Typically, for big Vegas openings, members of the press would be invited backstage after the show for interviews with the star. But so many reporters and critics were on hand that the Colonel arranged for a press conference—the only one Elvis would ever do in Las Vegas. Some two hundred people gathered in a hotel ballroom a little after midnight, and when Elvis walked in, wearing a new Bill Belew outfit, black with a bright red scarf, they gave him another standing ovation.
Elvis stood behind the head table, flanked by his father, Vernon, and Joe Esposito, his road manager. The Colonel stood by, dressed in a cheesy white smock with ELVIS INTERNATIONAL IN PERSON stenciled all over it. Elvis was relaxed and in high spirits, standing the whole time, often cocking one leg up to rest a foot on the table as he answered questions.
Elvis was candid when asked why it had taken so long for him to return to live performing: “We had to finish up the movie commitments before I could start on this. I really missed it. I love the live contact with an audience. It was getting harder and harder to perform to a movie camera all day long. The inspiration wasn’t there. I’m tired of playing a guy singing to the guy he’s beating up.”
Was he nervous during the show? a reporter asked. Yes, Elvis said, for the first three or four songs—“before I loosened up. Then I thought, ‘What the heck. Get with it, man, or you might be out of a job tomorrow.’ ” Did he dye his hair? “Sure, because I’ve always done it for the movies.” (Why? “Because it’s gray.”) Asked to name some of the singers who influenced him, Elvis pointed out one of them sitting right there in the room—Fats Domino, who was appearing in a lounge show on the Strip. Someone from England announced that he’d been authorized to offer Elvis “one million pounds sterling to make two appearances at the Wembley Empire Stadium.” Elvis referred the question to Colonel Parker. “Just put down the deposit,” said the Colonel. “Cash, not pounds.”
Colonel Parker ended the questioning after about twenty minutes and handed out press packets to the visiting reporters. Elvis stuck around for a few more minutes, talking and signing autographs, then retreated with his entourage to his suite on the hotel’s twenty-ninth floor (temporary quarters, while the thirtieth-floor suite—where he would spend all of his future Vegas engagements—was being finished). There the celebration continued for the rest of the night.
The reviews rolled in over the next several days. A few of the locals were blasé or outright skeptical. Las Vegas Sun columnist Ralph Pearl found “the glamorous rock and roll movie hero really cashing in on his reputation and not truly earning the enormous standing ovation. . . . There was a pounding, ear-aching sameness to many of Presley’s songs.” But nearly everyone else was bowled over. “It was not the Elvis with the rough edges of the middle 1950s, on stage Thursday,” said Billboard, in a review headlined “Elvis Retains Touch in Return to Stage.” “It was a polished, confident, and talented artist, knowing exactly what he was going to do and when.” Variety found him “very much in command of the entire scene as he went on to prove himself as one of the more potent Vegas lures.” Mike Jahn, recently hired by the New York Times as its first reporter assigned to the rock beat, wrote, “With his stature, it is fairly logical to expect him to go the Vegas route, that is, live out the rest of his life singing soft ballads in the style of Dean Martin or Paul Anka. . . . But with the opening song on his first night, it was clear that Elvis Presley still knows how to sing rock ’n’ roll. He seems, in fact, to have lost nothing in the past decade.”
The nation’s top rock critics soon weighed in, with nearly universal praise. “Presley came on and immediately shook up all my expectations and preconceived categories,” wrote Ellen Willis in the New Yorker. “There was a new man out there.” Seeing Elvis onstage, wrote Richard Goldstein in the Sunday New York Times, “felt like getting hit in the face with a bucket of melted ice. He looked so timeless up there, so constant. . . . He was still the boy who makes little girls weep. Still the man of the people, even though the people had moved to the suburbs. And still the jailhouse rocker.” Rolling Stone put its imprimatur on Elvis’s comeback with a long, adulatory piece by David Dalton the following February, which began, “Elvis was supernatural, his own resurrection, at the Showroom Internationale in Las Vegas last August.”
Elvis’s comeback in Vegas was soon the talk of the rock world. Ray Connolly, who covered the show for London’s Evening Standard, was in the office of Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, a few days later, trying to set up an interview. Unexpectedly, Grossman put Dylan on the phone, and Connolly mentioned that he had just come from seeing Elvis in Vegas. Dylan immediately began quizzing the journalist: “What did he do? Did he do the Sun stuff? Did he do ‘Mystery Train’? Who’s in the band?” A couple of days later Connolly was back in London, talking to John Lennon. Again he mentioned Elvis’s Vegas show, and Lennon peppered him with almost exactly the same questions. Everybody was a fan again.
Once past the pressure-filled opening night, Elvis got more comfortable and confident onstage. “The first night I thought it was good,” recalled Larry Muhoberac, “but I knew it was a handpicked audience. It was the next night when it was so amazing, so exciting, and the audience were hard-core fans who had paid money to see their star.” The set list remained fairly consistent throughout the run, though there were several additions, including Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” the Jimmy Reed blues song “Baby What You Want Me to Do,” and the sentimental oldie “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” (which Elvis had recorded in 1960—reputedly the only song Colonel Parker ever asked him to record, because it was his wife’s favorite). Elvis tinkered with the selections and the order from night to night, depending on his mood and his sense of the crowd. “If he felt a certain audience, a certain arrangement, was not going to do as well, he would change gears,” said Bobby Morris. “He was absolutely wonderful when it came to reading an audience. He had that instinct.” The band members had to be constantly on their toes. “He might do the first three songs, then he would jump all over the place,” said James Burton. “Elvis was an entertainer who could judge by the audience. He always seemed to have the right mood. Every show was different.”
There is no film or video of any of Elvis’s 1969 Las Vegas shows. But RCA recorded several of his performances, beginning on August 21 (cuts from those shows were released on a live album in October of that year and can be heard on various other compilation albums released since), which give at least a sense of the excitement Elvis created onstage. He is in superb voice—that rich, heaving baritone, emanating from deep in the chest cavity, a voice that seems to come with its own echo chamber. In the old days he had a youthful, rockabilly twang; his more robust, mature sound gives the early songs more body and weight, without losing the rocking energy. “Mystery Train” has more mystery; “Heartbreak Hotel” (a song inspired by a man’s suicide note that read, “I walk a lonely street”) more heartbreak. Elvis seems especially energized by the songs that are newer to his repertoire, such as “Baby What You Want Me to Do.” Like his very first release for Sun Records, “That’s All Right, Mama,” it’s a near-inarticulate cry of sexual helplessness (“Goin’ up, down / Down, up / Any way you want it”), only now he’s a hardened veteran of the love battlefield. Elvis pays his respects to Jimmy Reed’s loping blues original, while giving it his own defiant rock exclamation point. (It’s also one number where Elvis is able to show off his frequently underrated rhythm-guitar playing.)
Vegas also gave him a chance to demonstrate his flair for emotional dramatics. “In Vegas Elvis discovered that he was extremely good at melodrama,” wrote Dylan Jones in Elvis Has Left the Building, “and actually developed the acting skills that had eluded him for over a decade. He was a much better actor on stage in Vegas than he had been in any of his films.” Most white singers would sound phony doing “In the Ghetto” (and that over-articulated t in ghetto is easy to make fun of), but Elvis puts it across with the sheer intensity of his attack and the beauty of his vocals. A big, steamy balla
d like “I Can’t Stop Loving You” is right in his wheelhouse, but he can also take an unlikely number, like the Bee Gees’ somewhat drippy “Words,” and give it real passion and splendor. He turns “Suspicious Minds” into a seven-minute symphony of anguished love—with its four-minute-long, almost incantatory coda, in which the first three lines (“I’m caught in a trap / I can’t walk out / Because I love you too much, baby”) are repeated nearly twenty times, with a series of diminuendos and crescendos that tease the audience, as the song builds to a furious, almost orgasmic climax and Elvis seems ready to keel over from exhaustion.
The big assemblage of musicians and backup singers aren’t simply Vegas overkill; they seem to complete the songs, to unleash their full power. The soulful embellishments of the Sweet Inspirations fill up the house beautifully, and the James Burton–led rhythm group is always tight and on the money. (“Play it, James,” Elvis would say, introducing Burton’s slick but never showy solo turns.) Only the orchestra seems a little underused. Frank Leone, who played piano in the Bobby Morris–led outfit, felt it was handicapped by Elvis’s lack of any conventional charts, or arrangements. “Elvis came in with no music; he was very naive as to charts,” said Leone. “The rhythm section was like gold—they were great musicians. But the [house] band would just sit there. It was a shame. It was a wasted orchestra.”
As the engagement went on, Elvis’s patter between songs got wackier and more freewheeling, with stream-of-consciousness ramblings that are often silly, disjointed, and sometimes nearly incomprehensible. He mumbles and meanders, constantly interrupts himself, makes self-referential asides, laughs at jokes he seems to be the only one in on (“Whassat? Whassat? Oh, it’s me, it’s me”).When he clears his throat, he jokes about clearing his throat. When he asks for water, he calls it “wa-wa”—then makes fun of himself for using the baby word. There are nervous, self-deprecating interjections: “They’re watchin’ me, folks, they’re gonna put me away, I know it!” But nobody was watching him more closely than Elvis himself—who always felt like an outsider, never quite comfortable with the success that he feared could vanish any minute.
Midway through the show, Elvis delivered his most extended monologue, a somewhat rambling recap of his life and career: the early Memphis years, The Ed Sullivan Show, the Army, Hollywood—“my side of the story,” as he put it. It was as self-revealing as Elvis would ever get onstage, if you could navigate through all the digressions, fits and starts, bad jokes, and country-boy cuteness:
I was just out of high school, I was driving a truck, and I was training to be an electrician. And I got wired the wrong way, baby. One day on my lunch break I went into a . . . hot-dog stand! No, a record company. To make a record for my own use, you know. I really wasn’t trying to get into the business. The guy put the record out about a year and a half later. So just overnight in my hometown, it started to get a lot of reaction. People were saying, “Who is he?” “What is he?” “Is he, is he?” I don’t know, I’m saying, “Am I? Am I?” I had sideburns and all. Fourteen years ago it was weird, you know. You think it’s weird now, fourteen years ago I couldn’t walk down the street, man—“Get him! Get him! He’s a squirrel, man!” So I was goin’, “Hmmpfh hmmpfh!” Shaking. In fact, that’s how I get into this business was shakin’. May be how I get out of it too. So anyway, the guy put the record out, and it became pretty big in my home town, Memphis, and in certain parts of the country it got to be pretty big, pretty well-known. But nobody really knew who I was. So I was workin’ little nightclubs, little football fields, little alleys, you know, weird-looking rooms with little things crawling around the ceiling lookin’ at you, you know. And I did it for like a year and a half. And in 1956 I met Colonel Sanders—Parker!
Elvis was always at his worst talking onstage, trying to sound casual and unscripted; as a stand-up comedian he was hopeless. “He was so undisciplined it was a joke,” said Joe Guercio, who became Elvis’s orchestra leader a year later. “I don’t think he was ever really at ease onstage. Every time he felt an insecure moment, he would turn around and do a ha-ha to somebody, go to Charlie for a minute or somebody else.” Elvis never used four-letter words onstage, but he began to get a little loose with the racy double entendres. (Talking about his time in the Army, Elvis joked that the men must have been awfully lonely because they kept calling each other “mother.”) Midway through the run, Colonel Parker wrote Elvis a note cautioning him to watch himself, especially during dinner shows, when families could be in the audience. “The pressure is getting a little heavy regarding the off-color material,” the Colonel wrote, warning him not to “undo all the good that we have created during the first part of our engagement.”
In rehearsals Elvis would often play around by slipping jokey or off-color lyrics into familiar songs, just to amuse himself and loosen up the room. He mostly restrained himself from that kind of thing in his first Vegas engagement, with one notorious exception. At the midnight show on August 26, Elvis was in the middle of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” when he mischievously changed the lyrics and created a blooper reel for the ages. The lines he usually sang were:
Do the chairs in your parlor seem empty and bare?
Do you gaze at your doorstep and picture me there?”
At this performance, he sang instead:
Do the chairs in your parlor seem empty and bare?
Do you gaze at your bald head and wish you had hair?
The altered lyrics were clearly planned in advance, and he delivered them so deftly that some in the audience might not even have realized the switch. But the stunt so cracked him up that he burst into a laughing jag that he simply couldn’t stop. He kept trying to resume the song, only to dissolve back into guffaws—right through the sober talking interlude (“I wonder if you’re lonesome tonight . . .”), even as Cissy Houston continued her florid soprano accompaniment, untethered to the absent lead singer. That seemed to crack up Elvis even more.
“That’s it, man. Fourteen years, right down the drain,” Elvis said when he finally, breathlessly, reached the end. It was an unprofessional, really inexcusable lapse—yet one of the most disarming and delightfully genuine moments of his career.
He performed for four solid weeks, two shows a night, without a single night off. Elvis claimed he didn’t mind the grueling schedule. “I’d go stark raving mad if I had to sit around one night, just twiddling my thumbs,” he told friends. But the punishing pace almost surely contributed to his mounting drug use—pills to keep him alert, more pills to get himself to sleep. “Do you realize what kind of hell four weeks is?” said Lamar Fike. “That’s a marathon—nearly sixty performances. And Elvis had such a high-energy act that when he would do an honest hour and fifteen minutes twice a night, he was so tired he was cross-eyed. That’s why he took all that stuff to keep him going.”
But no one was paying much attention to that now, least of all Elvis, who seemed fully in control and rejuvenated by the triumph in Vegas. “He was like a newborn child,” said Jerry Schilling. “He was smiling, he was in a great mood, he was untiring. He wanted to see everybody. He wanted to talk about the show. It was a great time professionally and personally. I would say, outside of the birth of his child, that was the happiest I ever saw him. And he was not just happy for himself; he was happy for the whole group. He was happy for the audience.”
“It gave me a new life,” Elvis told Frank Lieberman of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. “I was human again. There was hope for the future.”
Every night after finishing his midnight show, Elvis would hold court in his suite at the top of the International Hotel, with its panoramic view of the city he had just conquered. Often he would jam with members of the band or get the Imperials to join him in a late-night round of gospel songs. The singers enjoyed the time with him—but were just as happy when the call didn’t come and they could retreat to their own rooms, at a motel three blocks away. “I had never even been to Vegas,” said Terry Blackwood. “The whole Vegas scene was not
one that I was really that comfortable with. So I basically did the show and went to my room. My parents were very devout Christians, and they didn’t want me there. But I had a lot of prayer offered for me, to protect me, keep me from messing up, being caught up in that. And I didn’t.”
Elvis was feeling some of the same conflict, between his deep religious roots and the bacchanalia surrounding him in Vegas. Pat Boone, the former teen idol well-known for his clean-cut image and Christian family values, visited the suite one night and was surprised when Elvis took him into a walk-in closet to talk about religion. “I wish I could go to church like you,” Elvis told him. Boone asked what was stopping him. “I think I’d make too much of a scene,” Elvis said. “It would distract from the preacher.” Then he asked if Boone could help him get in touch with Oral Roberts, the Oklahoma televangelist. Though amused that Elvis thought he needed an intermediary, Boone did make the connection with Roberts, who later met with Elvis in Los Angeles. Boone felt that Elvis was “spiritually starved. He had been to church as a boy with his folks, and he was missing that experience.” Other performers who met with Elvis in Las Vegas were similarly struck by his eagerness to talk about his religious faith. Even Sammy Shore—who only played a preacher in his comedy act—would sometimes get visits in his dressing room from Elvis, who would read him Bible verses.
Elvis always had some ambivalence about the sins of Sin City. He loved the shows, the women, and the all-night action. (He would generally sleep until late afternoon, then get up for a 5:00 p.m. breakfast that usually included a Spanish omelet and a pound of bacon.) But he gambled only occasionally, and never with much enthusiasm. He would drink, but not to excess, and he had little patience for those who did. Comedian Rich Little was impressed when he met Elvis for the first time after one of his ’69 shows: “He was very nice, very courteous, very interested in what you were doing. He poured drinks for you.” But when a TV actor who was visiting got rip-roaring drunk, Elvis simply walked out of the room. “He didn’t like that, and he left. Didn’t say goodbye or anything. Just left.”
Elvis in Vegas : How the King of Rock 'n' Roll Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (9781501151217) Page 21
