ehollier
02-13-2009, 05:50 PM
ELVIS PRESLEY must have sensed that his credibility was on the line when he made the decision, in early January 1969, to cancel a Nashville recording date and book instead what were to be his first Memphis sessions in fourteen years. Fresh from the lean, mean triumph of the NBC-TV ‘Comeback’ special aired in December, he knew he had to capitalize on the excitement which that performance had generated.
Among the people urging him on was Marty Lacker, a prominent member of Presley’s ‘Memphis Mafia’ who just happened to be vice-president of a company called American Group Productions. Over dinner at Graceland one night, Lacker persuaded Elvis that he should switch his forthcoming session from Nashville to AGP’s studio at 827 Thomas Street, Memphis. It was hardly a difficult pitch, given that American was at that point perhaps the hottest studio in America. Indeed, Neil Diamond was in the process of wrapping up the sessions which were to produce the Top 10 hits ‘Sweet Caroline’ and ‘Holly Holy’. Other acts to have benefited from the studio’s glory run included B. J. Thomas, Dionne Warwick, and Dusty Springfield, the latter in the Billboard Top 20 that very week with the sultry ‘Son Of A Preacher Man’.
American was the brainchild of Lincoln ‘Chips’ Moman, a key figure in the germination of the post-Sun Memphis music scene. Chips had been in on the beginning of Stax, had co-written and produced James Carr’s classic soul ballad ‘Dark End Of The Street’ and even played on Atlantic sessions for Jerry Wexler in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. (It’s his telling guitar fill you can hear on Aretha’s ‘I Never Loved A Man’.) Having built the Thomas Street studio with the proceeds of a $3000 settlement from Stax in 1964, Chips had gone on to assemble a crack session team from the bands of Bill Black and Ace Cannon: guitarist Reggie Young, bassists Tommy Cogbill and Mike Leech, keyboard maestros Bobby Wood and Bobby Emmons, and drummer Gene Chrisman.
Moman had a knack for juggling black acts such as Bobby Womack and James and Bobby Purify with white ones such as the Gentrys and pop country chanteuse Sandy Posey, eventually chalking up a string of hits unparalleled even by nearby Stax. Indeed, so used to success were the American session men by 1969 that even Elvis Presley seemed to them ‘just another date’. "We’d been doing Neil Diamond just before Elvis came in, and he was a big deal to us," recalled trumpeter Wayne Jackson. "We were thrilled about Elvis, but it wasn’t like doing Neil Diamond."
If this strikes one as unduly blasé, it's worth bearing in mind that to these guys Elvis was just a fellow Southerner, and a Memphian to boot. Like him, they had broken through their own racist conditioning to embrace the blues, R&B, and gospel of southern blacks. What did they care about Girl Happy or Paradise Hawaiian Style? Consider also that, the TV special notwithstanding, Presley’s commercial standing was hardly at its highest in January 1969. As Peter Guralnick put it, "It’s difficult to recall just how far removed Elvis was, not simply from the pop mainstream, but from any degree of critical respect or even social recognition in at that time." Much of this was due to the mismanagement of Colonel Tom Parker, whose understanding of the pop market bordered on the farcical. Thanks to Parker, Elvis had lost sight of what had made him great in the first place. But for the vision of NBC producer Steve Binder, the second wind that was the comeback special might never have happened.
The Colonel Tom problem initially threatened to undo the whole point of the American Studio sessions. "At first I thought it wasn’t gonna work," Chips Moman admitted to me in 1985. "They were bringing in exactly the same kinda songs he’d been doing for years, whereas the only way it was gonna work was if there was a change of repertoire." It was Marty Lacker who finally prevailed upon Presley to see that Parker’s greed in taking huge cuts of publishing royalties meant that he was missing out on countless good songs. The result was that, in addition to the new Mac Davis and Dallas Frazier songs gathered by A&R man Felton Jarvis, Elvis wound up cutting a whole slew of vintage R&B and country songs – from Percy Mayfield’s ‘Stranger In My Own Home Town’ to Eddy Arnold’s ‘I’ll Hold You In My Heart (Till I can Hold You In My Arms)’ – and even trying his hand at such ‘60s soul numbers as Chuck Jackson’s ‘Any Day Now’ and Jerry Butler’s ‘Only The Strong Survive’.
Moman and the 827 Thomas Street Band had a mere four days to prepare for the sessions, which commenced on Monday 13 January. By a neat coincidence, cutting tracks in the next-door studio at American was the great R&B balladeer Roy Hamilton, whose fusion of gospel and pseudo-operatic sobbing had exerted a decisive vocal influence on the young Presley. "He talked a lot about Hamilton being his idol and about how he’d copied him," Chips recalled, and the two men even sat in on each other’s sessions. Elvis must have loved Hamilton’s delirious version of Conway Twitty’s ‘It’s Only Make Believe’ (AGP 1925), one of the man’s last sides before his death from a stroke six months later.
Presley’s own sessions usually kicked off in mid-afternoon, with Elvis himself fooling around on the ivories and warbling his favourite inspirational songs. (Note that his last proper studio album had been 1967’s How Great Thou Art.) The gospel leanings infused most of the tracks recorded that week, what with the massed backing singers and Elvis’s own evident sense of vocal liberation. "Elvis wasn’t the world’s greatest singer," said Chips, "but he had a sound and that’s all that’s important." If Chips often had to pick up Elvis up on his pitching – "his whole entourage would nearly faint," the producer remembered – the results he got by pushing for improvement spoke for themselves. Elvis would never be the elastic, ecstatic singer he was in 1955, but Moman knew the man could do better than the hammy pub-singer pastiche of bel canto he’d been getting away with for too long. In his book Lost Highway, Peter Guralnick compared the sessions to the TV special: "There continues to be that same sense of tension, the atmosphere remains nervous and almost self-effacing, and there is that strange anxiety to please and constriction in the voice which seems a million years away from the perfect self-assurance of the nineteen-year-old ‘natural’ who first recorded for Sun so very long ago."
A perfect case in point is ‘I’ll Hold You In My Heart’, a country and western hit for Eddy Arnold back in 1947. With a false start intro as contrived as the one which had kicked off ‘Milkcow Blues Boogie’ all those years before, Elvis’ version quickly turns into a prime piece of the kind of country-soul Moman and the band had cut a hundred times, with a rock-solid rhythm section and the telltale Telecaster fills of Reggie Young. Accompanying himself somewhat falteringly on the piano, Elvis really goes for it, pushing Arnold’s staid original to wild heights of improvised gospel abandon. The song ends up like something from Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes, a raggedy reworking bringing an old country chestnut back to life.
Like The Basement Tapes, too, the Memphis sessions served as a kind of ‘grab-bag’ – in this case for the multiple musical personae Presley had adopted throughout his career, from the raucous blues belter of ‘Power Of My Love’ to the cod-gospel penitent of ‘Who Am I?’, from the uptempo pop swaggerer of ‘Wearin’ That Loved-On Look’ to the schmaltzy balladeer of ‘Don’t Cry Daddy’. Elvis the Soul Man may leave something to be desired next to Jerry Butler, but one has to applaud the fact that he attempted ‘Only The Strong Survive’ in the first place. Moreover, the backing of the Thomas Street Band actually improves on the original. Chips Moman might not have created a ‘sound’ as distinct as that of Stax or Hi (or Fame in Muscle Shoals), but his variation on the sound Jerry Wexler had patented at Atlantic, with its ‘live’ drums and punchy Jerry Jermott-style bass figures, was always exciting. Wexler himself was hardly blind to this: despite professing disappointment at Chips’s decision to cut a distribution deal with Larry Utall’s Bell label rather than with Atlantic, he nonetheless brought acts like King Curtis and the Sweet Inspirations to record at American. Dusty Springfield’s great Dusty In Memphis and Herbie Man’s Memphis Underground were just two of the Atlantic albums cut in the studio.
The twelve songs which eventually made it onto the From Elvis In Memphis album that summer were fairly evenly weighted between contemporary pop and older country and R&B material. Of the ‘retro’ numbers, ‘Long Black Limousine’ was almost as good as ‘I’ll Hold You In My Heart’. A typical small-town sermonette, the song concerns a girl who splits for the big city vowing to return in a "big fancy car". She keeps her promise, except that the "long black limousine" in question turns out to be a hearse. "Elvis was no fool," wrote Greil Marcus; "he knew the song was about him, the country boy lost to the city if there ever was one, but he sang as if he liked that fact and loathed it all at once." As with ‘I’ll Hold You In My Heart’, Presley turned a somber, low-key country tune into a full-on vocal blowout.
The new pop material – including the Glen Campbell hit ‘Gentle On My Mind’ and Dallas Frenzier’s ‘True Love Travels On A Gravel Road’ – was some of Presley’s strongest in years. Elvis himself was uneasy about recording ‘In The Ghetto’, given that so-called ‘message songs’ were not exactly his forte. But Mac Davis’s schlocky sketch of inner-city deprivation gave the King his biggest hit in four years. An even bigger hit was held back from the album, and came close to not being recorded at all. Mark James’s ‘Suspicious Minds’ was published by Chips Moman’s own Press Music company, and Presley’s publishers Hill and Range wanted a chunk of it. Incensed by their greed, Chips apparently told their representatives Freddy Bienstock and Tom Diskin to get the hell out of his studio. Eventually they backed down, making it possible for Elvis to cut what has come to be regarded as a classic pop single. It’s one of those over-the-top three-and-a-half minute melodramas of the ‘Everlasting Love’ variety, a record which keeps lifting to another irresistible emotional peak. As Dave Marsh remarked, "Here’s the final piece of evidence that what happened at Sun was no fluke." Elvis never sang so powerfully again.
Further hits followed with the shameless Mac Davis weepie ‘Don’t Cry Daddy’ and with future country-pop star Eddie Rabbitt’s ‘Kentucky Rain’, one of a speight of ‘rain’ songs from the early Seventies. (Another of them, Dan Penn’s haunting ‘Raining In Memphis’, would have suited Presley perfectly. All in all, the fourteen days Elvis spent at American in January and February of 1969 resulted in four Top 20 singles and two gold albums. (The remaining Memphis material wound up as the second half of the album From Memphis To Vegas/From Vegas To Memphis.)
Presley briefly seemed galvanized by the Memphis sessions, going on to record the compelling concept album Elvis Country, as well as songs by southern writers such as Dennis Linde (‘Burning Love’) and Tony Joe White (‘Polk Salad Annie’). But it wasn’t long before the King had slumped back into barbiturated pap like Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite, and not a lot longer before he was scarcely in a fit state to record at all. As for Chips Moman and American, when the Memphis boom came to an end in 1972 he wound up in Nashville, bastion of all the mainstream country values he despised. Happily, however, he got cosy with the burgeoning Outlaw contingent and wound up producing Waylon Jennings’ Ol’ Waylon, the first platinum album ever to come out of Nashville. And when Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Carl Perkins congregated for a ‘Memphis Rock ‘n’ Roll Homecoming’ in September 1985, it was Chips Moman who got the job of producing the resulting album. When you cast your eyes down the credits of Class Of ’55 the same old names popped up from the past: Gene Chrisman, Mike Leech, Bobby Emmons, Bobby Wood, Reggie Young, Wayne Jackson, Dan Penn.
"When shadows fall in the valley/To that precious memory we cling," sang Johnny Cash on the album’s ‘We Remember The King’, one of many artifacts that implicitly equate Presley with Jesus Christ. If cling we must, let it at least be to the memory of Elvis in 1969, "thin as a rake and more handsome than ten movie stars", singing his heart out at 827 Thomas Street.
© Barney Hoskyns, 1994
http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article.html?ArticleID=1675
Among the people urging him on was Marty Lacker, a prominent member of Presley’s ‘Memphis Mafia’ who just happened to be vice-president of a company called American Group Productions. Over dinner at Graceland one night, Lacker persuaded Elvis that he should switch his forthcoming session from Nashville to AGP’s studio at 827 Thomas Street, Memphis. It was hardly a difficult pitch, given that American was at that point perhaps the hottest studio in America. Indeed, Neil Diamond was in the process of wrapping up the sessions which were to produce the Top 10 hits ‘Sweet Caroline’ and ‘Holly Holy’. Other acts to have benefited from the studio’s glory run included B. J. Thomas, Dionne Warwick, and Dusty Springfield, the latter in the Billboard Top 20 that very week with the sultry ‘Son Of A Preacher Man’.
American was the brainchild of Lincoln ‘Chips’ Moman, a key figure in the germination of the post-Sun Memphis music scene. Chips had been in on the beginning of Stax, had co-written and produced James Carr’s classic soul ballad ‘Dark End Of The Street’ and even played on Atlantic sessions for Jerry Wexler in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. (It’s his telling guitar fill you can hear on Aretha’s ‘I Never Loved A Man’.) Having built the Thomas Street studio with the proceeds of a $3000 settlement from Stax in 1964, Chips had gone on to assemble a crack session team from the bands of Bill Black and Ace Cannon: guitarist Reggie Young, bassists Tommy Cogbill and Mike Leech, keyboard maestros Bobby Wood and Bobby Emmons, and drummer Gene Chrisman.
Moman had a knack for juggling black acts such as Bobby Womack and James and Bobby Purify with white ones such as the Gentrys and pop country chanteuse Sandy Posey, eventually chalking up a string of hits unparalleled even by nearby Stax. Indeed, so used to success were the American session men by 1969 that even Elvis Presley seemed to them ‘just another date’. "We’d been doing Neil Diamond just before Elvis came in, and he was a big deal to us," recalled trumpeter Wayne Jackson. "We were thrilled about Elvis, but it wasn’t like doing Neil Diamond."
If this strikes one as unduly blasé, it's worth bearing in mind that to these guys Elvis was just a fellow Southerner, and a Memphian to boot. Like him, they had broken through their own racist conditioning to embrace the blues, R&B, and gospel of southern blacks. What did they care about Girl Happy or Paradise Hawaiian Style? Consider also that, the TV special notwithstanding, Presley’s commercial standing was hardly at its highest in January 1969. As Peter Guralnick put it, "It’s difficult to recall just how far removed Elvis was, not simply from the pop mainstream, but from any degree of critical respect or even social recognition in at that time." Much of this was due to the mismanagement of Colonel Tom Parker, whose understanding of the pop market bordered on the farcical. Thanks to Parker, Elvis had lost sight of what had made him great in the first place. But for the vision of NBC producer Steve Binder, the second wind that was the comeback special might never have happened.
The Colonel Tom problem initially threatened to undo the whole point of the American Studio sessions. "At first I thought it wasn’t gonna work," Chips Moman admitted to me in 1985. "They were bringing in exactly the same kinda songs he’d been doing for years, whereas the only way it was gonna work was if there was a change of repertoire." It was Marty Lacker who finally prevailed upon Presley to see that Parker’s greed in taking huge cuts of publishing royalties meant that he was missing out on countless good songs. The result was that, in addition to the new Mac Davis and Dallas Frazier songs gathered by A&R man Felton Jarvis, Elvis wound up cutting a whole slew of vintage R&B and country songs – from Percy Mayfield’s ‘Stranger In My Own Home Town’ to Eddy Arnold’s ‘I’ll Hold You In My Heart (Till I can Hold You In My Arms)’ – and even trying his hand at such ‘60s soul numbers as Chuck Jackson’s ‘Any Day Now’ and Jerry Butler’s ‘Only The Strong Survive’.
Moman and the 827 Thomas Street Band had a mere four days to prepare for the sessions, which commenced on Monday 13 January. By a neat coincidence, cutting tracks in the next-door studio at American was the great R&B balladeer Roy Hamilton, whose fusion of gospel and pseudo-operatic sobbing had exerted a decisive vocal influence on the young Presley. "He talked a lot about Hamilton being his idol and about how he’d copied him," Chips recalled, and the two men even sat in on each other’s sessions. Elvis must have loved Hamilton’s delirious version of Conway Twitty’s ‘It’s Only Make Believe’ (AGP 1925), one of the man’s last sides before his death from a stroke six months later.
Presley’s own sessions usually kicked off in mid-afternoon, with Elvis himself fooling around on the ivories and warbling his favourite inspirational songs. (Note that his last proper studio album had been 1967’s How Great Thou Art.) The gospel leanings infused most of the tracks recorded that week, what with the massed backing singers and Elvis’s own evident sense of vocal liberation. "Elvis wasn’t the world’s greatest singer," said Chips, "but he had a sound and that’s all that’s important." If Chips often had to pick up Elvis up on his pitching – "his whole entourage would nearly faint," the producer remembered – the results he got by pushing for improvement spoke for themselves. Elvis would never be the elastic, ecstatic singer he was in 1955, but Moman knew the man could do better than the hammy pub-singer pastiche of bel canto he’d been getting away with for too long. In his book Lost Highway, Peter Guralnick compared the sessions to the TV special: "There continues to be that same sense of tension, the atmosphere remains nervous and almost self-effacing, and there is that strange anxiety to please and constriction in the voice which seems a million years away from the perfect self-assurance of the nineteen-year-old ‘natural’ who first recorded for Sun so very long ago."
A perfect case in point is ‘I’ll Hold You In My Heart’, a country and western hit for Eddy Arnold back in 1947. With a false start intro as contrived as the one which had kicked off ‘Milkcow Blues Boogie’ all those years before, Elvis’ version quickly turns into a prime piece of the kind of country-soul Moman and the band had cut a hundred times, with a rock-solid rhythm section and the telltale Telecaster fills of Reggie Young. Accompanying himself somewhat falteringly on the piano, Elvis really goes for it, pushing Arnold’s staid original to wild heights of improvised gospel abandon. The song ends up like something from Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes, a raggedy reworking bringing an old country chestnut back to life.
Like The Basement Tapes, too, the Memphis sessions served as a kind of ‘grab-bag’ – in this case for the multiple musical personae Presley had adopted throughout his career, from the raucous blues belter of ‘Power Of My Love’ to the cod-gospel penitent of ‘Who Am I?’, from the uptempo pop swaggerer of ‘Wearin’ That Loved-On Look’ to the schmaltzy balladeer of ‘Don’t Cry Daddy’. Elvis the Soul Man may leave something to be desired next to Jerry Butler, but one has to applaud the fact that he attempted ‘Only The Strong Survive’ in the first place. Moreover, the backing of the Thomas Street Band actually improves on the original. Chips Moman might not have created a ‘sound’ as distinct as that of Stax or Hi (or Fame in Muscle Shoals), but his variation on the sound Jerry Wexler had patented at Atlantic, with its ‘live’ drums and punchy Jerry Jermott-style bass figures, was always exciting. Wexler himself was hardly blind to this: despite professing disappointment at Chips’s decision to cut a distribution deal with Larry Utall’s Bell label rather than with Atlantic, he nonetheless brought acts like King Curtis and the Sweet Inspirations to record at American. Dusty Springfield’s great Dusty In Memphis and Herbie Man’s Memphis Underground were just two of the Atlantic albums cut in the studio.
The twelve songs which eventually made it onto the From Elvis In Memphis album that summer were fairly evenly weighted between contemporary pop and older country and R&B material. Of the ‘retro’ numbers, ‘Long Black Limousine’ was almost as good as ‘I’ll Hold You In My Heart’. A typical small-town sermonette, the song concerns a girl who splits for the big city vowing to return in a "big fancy car". She keeps her promise, except that the "long black limousine" in question turns out to be a hearse. "Elvis was no fool," wrote Greil Marcus; "he knew the song was about him, the country boy lost to the city if there ever was one, but he sang as if he liked that fact and loathed it all at once." As with ‘I’ll Hold You In My Heart’, Presley turned a somber, low-key country tune into a full-on vocal blowout.
The new pop material – including the Glen Campbell hit ‘Gentle On My Mind’ and Dallas Frenzier’s ‘True Love Travels On A Gravel Road’ – was some of Presley’s strongest in years. Elvis himself was uneasy about recording ‘In The Ghetto’, given that so-called ‘message songs’ were not exactly his forte. But Mac Davis’s schlocky sketch of inner-city deprivation gave the King his biggest hit in four years. An even bigger hit was held back from the album, and came close to not being recorded at all. Mark James’s ‘Suspicious Minds’ was published by Chips Moman’s own Press Music company, and Presley’s publishers Hill and Range wanted a chunk of it. Incensed by their greed, Chips apparently told their representatives Freddy Bienstock and Tom Diskin to get the hell out of his studio. Eventually they backed down, making it possible for Elvis to cut what has come to be regarded as a classic pop single. It’s one of those over-the-top three-and-a-half minute melodramas of the ‘Everlasting Love’ variety, a record which keeps lifting to another irresistible emotional peak. As Dave Marsh remarked, "Here’s the final piece of evidence that what happened at Sun was no fluke." Elvis never sang so powerfully again.
Further hits followed with the shameless Mac Davis weepie ‘Don’t Cry Daddy’ and with future country-pop star Eddie Rabbitt’s ‘Kentucky Rain’, one of a speight of ‘rain’ songs from the early Seventies. (Another of them, Dan Penn’s haunting ‘Raining In Memphis’, would have suited Presley perfectly. All in all, the fourteen days Elvis spent at American in January and February of 1969 resulted in four Top 20 singles and two gold albums. (The remaining Memphis material wound up as the second half of the album From Memphis To Vegas/From Vegas To Memphis.)
Presley briefly seemed galvanized by the Memphis sessions, going on to record the compelling concept album Elvis Country, as well as songs by southern writers such as Dennis Linde (‘Burning Love’) and Tony Joe White (‘Polk Salad Annie’). But it wasn’t long before the King had slumped back into barbiturated pap like Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite, and not a lot longer before he was scarcely in a fit state to record at all. As for Chips Moman and American, when the Memphis boom came to an end in 1972 he wound up in Nashville, bastion of all the mainstream country values he despised. Happily, however, he got cosy with the burgeoning Outlaw contingent and wound up producing Waylon Jennings’ Ol’ Waylon, the first platinum album ever to come out of Nashville. And when Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Carl Perkins congregated for a ‘Memphis Rock ‘n’ Roll Homecoming’ in September 1985, it was Chips Moman who got the job of producing the resulting album. When you cast your eyes down the credits of Class Of ’55 the same old names popped up from the past: Gene Chrisman, Mike Leech, Bobby Emmons, Bobby Wood, Reggie Young, Wayne Jackson, Dan Penn.
"When shadows fall in the valley/To that precious memory we cling," sang Johnny Cash on the album’s ‘We Remember The King’, one of many artifacts that implicitly equate Presley with Jesus Christ. If cling we must, let it at least be to the memory of Elvis in 1969, "thin as a rake and more handsome than ten movie stars", singing his heart out at 827 Thomas Street.
© Barney Hoskyns, 1994
http://www.rocksbackpages.com/article.html?ArticleID=1675