Elvis in Vegas : How the King of Rock 'n' Roll Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (9781501151217)

by Zoglin, Richard

  Mac Davis, who went on to a substantial career as a country-music singer himself, remained one of Elvis’s favorite songwriters. (The Colonel liked him too. When they first met, after “A Little Less Conversation” was recorded, Colonel Parker told Davis to bend over so he could rub his curly head. “Now you go tell everybody that the Colonel rubbed your head,” said the old carny. “You’re gonna be a star.”) Davis’s work—particularly “In the Ghetto,” “Memories,” and another of his numbers that Elvis recorded in Memphis, “Don’t Cry Daddy”—satisfied Elvis’s craving for songs of more substance, emotion, and not a little sentimentality. “Elvis was really trying to find his way out of that vicious circle too,” said Davis. “He wanted to get back to being the performer that he was.”

  And soon he would.

  Six

  COMEBACK

  (Elvis Reborn)

  What was going through Elvis Presley’s mind in the early summer of 1969, as he prepared for his first live stage appearance in eight years, at the International Hotel in Las Vegas?

  It has been a rough decade for him, in many ways a disastrous one. His two-year hitch in the Army, from 1958 to 1960, had effectively bisected his career: ending the skyrocketing-to-fame early phase, during which he virtually revolutionized American popular music. He returned from the Army a much-changed, much-diluted performer. After one awkward “welcome home” TV special (forced to play second fiddle to Frank Sinatra), he largely retreated to Hollywood and abandoned live performing—along with much of the hard-driving rock ’n’ roll that had launched his career, in favor of mostly bland, disposable pop songs. Amid the radical changes that were taking place in music, and the rest of the culture, during the 1960s—the arrival of the Beatles, the ascension of the singer-songwriter, the embrace of social and political protest, and the quest for spiritual enlightenment, often aided by drugs—the founding father of rock ’n’ roll was looking increasingly out of touch, over-the-hill.

  “You have to remember how the counterculture hated him,” said rock critic Richard Goldstein. “By then he was doing music that we considered plastic. The talent was always there, but it was encrusted with this horrible veneer of stylization and commercialization, an utter inability to be authentic—that ‘good boy of the South’ image. He was led in the wrong direction.”

  Yet, against all odds, now there was some hope. His comeback special on NBC in December 1968 had reintroduced a still-vital performer to a public that had largely written him off. Emboldened by the reception, and at the end of his rope in Hollywood, Elvis was now determined to return to live performing. It was Colonel Parker’s idea, not his, to make that return in Las Vegas, but from a promotional point of view, it made sense. Elvis would be headlining in the biggest showroom, in the biggest hotel, in the biggest entertainment center in the nation, guaranteeing maximum attention. But it was a make-or-break gamble, the most daunting challenge of his career. Could Elvis Presley, at age thirty-four, resurrect his career in Las Vegas?

  Nearly everyone was rooting for him. For all the weirdness of Elvis’s world—the reclusive star, the entourage of sycophants, the cornpone Svengali pulling strings behind the scenes, the private eccentricities and drug problems that became widely known only later—people liked Elvis Presley. Those who met him or worked with him or became part of his circle in these years were struck by his modesty, his gracious Southern manners, his genuineness. He was still, in many ways, an overgrown country boy. He never got over the loss of his beloved mother (who died at age forty-six, of heart failure brought on by acute hepatitis, in August 1958, just as Elvis was getting ready to go overseas for his Army service) and kept his father, Vernon, close by to manage his finances. Elvis spent money wildly, often irrationally, but was unfailingly generous—buying cars and houses for friends, giving out gold watches (ordered in quantity from his Memphis jeweler) to dozens of people he crossed paths with. He grew up in a churchgoing family and retained a strong religious faith; singing gospel music was his favorite form of relaxation.

  He was insecure, and his ego needed to be fed constantly. He had what Jerry Schilling called “the worst temper I ever saw.” But he was not pretentious or phony. He was curious about people, a good listener, and an avid reader. Even after his spiritual guru, Larry Geller, was banished from his inner circle, Elvis’s room was always piled high with books of spiritual and religious seeking. He had a high school kid’s playfulness and irreverence, with a penchant for juvenile pranks and jokes. “I liked him a lot,” said Mac Davis, the singer-songwriter who composed several hits for him and became a casual friend. “He was an easy laugh. He was kind of a poster boy for arrested development, you know—he was nineteen forever. But he was a pretty amazing guy, really. It was the circus that went on around him, that was the thing.”

  The circus consisted of an entourage of longtime friends and employees—a constantly evolving group that included old high school pals, family members, former Army buddies, and assorted hangers-on. In some ways they were good for him: they kept him grounded, connected to his roots, and provided an outlet for his frustrations and bad moods. Yet they also coddled and flattered him shamelessly and kept him insulated from honest criticism. Priscilla Presley describes in her memoir a telling incident during her first trip to the United States to visit him. After returning from a recording session, Elvis played for her some of the songs he was working on and asked her opinion. She made the mistake of telling him what she really thought: she loved his singing, but wished he would do more old-style rock ’n’ roll songs, like “Jailhouse Rock.” Elvis flew into a rage—“God damn it, I didn’t ask for your opinion on what style I should sing; I asked if you liked the songs!”—and stormed out of the room. Priscilla, still in the first flush of her romance, was shocked to find herself the target of a temper she had seen but not yet experienced. She learned to tread carefully after that. So did everyone else.

  Colonel Parker usually bears the brunt of blame for Elvis’s career stagnation in the 1960s. The Colonel went for the surefire payday in Hollywood, over and over, even as Elvis’s confidence and creative spirit were withering. In the mid-1960s the Colonel negotiated an exploitive deal with Elvis, his only client, which gave him 50 percent of the profits from all Elvis enterprises, on top of his usual 25 percent management fee. He pushed away talented people who won Elvis’s confidence and threatened the Colonel’s sway over his star—among them Steve Binder, director of the 1968 comeback special on NBC, and Chips Moman, the producer who oversaw the 1969 Memphis recording sessions that were Elvis’s most productive in years, neither of whom ever worked with Elvis again. The Colonel never allowed Elvis to travel overseas, for what would surely have been lucrative and rejuvenating foreign tours, owing to the shady circumstances surrounding his own illegal immigration to the United States from Holland in 1929. Colonel Parker, it seems, didn’t have a passport.

  Yet Tom Parker also deserves much of the credit for orchestrating Elvis’s spectacular rise to fame, as well as for staying out of the way creatively; once Elvis stepped inside the recording studio, the Colonel’s role ended. Nor was Elvis himself entirely blameless for the rut his career fell into. “The Colonel did not make any deals that Elvis didn’t approve in advance,” said Loanne Miller Parker, who was working at the International Hotel when Colonel Parker hired her as an assistant (and who would become his second wife). “In fact, if I ever saw him a little nervous, it was when he was going to meet with Elvis and hoped that Elvis would or would not do whatever he was going to present to him.” Joe Esposito, Elvis’s longtime road manager, felt that Elvis often used the Colonel as a buffer. “The Colonel was forced to speak for Elvis many times because Elvis hated interviews, so it often appeared that the Colonel exercised more control than he actually did,” Esposito said. “Despite his complaints, Elvis always reserved the final decision. If he followed the Colonel’s advice more often than he should have, it was because he preferred that someone else take responsibility in case a decision turned out to b
e wrong.”

  By 1969, however, they were in agreement on one decision: it was time for Elvis to return to the concert stage. His movies were no longer doing much business, and live concerts were becoming a more lucrative option; top rock groups and solo superstars like Barbra Streisand were getting up to $100,000 for one-nighters. Tom Diskin, Colonel Parker’s assistant, acknowledged to the press that Elvis’s movie income was declining and that “for the time that goes into it, it’s more profitable for him to appear in public.” Elvis had been away for a long time, and there was no assurance he could draw crowds like he used to. But the Colonel’s plan was to test the waters and light the promotional spark in Las Vegas, setting the stage for Elvis’s return to national touring.

  The timing was good, for it came in the midst of a revival of interest in vintage rock ’n’ roll. Pioneering rockers from the 1950s like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, and the Everly Brothers, out of the limelight for years, were back doing concerts—some even playing Las Vegas. Radio stations around the country were revisiting rock’s classic era with “oldies” formats. At the Woodstock rock festival in August 1969—which came smack in the middle of Elvis’s comeback engagement in Las Vegas—one of the more unlikely hit acts was a greased-up sextet doing tongue-in-cheek versions of old doo-wop numbers, called Sha Na Na. “Teenagers seem to be tiring of bloodless electronic experimentation and intellectualism,” said Time magazine in August 1969, “and may be ready to discover for themselves the simplistic, hard-driving Big Beat.”

  But Elvis had no intention of becoming a nostalgia act. Nor did he want to do a conventional Vegas show. The Colonel’s initial idea was to put Elvis onstage with showgirls and glitzy production numbers, maybe something like the dancing jailbirds in his movie Jailhouse Rock. But Elvis had a dream one night in which he saw himself on a Vegas stage filled with a huge collection of musicians: a rhythm band, two backup singing groups, and the biggest orchestra Vegas had ever seen. When he called Colonel Parker in the morning to tell him his vision, the Colonel balked and said plans were already underway for something much different. Elvis insisted that he would do the show he wanted or not at all. It was the first time, he told friends, that he actually hung up on the Colonel.

  Then Elvis set out to do it his way.

  News that Elvis would make his return to live performing in Las Vegas broke in mid-December 1968, as soon as his deal with the International Hotel was completed. On February 26, after finishing his Memphis recording sessions, Elvis flew to Vegas to pose for publicity photos, signing the contract with the International’s Alex Shoofey and Bill Miller on the construction site of the still-unfinished hotel. (Elvis is the only one of the three not wearing a construction hat.) From there he went on to Hollywood to shoot his final movie, Change of Habit, took a two-week vacation in Hawaii, then returned to Memphis for most of May and June. There he made an effort to be more visible—spending many evenings in front of his Graceland home, greeting fans and signing autographs. The Colonel, who was usually careful to keep Elvis under wraps, wasn’t happy with his sudden gregariousness, but felt it was probably good for Elvis to “get used to the crowds again.”

  Meanwhile, Elvis was beginning to plan for his Las Vegas opening, set for July 31, 1969. And he was doing it largely on his own. For his big comeback show in Las Vegas, Elvis had no director, no producer with any hands-on involvement, not even a music-industry guru or Vegas veteran whom he could rely on for advice in shaping and staging the show. To help choose songs and put together his set, he depended mostly on his frequent jamming partner, Charlie Hodge, an affable, wisecracking guitar player from Memphis whom Elvis had gotten to know in the Army. But for this pivotal moment in his career, his first stage appearance in eight years, in a city that had not been kind to him the first time around, Elvis was guided mainly by his own instincts. “Not many people told Elvis what to do regarding music,” said Jerry Schilling. “If you want to know who put together that show, it was Elvis Presley.”

  First he needed to assemble a backup band. He approached the musicians at Chips Moman’s studio in Memphis, who had worked so well with him in the recording sessions that winter, about joining him in Vegas, but they had too much studio work to take the time off. He made an overture to Scotty Moore and D. J. Fontana—his original backup guitarist and drummer from the fifties, who had rejoined him for the NBC special—but they turned down the $500 a week apiece that Colonel Parker offered them, reasoning that they could make more money doing session work in Memphis, where Moore now had his own studio. (Scotty Moore, whose relations with Colonel Parker had been strained for years, felt the salary was lowballed because “management wanted new personnel.”)

  So Elvis began casting about for a new group, asking everyone he knew for the best session musicians available. For lead guitarist, the two names that came up most often were Glen Campbell and James Burton. But Campbell’s own singing career was taking off (he had just gotten his own TV variety show). So Elvis called up Burton, a lean, low-key Louisiana native who had created the memorable guitar licks for Dale Hawkins’s 1957 single “Susie Q” and spent years as the lead guitarist in Ricky Nelson’s band on the TV sitcom Ozzie and Harriet. Since playing in the house band on ABC’s mid-1960s rock ’n’ roll series Shindig!, Burton had become one of the busiest session players in Los Angeles, working with everyone from Dean Martin to Merle Haggard.

  Elvis and James had never met, but when Elvis phoned, he told Burton he used to watch Ozzie and Harriet just to see him play. They talked for a couple of hours, found they had a lot in common musically, and by the end of the conversation Burton had agreed to be Elvis’s lead guitarist and help put together the rest of the band. Elvis told Burton he wanted musicians who were versatile, able to play a broad range of music, from rock and country to operatic ballads. “Elvis wanted me to find players that could play different styles and could improvise,” Burton recalled. “He believed in me and respected my opinion and I wasn’t gonna let him down.”

  On keyboards, Burton’s first choice was Glen D. Hardin, a talented pianist and songwriter who had been part of the Shindig! band. But Hardin had too many other commitments, so Burton instead recruited Larry Muhoberac, a Memphis musician and producer who had worked on several Elvis albums and had been music director for two charity concerts Elvis gave in Memphis in early 1961. On rhythm guitar, Burton picked John Wilkinson, a mustachioed folk-singer-guitarist from Springfield, Missouri, who had just signed an RCA recording contract and whose work Elvis also knew and admired.

  Hiring a bassist took a bit more convincing. Burton called up Jerry Scheff, another fellow Shindig! alum, to come in for an audition. But Scheff, a red-haired California native who was into jazz and black rhythm and blues, initially wasn’t much interested in the job. “I didn’t like Elvis Presley’s music. I thought he was just some southern white guy trying to sound black,” Scheff recalled in his memoir, Way Down. “I had definite opinions about what was cool and what wasn’t. Elvis wasn’t.” But Scheff told his wife he would go to the audition anyway, simply out of curiosity.

  He was immediately impressed by Elvis’s charisma and obvious commitment to his craft. “When Elvis started singing, I couldn’t believe how natural he sounded,” said Scheff. “His phrasing wasn’t mechanical, as it can be with a lot of white singers (and even some black singers). No matter what style of music we played, he always focused on the story of the song. It was like the words and melody went through his brain, then to his heart, and then came out of his mouth.” When the audition was over, Scheff was offered the job, and to his own surprise he accepted it—the only Yankee in a band full of Southerners.

  The drummer spot proved to be the most complicated to fill. Burton offered the job first to Richie Frost, who had played with him in Ricky Nelson’s band, but Frost declined, saying he didn’t want the hassle of a live gig. Several more drummers auditioned, none of whom satisfied Elvis. Time was running short when Larry Muhoberac called a drummer he knew from Texas, Ron
nie Tutt, who was thinking of making a move to LA, and told him if he could get on a plane and be at an audition the next night, he might have a shot at the job.

  Tutt, a bearded, bearlike Dallas native, was not a particular Elvis Presley fan. They had crossed paths once before, at a country jamboree in Fort Worth in 1955, when Tutt was playing with a Western swing band and Elvis, touring the South with Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, appeared on the same bill. In the middle of his set, Elvis, chunking away on his guitar, broke the strings and on the spur of the moment grabbed another guitar from a member of Tutt’s band—then trashed it, too, without so much as an “I’m sorry.” Tutt also wasn’t thrilled that his girlfriend thought Elvis was cute.

  Still, fourteen years later, the chance to work with Elvis Presley was enough to get Tutt on a flight to Los Angeles, lugging his drum set with him, in time for the Saturday-night audition. Once there, he had to wait quietly while another candidate, Gene Pello, a well-respected Motown session drummer, auditioned first—even commandeering Tutt’s drum set—and seemed to win over everyone in the room. The musicians were all but packing up to go home when Muhoberac reminded them that Tutt had flown in from Texas for the audition, and Elvis agreed to hear him out.

  They did a number together, and then a couple more, and Elvis felt a connection: Tutt seemed to pick up on every move Elvis made. “We had this great eye communication,” Tutt recalled. “We could kind of read each other. They had me stay over an extra day so Elvis could make up his mind. And that’s basically what he said: ‘I wanted you because you watched me like a hawk; you anticipated what I was doing.’ ” Elvis told friends he needed “at least one guy onstage with my temperament.” So he passed over some of the top session players in Los Angeles and hired Tutt, a virtual unknown, to fill out the group. Rehearsals started the next day; Tutt didn’t even have time to return home for a change of clothes.