Felton Jarvis was in the midst of preparing for a new series of Elvis sessions in Nashville when he officially resigned from his position with the RCA label. In the four years they'd been working together Elvis had grown comfortable with Felton's producing style and judgment, and when Elvis offered to hire him on as his personal producer, Jarvis jumped at the chance. His first order of business was to make arrangements to cut the eighteen sides (one album and two singles) the singer was required to deliver in 1970. In addition to putting him in exclusive charge of Elvis's recording career, the new position would also give Felton a control in the artist's escalating concert schedule.
Felton's new employment started with a session scheduled for the night of June 4, 1970. Two and a half years had passed since Elvis had last recorded at RCA's Studio B in Nashville; fed up with a system that was going nowhere, Elvis had given up Music City for Chips Morman's Memphis, but their uncomfortable parting meant that returning to American was out of the question this time around. And perhaps there were other reasons Elvis might have been happy to look elsewhere: Working with Moman, whose preference for strong, contemporary songs, rehearsed, played, and arranged to meet his own vision and standards....collided sharply with the freewheeling, try-and-thing approach to recording that Elvis had followed since the Sun days. Nor was Felton without his own feelings in the matter: He didn't want to be overlooked in the credit process either, and he felt he was just as responsible as Chips for some of the best of the Memphis recordings....not the mention five hit singles and the Grammy winning How Great Thou Art album before Chips was even in the picture. He was more than ready to be back in the driver's seat.....on his own.....and he couldn't wait to get started.
June 8. What became the final night of the session began with Elvis agreeing that Dallas Frazier's "There Goes My Everything" "doesn't have to be straight country" and turning it into another fervent modern ballad. With the next three songs, "If I Were You," the inspirational "Only Believe," and "Sylvia," they all knew they'd reached the bottom of the demo pile. They were all still performing at their peek, but the material was unimaginative, and so were the arrangements. When Elvis closed the sessions with Eddie Rabbitt and Rory Bourke's frenetic rocker "Patch It Up," he brought the four days of sessions to a blaxing conclusion; if the material had only been there, it seemed he could have gone on all week.
**The Complete Recording Sessions**
by Ernst Jorgensen |
