Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [282]
“You’re going to find out what an opening is like when Elvis comes in,” Parker boasted, closing his deal with a jab of his cane, and then waving it across an invisible map. “They’ll come from all over the world.” Shoofey raised a thick eyebrow, pondered the thought, and then shook his head yes.
In late July 1969 Elvis would kick off a four-week engagement of two shows a night, seven nights a week. No other entertainer had ever committed to such a grueling schedule, usually taking Monday or Tuesday off. As compensation, Parker demanded $100,000 a week, out of which Elvis and the Colonel would pay the musicians and backup vocalists. “Mark my words,” Parker declared, “Elvis will be the first star in Las Vegas to make money for the showroom, apart from whatever his fans drop out in the casino. You’ll never have an empty seat. I can promise you that.”
Elvis, meanwhile, concerned himself more with what he’d promised Steve Binder—to maintain his artistic credibility. On January 6, two days before his thirty-fourth birthday, Elvis took a meeting with Felton Jarvis, who drove over to Graceland from Nashville to discuss Elvis’s next record. Marty Lacker was there, and for a while, he just listened to what the two men had to say.
Marty was now running a small record label and working closely with Chips Moman at his American Studio there in Memphis. He had already reminded Elvis that Chips was one of the founders of Stax Records, and that 164 hit records had come out of his little run-down studio at 827 Thomas Street in just the last eighteen months. Red had recorded his own stuff there recently, too, and though he and Elvis still weren’t speaking, George Klein also prompted Elvis to think about cutting his next record at American. Maybe there was something magical in those North Memphis walls.
Elvis hadn’t recorded in his hometown since the Sun years, and it might put some of that deep-dish soul back in his music, Marty told him some months earlier. It would be his most logical album setting in years. But Elvis had only said he’d think about it. Jerry Leiber, who wrote so many of Elvis’s hits with his partner Mike Stoller, knew that Elvis’s music was “really white music with black undertones,” but that there was no getting around “that Memphis place, where a lot of different things came together at the right time, at the point it was ready to happen.”
Maybe it was time for that to happen again, Marty said, speaking now to both Elvis and Felton. Nothing against Nashville, of course, but a lot of the records that came out of there sounded like something turned out of a factory. Felton knew what Marty meant. He knew, too, that Moman had a group of players there—particularly Reggie Young on lead guitar, Bobby Emmons and Bobby Wood on keyboards, Gene Chrisman on drums, and Tommy Cogbill and Mike Leech on bass—who’d mastered a hand-in-glove synthesis of pop and rhythm-and-blues.
After the television special Marty “saw that it could go either way. And Chips kept saying, ‘When are you going to tell Elvis to let me produce a record?’ ”
It took a bit of arm-twisting, but before Marty and Felton left that day, Elvis had agreed. And during the first two months of 1969, he would record some of his most enduring music, including “Suspicious Minds,” “Kentucky Rain,” “In the Ghetto,” and “Long Black Limousine.”
“It would have taken a complete fool not to hit with Elvis Presley, if you had the songs,” Moman says. But in getting the right songs to him, the project would be fraught with tension, as both RCA and the Colonel threw up obstacles and hurdles about studio policy and publishing rights. That put Lamar, now working for Elvis’s publishers, Hill & Range, and Marty, who was Chips’s friend and also moonlighted as a song plugger, in the middle.
A confrontation quickly ensued over the publishing rights to “Suspicious Minds,” which Moman controlled, as well as Mac Davis’s “In the Ghetto,