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 * Inside the Las Vegas Show That Turned Elvis' Career Around


INSIDE THE LAS VEGAS SHOW THAT TURNED ELVIS' CAREER AROUND

Elvis Presley performs onstage at the International Hotel in Las Vegas, in late
July or August 1969. Presley performed 57 shows, usually two a day, between July
31 and August 28, at the newly opened hotel.
Fotos International—Getty Images
Ideas
By Richard Zoglin
July 23, 2019 10:28 AM EDT
Richard Zoglin is a TIME magazine contributor and the author of Hope:
Entertainer of the Century and Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s
Changed America.

By the end of the 1960s, Elvis Presley’s career was in disrepair — treading
water in a sea of bad movies, records that no longer made the charts and a
decade of increasing irrelevance in the fast-changing world of rock’ n’ roll. He
had made a splashy comeback in a widely acclaimed NBC special in December 1968.
But he hadn’t performed live onstage in more than eight years. So when he opened
in Las Vegas on July 31, 1969 — the start of a four-week engagement at the brand
new International Hotel — it was a make-or-break career gamble. Richard Zoglin’s
book Elvis in Vegas: How the King Reinvented the Las Vegas Show, out July 23,
offers a counter-narrative to the conventional wisdom that his time in Vegas
contributed to the star’s decline. Instead, Zoglin argues, this time saw him not
only remake himself, but the entire template for Las Vegas entertainment. The
following excerpt goes inside that opening night, revealing both the anxiety
leading up to it and the resulting triumph.


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Listen to the audiobook version of this excerpt here:



Elvis was as ready as he could ever be: well rehearsed, backed by first-rate
musicians, and heralded by the biggest publicity campaign in Vegas history. Yet
his show still had something of a homemade, seat of-the-pants quality. Elvis
hadn’t been on a concert stage in years and knew little about modern sound
systems and other technical matters. The showroom was daunting: twice as large
as any other venue in Las Vegas, with room for 2,000 people. The opening-night
audience was filled with Hollywood stars, Vegas entertainers and assorted high
rollers, along with rock critics and entertainment reporters from around the
country. Even in a town used to star-studded opening nights, the array of
celebrities—Cary Grant, Sammy Davis Jr., Ann-Margret, Paul Anka, Dionne
Warwick—was impressive.

Backstage before the show, Elvis was a nervous wreck. “I can remember Elvis
sitting on a couch,” bassist Jerry Scheff recalled, “his knee going up and down
like a piston, his hands dancing like butterflies.” “You could see the sweat
just pouring out of him before he went onstage,” said his friend and road
manager Joe Esposito. “He was always nervous before a show, but he was never
nervous like that again.” Everybody tried to keep him calm. “If you get lost,
just turn around and we’ll start playing louder,” guitarist John Wilkinson
reassured him. “Don’t worry about it, your friends are here.”

The Showroom Internationale was filling up, anticipation building. The expansive
stage was sixty feet wide, with a ten-thousand-pound, Austrianmade gold-lamé
curtain. The ornate decor featured crystal chandeliers and figurines of angels
hanging from the ceiling and a hodgepodge of ancient Greek, Roman, and Louis
XIV-era paintings and statuary. A setting fit for a returning king.

Simon and Schuster

Usually in Vegas the headliner would be announced by a disembodied voice—“Ladies
and gentlemen, direct from the bar—Dean Martin!” But as the curtain rose, Elvis
simply walked out, an acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder, grabbed the
microphone in his right hand—which was visibly trembling—paused for a moment,
then launched into the familiar lyrics: “Well, it’s one for the money, / Two for
the show, / Three to get ready / Now go, cat, go . . .”




As he sang “Blue Suede Shoes,” the crowd erupted. It was the old Elvis, rocking
as hard as ever on a classic hit they hadn’t heard him sing in over a decade. He
was wearing one of costume designer Bill Belew’s two-piece karate outfits, dark
blue, with flared pants and a sashlike belt that whipped around as he moved. His
high-collared shirt was unbuttoned nearly to his navel, with a scarf loosely
knotted around his neck. (His friend and hairstylist Larry Geller claimed that
Elvis wore high collars to imitate the spiritual masters in David Anrias’s book
Through the Eyes of the Masters. Priscilla said it was because Elvis thought his
neck was too long.)

The frenzied reaction from the crowd startled the performers. “They wouldn’t
shut up,” Wilkinson recalled; “all through the first song they kept shouting and
cheering, they couldn’t get enough of him.” As he finished his opening number,
Elvis let the cheers wash over him, then turned around to face the musicians
behind him and sort of shrugged his shoulders—as if to say, “Maybe this isn’t
going to be so bad.”

Then he roared on, doing a hard-driving version of Ray Charles’s “I Got a
Woman,” followed by a string of his biggest fifties hits, from “All Shook Up,”
to “Heartbreak Hotel.” During “Love Me Tender,” Elvis planted kisses on as many
female fans in the front row as he could reach. He did the up-tempo songs faster
than in the old days, as if he were trying to get through them as quickly as
possible. “I think he did them because people expected those songs,” said
drummer Ronnie Tutt. “You could tell he just wanted to rush through them. He
wasn’t necessarily thrilled with who he was in the fifties. Because he had
become a different man.” When he got to “Hound Dog” (a song he didn’t like
anymore), he prefaced it with a long, tongue-in-cheek buildup, telling the
audience he wanted to do a “special song” just right for a “tender, touching
moment”—before the sudden explosion: “YOU AIN’T NOTHIN’ . . .” He raced through
that one so fast it was almost disrespectful.




After the trip down memory lane, Elvis changed the pace with several numbers
that showcased his more emotional, ballad-driven style, like Mac Davis’
“Memories,” the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” and the angsty “I Can’t Stop Loving You.”
Elvis’s feverish, seven-minute performance of the yet-unreleased single
“Suspicious Minds” nearly brought the house down. In the last part of the show,
Elvis circled back to the 1950s with an energetic cover of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny
B. Goode.” Then he revved up the jets for the old Ray Charles rouser “What’d I
Say,” before closing the show (as he would nearly every live show for the rest
of his career) with “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” his ballad from the 1961 film
Blue Hawaii.

“I never saw anything like it in my life,” said Mac Davis, who was in the
audience, flattered when Elvis gave him a shout-out—“Hiya, Mac”—before singing
“In the Ghetto,” the hit that Davis had written for him. “He was physically
beautiful at that age, just a specimen. You couldn’t take your eyes off the guy.
Women rushing the stage, people clamoring over each other. I couldn’t wipe the
grin off my face the entire time.” Ann Moses, editor of the teen magazine Tiger
Beat, said, “I saw the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, and the Rolling Stones at
the Cow Palace in San Francisco. But there was something about that night that
was so special. Everyone was dumbstruck and didn’t want the night to end. It was
one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen.”

The performance lasted an hour and fifteen minutes, with Elvis pacing the stage
like a panther, crouching, lunging, leaping, doing karate kicks and punches. He
gulped water and Gatorade and mopped his sweat with handkerchiefs tossed onstage
by women in the audience. “He was like a wild man,” recalled Felton Jarvis, his
RCA record producer. “I mean, he almost hurt himself—he was doing flips and
cartwheels and all kinds of stuff.” The cartwheels may have been an
exaggeration, but no one could doubt that Elvis was giving it everything he had.
In one show later in the run, he split his pants and had to retreat offstage,
where his entourage formed a protective ring around him while he changed quickly
into a new pair. (This prompted Belew to switch to one-piece jumpsuits—more
forgiving in the crotch.)




He talked to the audience in between numbers—nervously, self-consciously, with a
few awkward jokes. He noted that this was “my first live appearance in nine
years. Appeared dead a few times. . . .” He joked about the garish
showroom—“Welcome to the big, freaky International Hotel, with those weirdo
dolls on the walls and those funky angels on the ceiling.” He repeated the same
lines almost every night, but the evening had a loose, spontaneous quality too.

The awkwardness and spontaneity were refreshing. This was no slick Vegas
headliner, with polished stage patter and fake effusions of love for the
audience. Elvis was still the overgrown kid from Memphis, as anxious about
talking (as opposed to singing) to an audience as the audience was eager to make
him feel welcome. But musically, he was a revelation. When the show was over,
Elvis got a standing ovation—“one of the rare occasions,” Myram Borders reported
in the Nevada State Journal, “when a Las Vegas standing salute was sincere
rather than rigged with a few cronies of an entertainer planted down front to
stamp and scream approval.” Over the next seven years, he would perform more
than 600 shows in Las Vegas—and sell out every one. The show was a clear
triumph.

Copyright © 2019 by Richard Zoglin. From the forthcoming book ELVIS IN VEGAS:
How the King Reinvented the Las Vegas Show by Richard Zoglin to be published by
Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.

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