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

by Zoglin, Richard

The Vegas showroom scene was not entirely comfortable for Elvis and the band. “I always hated the place,” said Jerry Scheff. “In my opinion nothing could ever make Vegas hip.” Elvis was particularly distracted by the dinner shows—with plates and glasses clanking while he was trying to emote onstage. But for James Burton—who had played Vegas several times before, with such rock performers as Leon Russell—the excitement Elvis created made up for everything. “It was a great place to play,” he said. “We had 747s coming in from Japan, two planes a day. We always had great audiences. I enjoyed playing Vegas.”

  Elvis wasn’t greeted warmly by everyone in Vegas. Some of the old-timers saw him as an interloper, a rebuke to the classy, sophisticated Rat Pack era. “Elvis was uncultured, uneducated,” said Corinne Entratter, wife of the longtime manager of the Sands (and who later married George Sidney, the director of Viva Las Vegas). “He was a complete outsider. He knew nothing about show business. He made the crowd happy, but it was not a sophisticated crowd.” Yet Elvis made an effort to be a supportive member of the city’s showbiz community. Even after he became Vegas’ most celebrated star, he (or more likely Colonel Parker) would always send congratulatory telegrams or flower bouquets to others who were opening in Vegas while Elvis was there. That generated a lot of goodwill. Nelson Sardelli, a lounge singer whom Elvis had never even met, got one of the notes and later went up to thank Elvis when he saw him in the lobby of the Flamingo Hotel. “Elvis looked at me as if we were oldest buddies,” Sardelli recalled. “ ‘Nelson, man, nice to see you!’ ” Trini Lopez was a little insulted when Tom Jones came to see his show, brought an entourage that took up two booths, and told Trini’s manager that he wouldn’t be able to come backstage after the show, but would hang out in the lounge if Trini wanted to say hello. Elvis, by contrast, came to Lopez’s show with just his father and Priscilla, no entourage at all, and asked Trini’s manager to alert him before the singer’s final number—so Elvis could get backstage before the crowds and congratulate him.

  Elvis would often drop in on other lounge shows in Vegas, sometimes even popping up onstage, which always caused a stir. One night, after finishing his show, Elvis was passing by the International’s lounge when he heard the Righteous Brothers singing “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” which Elvis had begun doing in his own act. He suddenly walked onstage, greeted singer Bill Medley—“Hi, Bill”—then walked off. Word got around of the visit, and a big crowd gathered the next night for the Brothers’ show, in hopes of seeing Elvis again. Sure enough, Elvis was passing by at the same time with his entourage, sauntered onstage for another “Hi, Bill,” before scooting away like the Lone Ranger. “OK, I don’t know who he is,” Medley quipped, “but now he’s starting to piss me off.”

  Elvis’s comeback at the International established a new template for the Las Vegas show: no longer an intimate, sophisticated, Sinatra-style nightclub act, but a big rock-concert-like spectacle. “Elvis didn’t go in saying, ‘I’m doing a show for Vegas,’ ” said Jerry Schilling. “He did a touring show onstage in Vegas.” It was, by Vegas standards, a relatively pared-down spectacle—no chorus line of showgirls, levitating stages, laser-light shows, or much production at all. But for the sheer size of its musical presentation (not one but two backup singing groups, a rhythm band, plus a full orchestra—nearly sixty people onstage), the almost superhuman energy Elvis displayed, and the electricity he created in the showroom, Elvis’s show set a new standard for Las Vegas. The star was now his own spectacle.

  His show was, most of all, an event. In the old days, people would plan their trips to Las Vegas and then book their shows: if Frank or Sammy wasn’t in town, there were always plenty of others to choose from, among the many stars who were constantly circulating in and out of Vegas. Now people began to schedule their trips to Vegas around Elvis shows. He was the first major star to establish something like a regular schedule in Las Vegas: two four-week engagements a year, one in the winter, one in the summer—a forerunner of the “residencies” of latter-day Vegas stars like Céline Dion. Elvis fans came from all over the world, and some would get tickets for a whole week of shows. The big gamblers who didn’t care for Elvis could plant their wives in the showroom and spend their evening at the crap tables. The International would give complimentary tickets for Elvis’s shows to high rollers from other hotels; in return, the Riviera or Caesars would comp the International’s guests for their headliners. When Elvis was in town, everybody did well.

  Elvis hardly enhanced his stature in the rock world by becoming a Las Vegas star. The gaudy setting, the showbiz affectations, the sentimental ballads, the mostly middle-aged, middlebrow audience, the housewives with bouffant hairdos who sat swooning in the front rows—it hardly jibed with the motivating ethos of so many rock performers in the late sixties. They saw their music as an avenue for personal expression, social-political protest, and artistic experimentation. All Elvis wanted to do was sing.

  And sing to everybody. Las Vegas wasn’t just a creative resurrection for Elvis; it was also his grand statement of inclusiveness. No one was more responsible than Elvis, back in the mid-1950s, for driving the initial stake that split the music audience, and eventually the entire culture, in two: the adults who listened to the pop standards and Hit Parade tunes sung by Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and Rosemary Clooney; and the kids who embraced a new kind of music called rock ’n’ roll. By the end of the sixties, the battle had grown awfully lopsided: rock was becoming mainstream, while the old-style crooners were reduced to a few creaky TV variety shows, a diminishing roster of nightclubs—and Las Vegas.

  Elvis wanted to bring everyone back together under one tent. He was a rocker and a child of Memphis blues, but also an unabashed romantic; he loved Mario Lanza as well as Bo Diddley. He could kick ass in “What’d I Say” or go for the tears with “Memories.” For Elvis, it was all music. He was a great populist—a uniter, not a divider—and Vegas gave him his greatest platform. He brought his showmanship, his matchless voice, and the urgency of an artist on a mission to redeem himself. Las Vegas brought the crowds. Neither would ever be the same again.

  Seven

  AFTERMATH

  (Elvis Forever)

  He got better before he got worse.

  When Elvis Presley made his long-awaited return to the concert stage at Las Vegas’ International Hotel in August 1969, many people, both inside and outside his circle, assumed it would be a onetime event. But the phenomenal success of his show, and the long-term contract that Colonel Parker drew up with the hotel shortly after the opening, ensured that Las Vegas would become a recurring, twice-yearly stop on Elvis’s soon-to-be-resumed touring schedule. And for at least the first two or three of those Vegas appearances, Elvis was still engaged, energized, and musically at the top of his game.

  First there were some personnel changes. Larry Muhoberac, the keyboard player in Elvis’s backup band, decided to return to session work in Los Angeles rather than continue with Elvis. So James Burton recruited Glen D. Hardin, who had passed on the job the first time around because he was too busy. An affable West Texas native who had played with Buddy Holly’s backup group, the Crickets, Hardin had a solid track record as a session player, as well as some experience as an arranger—a skill that quickly proved valuable. During rehearsals for his January show in Vegas, Elvis said he wanted to try doing the old Everly Brothers song “Let It Be Me,” but had no arrangement. Hardin showed up the next morning with one he had written overnight. Elvis was pleased, the number was incorporated into the show, and Hardin went on to become Elvis’s reliable in-house arranger.

  Drummer Ronnie Tutt also opted out of the second Vegas engagement to take a better-paying job with Andy Williams. His replacement, Bob Lanning, was a competent session player, but Elvis missed Tutt’s hard-charging backup, and he made sure that Colonel Parker paid Tutt enough to lure him back for the next Vegas gig. Tutt and Hardin, along with holdovers Jerry Scheff, John Wilkinson, and James Burton, would remain the core of El
vis’s backup band for most of his Vegas years. Elvis even gave them a name, the TCB (for Taking Care of Business) Band and cemented the fraternity by giving each member a bracelet and gold pendant with TCB and a lightning bolt insignia engraved on it.

  Elvis opened his second engagement at the International on January 26, 1970, and it proved the first one was no fluke. Reservations poured in even faster than they had the previous summer. The opening-night dinner show was packed with 1,780 people, 300 more than at opening night six months earlier. Elvis wore the first of his flashy, Bill Belew–designed jumpsuits—most of them white, but also in black and blue, with plunging necklines and a variety of jeweled designs. Ringo Starr was in the audience on opening night. Fats Domino came to one show, and Elvis sang “Blueberry Hill” in his honor. On closing night Dean Martin was in the audience, and Elvis acknowledged him with a few bars of “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.”

  Elvis’s repertoire was expanding, with several numbers that would remain part of his act for years. He still began the show with a string of his old hits (“All Shook Up” replaced “Blue Suede Shoes” as the opening number), but he added several contemporary selections: two singles from his Memphis recording sessions the previous year, “Kentucky Rain” and “Don’t Cry Daddy,” as well as several songs associated with other artists, including Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary,” and Tony Joe White’s country-fried dish of swamp rock, “Polk Salad Annie,” which gave Elvis a chance to deliver a little opening catechism on Southern customs. RCA released another live album from the show, and the critics were once again enthusiastic. “It was a flawless demonstration of his vocal ability and showmanship,” said Robert Hilburn in the Los Angeles Times. “Elvis, with the uncanny guidance of Col. Tom Parker, has done what once seemed impossible. He has become king on his own terms.”

  His third Vegas engagement, in August 1970, brought another key personnel change, as Joe Guercio replaced Bobby Morris as orchestra leader. (According to Morris, the hotel let him go after a dispute unrelated to Elvis: Morris had hired twenty-four string players for Julie Budd, Bill Cosby’s opening act, then had to fire them when Cosby switched to another opening act. The union objected, and the hotel blamed it on Morris.) Guercio was a fortuitous addition. He was a well-traveled and well-connected Vegas conductor, who had worked with everyone from Patti Page to Steve and Eydie, and he made his mark almost immediately. “Joe was the first one to really put the band to work,” said pianist Frank Leone. Guercio helped flesh out the arrangements, suggested new endings for some numbers, and in general got the orchestra more involved. His most notable contribution, however, came in January 1971, when he introduced a new opening for the show: heralding Elvis’s entrance with the dramatic theme from Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which Stanley Kubrick had used so memorably in 2001: A Space Odyssey—a suitably majestic introduction for the new king of Las Vegas.

  For his summer show in 1970, Elvis-mania in Las Vegas reached a new peak. The hotel was festooned with pennants announcing THE ELVIS SUMMER FESTIVAL. Colonel Parker shipped in tens of thousands of souvenir postcards, catalogs, photo albums, and ELVIS SUMMER FESTIVAL straw hats, which the waitresses, dealers, and other hotel employees were required to wear during the run. The old carny’s promotional ingenuity knew no bounds. Among the souvenirs on sale were expensive framed posters of Elvis, identified as “original Renaldis from Italy.” Renaldi was an Italian American employee in the International’s carpenter shop.

  Colonel Parker also brought in a documentary crew to film several nights of the August 1970 engagement. The Colonel’s original idea was to broadcast one of the Las Vegas concerts live for a closed-circuit pay-per-view TV event. But when news of the planned telecast leaked to the press prematurely, the Colonel scrapped the idea and instead made a deal with MGM, the Hollywood studio that Kirk Kerkorian had recently acquired, to produce a feature documentary on the Vegas show. The result, Elvis: That’s the Way It Is, directed by Oscar-winner Denis Sanders and released in November 1970, is the best record we have of Elvis’s power and charisma onstage at the height of his Vegas years.

  The film begins with behind-the-scenes footage of rehearsals in Los Angeles; Elvis is loose, in high spirits, and more naturally engaging than in any of his clumsy “ad-lib” patter onstage. But the bulk of the film is simply a record of his Vegas show, shot by acclaimed cinematographer Lucien Ballard (The Wild Bunch). In his high-collared white jumpsuit, open in front with giant silver buttons, Elvis is a magnetic presence onstage: in constant motion, pacing the stage, striking karate poses, whirling one arm like a pinwheel or slashing the air to punctuate the chords. He’s sweating by the end, yet he seems more comfortable and controlled than in his often out-of-breath performances in 1969.

  His rock engine still hums on old numbers like “I Got a Woman” and new ones (for him) like “C. C. Rider,” which opens the show. He tears into the big ballads with unabashed emotion and theatricality. He begins the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” with his back turned dramatically to the audience. He gives an impassioned (but not over-the-top) reading to Dusty Springfield’s “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Waters.” He loves the big finish, often closing songs with a dramatic freeze-frame, in karate warrior pose or with one hand thrust toward the sky. “Nobody could close a song any better than he could,” said Mac Davis. “I used to love watching other entertainers try, from Wayne Newton to Céline Dion. But nobody could. It was absolutely Elvis.”

  He could take the corniest songs and put them across with the sheer force of his musical conviction. Take “The Wonder of You.” The song was originally written for Perry Como, who never recorded it, and became a minor hit in 1959 for the sweet-voiced pop crooner Ray Peterson. When Elvis began performing it in Las Vegas in the winter of 1970 (with an arrangement rustled up in one night by Glen D. Hardin), he went to lunch with Peterson and told him he wanted to record the song. “You don’t have to ask permission, you’re Elvis Presley,” Peterson said. “Yes, I do,” Elvis replied. “You’re Ray Peterson.” Elvis’s version of “The Wonder of You,” recorded live in Las Vegas and released as a single in April 1970, rose to No. 9 in the United States and No. 1 in Great Britain, one of his biggest hits of the seventies.

  His performance of the song in Elvis: That’s the Way It Is is a vivid illustration of Elvis’s ability to transform a conventional love song into something grander, more emotional, almost operatic in its intensity. “When no one else can understand me / When everything I do is wrong,” go to the treacly lyrics, “You give me hope and consolation / You give me strength to carry on.” But Elvis leaves no doubt that he honestly believes them—or at least wants to. He builds the song beautifully, gathering force as the melody ascends the scale, his voice breaking ever so slightly on the word hope, his eyes closing as if imagining the wondrous woman he was never quite able to find (or maybe it’s his mother). During James Burton’s twangy guitar bridge (“Play the song, James”), Elvis joins with the swelling male-female chorus, guiding the number toward a thrilling climax and release—Elvis grabbing the air with one hand, fingers outstretched, tensed and almost trembling on the last chord, before a furious swipe of the air to end the song. It is the essence of Elvis in Vegas: schmaltz raised to the sublime.

  The decline that followed is a sad, familiar story: told many times, psychoanalyzed, moralized about, recounted in books by almost everyone who had even a passing acquaintance with Elvis during his last few years. Boredom and overwork, combined with drug use that was either ignored or enabled by his circle of intimates, sapped his energy, sank his spirits, and essentially drove him crazy. It was both tragic and ludicrous, a cautionary tale and parable for the age of rock superstardom—one of the first of many similarly tragic ends for rock stars unable to cope with the perks and perils of enormous fame.

  Las Vegas usually gets much of the blame, simply b
ecause it’s where the decline could be witnessed in real time. In 1969 and ’70 Elvis still looked and sounded great, buoyed by the enthusiastic crowds, critical acclaim, and renewed self-confidence. But his grueling, twice-yearly appearances in Las Vegas—two shows a night for four weeks, without a single night off—soon became a grind, and his thirtieth-floor home at the International, later the Hilton (a palatial, five-thousand-square-foot suite, complete with private swimming pool and rooftop terrace, from which Elvis and his pals would sometimes hit golf balls), a prison. “When he captured Vegas, he was the most dynamic performer in the world,” said Jerry Schilling, who worked with him during much of that period. “But what is the challenge, for an artist, after you’ve done it and done it, over and over again? To have him there twice a year, sixty shows in a row, the same place, never getting out of the hotel for maybe five weeks. In the wintertime we never saw daylight. We would go to bed, close the curtains just about sunrise. And we’d get up for breakfast, it was five o’clock; by the eight o’clock show, it was dark. It was great for two, three engagements. But then, it becomes decadent, if you will.”

  An early sign of trouble came in August 1970, when the hotel’s security office received an anonymous call warning that a man would try to kill Elvis during his Saturday-night show. The FBI was alerted, armed plainclothes officers and members of the Memphis Mafia were stationed around the room for protection, and Elvis carried two pistols in his boots when he took the stage. Tension was high throughout the show. Elvis stood sideways for much of the performance to make himself a smaller target; an ambulance was parked outside just in case. Despite one scary moment, when a man yelled out from the balcony (just requesting a song, it turned out), the threat came to nothing. But it added to Elvis’s paranoia and isolation. He grew more obsessed with guns, and more reckless with them, often firing shots in fits of anger or simply for kicks. His use of prescription drugs—increasingly strong sedatives to help him sleep, amphetamines to keep him going—grew worse, and he found a new physician in Las Vegas, Dr. Elias Ghanem, to help keep him supplied. His marriage was falling apart, he was spending money as fast as he could earn it, and his moods were growing increasingly capricious and foul.