Elvis Said “I Don’t Think I Should Do This Song” Chips Moman Said Four Words Elvis Never Blinked – HT

 

On January 20th, 1969, Elvis Presley was somewhere around his 23rd take of a song he had been wrestling with all night when he stopped and said the words that nearly ended it. He looked at the people in the room and said, “Look, I don’t think I should do this song.” Marty Lacer was in the control room.

 Lacer was one of Elvis’s closest friends, a member of the inner circle who had been with him since the Memphis days. the man who had pushed hardest for these sessions to happen at all, who had spent months convincing Elvis that recording at American Sound Studio in Memphis with producer Chips Mowman was the right move, who had eventually gotten Elvis to agree over dinner at Graceand on what amounted to a handshake, and who had then called Mman from the front hallway before Elvis could change his mind.

Lacer had been in this room every night for the past week watching Elvis record 20 songs in 8 days. And now on the one song that Lacker believed in more than almost any of the others, Elvis was pulling back. Lacker told him, “Elvis, if you’re ever going to do a song like this, this is the one.

” Elvis looked over at Chips’s Moment. Mman was direct in the way that very few people around Elvis ever were. He said, “This is a hit record, but I’ll tell you what. If you don’t want it, can I have the song?” Elvis didn’t blink. He said, “No, I’m going to do it.” That exchange, those specific words in that specific order, documented in multiple interviews with Lacer over the years is the center of everything in this story.

 Because what Elvis decided to do in that moment was not just record a song. It was the first time in his entire career that he had gone directly against the most consistent, most drilled piece of management advice Colonel Tom Parker had ever given him. It was the moment Elvis Presley decided he wanted to be taken seriously.

 And it happened on take 23 of a session that had started that morning and had not gone right yet, in a studio in Memphis, 10 miles from where he grew up, singing a song about a boy born into poverty with no way out. To understand why Parker’s warning carried as much weight as it did, you have to understand what the colonel’s management philosophy had been built on.

 From the moment Parker signed Elvis in 1955 and began structuring his career, the guiding principle was maximum commercial appeal with minimum controversy. Do not take sides. Do not alienate any part of the audience. Do not give anyone a reason to turn off the radio. The formula had worked. It had produced 31 films, hundreds of singles, and made Elvis one of the bestselling recording artists in American history.

 But it had also produced a decade of formulaic music and a chart drought that by January of 1969 stretched back to 1962. The last time Elvis had a top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 was 4 years earlier. Parker’s warning about message songs was specific and practical. If you take a political side, you will offend half your audience, and half your audience is too much to lose.

 The music industry in 1969 understood this calculation. Artists with mainstream pop careers stayed away from social commentary as a rule. The musicians who were making music about the Vietnam War and civil rights and poverty were doing so from a folk or counterculture position that was explicitly not trying to hold on to the audience Parker was protecting.

 But by January of 1969, Elvis was not interested in protecting that audience anymore. He had spent a decade making movies he was embarrassed by and recording soundtracks he did not believe in. And the 1968 NBC special had cracked something open in him, reminded him what it felt like to stand on a stage and mean what he was singing.

 The American Sound sessions were the follow through. And when M. Davis’s tape arrived. The very first song on it, the very first thing Elvis heard was in the ghetto. Mac Davis grew up in Leach, Texas, the son of a man who managed a Piggly Wiggly grocery store. He had a friend whose father worked with his father, a black boy his age, who lived on the other side of town in a neighborhood that Davis described as a dirt street ghetto.

 Broken bottles every 6 in. >> [snorts] >> Davis and this boy were close friends. They played together. And from a very young age, Davis had a question he could not answer. Why did his friend have to live where he lived? And Davis got to live where he lived. They did not have a lot of money either, but they had a paved street.

 He carried that question for years. At the 2006 ceremony inducting him into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Davis described how it finally became a song. The civil rights movement was the backdrop. Davis was writing in the late 1960s after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. After years of watching American cities burn, after years of public conversation about poverty and race and the cycles that kept people trapped in conditions they had not chosen.

 He originally called the song the vicious circle, a reference to the way the lyrics describe how poverty perpetuates itself across generations. A boy is born on a cold, gray Chicago morning. He grows up. He fights. He takes what he needs to survive. He dies young. And on the morning of his death, another boy is born. The circle continues. Nothing breaks it.

 Nobody intervenes. Elvis heard In the ghetto first, and he heard it the way a man hears a song that is about him. Even when the song is about someone else entirely. Elvis Aaron Presley was born on January 8th, 1935 in a two- room shotgun house in East Tupelo, Mississippi. The house had been built by his father Vernon and his uncle Veester for $180, borrowed money that Vernon could not repay, which eventually led to the family losing the house and moving in with relatives.

 When Elvis was 3 years old, his father went to prison for 8 months for altering a check. He had changed the amount on a check he received from his employer because he needed the money and could not ask for it. His mother, Glattis, moved in with family during those 8 months and worked in a laundry. They had nothing. They were not on the dirt street side of Leach, Texas.

 They were on the dirt street side of East Tupelo, Mississippi in the middle of the depression in one of the poorest states in the poorest country in America. The Presley family moved to Memphis in 1948 when Elvis was 13, packing everything they owned into a 1939 Plymouth Plymouth because there was more work in a city.

 They moved into a housing project called Lauderdale Courts, federally subsidized public housing, income restricted, the kind of place people lived when they had nowhere else to go. Elvis attended LC Humes High School, where he was not popular, where he did not fit in, where he was remembered by classmates as a quiet kid who wore clothes that were different from everyone else’s because he could not afford what everyone else wore.

That is who Elvis Presley was before Sun Records. That is the boy who grew up in a two- room house built with borrowed money, whose father went to prison, whose family moved into public housing. That is the person who heard M. Davis’s song about a boy born into poverty with no way out and decided on Take 23 in an American sound studio that he was going to record it no matter what Colonel Parker said.

The recording took 23 takes in total. The Wikipedia account of the From Elvis in Memphis sessions is specific on this point. Elvis arrived at American Sound on January 20th, 1969, and recorded in the ghetto in 23 takes, finishing the vocal track afterward as an overdub. The early takes were slow and somber, lacking the commitment that Chips Moment was looking for in the instrumental sound. Mman kept pushing.

The band kept adjusting. Elvis kept singing. By the end of the day, the final version existed. And it was not the early cautious version that a man records when he is not sure he should be doing something. It was the version of a man who had made his mind. Elvis said he wanted to be taken seriously.

 He said it in January of 1969 on take 23 of a song Colonel Parker did not want him to record when Chips Marman said he could have the song if Elvis didn’t want it. Elvis didn’t blink. The record went to number three. It was his first top 10 hit in four years. It was the first time in his career he recorded a song with a direct social message.

 And it was the beginning of the Memphis comeback that produced Suspicious Minds, Don’t Cry Daddy, and Kentucky Rain in the same 10-day session. The original 1969 recording is on every streaming platform. Listen to the first 10 seconds. Two notes on an acoustic guitar repeating before Elvis comes in. Listen to what he does with the bridge where the lyric shifts from description to direct address where he stops telling a story and starts talking to you.

 That is the moment Chip’s mom spent 23 takes trying to get right. He got it right. If this kind of story is what brings you here, subscribe and more of them will find you. See you in the next one. The arrangement moment built around the song was both simple and devastating. The song begins with a single acoustic guitar, two notes repeating before the voice comes in.

 There are strings, subtle and present, rather than overwhelming. There’s a rhythm section that holds steady underneath everything without calling attention to itself. The entire production is in service of the lyric. Nothing competes with what Elvis is saying because what Elvis is saying is the whole point. M.

 Davis described hearing the final recording. He said they had made an even greater record out of his song than he had imagined it could be. He was not being modest. The version Elvis recorded had something in it that Davis’s own demo did not have. The specific weight of a man who understood the subject matter from a direction that Davis, who had grown up in poverty, but not in the poverty the song describes, could only observe from the outside.

 RCA was afraid to release it. Colonel Parker was against it. The label shipped 300,000 copies when the single came out on April 14th, 1969, a cautious number for an Elvis single at that point in his career. In its second week on the charts, it entered the Billboard Hot 100. It climbed for 13 weeks. On June 14th, 1969, it peaked at number three.

 Elvis Presley’s first top 10 hit in four years. The single sold a million copies in the United States. It reached number two in the United Kingdom. It was his first overtly socially conscious recording in a mainstream career that had been explicitly kept away from social commentary for 15 years. Marty Lacer watched all of it from the inside.

 He had been the one in the control room who told Elvis this was the one if he was ever going to do a song like this. He later described what the success of those Memphis sessions meant. For the first time in his memory, Elvis was asking how his singles were doing on the charts, not because someone told him to check, because he was genuinely interested.

 He cared what happened to these songs in a way that he had not cared about his output in years. Lacker said, “I’ve never heard him ask before.” The man who had spent the 1960s not watching his own movies, not listening to his own records, not asking about his chart positions, that man was following In the Ghetto up the Billboard Hot 100 because he had fought to record it and he believed in it and he wanted to know if he had been right to fight.

 He had been right. Matt Davis went on from In the Ghetto to a solo career as a performer in the 1970s, eventually hosting his own television variety show and becoming one of the most recognizable faces on American television. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2006 and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame afterward.

 But in interviews for the rest of his life, when people asked him about his work, the song they wanted to talk about was always In the Ghetto. and he always told the same story. The kid on the dirt street in Labok, the question he could not answer, the 10-minute writing session that produced the lyric, the tape with 19 songs where it was first.

 In 2007, eight years after his death, Lisa Marie Presley recorded vocal tracks that were composited with her father’s original 1969 recording to create a duet. The same process Natalie Cole had used with her father, Nat King Cole, on Unforgettable. Some of the proceeds from that release went to benefit victims of Hurricane Katrina, a disaster that had exposed the same cycles of poverty and neglect that M.

Davis had written about in 1968. The song had traveled 38 years from a dirt street in Lukak to a studio in Memphis to number three on the charts to a fatherdaughter duet released to help the victims of a flood. And the question Davis had been asking since childhood was still not answered.