Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  Free at Last

  As Steve, Billy, and Bill gained control, everyone was amazed at how cooperative Elvis was. They had expected him to use his “star power” and manifest a lot of “artistic temperament.” Instead, as they began to rehearse various segments of the show, he became increasingly enthusiastic, accepting direction readily and involving himself creatively in developing details.

  What came to be called the “informal” segment in the Comeback Special was inspired by Elvis’s long-standing love of casual sessions offstage with his friends when they would sit around, talk, play the piano, pick guitars, and sing whatever came to mind. It was the kind of male gathering, although without music, that Elvis must have seen in barber shops, gas stations, and cafes in East Tupelo and Tupelo when he was a boy—all men, hanging out, joking, bantering, showing their wit to one another in amiable, low-key exchanges. Billy Goldenberg witnessed Elvis enjoying such sessions with the guys as they began to work on the show. He was intrigued. He said that Elvis could sing ninety-five choruses of “Jingle Bells” without tiring, switch to another song for a time, then go back and do ninety-five more choruses of “Jingle Bells.” All the time the guys would whoop and holler encouragement. As Elvis played and sang the same words over and over, the intensity would grow to a climax and end in some sort of jubilation. Steve Binder also saw how Elvis came alive in these sessions, and he used that insight to create what became for many the most appealing part of the show.

  This “informal” segment (shot in four performances on June 27 and 29) had Elvis and some of “the guys” exposed on all sides on a high fifteen-foot-square glistening white stage trimmed in bright red. It was like a small boxing ring without ropes or posts. Elvis was zippered into the skintight black leather outfit that Bill Belew had made for him. It was, his biographer Albert Goldman wrote, “a fabulous black leather motorcycle jacket with a stand-up collar, heavy welts along the seams and a broad, double-buckled strap around each wrist.” The effect was not cheapened by metal studs or ornaments. Elvis’s guys were seated casually and closely around him on the tiny stage. Charlie Hodge, who dearly loved the extravagance of all this, was there with his electric guitar, very excited, and exceedingly alert to every move that Elvis made. Alan Fortas, who projected a sort of teddy bear affability and had virtually no musical ability, was given a guitar case to lean on. Lance LeGault, Elvis’s choreographer and sometimes stunt double, who was not one of the guys but was deeply loyal and had worked on a number of his movies, had a tambourine.

  Appropriate to the storyline, Steve Binder wanted to put Elvis’s very first backup group, the Blue Moon Boys, on the stage with him. Two of them were there, Scotty Moore with his guitar, and D. J. Fontana with his drumsticks and a top-down guitar case in his lap serving as an impromptu drum. Bill Black, who had played bass fiddle with the Blue Moon Boys, had died of a brain tumor in 1965. Even if he had been alive, he might have refused the invitation. Up until his death, he was very bitter over his dismissal in 1957—with only two weeks’ salary—by Elvis.

  Elvis had not shared the wealth with the musicians who had done so much to launch his career. He paid each a flat $200 a week when working and a pitifully small retainer of $100 when not. Scotty and Bill demanded a raise of $50 a week and the right to work elsewhere when Elvis laid them off. D. J. decided not to ask for more, saying he had not expected more. To press their case, Scotty and Bill handed in their resignations and complained of their treatment to the local papers. Immediately, an angry Elvis responded in the press. He declared that he accepted their resignations with no sense of loss. “It may take a while,” he told a reporter, “but it’s not impossible to pick replacements.” Vernon promptly sent Scotty a curt “notice of separation” and a check “in the amount of $86.25, representing payment in full for all services rendered for us prior to September 21, 1957.” But in 1968 Bill was dead and Scotty was forgiving. The men on the platform were totally joyous.

  The scene onstage was supposed to appear spontaneous, but a script and cue cards had to be placed within Elvis’s line of vision. He was to seem to talk casually about his past, pointedly emphasizing his humble beginnings and depicting a pure young man entering a selfish and sinful world. The guys were to make sympathetic noises and appropriate comments—“Amens,” as it were. Elvis had hardly begun before he lost his place in the script and appealed to the audience for help.

  “What do I do now, folks?” he asked. As always, they loved his confession of helplessness and showered him with expressions of their love and affection. Elvis reciprocated and rambled about charmingly until he found out what they wanted to hear. Thereafter, he talked, played, and sang exuberantly. The boys whooped it up accordingly. Elvis was rising again, buoyed as always by a live and warmly responsive audience.

  Actually the producer and Colonel Parker had been negligent in not having carefully selected beforehand an audience for the performance, one that could be counted on to be enthusiastic. The special, of course, was a collection of various performances. In the last hours, they virtually brought people in off the street. Even so, the Colonel quickly came up to speed. “Who loves Elvis?” he called out to the gathering audience. He chose the youngest and most attractive women from among the respondents and planted them up front where the cameras would catch them. It worked. Elvis, tanned and trim after his Hawaiian vacation, was gorgeous in his black leather suit. He exuded the animal sexuality that Billy Goldenberg thought he could manifest onstage. It was not the 1950s all over again; it was better. Elvis was older, and the girls were women. The sex-play was riper, relaxed, and richer. It was savored and relished by the audience.

  During a part of the “informal” segment, several women were drawn up from the front of the audience to sit on the edge of the small stage on either side of the stairs. They are in their late twenties or early thirties, attractively and comfortably dressed. Elvis performs standing above them.

  After he does “Tiger Man,” one of the women hands him a Kleenex. He wipes the sweat from his face and gives it back to her. She puts the damp tissue carefully away in her purse. A tittering stir moves through the audience as it relishes the depth of the exchange. Elvis then swings into a steamy “To Spend One Night with You.”

  Next comes one of Elvis’s finest moments ever onstage. He settles down between the two women who were seated on either side of the stairs leading up to the stage. He sits with his feet on one of the stairs, and the women move close to him. Their bodies close to his, their feet also on the stairs with his. Both are about thirty, mature and knowing, attractive. One is white skinned with dark hair piled high in a bouffant. The other is slightly dark, Hispanic or Asian. She leans toward Elvis, her legs tucked neatly under her, rounded knees together. Elvis sings “Memories,” while the two women listen and watch him. The deep feelings—the warm and knowing intimacy—that passed between those women and Elvis was palpable, compelling even now, as one watches a film of the show.

  The original script called for Elvis to close with a Christmas song and a monologue, a token tossed to the culturally conservative sponsors and the Colonel. Compared to the excitement they were generating, Christmas now seemed a dull passion. Steve Binder thought he had a better idea. He asked his vocal arranger, Earl Brown, an African American, to compose a song especially for the ending, one that would define what Steve thought the show was all about. Overnight, Brown came up with “If I Can Dream.” Elvis just loved it. Singing the words before a studio audience, he preached love to a nation; he was the great unifier that Steve had imagined him to be. Elvis threw himself into the song:

  There must be lights burning brighter somewhere

  Got to be birds flying higher in a sky more blue

  If I can dream of a better land

  Where all my brothers walk hand in hand

  Tell me why, oh why, oh why can’t my dream come true

  In the next verse, he thought that “there must be peace and understanding sometime” and that strong “winds of promi
se” would blow away all “doubt and fear.” In the third verse, he declared, “We’re lost in a cloud with too much rain” and “trapped in a world that’s troubled with pain.” But as long as mankind can dream, “he can redeem his soul and fly.” In the final verse, he was “sure that the answer’s gonna come somehow.” He then sang, “In the dark, there’s a beckoning candle.” While he can think, talk, stand, walk, and dream, “let my dream come true, right now,” he pleaded.

  “Let it come true right now,” he repeated. “Oh ye-e-a h.”

  The message was, of course, a melodramatic but watered down and musically overblown version of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, but the whole thing somehow brings to mind Judy Garland singing “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” Shallow as the song was, with Elvis singing, it sounded good. Elvis did the song backed by a full orchestra conducted by Billy Goldenberg, and he sang in his risingly emotional, over-the-top, climactic style, falling in the end to an anguished and tremulous plea. With Elvis, the medium—himself—was the message, not the words.

  Two days later Elvis did another part of the show before another live audience. This was the “stand-up” segment that took him through the great hits of his career. Billy Goldenberg arranged the music and led the orchestra. Again Elvis was in the black leather suit, but now he was all over a full-sized stage, slinking like a panther, sliding down to his knees on “Hound Dog,” pacing, panting, jerking, strands of jet black hair falling excitingly across his face, giving out handkerchiefs drenched with his sweat to the audience. The wet handkerchief bit was a trick he had copied from singer Tom Jones.

  The “informal” and “stand-up” segments had been done with live audiences. The third major segment, “Guitar Man,” was done with no audience. It opened with one hundred guitar players playing “Guitar Man” for a minute and a half on a large stage with huge lit-up three-dimensional letters that spelled out E L V I S. As the sequence proceeded, at times there were as many as eighty musicians, singers, and dancers on the stage at once, throwing themselves about, singing, swaying, and shouting with seemingly total abandon. It was an extravaganza, huge and costly, far beyond the original budget, but by this time NBC saw high ratings for this show and paid willingly. In effect, Steve and Billy had put Elvis into an extravagant Broadway production.

  The Guitar Man was Elvis, an innocent and highly talented young man who set out from home into a selfish and sinful world. Originally, Steve had begun the segment with Elvis going into a room full of women (“It did not say whorehouse,” Binder later emphasized), where he gravitates toward a girl named Purity and sings and dances amid a score of others before the police raid the place and drive him out into the world again. When Steve made the mistake of confessing to NBC that the scene actually took place in a brothel, the sponsors pressured him into cutting it out of the final tape. “People would have remembered it for years,” he lamented to the writer Jerry Hopkins.

  The Singer Sewing Machine Company, NBC, Steve Binder, and the superbly creative artists that Steve gathered around him in June 1968 created the mold that Elvis and his company would fill with their performances in hotel showrooms and tour venues all over America during the last eight years of his life. It was a stage full to overflowing with performers, a band of several carefully chosen musicians (piano, drums, and guitars, one of which was always played by Charlie Hodge), a full orchestra, a black presence, a female presence, and a gospel quartet or quintet (a religious presence representative of the working class South).

  The Comeback Special was light-years away from “Jingle Bells” and “A Blue Christmas.” It was a Broadway musical extravaganza. It created a stage filled with Elvis and his people. At a get-acquainted party before rehearsals started, there were thirty-six dancers and thirty-five musicians. There were eighty performers in the opening scene of “Guitar Man,” all in motion—backup singers black and white, male and female, a quartet, a trio, a high soprano, a full orchestra, virtuoso musicians on drums, guitars, and piano from country, pop, soul, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Muscle Shoals, Alabama. He changed his costumes three times in one scene. He wore a dozen or more different costumes during the show, each of them bold in the Bill Belew mode, daring but strikingly appropriate to the performance.

  The Comeback Special was drenched in black culture. It was as if Steve, Billy, Bill, and Lance LeGault had taken Elvis up and out of the Snow White world of Hollywood movies, dunked him into the current broad-flowing stream of black culture in America, and put him back onstage again. The change is striking in a scene in the “Guitar Man” segment that opens with a black male dancer very still in a crouching position forehead down on the stage floor. Slowly, he unfolds himself to a mournful rendition by orchestra and singers of “Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child.” The scene soon builds to a joyous, jumping, triumphal, shouting, double-clapping “Where could I go but to the Lord?” All the while, black and white dancers, girls dressed in white, boys dressed in black, are throwing themselves around the stage. The Blossoms (three black women) and Darlene Love (also black and a high soprano) are doing music and motion that no whites, no men, and few women of any color could do. Elvis, dressed in a smart-cut purple suit, a white shirt with a wide collar, and a red bandanna around his neck, singing and dancing, melts easily into the flow. Elvis scorns no music.

  Finally, all during the Comeback Special there was Elvis himself, resplendent in outré costumes, doing karate moves, slides, kneels, and, metaphorically speaking, cartwheels and somersaults, bantering onstage with his friends, and talking to his audience. No longer did he merely jiggle his leg or move through carefully choreographed scenes. With Lance LeGault’s help, he developed relatively graceful and flowing movements and began striking statue-like poses. He delivered rambling monologues, especially one in which he repeatedly depicted himself as a poor boy in Memphis, who had only wanted to make a vanity record for his mother during his lunch-hour break from his job driving a delivery truck for an electric company. This was not a true story but an Elvis myth that he himself loved to tell. It was an imagined and highly romantic tale that worked for him and left out many things.

  The taping of the whole production was completed before the end of June 1968. As Steve edited hours of tape down to the one-hour show that would be aired in December, he knew that he had done it right. Elvis had burst forth in all his natural beauty. “All of a sudden you could see the metamorphosis,” he said. “All of a sudden the confidence started swelling.” Guided by his managers, Elvis had discovered himself anew. Again he found himself rising up to meet the applause of live audiences while performing onstage—as he had in the Shell in Overton Park in Memphis in July 1954, and yet again when he appeared with Milton Berle on the flight deck of the carrier Hancock in San Diego Bay in April 1956. Elvis was now fully mature, darkly sexual, and imperiously commanding.

  “They still like me!” Elvis exclaimed as he came off the stage after his second run at the stand-up performance before a live audience. It was as if he had achieved once again the much-needed affirmation that he got from the enthusiastic applause of the audience in the talent contest at Humes High fifteen years before. Now, he had become what a studio audience in 1968 wanted him to be.

  Elvis sent someone to ask the Colonel to come to his dressing room. “I want to tour again,” he told his manager. “I want to go out and work with a live audience.”

  Colonel Parker Re-creates the Elvis Venue

  Colonel Parker, having caught the vision of an Elvis bankruptcy, was ready for a change too. In the mid-1950s, he had moved Elvis from the stage to television and then to the movies. A decade later, he moved him back from the movies to television and then to the stage again, in Las Vegas and then into widening streams of touring. The Colonel moved quickly to totally finish off Elvis’s movie career, get him back into the recording studio, and book him for live shows.

  Elvis’s movies never took long. Within a year, he was done with the three films already contracted: Ch
arro! in July and August 1968, The Trouble with Girls (And How to Get into It) from late October to mid-December, and Change of Habit in seven weeks during March and April 1969.

  Meanwhile, in January and February 1969, Elvis returned to the recording studio with a passion he had not shown in years. The studio he chose was not in Nashville, New York, or Los Angeles. It was in Memphis. There, American Sound Studio was heavily involved with “the Memphis Sound,” a genre that was rivaling the highly popular Detroit “Motown Sound” in the late sixties. It had produced a phenomenal ninety-seven hits on the charts in twenty-eight months. The studio was located, appropriately, on the black side of the city, in a run-down building at 827 Thomas Street. The guiding genius was Lincoln Wayne “Chips” Moman, who was born in La Grange, Georgia, in 1936, hitch-hiked to Memphis at age fourteen, and entered the music business as a guitarist. Chips had gathered a talented assemblage of musicians to play backup in his studio, some of whom Elvis had known from his early years. These Memphians had absorbed what black musicians were doing in Memphis and elsewhere in the 1960s and played what people wanted to hear in the way they wanted to hear it. Chips’s stars were black and white, male and female, singles and groups, country, rock, pop, and soul. One of his successes was Dionne Warwick.

  Elvis chose the right place. In ten days, he cut thirty-six songs. In both art and numbers, it was, arguably, his most productive recording session ever. Among the hits that emerged were “In the Ghetto (The Vicious Circle),” carrying the sad and simple message that a baby born in the ghetto probably could never get out and would probably die a violent death, and “Suspicious Minds,” which carried a theme that Elvis took very personally, which is honesty and simple purity in important relationships. Priscilla, rejected sexually by Elvis after the birth of Lisa Marie, had already had an affair with her dance instructor and was developing interests in other men. Elvis suspected, erroneously, that she was having—or about to have—an affair with Jerry Schilling, probably the most sensitive, honorable, handsome, and gentlemanly of his male associates and certainly the best educated.