Originally published in Uncut Take 201 [February 2014 issue], we look back to 1970 and Elvis Presley’s attempts to reconnect with the long-lost roots of his music; to create a remarkable album, Elvis Country. “I was wondering,” he says, “if any of you guys would like to help me make a few phonograph records?…”
A flamboyant black cape and carrying a lion’s‑head walking stick
It’s a sleepy Sunday afternoon on the outskirts of Bonn. Last night, veterans of Elvis Presley’s TCB Band packed out the city’s Stadthalle as part of a European tour to celebrate what would have been the King’s 78th birthday. Today, a couple of middle-aged men in pompadours from the local Elvis Presley fan club drift around the foyer of a hotel close to the venue.
Meanwhile, just a few feet away from them, sitting at the rear of the hotel’s restaurant, two members of the TCB Band are reminiscing about a forgotten peak in Presley’s career. James Burton was Presley’s guitarist and right-hand man from 1969 until the singer’s death in 1977. Sporting a thin moustache and a black Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame cap and jacket, he trades stories with bassist Norbert Putnam, a founding member of Alabama’s iconic Muscle Shoals rhythm section. They met in Nashville, almost 44 years ago. A copy of the first record they played on together, Elvis Country, lies on a table between them – a photograph of the future King Of Rock’n’Roll, aged two, staring out at them from the front cover.
An unexpected third‑act peak
“I was totally stiff with fright before that first session,” laughs Putnam. “I don’t know why, because I’d already had a very successful 10 years in the studio. But something told me, this is bigger than anything that you’ve ever been a part of. I remember standing in the bathroom, just before I went out there, and I’d look in the mirror and say, ‘Dear God, guide my fingers. Don’t allow me to be the one to screw up this up.’”
When Elvis Presley entered the studio in June 1970, he did so as a man enjoying an unexpected third-act peak. The NBC TV special – the ’68 Comeback – his record-breaking live return in Las Vegas, and a batch of sessions at Memphis’ American Sound Studio resulting in the acclaimed From Elvis In Memphis album had successfully reinvigorated his career after a decade of artistic and commercial decline.
These are remembered now as the final flare of Presley’s majesty, but the Elvis Country sessions tell a different story: of a comeback with some distance left to run. As the surviving musicians who gathered in Nashville’s RCA Studio B now testify, they found Presley energised, determined, ready to pull off whatever he set his mind to. “He was fearless,” confirms Putnam. “Elvis didn’t have any borders.”
“They’d made a great LP in Memphis”
Elvis Country is a return to roots. Released in 1971 at the height of country rock, the material – bluegrass, rockabilly, honky tonk, covers of songs by his heroes Eddy Arnold and Ernest Tubb – was deeply personal to Elvis. “Many of them were hits when he was just a kid,” acknowledges the archivist who helps compile Sony Legacy’s Elvis releases, Ernst Mikael Jorgensen. But astonishingly, it’s an album that seems to have been created almost by accident, in the middle of recording something else altogether.
Prior to the Elvis Country sessions, Presley had made a successful trip to the American Sound Studios in Memphis, which had yielded “Suspicious Minds” and the aforementioned From Elvis In Memphis, produced by Chip Moman. Moman encouraged Presley to work with material outside his normal range – including “In The Ghetto”. “They’d made a great LP in Memphis, and they should have cut there again,” says Elvis’ pianist David Briggs, speaking from his Nashville home. “But I don’t think they could get along with Chips Moman. It was politics and business.”
Elvis returned to Nashville, to RCA Studio B – where he’d recorded 18 sessions since 1958 – and his regular producer, Felton Jarvis, very different from the demanding Moman. “Felton wasn’t a musical guy,” says Putnam. “Felton was a pretty good judge of material that normal people would buy, and he was fun. Felton never got in the way.”
“I remember seeing him for the first time”
“Felton wanted to get it back up here where he could control it,” adds Briggs. The success of From Elvis In Memphis had been noted, though, as Putnam recalls: “Felton said, ‘I want you on the next batch of Elvis sessions, ’cos it’s got to be more like the American guys, and you guys are Muscle Shoals.’”
Elvis Presley walked into RCA Studio B at 8pm on June 4 to be greeted by some familiar faces – James Burton, who’d made his live debut with Elvis the previous year, David Briggs, harmonica player/organist Charlie McCoy and guitarist Chip Young. There were some new ones, too: the rhythm section of Putnam and drummer Jerry Carrigan – both Muscle Shoals alumni. In effect, this was a new band waiting for him.
“I remember seeing him for the first time,” says Putnam. “He comes bursting into the studio, and he’s wearing a long black cape, and he’s carrying a walking stick with a lion’s head with ruby eyes. And he walked in like Prince Leopold, and took his cape off and he tossed it. He stood up and said, ‘I was wondering if any of you guys would like to help me make a few phonograph records?’
“He burst out laughing”
“Then he burst out laughing, and he’s telling four or five stories, making us all laugh. He reminded me of the kids I knew in high school. He never wore that cape again. Maybe he was dressing up for the new boys. In 1970, he was in great physical condition, he was still working out with his karate every day. I looked at him when he came in, and thought, ‘He’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.’”
Working with Elvis was a unique experience for the musicians. “Elvis was on a different planet,” Putnam explains. “In the control room would be all the Memphis Mafia and the publishing guys. And no matter how mediocre the first take was, at the end of it, they would leap into the air. They’re saying, ‘Gas, King! You’re the King! Touchdown!’ And we’re all going, ‘Boy, we could make this a lot better…’ But they all worked for him. Every man had a chore assigned. I remember one of them brought in a Halliburton briefcase. And inside was an arsenal of weapons. So he was obviously the security guy.”
“He’d be putting on a show for the musicians”
Putnam also remembers some of Elvis’ more unusual studio practices. “Studio B was a very traditional, open room. Screens were available, but most nights Presley sang into this mic with a long cable, and he’d come out and stand in front of us, and he’d be dancing. It was very difficult for the engineer. He wasn’t interested in recording technique, whatsoever.”
“It was almost like he was doing a live show for you,” says Burton. “He’d be putting on a show for the musicians.”
According to Peter Guralnick’s Elvis biography Careless Love, a rack of clothes was available for costume changes. “He wasn’t changing clothes to impress you,” Briggs says. “He was sweating and felt dirty. He was working hard.”
There was little evidence of how good that work would be when the sessions began. Elvis’ publishers Freddy Bienstock and Lamar Fike started off by pitching the sort of tame material he’d been singing before Memphis. “There’s every reason to believe the country album wasn’t planned,” explains Ernst Mikael Jorgensen, who has heard every tape from the sessions. “I think Felton thought he was going to go in there to record an album of pop songs. They started with two British power ballads – ‘I’ve Lost You’ and ‘Twenty Days And Twenty Nights’. But then Elvis jumps into ‘I Was Born About Ten Thousand Years Ago’, in one take.”
“It’s past midnight”
Originally a gospel tune, the boisterous version of “I Was Born…” would weave in and out of Elvis Country, an impromptu theme threading the record together. “After Elvis has finished more demanding, big ballads, including 11 takes of ‘The Sound Of Your Cry’, it’s past midnight,” Jorgensen continues. “And they start to play ‘Faded Love’ in a country version, and then they jump into ‘100 Years From Now’ and ‘Little Cabin On The Hill’ – bluegrass songs like he did at Sun, not serious, with Elvis on his own acoustic guitar, very spirited. And Felton panics. This is developing in a way that he never anticipated, and fast, so at the end of the reel he has to turn the tape over and record on the back, there’s no time to get a new one. They did nine songs that first night.”
For a typical session, Burton remembers, “Elvis would only wanna sing a song three, four times at most. And after that, he’d move onto something else. He was the greatest at taking the song and redoing it, putting his thing to it, his arrangement. His voice was so powerful, and we had all the freedom in the world to play what we wanted to play. I loved it when Norbert would break out the stand-up bass…”
“I had all the freedom I needed”
“Elvis would let you go,” continues Putnam. “He never said, ‘I’d like you to play like this.’ He would take the song and start getting in the mood to do it, then the light would come on and we’d play to that emotion. And he loved it, didn’t he? I’d say, ‘King’ or sometimes we called him El. ‘El, what do you think of the bass part?’”
“I had all the freedom I needed,” adds Burton. “We’d rehearse a song, and after one time, we knew who was going to play the intro, who was going to play the turn-around, and we all picked out the little frills for each one of us…”
Over the next two nights, there was little sign this interlude was significant. But on June 7, the floodgates opened and six country songs poured out of Elvis. Eddy Arnold’s 1954 hit “I Really Don’t Want to Know”, another version of Bob Wills’ “Faded Love”, Ernest Tubb’s “Tomorrow Never Comes”, Ray Price’s “Make The World Go Away”, Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” and a riotous take on Charlie Rich’s 1965 hit, “I Washed My Hands In Muddy Water”. “He puts this blues phrasing on ‘I Really Don’t Want to Know’ that makes it wonderful,” Jorgensen says, “and then the whole spirit is created.”
“If I can’t sing it all the way through, I’m not going to do it”
Presley had effectively hijacked his own session, using it to pay tribute to many of his favourite songs and formative musical idols. Eddy Arnold – pioneer of the ‘Nashville sound’ – was “definitely a hero”, Jorgensen explains, and points out that Arnold was there in the photo commemorating Elvis’ signing to RCA. Grand Ole Opry patriarch Ernest Tubb was, Jorgensen says, a “mighty man” to Elvis: “‘Tomorrow Never Comes’ is a difficult song for Elvis to sing, you can hear him struggling all the way through the takes. But it’s an Ernest Tubb song. And Elvis says, ‘If I can’t sing it all the way through, I’m not going to do it.’”
Meanwhile, Texan swing king Bob Wills personally also encouraged the young Elvis in 1954. Elsewhere, Charlie Rich, Presley’s near-contemporary at Sun, and Willie Nelson complete the night’s cross-section of country songs. “There’s no talking, mostly first takes, one right after another,” reveals Jorgensen. “I wouldn’t say the excitement is building that night. What happens is, it flows so naturally. It’s more like playing music than recording it.”
“We didn’t treat ’em like country”
“There was some plan,” nods Putnam. “I think he and Felton had considered doing a country LP. But it was a total surprise to us.” At the session, Elvis would try to get the songs in one take, and the band would find ways of stalling him while Putnam or Briggs scrawled down arrangements in pencil. The songs, at least, they knew well: “A lot of stuff we’d played on the original sessions,” laughs Briggs.
“I thought he should have done it a long time before that,” says Charlie McCoy. “It’s so natural for him. OK, he grew up doing R’n’B, but his roots are as country as anything else.”
“But,” Burton emphasises, “we didn’t treat ’em like country.”
“We didn’t go for the normal country arrangement,” Putnam confirms. “We played them in the way that came naturally. Black music had influenced me heavier than anything, after I became a musician. And I needed to make the bassline more interesting than a country bassline. Jerry Carrigan and I had come up from Muscle Shoals, and you’ll hear that R’n’B influence in songs like ‘Make The World Go Away’ – a little more soul on the bass and drums.”
“Elvis made all the primal sounds that human beings exhibit”
Burton: “When I got out the dobro, for ‘Funny How Time Slips Away’, Elvis said, ‘Come on, baby. Come on…’ You know like on ‘Make The World Go Away’, Elvis’ vocal on that [croons delicately] and then the dobro thing really fit that song, and it was different to what you were expecting. And ‘I Washed My Hands In Muddy Water’, I had a little mud on my strings to get that scratchy sound. Ooh, and ‘Faded Love’, that was raunchy. Yeah, man. It’s one of my favourite albums ever.”
The last country song they recorded on the June 7 sessions, “I Washed My Hands In Muddy Water”, shows the kind of music they were creating here. A tale of a Tennessee outlaw who can’t wash himself clean of his crimes, it’s rendered here as exhilarating rock’n’roll, driven by McCoy’s blasting harmonica riffs and Briggs’ urgent piano vamping, with Elvis himself giving full vent to his vocal abilities. Says Putnam: “He would dive down here and he’d soar up there, and he’d pant into the mic. Elvis made all the primal sounds that human beings exhibit, from blissful love to a primal scream, in one song.”
The musicians came home in the small hours of June 8, many stunned by what had transpired. “It was like you’d just played four quarters of football and you won,” says Putnam. “Everyone’s gone, and you’re sitting alone in your car, and can you get home without hitting a tree? It was exhilarating exhaustion.”
They had completed 35 master takes in five nights
The evening of June 8, they went back to RCA Studio B. It was as if the previous night’s session hadn’t happened. The five songs they recorded – “There Goes My Everything”, “If I Were You”, “Only Believe”, “Sylvia” and “Patch It Up” – were the usual hotch-potch of mid-tempo ballads and love songs. They had completed 35 master-takes in five nights. Presley left Nashville shortly after. On August 10, he began what Colonel Tom Parker dubbed ‘The Elvis Presley Summer Festival’: a month-long residency at the International Hotel in Las Vegas, filmed as Elvis: That’s The Way It Is, another triumph.
At some point during his tenure in Vegas, the decision was taken to release a country album drawn from the Nashville sessions. On September 22, Elvis returned to RCA Studio B. Four new songs were added to the 35 they’d cut back in June. Only two of those – Anne Murray’s recent hit “Snowbird” and Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” – made the LP. But, as David Briggs recalls, the mood had gone: “James Burton wasn’t on that session, and we got Eddie Hinton, which was my idea as he was a great rock’n’roll player. But when Elvis came in and had all these sorta corny songs like ‘Snowbird’, it’s hard to make them anything that’s groovy.”
“I was there! I was there!”
Presley lacked enthusiasm for the material. Even before they began “Whole Lotta Shakin’…” he told his band, “We’ve been doing it too long already.” However, David Briggs remembers that their fierce, authoritative take of “Whole Lotta Shakin’…” would come to mean a great deal to Elvis later: “This was just before he died, in ’77, when we were supposed to be recording an LP with just piano in Graceland.
He used to like to listen to that up in his bedroom when I was with him. He played ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’…’ every day, ’cos he liked what Jerry Carrigan played on the drums. He wore me out, he must have played it 50 times. ‘Listen to this, listen to this!’ ‘I was there! I was there!’ We were just playing around on songs like that… we’d just go, ‘Jesus Christ!’ and start jamming. It was a way of getting away from all that stuff he didn’t like, the stack of bad songs that the Colonel had always agreed to do for somebody.”
Elvis Country was released on January 2, 1971, with the evocative subtitle, ‘I’m 10,000 Years Old’. It reached No 12 on the Billboard Hot 100 – the highest place an Elvis album would reach until his death in 1977. In his review for Rolling Stone, future Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick considered it among Presley’s best “since he first recorded for Sun almost 17 years ago… music that, while undeniably country, puts him in touch more directly with the soul singer.”
“A shared frustration with the band”
The surfeit of recorded songs would be spread through a further two albums, That’s The Way It Is and Love Letters From Elvis. “Mostly it was just, ‘everybody goes wild’,” remembers David Briggs. “It was like a big gang-bang there. The engineers were lazy, some of them, and they were too busy dancing in the control room rather than working on the EQ. It’s probably 10 per cent of what it could have been. And that’s Elvis – that’s the part that sounds great.”
Briggs also contends that 1970 was a pivotal year for Presley, both in the studio and during his ever-expanding Vegas residency. “A lot of that stuff is when it started going bad. Maybe being so constricted in Memphis, when he did that great album, wore him out. Maybe he just didn’t like to cut that way. Whereas before he’d sing softer, more in control and didn’t sing hardly any bad notes, that was the start of his going down with his vocals. Singing in Vegas could have been a big part of it – that brassy, hard singing above the orchestra.”
“Elvis never cared for perfection”
“It was a shared frustration with the band, that it went too fast and they could have done better,” counters Ernst Mikael Jorgensen. “But Elvis never cared for perfection, if the thing had the feel.” Elvis’ exhilarated vocal outbursts on Elvis Country set the template for the unchecked soul of his best ’70s singing, and the bombast of the worst. “He was in better shape to pull it off as a vocalist in 1970,” Briggs concedes. “It was more special working with him than anybody else.”
Back in Bonn, James Burton turns over the sleeve of Elvis Country and runs a finger along the tracklisting, before letting it rest on the title, “I Was Born About Ten Thousand Years Ago”. “If you go through all the generations of this guy’s music in his life,” he says, “he might well have been born 10,000 years ago. It was a natural, exciting thing, playing behind that voice. Playing all the hot licks, all at once.”
