Elvis Recorded Song Lying On The Studio Floor He Never Performed It Live Again HT

 

 

 

June 6th, 1968. NBC Studio 4, Burbank, California. Elvis Presley and his creative team are in the middle of rehearsals for his television comeback special when someone in the building says the words that stop the room. Bobby Kennedy has been shot. They rush into the next office. The television is on.

 The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, the same city they are sitting in. Robert Kennedy making his speech, then the chaos that follows. Elvis and director Steve Binder and the entire production team spend the rest of the night talking, not rehearsing, not planning, talking about Robert Kennedy. Talking about Martin Luther King Jr.

, who had been assassinated 63 days earlier in Memphis, Elvis’s hometown, the city he had grown up in, the city he still thought of as home. Two dreamers shot dead in two months and Elvis Presley, who had spent the last six years making movies that he did not believe in, sitting in a television studio in Burbank trying to figure out how to come back.

Steve Binder went to songwriter Walter Earl Brown the following day. He told him to write the greatest song he had ever written to put at the end of the show. He told him, “If you want to know Elvis’s thoughts and philosophy, write that.” Brown went home and wrote If I Can Dream. The story of the 1968 comeback special begins earlier than June and it begins with a lie.

 Colonel Tom Parker had made a deal with NBC, the network would finance Elvis’s next film, Change of Habit, eventually released in 1969, in exchange for a one-hour television special. Parker had not told Elvis about this arrangement. His reason for not telling him was straightforward. Elvis did not want to do television. He had been burned by it.

 The Steve Allen humiliation, tuxedo, basset hound, Hound Dog performed for an actual dog while Allen stood smirking in a suit, had left a mark. The string of Ed Sullivan appearances, the censors filming from the waist up, the sense that television always wanted to manage him into something smaller and safer, Elvis associated television with compromise and he had enough compromise in his life from the films without adding more.

When Parker finally told Elvis about the deal, Elvis was 33 years old. He had not performed live in seven years. He had spent most of the 1960s on soundstage lots in Hollywood making the films that Colonel Parker and the producers had constructed around him, formulaic, comfortable, inoffensive, and by the middle of the decade largely ignored by critics and increasingly avoided by the audience that had worshipped him in the 1950s.

The Beatles had arrived. Bob Dylan had arrived. The Rolling Stones had arrived. The cultural conversation had moved so far past the version of Elvis Presley that RCA and Colonel Parker was selling that many music writers had begun treating him as a historical figure rather than a working artist. He was 33 years old and being discussed in the past tense.

Parker’s vision for the television special was a Christmas show, Elvis in a tuxedo singing Christmas songs, warm and unthreatening, ending 1968 on a note of seasonal goodwill that would offend nobody and challenge nothing. Director Steve Binder, who had been brought in to produce the special, heard Parker’s plan and immediately understood it as exactly what it was, an attempt by Parker to keep control of an artist who was, finally, after years of material he hadn’t believed in, in a position to do something real.

Binder went directly to Elvis. He told him he had one chance, one shot to prove that the person who had made the Sun recordings in 1954 and 1955, the person Ed Sullivan had eventually called a real decent fine boy because he could not argue with what he had seen, the person John Lennon had been trying to describe for 10 years, that person was still in there, still capable of doing what he had once done, still worth watching.

He asked Elvis, “What happens if I bomb?” Binder told him he would still be remembered for his movies and his early records. He told him, “If it’s successful, every door that was closed to you will reopen.” Elvis trusted him and when Parker pushed back, as Parker always pushed back, because his management of Elvis was, at its core, a decade-long exercise in keeping the doors closed so that the control he had built could not be challenged, Elvis pushed back harder than he had in years.

He told Binder he wanted to do a live performance. He wanted to perform in front of a real audience. He wanted to play guitar with his original band, Scotty Moore and D.J. Fontana, the men who had been with him at Sun Studio, the men he had not played with in seven years. He wanted to come out of the control that had been placed around him and do the thing he had always been best at, walk onto a stage and perform.

Parker wanted a Christmas special. He got the 1968 comeback special instead. The special was filmed at NBC Studio 4 in Burbank, California between June 20th and June 23rd, 1968. The centerpiece was the live performance segment, Elvis in a black leather suit on a small square stage surrounded by audience members on all four sides, just him and a guitar and the men he had grown up playing with doing what no television camera had been permitted to show properly since 1957.

The cultural temperature of 1968 was everywhere in the room. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot April 4th in Memphis. Robert Kennedy had been shot June 6th in Los Angeles. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August would end with police beating demonstrators in the streets outside the hall. The country was fracturing in real time and the man on the small stage in the black leather suit had been, by accident or by instinct or by both, present in Memphis when one of the year’s worst events happened, present in Los Angeles

when another one happened, and was now being asked to close the show with something that said something about all of it. Binder wanted the finale to be a statement, not a political manifesto, not a speech, a song, the kind of song that did what Elvis did better than almost anyone alive, which was make something personal feel universal.

He told Walter Earl Brown to write the greatest song he had ever written. He told him to capture Elvis’s thoughts and his philosophy. He told him what had happened the night Bobby Kennedy was shot and how Elvis had been in the room and what the rest of that night had been. Brown had grown up admiring Martin Luther King Jr.

 He knew that Elvis had grown up admiring him, too, that Elvis’s relationship to King was not abstract, not a respectful distance of a white entertainer acknowledging a civil rights leader, but something more personal and more specifically rooted in where they had both come from. King had been shot in Memphis. Elvis had grown up in Memphis.

 The music Elvis had built his career on had come from the same cultural soil that King had grown up in, the same geography of the American South, the same specific conditions of race and class and religious feeling that had produced both the gospel churches and the blues clubs and the divide between them that Elvis had spent his entire career crossing and recrossing.

Brown understood all of this. He took it home and he wrote If I Can Dream. The lyrics draw directly from Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech of August 28th, 1963. Not quoted, paraphrased, absorbed, transformed into a first-person declaration. Where King had spoken about a dream of a nation that would live up to its founding documents, Brown wrote about a dream of a better land where all my brothers walk in hand.

Where King had spoken about the children of former slaves and the children of former slave owners sitting together at the table of brotherhood, Brown wrote about lights burning brighter somewhere, birds flying higher in a sky more blue. The gospel structure of the lyric, the call and response between the dream and the reality, the insistence on the dream in the face of the rain and the pain and the cloud, is the same structure that King had borrowed from the black church tradition and that Brown was now returning to through Elvis for a country

that was being asked to hold on to hope in a year that had given it very little reason to. Colonel Parker heard the demo and said, “That ain’t no Elvis song.” He said it in front of Elvis. He was playing the role he had always played, the practical mind, the commercial mind, the person whose job was to protect the investment by keeping the artist from doing anything risky.

A song song was risky. A song that contained the ghost of Robert Kennedy and the ghost of Martin Luther King Jr. was risky. A song that stood in front of an NBC television audience in December of 1968 and said directly that the country was lost in a cloud with too much rain, that it was trapped in a world troubled with pain, that was risky.

Colonel Parker had spent a decade making sure Elvis didn’t take risks. That was what the Christmas special was for. That was what the tuxedo was for. That was 29 movies in 15 years had been for. Elvis listened to Parker’s objection and said, “Let me give it a shot, man.” That sentence, six words, is the sentence that ends the version of Elvis Presley that Colonel Parker had been building for a decade.

He recorded If I Can Dream on June 23rd, 1968, the last day of filming for the special. The session was at NBC Studio 4. The backing vocalists who had been hired for the special were in the room. Walter Earl Brown, who had written the song specifically for this man and this moment and this year, was not present at the session, but his cousin later described the stories Brown had told him over the years about what happened.

One of the details that has been documented across multiple sources is that Elvis, during the recording, lay down on the studio floor. He was so inside the emotional territory of the song that he needed to be horizontal. He sang it from the floor. The backing vocalists watched him. One of them whispered to Brown afterward, “Elvis never sang with so much emotion.

Looks like he means every word.” He did mean every word. Steve Binder, who was present for the recording, described the session as a raw, unfiltered expression of Elvis’s innermost feelings. He said that if you want to know Elvis’s thoughts and philosophy, Earl Brown had nailed it in the lyrics. Jerry Schilling, Elvis’s friend and long-time associate, who had been with him since 1954 when they met at a football game in Memphis, said afterward, “I consider Elvis to be a writer on this song.

 That song was him expressing how he truly felt.” After hearing the completed demo, Elvis made a statement that the people around him never forgot. He said, “I’m never going to sing another song I don’t believe in. I’m never going to make another movie I don’t believe in.” He signed the original sheet music in red ink.

 He wrote, “This should be it, my boy, my boy.” The special aired on December 3rd, 1968. It attracted 42% of the television viewing audience. It ended the year as NBC’s highest-rated show of 1968, the year that had included the Democratic National Convention and multiple major news broadcasts and every other programming category that NBC competed in.

The finale, If I Can Dream, the song Colonel Parker had called not an Elvis song, the song Elvis had recorded lying on the studio floor while his backing vocalists stood in the room with tears on their faces, was the last thing the country saw. The single was released on November 22nd, 1968, 11 days before the special aired.

>> [snorts] >> It climbed to number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 and reached number six on the Canadian RPM chart. It was certified gold for sales exceeding 1 million copies. In the United Kingdom, it charted for 10 weeks and peaked at number 11. It was Elvis’s biggest chart hit since Love Letters in 1966, two and a half years during which the machine of Hollywood films had produced soundtrack albums and B-grade singles that nobody kept.

If I Can Dream was the first record in two and a half years that the audience had bought because they needed to own it. The sheet music signed by Elvis in red ink is in private hands. The family of Walter Earl Brown, who died in 2008, still has the gold record. Brown had written for the Andy Williams Show, the Carol Burnett Show, the Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.

 He had arranged music for multiple artists and variety programs across a long career. He had written If I Can Dream in the days after Robert Kennedy was shot at the request of a director who told him to write the greatest song he had ever written. It sold over a million copies and was performed by the most-watched television audience of 1968.

And over it, in a piano room above the display case, Brown had kept a note beside his phone that read, “Call Elvis” with a phone number. Brown’s cousin, who visited him in California in the 1970s, saw it and realized only years later what it meant. There is one more detail that sits at the center of this story and that most people who love this song have never heard.

Elvis Presley performed If I Can Dream on the 1968 Comeback Special. He released it as a single. It sold over a million copies. And then, according to multiple sources including Darlene Love, the gospel singer who performed in the special alongside him, he never performed it live again. Not once.

 Not at the Madison Square Garden shows of 1972. Not at Aloha from Hawaii in 1973. Not on the 1970s tours. He had recorded one of the most powerful songs of his career and then, after the special aired, put it away. Darlene Love, speaking of the song decades later, said he never performed that song live following the special. She said she had performed it herself at concerts around the world, in Germany, in the United Kingdom, and that it still required three encores wherever she sang it.

She said the words in the song are so heavy, that song could be written for today. Why Elvis never performed it again is not documented. He left no statement about it. The people around him have offered no clear explanation. What can be documented is what the song contained, what Walter Earl Brown had written into it from the nights of the Kennedy assassination and the King assassination and the conversations with Steve Binder.

 And what it would have cost to stand on a stage every night in Las Vegas and sing every word of it and mean it. There is a version of restraint that is its own kind of respect, a version of not performing something because performing it every night for an audience that wanted entertainment would reduce it to something it was not. Elvis had said he was never going to sing another song he didn’t believe in.

Perhaps that meant never singing this one in a context that did not deserve it. Priscilla Presley, at a forum with Ron Onesti in 2017, was asked about her favorite Elvis songs. She named two. She named If I Can Dream and An American Trilogy. Not Heartbreak Hotel. Not Suspicious Minds.

 Not Hound Dog or Jailhouse Rock or Love Me Tender. The two songs about a country that was broken and a man who believed it did not have to stay that way. She was there for the career. She heard all of it. And she named those two. On the evening of June 6th, 1968, in a rehearsal room at NBC Studio 4 in Burbank, Elvis Presley and his team watched Robert Kennedy being shot on live television.

They spent the rest of the night talking. They did not rehearse. They did not plan. They sat with what had happened the way people sit with things that are too large to immediately process. 17 days later, on June 23rd, 1968, Elvis lay down on the studio floor and sang If I Can Dream until the backing vocalists were in tears.

Five months after that, 42% of the American television audience watched him sing it. He never sang it live again. The song is on every streaming platform. It runs 3 minutes and 20 seconds. If you have never heard it, or if you have heard it and forgotten how large it is, listen to it knowing what was in the room when it was recorded.

 The deaths that had preceded it, the conversation that had lasted all night, the man on the floor of the studio giving everything he had to a song that Colonel Parker had told him was not his kind of song. He signed the sheet music in red ink. This should be it, my boy. My boy. He was right.