1956. Photo by Alfred Wertheimer
21-year-old Elvis, listening to the playback of “Hound Dog” at the RCA Studio in NYC. (Normally he recorded at the RCA facilities in Nashville – which he really didn’t care for – but in this case, he was in town to appear on the Steve Allen Show, so a session was set up in New York.) Elvis had been performing “Hound Dog” live at his shows for months at that point. A Mama Thornton song originally, Elvis took it on because he loved it, and there’s a nice gender-bending quality to all of it. If you listen to the lyrics, it makes more sense (in a binary world, anyway) if the song is sung by a woman. Elvis never cared about that stuff. The song KILLED in his live shows. He performed it on the Milton Berle Show earlier that year, and it was such a controversial performance, with full body bumping and grinding, that it launched him into national notoreity.
All hell broke loose. The song continued to kill at his live shows, but Elvis always saw the song as a “novelty” song, kind of a joke, nothing that could really be captured on an album. But the demand was so enormous from his fans for a recording of it, and so into the studio he went. The challenge was: to come up with an arrangement, a sound, that somehow captured what happened when he did it live. Not as easy a task as you might imagine.
It was a rigorous lengthy recording session, and Elvis demanded take after take. 38, 39 takes. He drove everyone crazy. All of these career studio musicians, career studio technicians – guys who had 20+ years on him in age and experience … were convinced they had “got it,” but Elvis would listen to the playback, and then say, “Let’s try it again.”
Elvis basically PRODUCED that record, even though there were actual RCA producers in the room. Elvis RAN that session. He ran everyone ragged. But he knew … he knew the sound he wanted. He knew the sound he heard in his head. Nothing less would suffice.
Lifelong friend Jerry Schilling wrote in his book that Elvis’ gifts as a producer have been almost entirely unacknowledged – that he was a great producer. And like everything else, Elvis didn’t need to “grow into” that kind of confidence. He arrived confident. He’s only 21 here, but he is running the show. Anyone who thinks Elvis was some “idiot savant “ or raw hillbilly “genius” or a “puppet” of the Colonel (and on and on) – frankly does not know enough about the topic and should not be listened to.
Here’s the final version. The one Elvis “okayed.” His instincts were always spot on. For me, those complicated hand-claps are an essential part of why the whole thing works as well as it does (outside of his performance, that is).
