“Elvis was hardly ever nervous – but he was then,” drummer D.J. Fontana tells Rolling Stone, reflecting on the 1968 television special that relaunched Presley’s career.
“We played a couple of songs, and it got loose after a while, and it turned out fine. He just had been out of the public eye for a long time.”If Presley was nervous at all, though, it didn’t show. When he appeared onscreen, it was with a piercing stare and a curled lip. He was dressed head-to-toe in black leather, and best of all, his voice sounded powerful: He wailed “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” and other hits like it was 1956. The hour-long broadcast, then dubbed Elvis and now known as the “’68 Comeback Special,” proved that the then–33-year-old still had swagger. For years, he’d been exiled in Hollywood – making movies instead of touring, as the Beatles blew up and rock got bigger than ever – so the show was a long-overdue return to pure performing for the singer. It was a daring move, and it almost didn’t happen.
When Presley’s manager, the notoriously iron-willed Colonel Tom Parker, initially met with NBC in May 1968, he asked them to produce a special of Presley singing Christmas songs. It was a novel idea, since most TV specials then featured multiple artists and this one would focus solely on Presley, but it wasn’t until onetime Hullabaloo director Steve Binder and his producer foil Bones Howe took creative control and told Presley it could be an opportunity to do what Binder called “something really important” – ditching the Christmas angle and instead re-announcing himself as a performer – that Presley was sold.
Binder and Howe decided the special should tell the story of Presley’s life in music through the lyrics he sang, beginning with the chucka-chucka rhythms of Jerry Reed’s “Guitar Man” (later paired with “Trouble”) and showing how singing had delivered a sometime truck driver to stardom. They wanted it to end with Elvis singing a current hit, possibly “MacArthur Park,” though Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker was still hoping for it to end with a Christmas song. It was an idea that they’d develop until almost the last minute. Meanwhile, the singer went on vacation and slimmed down.
When he’d returned, the creators had decided to include an “informal segment” – an off-the-cuff performance with a little scripted conversation. That, too, evolved as they watched Presley riff with the other musicians during rehearsals. “Elvis loved to improvise and talk about old times and play the songs and keep repeating them – he would get excited just by repetition,” song arranger Billy Goldenberg said in Peter Guralnick’s book Careless Love. “So that the intensity of the song seemed to grow as he kept playing it, almost to a climax.”
At Presley’s request, Binder flew in Presley’s original sidemen – Fontana and guitarist Scotty Moore – to make him feel more comfortable for the segment, and he suggested that Presley could talk about his infamous censored Ed Sullivan Show performance and other hijinks, such as a time in Florida when he had to stand still and move only his pinky to avoid an arrest for being too sexual in public. The director felt this would give the singer more edge.
They moved into the NBC studio on June 17th, rehearsing “Guitar Man,” and they began recording the choreographed “story” section of the special three days later with a strong selection of L.A. sidemen, including guitarist Mike Deasy and drummer Hal Blaine. It was also then that Binder decided they needed another song to end the show, leading him to beseech vocal arranger Earl Brown to write what would become “If I Can Dream” – a vision of unity and racial harmony – overnight as a replacement for Parker’s Christmas song.
Presley loved it. When he recorded the song, he did so in the dark. “He was in an almost fetal position, writhing on the cement floor, singing that song,” Binder told Guralnick. “And when he got done, he came in the control room, and we played it maybe 15 times. He just loved it so much.”
By and large, though, Deasy remembers Presley as lighthearted during the recording sessions. “My wife was at the rehearsal, and Elvis came in and walked up behind her,” he says. “I said, ‘Kathie, I want you to meet Elvis.’ And she turns around and elbows him right in the chest, and of course, he fell back and acted like it really hurt. We all got a good laugh. That’s how cool he was.”
Presley goofed around a lot at the rehearsals, too. He’d push recordings to just a few minutes before midnight – driving the music-union representatives crazy – only to finish perfectly on time. And when the band recorded “Guitar Man,” he came out of the vocal booth to dance to the music. “He was in such good shape,” Deasy says. “He was into karate, and he was physically very cool. He’s taller than you thought, but he was out there doing this dance while we were playing and it was a super connection. It…
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