For me, the highlight of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is the recreation of what we now call the ’68 Comeback Special. Just as Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary Get Back reveals the Beatles fitfully recapturing past glories, the actual ’68 Comeback Special offers an intimate view of an insecure icon re-awakening to grandeur as the cameras roll. In both cases, the reprieve from decline is short lived, but magnificent.
Of course, Luhrmann’s take on the ’68 Comeback Special is compressed, fictionalized, and stylized, but the gist is there. In a frenetic biopic, I was glad to see so much running time devoted to it.
Soon after walking out of the theater, I re-watched the real leather-clad 1968 Elvis yet again. (Much of it is on YouTube and is well worth your undivided attention.) With Luhrman’s slick fantasia still swirling in my head, I found my favorite segments of the ’68 Comeback Special – originally entitled Singer Presents… Elvis – even more raw and deliciously lo-fi than I recalled: Elvis drenched in sweat, hair askew, howling, an animal released back into the wild after eight years in golden-handcuffed exile.
It rankles me that most folks associate Presley with the addled, caped, so-called “Fat Elvis.” Google “Elvis costume” and in milliseconds, you’ll get hundreds of white rhinestone jumpsuits, the uniform of past-his-prime EP. In my alternate universe, the go-to Elvis get-up is a leather suit, spray tan, mussed black pompadour, and black Chelsea boots, i.e. the ’68 Comeback Special look. (Spritzer bottle for sweat optional.) That’s the image of Elvis Presley at the height of his powers.
With most artistic achievements, the person in the spotlight rarely arrives solely on their own steam. The ’68 Comeback Special is no different.
Elvis’s manager Colonel Tom Parker deserves credit for the one-off deal with NBC, to be sponsored by the Singer Sewing Company. The moribund Elvis empire needed a boost. The Colonel believed an Andy Williams-type network Christmas show, with The King lip synching carols for an hour on a bare stage, would be the ticket. Elvis was not thrilled at this prospect, but he likely would have done it, if not for producer/director Steve Binder.
In Elvis, Luhrmann cast Dacre Montgomery, of Stranger Things fame, as hip, handsome Binder, the neckerchief-ed man who would defy the Colonel and inspire Elvis to do the same. We have much to lay at Binder’s feet.
Binder was on a roll in the late 60s. He was one of the only Hollywood creatives who valued the combustive and rapidly evolving pop music of the day, and he could capture it on celluloid like no one else. While Elvis, at the Colonel’s behest, was starring in goofy movies, Binder was making a name as the man behind cutting-edge filmed live music productions like the legendary 1964 T.A.M.I. Show movie (featuring the Rolling Stones, James Brown, The Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, and the Supremes), and rock n’ roll TV series Hullabaloo. Both were critical and commercial successes. Binder had presided over a controversial 1968 Petula Clark program in which Clark grasped the arm of Harry Belafonte during antiwar song “On the Path of Glory,” the first interracial touch on television. It caused a stir, but the show got all-important high ratings, so NBC producer Bob Finkel – another unsung hero of this endeavor –invited Binder to helm the Elvis special.
Binder was not enamored of Elvis’s Hollywood work and had no interest in directing a Christmas show. He initially turned NBC down. His partner, producer Bones Howe (The Association, The 5th Dimension, later Tom Waits) happened to overhear the phone conversation and convinced him to reconsider. Howe had worked with Elvis in the 50s, and he felt the phenomenal King of Rock & Roll was still there, just awaiting an opportunity to re-emerge. This could be it. Binder called back. NBC and Finkel wisely did not press the “Christmas special” aspect. A meeting between Binder and Elvis was arranged. (Contrary to Luhrmann’s Elvis, it did not occur at the crumbling “Hollywood” sign.)
In walked a man the pushing-ninety Binder still calls, “the most beautiful human I have ever seen.” But that wasn’t the only thing about Elvis that surprised him.
In 1968, the thirty-three-year-old erstwhile truck driver was experiencing a kind of “good life” with his wife and new baby daughter, but he’d lost his mojo. Elvis was unhappy. He was well aware of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the hippies – all ascendant in a showbiz world to which he felt no kinship. He’d deeply desired respect as an actor but had grudgingly accepted that audiences would only pay to see him sing mostly uninspired songs in lowbrow comedies. The Colonel, and Elvis’s on-the-payroll entourage, did nothing to dissuade him from these notions.
Binder perceived a ravenous longing. Elvis had been spinning his wheels, and no one was looking out for him – not his manager, his feckless father, his just-out-of-her-teens spouse, or his “friends.” His drug use, which has begun with speed during his 50s heyday, was increasing – barbiturates and amphetamines.
Elvis was not enthused about doing TV, however. Last he’d been involved with the medium, they’d mostly made fun of him. (For the top-rated Steve Allen Show, Allen – the Colbert of his day – had made Elvis wear a tux with tails and sing “Hound Dog” to a Basset hound in a top hat.) But NBC had promised the Colonel financing for A Change of Habit (one of thirty-one Elvis flicks, this one co-starring up-and-comer Mary Tyler Moore) if he did a special for them. The Colonel had agreed. Elvis was legally bound to deliver.
In that first meeting, Elvis asked what Binder thought of his career. Binder said, “It’s in the toilet.” Elvis laughed, impressed that someone was finally telling him the truth. He expressed his misgivings. He’d not faced a live audience in almost a decade. He wasn’t sure he could even perform on TV. It wasn’t his turf.
“What is your turf?” Binder asked.
“Making records I love,” Elvis replied.
“Well, why don’t you make a record album, and I’ll put pictures to it?”
The men clicked, and Elvis soon agreed to everything Binder and his writers suggested. There was nothing about Christmas in their Singer Presents… Elvis pitch. The Colonel still vociferously insisted the show close with “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” which he would release as a yuletide single. Initially, Binder and Elvis agreed.
Although he felt alien to the counterculture, Elvis nevertheless was deeply troubled by the escalating violence in the streets, the assassinations of John Kennedy and, just months before, of both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Bobby Kennedy was not assassinated during production of Singer Presents… Elvis, as Lurhmann’s film asserts). Binder encouraged Elvis to put his anguish, rage, and desperate hope into song; the director insisted he would not be ridiculed.
Binder intended to direct something threatening to the status quo, as Elvis had been in the 50s before the U.S. government, perhaps alarmed at his growing power, drafted him into the Army at the height of his initial fame. Binder wanted an Elvis resurrection. He possessed the skills, both technical and persuasive, and the team, to show everyone – including Elvis – this complacent B-movie star could still set a stage afire. Elvis, admittedly terrified, agreed.
People like Steve Binder fascinate me. Behind-the-scenes mover-shakers who embolden artists in moments of uncertainty. Often, they literally push an artist onto the stage for a life-changing performance. Without their unshakeable conviction, nothing happens. On a much smaller scale, I’ve been that person. As a teacher, a parent, a friend, a spouse. A handful of times in my life, someone has been that person for me. They see me clearer than I see myself, and convince me – through cajoling, encouragement, or both – to manifest their vision. It can be unnerving, and only time tells if these catalyst folk are in the right. The few very successful folks in the arts I personally know, the ones who’ve essentially achieved their dreams, all have a person like Steve Binder in their story, a figure their fans know little or nothing about.
The making of the ’68 Comeback Special was no cakewalk. Although Elvis charmed everyone, the set was tense when the Colonel was present. Binder ingeniously instructed Bob Finkel to distract the Colonel by squiring him around Hollywood, bedazzle him with fine food, liquor, and entertainment while Singer Presents… Elvis was being rehearsed and filmed. Meanwhile Binder and Co. put together a Hair-inspired production number around a gospel medley; a narrative music video built around the rocking Jerry Reed song “Guitar Man,” and a R & B-ish production number set in a brothel. Although these sections feature lithe dancers and some production value, they are in fact the most forgettable aspects of the ’68 Comeback Special. They most resemble Elvis movies, in which he lip synchs and flirts with beautiful writhing women. Whenever Elvis lip synchs, the energy flags. Fortunately, the opening song, “Trouble,” is live, Elvis staring down the camera, infused with an adult man’s smoldering defiance.
The “68 Comeback Special really catches fire in “the black leather standup show” and the jam session, each harbingers of what was to come in Elvis’s final years. Both, not surprisingly, are absolutely live, warts-and-all, and, crucially, performed in front of audiences. And both happened over the Colonel’s strenuous objections. The Colonel had not wanted “his boy” in front of a crowd, unscripted, up close and personal, and beautifully flawed.
The black leather standup show features Elvis on a lit, boxing ring-like stage, with a big band with full orchestra offstage – the first time Elvis sang with strings – and a gathering of genuinely rapt young women (and a few guys) on every side of the square. The jam session – was an 11th hour addition to the schedule. It is perhaps the most satisfying footage of Elvis Presley in existence.
Immediately preceding the black leather standup show of mostly hits from yesteryear, Elvis, perhaps sensing a pivotal moment, and perhaps feeling the will of his manager, experienced extreme, unprecedented stage fright. He couldn’t remember lyrics to any songs.
“I changed my mind,” Elvis, shaking with anxiety, told Binder in his dressing room. “I can’t go on.”
Binder insisted he get out there, face the people. Shouting ensued.
Elvis subsequently emerges a vision of fussed-over beauty, bashful at first, a coiled spring, but decidedly not panicky. Within minutes of delivering new arrangements of “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Hound Dog,” “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “Love Me Tender,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” et al, he is a mess of sweat, crazed hair, and blind, unadulterated joy. His big blue eyes register surprise that the force is once again coursing through him, literally sending him to his knees. He gradually settles into it, like a man breaking a wild horse. He occasionally laughs with exhilaration, relief, and astonishment that he is still as good as he hoped he was, maybe better. Most of the carefully selected women in the audience are too young to have been original Elvis fans. Close-ups of their faces nevertheless reveal sustained astonishment and lust.
The jam session was an inspired afterthought. It features two-thirds of Elvis’s 50s-era band, guitarist Scotty Moore and drummer DJ Fontana (bassist Bill Black had passed from a brain tumor in 1965). Early on in the project, after rehearsals and shooting of the production numbers, a jazzed-up Elvis would spend hours in his dressing room, unwinding, whacking at his Gibson J-200 acoustic and singing old songs with his entourage. Binder had stood at the doorway, captivated. He’d said, “We need to capture this, put it in front of an audience.” The Colonel said absolutely not, it’s too raggedy, too hillbilly. Even Elvis was taken aback at Binder’s idea. Binder insisted, and flew in Moore and Fontana, who loathed the Colonel, to join in the unrehearsed segment. He assured (read: lied to) the Colonel that he’d leave anything that didn’t work out of the final edit. On the day of shooting, Binder and his team hustled up an audience of girlfriends and wives and NBC employees. They packed Elvis and his friends and bandmates onto the “boxing ring” stage, facing each other, set up some standard microphones, and rolled the cameras.
This jam session segment gets me more than any other. Elvis was a lonely man, but here he glows not only with musical brilliance, but with the emboldening light of companionship. Again, like the recently excavated Beatles bromaces in Peter Jackson’s in Get Back.
As great as Elvis’s onstage performances were, he was essentially alone in the spotlight, a soloist. But in the ’68 Comeback Special jam session, there is no spotlight. Elvis meets the gaze of his accompanists, and engages in loose, uninhibited play. He effortlessly coaxes exhilaration from them – shouts, whoops, and rollicking rhythms. It’s as close as we will ever get to seeing what it was like when he and Scotty Moore and Bill Black first lightheartedly launched into Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s All Right” at Sun Studios on July 5th, 1954, enticing Sam Phillips to hit RECORD and change the world.
All that has clouded Elvis’s spirit since his dream consumed him, since his associates subsequently undermined him, falls away on that cramped stage. He is as pure as when he was the nineteen-year-old “Hillbilly Cat,” driving women riotously, orgasmically insane on the Louisiana Hayride. He is free of the past, unconcerned with the future, completely in the moment, having fun. Not so much childlike as outside of time, ageless, beyond the gender binary. Magnetic to all. To witness him thus is to be transported to that place. Until the song ends.
Although Baz Luhrmann makes a valiant, expensive effort in Elvis, the precious vibe of the jam session is impossible to intentionally recreate with accuracy. Not even Elvis himself could ever recapture that lightning-in-a-bottle energy. It’s one of those situations where throwing money at it will not make it better.
Between numbers – “That’s All Right,” “Anyway You Want Me to Do,” “Tiger Man,” “Lawdy, Miss Clawdy” “Trying to Get to You,” – Elvis recedes into sweet, vulnerable nervousness, but only briefly. He jokes, stumbles over words, bums Kleenex from a fan to mop his drenched face, tries halfheartedly and humorously to recite from a hastily written script. At one point, Scotty Moore hands over his electric hollow-body Gibson Super 400, and Elvis executes blues licks and swampy country rhythms, skills unseen in his films or concerts. This is the private Elvis. They’re like incantations, these riffs, drawing from him a strange power that even he sometimes seems startled by. During “One Night with You,” he is so overcome he rises from his folding chair as if at a revival meeting, consumed by the spirit. No one is properly prepared. A companion, bless him, holds the microphone stand aloft to capture the voice of a man joyously possessed, and as raw as we will ever see him. The crowd goes wild.
The Colonel’s demand of an “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” finale would ultimately be dashed by “If I Can Dream.” As shooting neared completion, Steve Binder knew they needed a finale song that encompassed everything they’d presented, from the multi-racial cast of performers, the different styles of roots music from Elvis’s beginnings, and the edgy, urgent undertone of it all. In a panic, he approached the hired arranger, Walter Earl Brown, and told him they needed a finale tune as soon as possible. Taking his lyrical cue from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s already-famous speech, Brown composed “If I Can Dream” in one night. Elvis loved it. The Colonel did not, and he and NBC stridently objected capping off the special with an untested song. But Binder had gotten to Elvis, had uncorked something strong, some willpower. The Colonel uncharacteristically buckled under Elvis’s plea to “give it a shot.”
The wily manager did not cede every inch of ground, however. As with virtually every song Elvis recorded (except Jerry Reed’s “Guitar Man”) the Colonel copyrighted and published “If I Can Dream,” meaning he would garner income from it in perpetuity. (Indeed, whoever controls his estate gets paid to this day.) “If I Can Dream” would rise to Number 12 on the Billboard charts, eventually selling a million copies.
Elvis performs “If I Can Dream” live, in a white suit, with all the passion of true-believing Pentecostal preacher, bending notes and wailing in the bridge, “We're lost in a cloud with too much rain / We're trapped in a world that's troubled with pain / But as long as a man has the strength to dream / He can redeem his soul and fly.”
When you know the story of the ’68 Comeback Special, it becomes clear Elvis is singing not only for the troubled society that birthed him, but for himself, too. A dreamer who’d given up, but who is offered an unexpected chance to give wings to those dreams one more time.
Soon after Singer Presents… Elvis aired, Elvis radiated newfound energy and renewed confidence. He released his best album, 1969’s From Elvis in Memphis, a decidedly non-schmaltzy collection of country soul and funky rock, produced by hip session guitarist and co-writer of “Dark End of the Street,” Memphis’ own Chips Moman. The same sessions produced Elvis’s massive worldwide hit “Suspicious Minds,” which rocketed to the U.S. Number One spot, past the Beatles’ “Come Together” and Sly & the Family Stone’s “Hot Fun in the Summertime.” More hits would follow: “In the Ghetto,” “Burning Love,” “The Wonder of You.”
Sadly, the reprieve lasted only a few years. The Colonel redoubled his efforts at control, and successfully cut Elvis off from Steve Binder and all who were part of Singer Presents… Elvis. Although Elvis enthusiastically promised Scotty Moore and DJ Fontana they would record again, he never followed up. The Colonel did nothing to curtail visits from Elvis’s personal physician, “Dr. Nick.”
The Colonel booked Elvis into sold out runs in Las Vegas, where manager could keep client under a manipulative thumb and indulge his own gambling addictions. In truth, the early years of this arrangement allowed Elvis to experiment with and master an unprecedentedly huge band, featuring an orchestra, many back-up singers, off-the-charts drama, and some stellar live recordings. The Colonel would eventually book lucrative domestic tours of arenas and civic centers, but Elvis’s dream of bringing his music to Europe and the Far East never came true, due to the Colonel’s secret status as an illegal Dutch alien. If he’d left the country, he would not have been able to return.
The intensity of it all brought increased, epic drug use, allowed by sycophants and hangers-on, family, and the Colonel himself. Elvis’s marriage to Priscilla crumbled. Although his voice somehow never seemed to suffer, his physical and mental health rapidly decayed.
In one of several tantalizing-yet-excruciating “coulda beens,” Barbra Streisand really wanted Elvis as the male lead, John Norman Howard, in the 1976 remake of A Star is Born. Elvis wanted it, too. Finally a chance to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor. But the Colonel insisted on a huge sum of money, and billing over Streisand, so the part went to Kris Kristofferson. The movie was a massive hit. The next year, Elvis died of heart failure at his home in Graceland, a mere nine years after his 1968 triumph.
Time is a funny thing, though. What we now call the ’68 Comeback Special was too great to stay dormant to the general public forever. At this writing, although critics are divided, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is the Number One movie in America, displacing Tom Cruise’s Top Gun: Maverick. One of my teenage guitar students was just waxing enthusiastically about it. It’s the first movie I’ve heard this youngster talk about, after a year of lessons. To mention Elvis Presley’s ’68 Comeback Special to a digital native kid and have them nod in appreciative understanding is no small thing.
So perhaps my hope of the go-to Elvis costume becoming the black leather suit, boots, and mussed pompadour is not so far off after all. If I can dream…
Sources:
Gates of Graceland interview with Steve Binder
Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick
Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick