fiery early singles he’d recorded at Sun with Sam Phillips, the last producer to really push Elvis—and to intuitively understand what made him tick. “Chips understood Elvis,” says Dickinson. “They were both Southern guys who grew up poor, listening to country, gospel, and R&B. He knew what would work for Elvis; he knew what would move him. Because of that, Chips could get the best out of Elvis.” Moman did that by pushing Elvis through the takes when the singer would stop midway, cursing at his inability to handle the sophisticated melodies—and by pushing Elvis through the rough spots when he fell off key and keeping him focused when his bud- dies wanted to goof around. And he did that by forcing Elvis to reconnect with his roots. More than at any time since the mid-’50s, Elvis was again singing like a Southerner, drawling like a true son of Dixie, his voice stripped back to the blues of a man born to a sewing-machine operator and sharecropper in a two-room shack in Tupelo, Mississippi. At the end of the first week of recording, work was postponed when Elvis came down with laryngitis. The break gave Moman a chance to clean house. “Elvis’s guys were getting in the way,” says Jackson. “They were busy yakking and yammering and trying to be important, giving input and such. But none of them had any great musical skills. They had no place in the studio.” Moman broached the subject with Elvis. When recording reconvened a few days later, the Mafia was gone. But a bigger problem still remained. Time and energy was being wasted on the weaker material—like the tepid “My Little Friend” and “A Little Bit of Green”—being peddled by Parker’s men. The songs Diskin and Bienstock were hawking may have been well suited to Nashville’s dross mills, but were a poor fit for Ameri- can. “The Colonel’s guys played some of their songs for us,” says Young. “Chips didn’t want to record them. They were pieces of shit.” Upon realizing that Moman wasn’t going to record subpar mate- rial simply to satisfy someone’s business interests, Diskin changed plans. Rather than push pre-approved material, Diskin instead tried to strong-arm his way into a piece of the songs that Moman had brought to the sessions, even suggesting that Elvis could be per- suaded to record elsewhere if the situation didn’t meet everyone’s needs. Always sensitive to being scammed, Moman told Diskin that he, and everyone who came with him, could take his threats and get the fuck out of the studio if they didn’t like the way he was running things. Diskin took Moman’s ultimatum back to Elvis, who typi- cally tried his damnedest to avoid anything resembling a confronta- tion. This time though, he told Diskin to go home. Upon hearing the news, the Colonel, then sunning in California, told Diskin that Elvis was a big boy and free to fall on his own ass. With the annoyances out of the way, Moman and Elvis got back to business, cutting the gorgeous soul ballad, “In the Ghetto,” on January 21, and the driving, urgent “Suspicious Minds” two days later. Both songs would be released as singles. Both songs showed Elvis singing with a lived-in emotional potency he’d only previ- ously suggested. But this was no miracle transformation—Elvis worked hard to sing so well. Prior to working with Moman, Elvis had been inclined to take a sing-it-and-run approach in the studio, with the sloth having set in to such a degree that rather than make extra work, Jarvis kept quiet even when Elvis flubbed notes. But Moman was different. The producer sang Elvis raw, demanding he
Seemingly intent on continuing the play-a-lot, work-a-little atmosphere of his typical recording sessions from the period, Mo- man and his band weren’t immediately impressed by Elvis either. “Elvis’s whole gang was busy laughing at his jokes and falling over themselves to light his little German cigars,” says Spreen. “They were ready to have a good time; we were ready to work.” Despite the mu- tual misgivings, there was at least one person at American who felt no ambivalence about Elvis’s arrival. “I just about keeled over when he walked in the room!” says backup singer Donna Thatcher, only nineteen at the time of the sessions. “He was the most incredibly gorgeous human being I’d ever seen in my life. All those musicians like to pretend it wasn’t a big deal recording with Elvis, but it was Elvis Presley! It was a big deal!” After getting the greetings out of the way, Moman put Elvis to work. The first song the new team tackled was Bobby George and Vern Stovall’s bawler, “Long Black Limousine,” the story of a coun- try hopeful who meets her demise in the city. It didn’t take long for Moman, the musicians, the Memphis Mafia, and the rats in the walls to realize something special was happening. “Right away, the gospel part of Elvis just spilled out,” says Spreen. “I realized there was a lot more to this guy than I thought.” Listening back to the first song Elvis cut at American proves that the singer was still mainlining the magic of his comeback television special. He starts off subtly, tentatively, giving his vowels a soft shake, easing into the song, accompanied only by a tolling bell and some deep blue piano chords. Then Young snaps off a blues lick, Bobby Emmons lays down a swaying organ line, and Chrisman ambles off on one of those sweet, sticky molasses rhythms only Memphis drum- mers know how to play. The tempo speeds up. Elvis pushes harder, his voice like an hourglass, its clear, curved body slowly filling with grit. Elvis and the band burn through to the bridge. Then something strange happens. For eight bars, the singer is silent—a rare occur- rence for an Elvis record—his voice replaced by a French horn play- ing a sad, smiling melody over the backup singers’ wordless vocals. Then the dreamy interlude ends, and Elvis comes roaring back—the power of his voice amplified by its momentary disappearance—and ends the song in a soul-wracked fit of testifying. Passionate, elegant, surprising—“Limousine” was a long way from Nashville. The first session ran until 1:00 AM, as the musicians also worked through the tomcat strut of “Wearin’ That Loved On Look” before ending, on something of a down, with “This Is the Story,” an under- whelming weeper brought in by Diskin and Bienstock. On the drive back to Graceland, Elvis raved about Moman and his band. They’d performed as advertised. But he was also impressed, and perhaps re- lieved, with himself. On that moonlit ride back home, Elvis confid- ed to his friend. “He looked me right in the eye,” remembers Lacker. “And he said, ‘I just needed to see if I could cut hits again.’ ” The next two nights of recording went even longer than the first, both starting at 7:00 PM and running deep into the night as Elvis, Moman, and the band chiseled away at eventual album tracks like the clavinet-driven traveling tune “Gentle on My Mind” and “You’ll Think of Me,” a Sunday morning lament given exotic edge by Reg- gie Young’s sitar-toned guitar sound (“If you woke Eric Clapton up in the middle of the night and asked him who the best guitar player in the world is,” says Dickinson, “He’ll say Reggie Young.”) As the takes mounted, Elvis got closer to the spirit, if not the sound, of the
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