One month after closing in Las Vegas Elvis was back in the studio, but not in Nashvville this time. Instead, Felton racked with pain and wasting away from the kidney disease that would kill him unless he got a transplant soon, came out to Los Angeles, where Elvis was scheduled to start filming rehearsals for the upcoming tour on March 30, the day after the recording session was finished. Six days later the tour itself would begin, the occasion for another hastily arranged MGM documentary, which dislodged the original concept for a Vegas live album with a live soundtrack album (to be called, like the film, Standing Room Only) and which would generate another $250,000 on top of the million dollars they were guaranteed by the concert promoters. It was just one more of the Colonel's intricately wrapped packages, but this time with a couple of differences: one was that the informal understanding that Elvis and Colonel had arrived at for a two-thirds-one-third division of the income from personal appearances had not been formalized with a February 4 contractual agreement acknowledging the Colonel's "unique contributions" as a justification for his one-third share; in addition, Management III was no longer the sole promoter of the tour. Through a series of carefully maneuvers, Colonel had inveigled RCA to go into the concert business as RCa Record Tours, to put up half the money and take half the risk on Elvis' show, and thus in effect to undercut Jerry Weintraub's influence, with everything now taking place directly under the Colonel's supervision.
Elvis could not have cared less about any of this. He was, everyone agreed, in a funny kind of mood, even for Elvis, chastened, brooding, almost perplexed over what could have finally caused Priscilla to leave, after all he had done to drive her to it. Some of the guys thought it was simply the humiliation of her going off with someone else, particularly someone that Elvis knew and admired, but it seemed as much of almost autumnal regret. He kept listening to that damned Charles Boyer album "Where Does Love Go?" over and over, until it just about drove them all crazy, listening intently to those melancholy recitations, as if they alone might provide the answer to the question that the album's title posed, the one question that seemed to be forever on his mind.
On the second night of the sessions everyone could see that Elvis' heart wasn't really in it. They kept working till four in the morning but got only one more song that night and two the following night, including "Always On My Mind," another guilt-laden number that Red West had brought to the session by "Mama Liked The Roses" author Johnny Christopher and Mark James.
**Careless Love**
by Peter Guralnick |
