a special drawer down in the Graceland TV room where he kept some favorite records—songs he had some kind of emotional connection to, some dating back to his high school days. From those 45s and 78s Elvis would very carefully select a song or two he felt ready to take on, and he’d carry those precious bits of vinyl off to the recording session with him. If the studio was his sanctuary, that drawer was full of scripture, and everything he pulled from there was chosen, and performed, with love.
Elvis always had the freedom, and the power, to bring in a song to a session. If Elvis was excited about it, the businessmen would keep quiet and arrangements would be made. But increasingly, when Elvis was asked to pick material from a pile of Hill and Range–selected songs, he found himself listening to material he just couldn’t get excited about. Elvis trusted that the people around him would be trying to get top material for him, and sadly, he was just way too trusting in that regard.
It may have been frustration over material, or frustration with the lousy script for his next film (Double Trouble), but, for some reason, on June 10, 1966, when we were back in Nashville for more sessions at RCA Studio B, Elvis was in a foul mood. He didn’t want to go to the studio at all, so an unusual plan B was put into effect. Since one of the three songs scheduled to be worked on that night was a Red West composition, “If Every Day Was Like Christmas,” Elvis decided he would stay at our Nashville lodging, the Albert Pick Motel, and Red, Marty, and Charlie would go to the studio so that Red could sing reference vocals while the session musicians laid down the three backing tracks.
I was the guy Elvis chose to stay with him at the Albert Pick, though it could sometimes be considered hazardous duty to be sitting up with a moody Elvis. His room at the Albert Pick wasn’t anything special—just a small, typical motel bedroom. As usual, tinfoil was up on the windows to keep it dark, and Elvis had the air-conditioning turned up so high it felt like a meat locker. His mood was about as dark and cold as the surroundings. I did what I could to keep him distracted and comfortable, and between ordering some food and watching some TV, I tried to keep the conversation light and minimal.
Hours later, there was a knock at the motel door, and I let in Red, who was carrying a small tape machine. He asked if Elvis wanted to hear the results of the evening’s work there, and Elvis gave him a not very enthusiastic OK. Red played the tapes of the three tracks, with and without his scratch vocals: his Christmas song, “I’ll Remember You,” and “Indescribably Blue.” For the first time that night, I saw Elvis’s expression warm, and he let himself relax. He sat cross-legged on his bed, nodding along with the rhythm, mouthing the words and getting lost in the music. I think he must have appreciated how strange and daunting it had been for Red to try to step into his shoes, and now, listening to Red’s remarkably Elvis-like stand-in performance, I think he did get a sense of just how much his friends were willing to put themselves on the line for him.
“That’s it, man, that’s it,” Elvis said when the tape ended. I’m pretty sure that was all Red needed to hear to make his night. But Elvis wasn’t quite through with that tape. Something about “Indescribably Blue” had fanned a creative spark, and he wasn’t going to let the moment pass. He wanted to make some music. Red quickly hooked up the machine’s dinky little microphone and flipped a few switches so that Elvis could hear one channel while recording into the other. Elvis plumped up the pillows behind him on the bed, got himself settled against the backboard, pulled the little tape machine close, and set the mike out in front of him. Then he started playing the backing track. And he started singing.
Now, “Indescribably Blue” is no throwaway tune. It’s an intense, emotional, vocally demanding ballad. And, sitting there in his pajamas at the Albert Pick Motel, with a battery-powered tape player in front of him, Elvis nailed it. But this vocal performance was almost the polar opposite of what I’d heard him do in the studio. This time, the music came out of him so easily, as naturally as breath. I sat there on the foot of the bed as Elvis moved from the song’s almost whispered, confessional opening to its heartbroken crescendo, and then back down to its trembling finale. With his eyes shut, singing out to that little plastic mike with calm and tenderness, he casually, quietly packed everything he loved about singing into the two and a half minutes of “Indescribably Blue.” I think, for him, the Albert Pick Motel just disappeared. He didn’t know where he was, and he didn’t care. He let himself get lost in that song.
And when he was through, you could see the change: The black mood had lifted. The AC was still cranking, but the big chill had passed. That little moment of music in a motel room had done something big for him—it satisfied his soul.
Life with Elvis changed quite a bit for me in 1966. Most significantly, I moved out of the Graceland basement. Sandy did come to Memphis at the end of the Christmas season in ’65, and rather than subject her to the bare bulbs, dangling insulation, and seeping puddle of my room, Elvis arranged for us to have a place in the apartment building directly across the street from the estate (behind where the Graceland shops and ticket counters are today). Charlie Hodge, still single, inherited the spot in the basement. I knew I was in love, and I wanted to do right by Sandy, who was leaving a lot behind to come step into our crazy world. But I have to say it was hard to give up that ugly little room in Graceland. It was hard to have to leave at the end of the night and head back out through those gates I’d wanted so much to come through.
It felt both wonderful and surreal to be living with my Polynesian love in our own apartment. We’d fallen in love and gone through a dramatic courtship, and it was strange now in Memphis to finally settle down and really get to know each other. We’d never even spent the night together in Hawaii or Los Angeles, and now we found ourselves building a life together. Sandy was as beautiful out of her home environment as she had been in it, but where she had once been safely looked after by her family, now she was vulnerable, and it hit me just how much she was depending on me and how responsible I was for her. For her part, Sandy never complained at all about what must have been a rough transition, and day after day I was even more taken with her calm, her grace, and her loveliness.
My relations
hip with Sandy may have pulled me out of Elvis’s house, but as a couple we had the opportunity to connect with Elvis and Priscilla on a different level. For one thing, they could see the sweetness, beauty, and honesty in Sandy as clearly as I could, and they welcomed her into their life as a new member of the family (when Grandma had first heard I was in love with a Hawaiian girl, she looked very concerned and said, “Oh, son, why don’t you settle down with an American girl?”—but when Sandy finally came over, Grandma warmed up to her and eventually thought of her as family, too). Priscilla and Sandy were from very different backgrounds, but their jumps from stable family homes to the craziness of the Elvis world gave them a lot in common. Priscilla and Sandy gradually became good friends, and Elvis and I spent a lot of time together with the ladies, going for walks, going for drives, spending time in the Meditation Garden, and enjoying each other’s company. There was enough of a bond between the four of us that Elvis felt comfortable taking us along when he made his trips to his mother’s grave.
Life was good, but with all that was going on around Elvis, it sometimes seemed that every silver lining had a way of finding a cloud. I remember one warm evening the four of us decided to take a drive down to the Mississippi River in Elvis’s newest Cadillac Eldorado convertible. We were driving along, watching the sunset over the water, when Elvis’s new single came on over the radio (I can’t quite remember which single it was). I was thinking that the moment was perfect: a Caddy, two beautiful women, and Elvis both at the wheel and on the radio. But suddenly the car was turned 180 degrees around and we were heading back to Graceland at about a hundred miles an hour. When we got there, Elvis jumped out of the car looking like he was ready to kill somebody. He headed upstairs and I don’t think we saw him for a couple of days.
When I did see him again, it was in the back room of the house, where I was hanging out with a couple of the other guys. Now Elvis was looking more concerned than angry.
“Look, I know you guys think I’m crazy. But Jerry, go down to the record store down the street and buy that single.”
I went down to the record store closest to Graceland and got the record. When I brought it back to Elvis, he took it downstairs to the TV room along with an acetate of the same song. Elvis wanted to be involved in every step of the recording process, and the last step was always for him to listen to an acetate—a kind of test pressing—of the takes and mixes he was approving, and then he’d sit through the mastering of those recordings with the engineer. He assumed, as anybody would, that what he heard and approved was what a listener would eventually hear when they bought the record.
Down in the TV room, he put his acetate on and played the song. Then he put the actual single on, and even a nonmusician like me could hear the difference—there was a marked drop in punch and volume. His voice was forward in the mix and the band and background vocals had just about disappeared. To put it bluntly, the song had lost its balls.
Elvis just stood there shaking his head, and I don’t think any of us knew what to say except that we heard the difference. I remember the word that came to mind for me—a word out of my Catholic school days: sacrilegious. Here’s one of the greatest talents of his time, and rather than just let him do what he did so well, the business people around him kept finding new ways to mess with his music. Sadly enough, I think one of the reasons my memory’s foggy about this single is that the same scene happened more than once.
When we were all back in Memphis, there were still football games and nights at the Fairgrounds or the Memphian. There was also a new leisure activity that was undertaken with typical Elvis-style intensity: slot-car racing. Priscilla had given Elvis a beautiful track for Christmas, and he got excited enough about it that within a couple of weeks he’d gone out and bought a huge, professional, arcade-size track. He set it up in an extension to Graceland he’d built off the music room. For a while, racing those little cars was just lighthearted fun, but pretty quickly, all of us guys had our own personalized slot car, and those races were intensely competitive and treated as very serious business. Serious enough that during one heated set of qualifying laps, Marty Lacker and Red West came close to throwing punches over who’d nosed out who at the finish line, an argument that sparked probably the biggest fit of temper I ever saw Elvis unleash.
He had his frustrations over the movies, and he got understandably upset when his music was tampered with, but the one thing he absolutely wouldn’t stand for was disharmony in the group. When the guys went after each other in a mean or petty way, it drove Elvis crazy, and when he got crazy, he was not the type of guy to talk through his feelings. So, as words were exchanged between Marty and Red over that slot-car track, there was suddenly another sound—the sound of Elvis erupting.
He lifted up his hefty, metal control box and smashed it down hard on the track, shattering lengths of it into pieces.
“Goddamn it—if you guys want to argue about something, argue about who’s going to clean this shit up,” he yelled. He smashed a bit more, then headed out of the room.
No, it wasn’t a pretty picture. But I will say this—Red and Marty didn’t exchange one more word about who had the faster slot car. Elvis had multimillion-dollar contracts to live up to, and he couldn’t see any way to step back and figure out where it was all heading. Now his friends couldn’t even race slot cars without bickering and sniping at each other. Why not smash something up? It wasn’t long after that the the slot-car track disappeared entirely and the extension became Elvis’s “Trophy Room,” home to his gold records, plaques and awards, and fans’ scrapbooks from all over the world.
Out in L.A. there had been some changes in the housing situation. By early 1966, Elvis had moved out of the Perugia house and into a new one on Rocca Place in Bel Air, and compared to the bachelor-pad feel of the former, the new home felt much more domesticated. In addition to Elvis and Priscilla, the Rocca inhabitants included Sandy and me, Marty Lacker, and Patsy Presley and her husband, Gee Gee Gambill (dubbed “Muffin” by Elvis for his easygoing nature). Elvis would star in three more films that year, first making Spinout and Double Trouble at MGM, and Easy Come, Easy Go back at Paramount.
Once during a lunch break on a location shoot day for Spinout, Elvis had Alan Fortas bring some of our motorcycles to the set, and we’d go for rides through Topanga Canyon, often with Spinout costar Deborah Walley sitting on the back of Elvis’s Harley. I had a chance to get to know another costar—Shelley Fabares—a little better during some of the filming. In a scene in which Shelley’s car goes off the road and into a little lake and Elvis wades in to help her, I was working as Elvis’s stand-in. We were working late in the day, and we needed to do many takes of the characters in the water, so I had a wet suit on under my wardrobe. Shelley had on only wet wardrobe however, and I knew just how cold she had to be in that water. Alan Fortas came up with a solution—he thought a few sips of brandy might help keep Shelley warm, so he passed a small bottle to assistant director Claude Binyon, who rode a small boat out between takes and delivered it to the actress. Shelley wasn’t a drinker and she may have had more than a few sips. Fighting her way through the cold and the brandy, she bravely finished the scene. We could see why she was one of Elvis’s very favorite costars.
Elvis himself was quite protective of his Double Trouble leading lady, a British girl named Annette Day. Annette didn’t have any acting experience—not even in a high school play—but the producers thought she had the perfect look to play against Elvis in a story about European intrigue. Elvis wanted Annette to feel comfortable throughout the production and tried to help her out any way he could. So when he heard that she didn’t have a car of her own, he gave her one. This was typical Elvis generosity, but the trouble this time was that the car he gave her was mine—a ’64 Mustang that I had purchased for Sandy and myself. One day on the set, Elvis simply said, “Jerry, you got the paperwork on that?” and the deal was done—Annette Day was a Mustang owner. Of course, Sandy and I didn’t get stuck taking the bu
s around town—Elvis bought us a convertible Cadillac as a sign of appreciation for our unintentional generosity.
And Sandy and I weren’t the only drivers Elvis put in a Cadillac—he bought several of them, all convertibles, for me, Red West, Sonny West, Joe Esposito, Richard Davis, Alan Fortas, Larry Geller, and Marty Lacker. The cars were offered to us in a great spirit of friendly giving, and Elvis explained his generosity by telling us, “Hell, we were all poor kids from Memphis—we deserve it.” And just as we had ridden our matching motorcycles together as the “Bel Air Bonnevilles,” we celebrated our Cadillac ownership one afternoon by putting all the tops down and caravanning along Sunset Boulevard and out onto the San Diego Freeway.
George Klein was out in L.A. to take a bit part in Double Trouble, and he had connections with the sensational soul singer Jackie Wilson. When Wilson did a run of nights at a Sunset Strip club called the Trip, Elvis and the rest of us went out to catch a show. Elvis and Jackie hit it off well enough that night that Elvis invited Jackie to come to the MGM lot to watch a day’s shoot. If you look carefully at a couple of the music sequences in Double Trouble you may notice that Elvis doesn’t really move in patented Elvis fashion. There’s something different about the way he snaps his fingers and twists his torso. In fact, he’s doing his best Jackie Wilson impression, because Jackie Wilson is standing about ten feet away. All those smiles Elvis is directing off-screen are directed right at Jackie, and the two of them cracked up together after every take (Elvis also memorably borrowed some Jackie moves when he performed “Return to Sender” in 1962’s Girls! Girls! Girls!).
Me and a Guy Named Elvis Page 19