Opening Night, July 31, 1969 was by invitation, one show only, with A-plus celebrity list that the Colonel had been working on for the last two months, There was a pantheon of music celebrities, from Fats Domino and Pat Boone to Paul Anka, Phil Ochs, Carol Channing, Shirley Bassey, and Dick Clark---with most of the Strip headliners in attendance.
There was a full-scale dress rehearsal in the afternoon, but by the time the curtain went up on the Sweet Inspirations at 8:15, Elvis had worked himself into such a frenzy that Joe had his doubts about whether or not he was going to be able to go on. "Everything was fine right up until that night. He just had no idea of how he was going to be received. He was pacing back and forth, back and forth; you could see the sweat just pouring out of him before he went onstage. He was always nervous before every show, but he was never nervous like that again."
The Sweet Inspirations did a stiff opening set, highlighted by dressed-up versions of "Born Free," "The Impossible Bream," and "How High the Moon." Dammy Shore, a forty-one year-old comic whom the Colonel had spotted opening for Tom Jones, did a crowd-pleasing turn that centered around the exhortations of his alter ego, a black preacher named Brother Sam. And then Elvis came out, unheralded, practically unannounced, to a vamp from all things, Carl Perkins' "Blue Suede Shoes," which he had practically massacred in a clash of over-the-top vocals and orchestral pretensions on the NBC special. This time there was no question of pretense; with his own handpicked band behind him he simply rocked, and almost in that instant, the whole room exploded.
The first few nights were not recorded, but with the evidence of subsequent recordings and from response he got, it doesn't seem difficult to imagine just how explosive a moment it really was, as he roared from one number to the next. "Don't Be Cruel" in which (the former) a "knocked-out jailbird" became a "knocked-out sonabitch" under the influence of Elvis' high spirits. And then he spoke, in a human voice that both reassured an audience almost dazzled by his show and at the same time raised the level of nervous energy another notch. "Good evening ladies and gentlemen," he said. "Welcome to the big, freaky International Hotel, with those weirdo dolls on the walls and those little funky angels on the ceiling [referring to the ornate semiclassical sculptures scattered around the room], and, man, you ain't seen nothing until you've seen a funky angel. Before the evening's out I'm sure I will have made a complete and utter fool of myself--but I hope you get a kick out of watching."
This was Elvis in overdrive; all the terror that Joe had glimpsed during the day exploded now in a kind of manic release, but a release that was as instinctively controlled and responsive to hie own sense of the audience's needs as it was the first time he ever set foot on a stage. Gary Grant was on his feet; comedienne Totie Fields stood on a table swinging a bottle; even Divine Barbra Streisand was visibly swooning.
As he grew more secure, more of a sense of fun crept into his perfprmance, something that may have escaped many opening-night critics and fans. This became most noticable in the between-songs patter that evolved over the next few nights, which became increasingly revealing as he let his fondness fot puns and wordplay run rampant. He invariably delivered "Mystery Train" and "Tiger Man" with gusto, but then, dredging up elements of the monologue that Steve Binder had urged on him for the television special, he gave the audience a little history lesson, too. It would change every night, but the essence of it always remained the same: how he started out in show business almost by accident, while studying to be an electrictian.
"But I was wired the wrong way. One day on my lunch break I went in to make a little demonstration record---I mean, I really wasn't trying to get into the business, but about a year and a half later the guy put the record out. No one had heard of me, but just overnight people were saying, "Is he? Is he?,' you know, and I'm going, 'Am I? Am I?' I bacame pretty big in my hometown and a few parts of the country, and I started working nightclubs and football fields, little weird rooms where people are going, 'Hmm, hmm,' you know, and they threw me off the Opry, and Aruthur Godfrey took one look and said, 'Nah, nah...' So I did that for a year and a half, and Parker, he explained, got him on television.
So I went to New York, and people were saying, "Get him, get him, hot damn, he's just out of the trees."...So there was a lot of controversy, and I went on The Ed Sullivan Show, and the cameras were only filming from the waist up, you know, and Ed Sullivan is standing on the sidelines going, "Sonofabitch, sonofabitch," and I', saying, "Thank you, Ed, thank you very much"----I didn't know what he was calling me at the time. And I did The Steve Allen Show, and they wanted to tame me down, so they had me dressed in a tuxedo and singing to a dog on a stool. The dog is peeing, and I didn't know it, you know, so I'm singing, "You ain't nothing but a hound dog," and the dog's going, "Ump. ump," and I'm going, "Back, back, you fool," and the dog ran out of the room.
So I did that show, and then I went to Hollywood. Hollywood is the next move, you know. That's what happens: you get a record, then you get on television, and then you go to Hollywood. So I made Love Me Tender, then I did Loving You, "Loving Her," loving whoever I could get my hands on a the time. So I did Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, four pictures, man, I was really getting used to the Hollywood bit. I had a Cadillac limousine, I had sunglasses on, sitting in the backseat, saying, "I'm a movie star, hot damn, I'm cool." Eating hamburgers and drinking Pepsi Colas, you know. "Better watch squirrel, man, when he gets out of the trees!" So I was living it up pretty good when I got drafted, shafted, and everything else. Just overnight it was all gone, you know. I was in a different world, and I woke up, and it was gone.
At first they watched me to see what I was going to do. And when they saw I was just like them, then everything turned out okay. But the guys in the service must get awful lonesome, because they call each other "mother" a lot.......Anyway, I got out of the service in 1960, and I made some movies like G.I. Blues and Blue Hawaii, and several pictures that did very well for me. But as the years went by it got harder and harder to perform to a movie camera, and I really missed the people, I really missed contact with a live audience. And I just wanted to tell you how good it is to be back.
And then he would return to the show. He never once lost them, he had them in the palm of his hand. It was a triumph of the rarest sort, a triumph of class, in which, finally. he was able to achieve the validation he had always wanted but never explicitly sought...........and strictly on his own terms.
*Careless Love by Peter Guralnick* |
