Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [276]
On June 3, Elvis arrived at the Binder-Howe offices for the start of two weeks of rehearsals. He was fourteen pounds lighter from his diet, and his skin was bronzed from the Hawaiian sun. “He looked amazing,” Binder remembers. Elvis got excited about the script, and then Howe said he’d like to bring in some of L.A.’s best session players, like guitarists Mike Deasy and Tommy Tedesco, and drummer Hal Blaine. Elvis nodded in agreement. In fact, he said, “I like it all.”
However, the team’s buoyant mood vanished three days later, when on a visit to Los Angeles, Robert Kennedy was shot and killed at the Ambassador Hotel. His death, coming so close on the heels of the Martin Luther King Jr., assassination, spiraled Elvis into a well of despair. Binder, seeing Elvis’s deep reaction and listening to him talk about the lost Kennedy brothers—and in a roundabout way, civil rights—asked songwriter Earl Brown to compose an emotional finale that captured some of Elvis’s idealistic and spiritual outlook on life.
Brown stayed up all night to write a climactic ballad called “If I Can Dream,” the title hinting at the slain leaders’ impassioned words.
In mid-June, to Elvis’s surprise, Binder dismissed Billy Strange, the musical director who, with Mac Davis, had written “Memories,” one of the special’s keynote ballads. Strange, who also worked as a writer-scorer for Nancy Sinatra, was the only person Elvis had asked to be on the project, stemming from his work on Live a Little, Love a Little. In his place, Binder brought in Billy Goldenberg, a cohort from a number of Binder’s previous specials.
At first, both men were uneasy. Goldenberg thought, “I’m a Jewish kid from New York who grew up on Broadway. What am I doing playing ‘Hound Dog’?”
Their first big test came on the day the team went to Elvis’s dressing room and played “If I Can Dream.” Howe said he was sure it was a hit song, but the way Goldenberg played it, Elvis thought it sounded a little too theatrical. Howe knew it was right for him: “You can do it with a real bluesy feel.”
“Let me hear it again,” Elvis said.
Goldenberg played it seven or eight times, Elvis bowing his head, getting inside the song. Finally, he looked up. “Okay, I’ll do it.”
For his entire life, Elvis had fronted nothing bigger than a small rhythm section onstage. Now, in backing him with a thirty-nine-piece orchestra, Goldenberg would bring about the biggest change in Elvis’s music since his move from Sun to RCA.
Ultimately, the musical director would create a new, sophisticated sound that would set Elvis up for the next phase of his career. But Elvis had never allowed anyone to tamper with the direction of his music. The angriest he’d ever gotten with Colonel Parker was in January, when Parker had ordered RCA to remaster “Guitar Man” and bring Elvis’s voice farther out front. And when he walked into the session at Western Recorders and saw the horns and string section, he nervously called the producer-director aside. Binder told him they’d send everybody home if he didn’t like it.
“When Elvis heard the first note, he loved it,” Binder says. “He had his sunglasses on and was standing next to Billy on the podium, and he looked into the control booth at me and gave me the high sign, like, ‘We’re going to be okay.’ He just fell out, and he never once questioned anything that we did musically. That was the one moment when he knew it would all come together.”
Elvis had now literally moved into the NBC studios, the staff having converted the dressing rooms on the stage into sleeping quarters. Each evening, Elvis jammed and cut up with Charlie, Joe, Alan, and Lamar, and Binder was enthralled, realizing that was the kind of intimacy, informality, and playfulness