recording console out of the Thomas Street building and took his operation, disastrously, to the smaller Atlanta market. “Going to Atlanta was the worst thing that happened to us,” says Young. “We couldn’t get any work.” After floundering in Atlanta, Moman moved again, this time to Nashville, where he became more involved in country music, notably cowriting the Waylon Jennings’s hit “Luck- enbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love).” But the stardust of Moman’s Memphis work had been swept away. By the mid-’80s, Moman was back to Georgia, living in a small town near La Grange. Today, he keeps busy working fitfully on an autobiography and re- leasing music online. His old studio on Thomas Street has long since been torn down. With the Moman-assisted hits having revived his recording ca- reer, Elvis turned his sights towards the live arena. At the rate of one million dollars a year for five years—a figure twice as high as that paid to comparable stars—Elvis agreed to play two multi-date en- gagements per year at the International Hotel in Las Vegas, his first extended run of live performances in almost ten years. Premiering on July 31, 1969, Elvis’s Vegas act was a smash success. Tearing into hits old and new with astonishing vigor and renewed confidence, Elvis thrilled audiences and critics alike, as the sold-out shows prompted critics like the Village Voice ’s Robert Christgau to write that the singer was “fantastic…and his material was perfect.” With
great tragedy was that the Colonel knew that Elvis could sing like crap and still sound like Elvis. The Colonel could sell Elvis without having to deal with a wild card like Moman.” In the end, a bit of mundane music-business chicanery was all it took to sever the rela- tionship between Elvis and Moman. In accordance with a longstanding rule of the Colonel’s, when From Elvis in Memphis was released in June 1969, Moman’s name wasn’t listed as the producer for the album, which was instead cred- ited solely to Elvis. The erasure was a matter of simple pragmat- ics. As far as the Colonel was concerned, Elvis’s albums sold on the strength of the singer’s name, and as such, there was no reason to credit a producer and thus cede royalty points. Moman, always sen- sitive to issues of respect and remuneration, took his lack of a credit (and corresponding loss of royalties) as a slap in the face. He vowed never again to work with the Colonel. That, of course, meant never again working with Elvis. From Elvis in Memphis , along with Moman’s other similarly named 1969 classic, Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis, turned out to be one of American’s last hurrahs. Miffed at a perceived lack of respect from the same Memphis music industry he’d helped turn into the nation’s fourth largest (“It seemed like all the publicity was going to Stax and Willie Mitchell and Hi,” remembers Young), by 1972, Moman moved his studio out of the city. He ripped the
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