Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [273]
Twenty-nine-year-old Steve Binder was a TV wunderkind, but he’d grown up with blue-collar roots, working in his father’s Los Angeles gas station. He had a rock-and-roll heart, having directed NBC’s prime-time musical-variety series Hullabaloo, a quality, big-budget showcase for the top pop acts of the day, and The T.A.M.I. Show, a 1964 concert film with James Brown, Marvin Gaye, and the Rolling Stones.
Only weeks before getting the call from Finkel, he’d produced and directed a Petula Clark special that sparked a national controversy. While singing a duet of “On the Path of Glory” with Harry Belafonte, Petula touched Harry’s arm. In an era when racial mixing could still raise eyebrows, the show’s sponsor, Plymouth, requested that “the touch” be edited out, fearing it might offend southern viewers. Binder and Clark not only held their ground but also destroyed all other takes of the song, insisting the show be broadcast uncensored. It aired on April 8, 1968, to high ratings and critical acclaim, and made history as the first time a man and a woman of different races had physical contact on American variety TV.
The Elvis special would also be unique, but for different reasons. At the time, it was the first prime-time network show devoted to one star. Today it is also recognized as the first “unplugged,” or acoustic concert given by a rock-and-roll artist who usually performed with electric instruments. More important to Elvis’s artistic growth, the show marked the first time he would buck the Colonel. But neither Finkel nor Binder saw it coming.
“We didn’t know we were doing anything historic,” says Binder. “This was just another special with somebody we never listened to, because his records were not our thing. We’d only been exposed to him by Steve Allen, Ed Sullivan, and Milton Berle, though we’d been amused by his publicity and the stories about Colonel Parker.”
But Binder’s business partner, Dayton Burr “Bones” Howe, who had been the music supervisor on Binder’s TV shows, had some history with Elvis. He was currently producing records for such sunshine pop groups as the Fifth Dimension and the Association. But after college at Georgia Tech, he moved to Hollywood for a career as an audio engineer and found work at Radio Recorders. There, he worked on Elvis’s early RCA records as the assistant to engineer Thorne Nogar.
Howe recalled how Elvis had really been his own producer, that while he rarely recast a song from the style of the demo, he had remarkable ears for the mix, asking that a guitar lick be brought up here, or a bass thump toned down there, and he never wanted his own voice to stand apart from the instruments.
He also remembered how much fun Elvis had been in the early days, how he’d flirt with girls in cars at the stoplights, rolling down the glass just as the light turned green and taking off his dark glasses (“It’s him, it’s him!”), or talking them up the fire escape at the Knickerbocker Hotel. Sometimes he’d invite teenagers from nearby Hollywood High right into his recording sessions (“Hi, what’s your name? I’m Elvis”).
“He was really involved with what was going on in a healthy way,” Howe recalled. So when Finkel told him that the Colonel insisted that the NBC show be a twenty-song Christmas special and that Elvis was not to say anything other than, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” and “Merry Christmas, good night,” he scowled.
Binder and Howe realized the best way to present Elvis was in a relaxed atmosphere—some kind of showcase where people could see how warm and funny he was, instead of the canned personality from the movies. They tossed around the idea of a live segment where Elvis could talk about his musical roots, and then maybe play a little informally. Binder talked to Finkel and said he would only come on board if he could draw the curtain back on what he saw as a once-in-a-lifetime personality.
On May 14, Finkel