Previous Page What Elvis needed was a complete shakeup of the way he did his business and the way that business was presented to the public. Unfortunately, the man himself had no interest in putting in the kind of work that was needed to pull it off. He had been eager in 1968-1969 but those days were over. His live shows in Las Vegas were increasingly becoming exhibitions of his erratic behavior. The man who once held his public image with extreme care, was now slipping into drug-addled rants in the middle of his shows, where he would call out celebrities in the audience that weren’t actually present, or spend ten minutes explaining how “You Gave Me a Mountain” wasn’t about he and Priscilla, despite what the tabloids said. Long meandering conversations with the crowd or with no one in particular had always been common, going back to the beginning of his Las Vegas career, but those had been playful, smiling and, despite the oddity, semi-coherent. Elvis’s 1974 rants were another matter entirely. One famous rant happened to be captured by a fan and was uploaded on YouTube, featuring Elvis railing against a report that he was strung out on heroin. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, the man never touched the stuff, but tabloids make their money with the sensational not the factual. Elvis, of course, had grown increasingly dependent on prescription drugs, not only in the number of different drugs he was taking but also how much he needed to take at once to feel any kind of an effect, but he no doubt rationalized a difference in the two kinds of addictions and justified his own drug-dependency as okay since it was “prescribed by a doctor” (and we’re really stretching the definition of the word “doctor” with respect to Elvis’s primary physician George Nichopoulos). The reports that he was a “drug” user enraged him so much he went on a profanity-laced tirade in the middle of a Las Vegas show, and threatened to pull out the tongue of the man who printed the story. After that, he casually launched into “Hawaiian Wedding Song.” Listen below if you want, but beware: There’s harsh language… 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 Somehow, while his sole gravy train was in the middle of a meltdown, Col. Parker got an idea. Despite the seriousness of Elvis’s condition, the fans in the audience remained loyal and laughed and clapped along with him, no matter what he said. That kind of loyalty sells records, so Parker launched his own record label so that he could sell a “talking album” featuring Elvis’s on-stage banter. Since the RCA contract specifically allowed the company to own Elvis’s recorded music but did not specify the ownership of his words, Parker was able to sell the album (titled Having Fun With Elvis On Stage) at Elvis concerts and reap all of the profits. The record contained merely snippets of Elvis talking about random things, with no continuity, no rhyme or reason to what it said. It’s like listening to randomly assembled pieces of multiple conversations. It’s literally just Elvis…talking. But Parker was, if nothing else, a grade-A huckster who used to paint pigeons yellow and sell them as canaries, and he managed to sell the snake oil of that “record” to countless fans from sea to shining sea. This is where we need to remember that Tom Parker got his start as a Carny. Parker even sold the rights to the album to RCA who turned around and with a straight face sold it like it was just the next Presley album (before an embarrassed Elvis finally discovered it and ordered it discontinued). Probably the most disappointing thing about the record is that it sold! It reached #9 on the US Country charts and sold about as well as Good Times had done earlier in the year. Meanwhile, Elvis was spending almost as much time in bed at the Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis as he was in Graceland. A January 1975 engagement in Las Vegas was postponed so Elvis could be hospitalized with what was announced to be the Flu, but in truth, it was a detox and treatment for an enlarged colon (a side effect of his regular cocktail of drugs). The Baptist Hospital staff tried to flush the drugs out of his system, but Elvis’s lackeys kept him in regular supply, often entering the room with pills as nurses would exit. During this stay, Elvis’s father Vernon suffered a heart attack and spent his stay at Baptist in a bed next to his son. By the end of his life, Elvis would have the entire top floor of the Baptist hospital devoted to his care, ready to receive him whenever he came in. Eventually, Elvis recovered well enough to host a contracted Las Vegas appearance, scheduled for March. RCA needed new albums for 1975 as well, and the December 1973 session at Stax only had enough leftover material for one more record; more would need to be recorded. Felton Jarvis knew it would be a struggle to get much work out of Elvis, who had become almost allergic to responsibility, so he arranged it for Elvis to combine his Vegas rehearsal with a recording session, and booked RCA’s Studio C in Hollywood as the location they’d record in. Much of the material available however was previously-recorded by other artists. Elvis was no song-writer, of course, and while he did love taking someone else’s arrangements and putting his own spin on them, he still relied on material written for him. There was not much of that to be found here, as Elvis was more interested in just recording whatever he’d heard recently on the radio. There was also the matter of Elvis’s enthusiasm, which had been almost non-existent in 1973. There was no way to know, until the man walked into the studio whether they’d get a singer eager to work or a man desperate to go home. Fortunately for everyone, Elvis walked in with a smile on his face and a readiness to take care of business.
