Previous Page In the meantime, Hollywood beckoned again, and the afterglow of the Gospel session quickly disappeared. Just two weeks after finishing “If Every Day Was Like Christmas” it was back to the drudgery of the MGM recording studio in Hollywood. Up next: The Double Trouble soundtrack. Two songs stand out for wildly different reasons: A low-effort rocker called “Long Legged Girl (With a Short Dress On)” was the highpoint of the soundtrack session, but though it was comparatively good, it had nothing on the work he’d just finished in Nashville. Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content On the other side of the coin….is “Old MacDonald.” If you want a quick summation of how far Elvis had fallen as a rebellious rock and roll icon, this is it: The man who recorded “One Night Of Sin” and who had to be filmed from the waist up on Ed Sullivan was now forced to smile with dead eyes and sing “E-I-E-I-O.” Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content Kill me. And then, to pour salt in the wound, in comes September’s recording session for Paramount’s Easy Come Easy Go. Unlike most of his 1960’s soundtrack work, the thin and flat sound that usually accompanied Elvis’s bored uninspired vocals are missing here. Now, Elvis is at least backed by a lively band, but unfortunately, an overproduced brass section on “You Gotta Stop” turns an already-average song into something nearly-unlistenable as Elvis is almost drowned out for most of the number. Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content Easy Come Easy Go was a failure on all fronts. As a movie, it failed even to make its production budget back. This was actually the second Elvis movie that failed to turn a profit (not counting Wild in the Country which broke even), but unlike the previous failure, Frankie and Johnny, Easy Come Easy Go was not an expensive film. Frankie and Johnny was insanely-budgeted at nearly four-million dollars (a lot for an Elvis musical) and ended up earning 2.75 million at the box office; had the film been more modestly budgeted it might have made money. Easy Come Easy Go, however, was modestly budgeted. It only cost two million dollars to make, but only pulled in 1.9 million in ticket sales. Apparently, Elvis himself wasn’t the only one growing tired of the same old song and dance. The soundtrack fared no better; in fact it fared worse: With only eight songs recorded and no obvious hit among them, Parker decided to release the soundtrack as a six-track Extended Play. By 1966, however, the EP was essentially a dead medium and the album’s sales reflected that: It became the first Elvis’s album of new material to fail to chart anywhere on the Billboard rankings. Its sales were an astonishingly-dismal thirty-thousand units. As 1967 approached, things looked no better. Clambake saw Elvis playing a son who rebels against the arranged plans of his father, and oil tycoon. Let’s just pause and consider the fact that Elvis was over thirty years old and was playing a role that would have been right at home with someone almost half his age. The hook of the story is that Elvis trades identities with a water-skiing instructor so that he can see how people react to him, not as a “rich kid” (again, he’s over thirty) but as a “normal guy.” Because nothing says “normal guy” like water-skiing instructor. If the plot sounds derivative that’s because it is. Rich guy swapping roles with a poor guy has been done in storytelling since there were rich guys and poor guys. But if you tell a story well enough or put a clever enough twist on it you can make any “old tale” fresh and interesting. And if this was 1957 maybe you might expect something clever or well-told. But this was 1967, and by this point, Elvis’s movies were just assembly-line productions that came with only the bare essentials needed to get by. The movie was set in Florida, but next to nothing was filmed there (some minor B-roll footage and that’s it). All of the major scenes were filmed in Hollywood, to save money. On the one hand that’s understandable, considering some of the recent Box Office struggles Elvis’s movies had incurred, but on the other hand if you’re going to make the theme a beach/water-skiing one then why not just set it in California? I mean at one point the sun is shown setting over what is supposed to be the Atlantic Ocean! Critics chewed the film up. It first premiered in October but didn’t receive a wide release until that Christmas, and its detractors used every bad Christmas pun they could think of in their reviews. The soundtrack was a mixed bag; the material recorded for the movie (which was recorded way back in February) offered almost nothing of substance. The only real standout in the bunch was a cover of the Ray Charles classic “You Don’t Know Me” and even that song was bested just a few months later by a second version he recorded in Nashville. The Nashville version ended up as a B-side single release but still managed to reach #44. The movie version, however, is vocally-weak and lacks a depth of instrumentation that the second try in September would bring… Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content Only eight of the twelve songs featured on the soundtrack album came from the movie. The other four songs were taken from his recent September recording session. That material, both the writing and performances, was strong enough to almost save the record. It ended up a Top-40 album. It wasn’t just Elvis’s career that seemed to be getting away from him, either: His personal life nearly did him in all on its own. Presley proposed to Priscilla around Christmastime of 1966, and the couple married on the first day of May, 1967. Depending on who you choose to believe, the marriage was either a case of Elvis doing right by the young lady he’d been stringing along for years, or Elvis being forced to do right by the young lady he’d been stringing along for years. Some close associates, like Elvis’s Graceland cook, claim that Elvis was despondent over having to marry Priscilla, saying that he couldn’t cancel and that he “had to” marry her. There were whispers and rumors that either Priscilla or her father threatened to expose Elvis’s relationship with the twenty-two-year-old (who had been a minor when they first started seeing each other). It’s a felony to take a minor across state lines in the context of a sexual relationship, but Priscilla herself says that she and Elvis never had sex until after they were married. It wouldn’t have mattered though, RCA had its own rules and clauses in their talent contracts, and a scandal is a scandal even without any actual laws being broken. If you believe Elvis’s hand was forced then it came by way of Col. Parker more than anyone else. On the other hand, there’s someone like long-time companion Red West, who says that Elvis always talked to him happily about marrying Priscilla and seemed excited to do it. In the end, they wed, and exactly nine months later, Lisa Marie came into the world. Elvis was there, but soon after was gone again. More movies had to be made and more soundtracks had to be recorded. Speedway was next up after Clambake but unfortunately, it was too much like Clambake (in tone) and not enough like Viva Las Vegas. The movie again cast Elvis as a race car driver, a move that seemingly was meant to project “coolness” yet never could because everything around the racing scenes was square and corny. It also didn’t help that the racing scenes themselves were just shots of Elvis making faces in front of a rear-projection screen, mixed with stock footage of real racers zipping around a track. At least in this film, Elvis was given a female co-star of some presence: Nancy Sinatra played the role of Elvis’s love interest better than any since Ann-Margret. Sinatra had already scored several top-ten music hits as well as a number-one duet with her father Frank. Piggybacking off her popularity, the soundtrack featured a rarity: a song by Nancy without Elvis’s vocals anywhere to be heard. Unfortunately, not even Nancy Sinatra could pull Elvis’s movies or soundtracks out of the ditch: The album never moved past #80 and the movie flopped; grossing only two-million dollars on a three-million-dollar budget. Elvis was paid thirty-percent of the movie’s budget, with a bonus written into his contract that would have seen him score 50% of the film’s profit had the movie actually made a profit. Presley was now becoming more of a studio liability than a guaranteed bankable star. Elvis pictures used to be “easy money” movies for studios, films that could be made relatively cheaply and bring in a profit with ease. Those days were gone; Speedway was basically the last “goofy” Elvis movie that he would make, as most subsequent pictures tried to move toward less campy roles. It’s interesting to consider that, at the time Elvis was recording the soundtrack material for Speedway, The Beatles released their masterpiece: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was an audacious album, vivid in color, varied in lyric, and instantly vital to every music aficionado. Meanwhile, Elvis was knocking out songs like “Five Sleepy Heads” and “He’s Your Uncle Not Your Dad.” While there were a few gems on the album (taken from his studio sessions) the only worthwhile song on the album that was actually recorded for the movie, “Let Yourself Go”, was a song the man himself would remake and far outdo a year later. Please accept YouTube cookies to play this video. By accepting you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party. YouTube privacy policy If you accept this notice, your choice will be saved and the page will refresh. Accept YouTube Content
