“Do You Gaze At Your Bald Head …” Hilarity Ensues. And Ensues. And Ensues.

Elvis Presley losing it during a live performance of “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” in 1969 at the International Hotel in Las Vegas. You can hear events conspiring against him. He starts out seriously, he’s playing it straight, then he changed the lyrics from “Do you gaze at your doorstep and wish I was there” to “When you gaze at your bald head, do you wish you had hair?” Live, Elvis liked to keep it loose. You can even see that in the 1968 Comeback Special, where he changes the lyrics in “Love Me Tender” from “You have made my life complete” to “You have made my life … a wreck …” That was part of the fun of live performance for him.

So first comes the “gaze at your bald head” lyric change, which puts a silly mood onto the thing. You can hear moments like that in so many of his live performances. But things immediately start to go south in a big big way, as the omnipresent soprano takes over in the background. And once things start going south for real, then everything becomes funny, as anyone who has had a laughing fit in church or in a quiet classroom will know. The band keeps playing, the soprano keeps trilling her background vocals (which also appears to destroy Presley), and Presley keeps trying to get it back together, but he cannot. He basically never recovers.

I love that the band keeps playing through it all, as Elvis basically disintegrates into a crying ball of laughter, gasping helplessly at one point, “Oh God …”

I remember we used to listen to this on vinyl in college. There was some limited edition album it appeared on, and I had it. Or maybe it was a total bootleg. I can’t remember. I bought it at Ricky’s House o’ Bargains. I had it on cassette tape too. The quality was very poor. It’s very difficult to find (at least to buy, there are Youtube videos, etc.).

When I finally met the man whom I refer to as my “friend from the CIA” (and more than that I cannot reveal, otherwise they might have me killed!!), we hung out at a dive bar, and talked for seven hours on our first meeting (although we had been corresponding and such for a couple of years before then, so we had a lot to talk about). We drank Scotch and we talked about Lauren Bacall and movies and politics and I grilled him on “what he knew” as though he were Mata freakin’ Hari. We couldn’t stop talking. I knew that he was a pretty serious survivalist and if an apocalypse came I’d want to be near him because he would have all the necessary supplies ON him. I said to him at one point, “Let me ask you a serious question. Do you have a roll of duct tape on you as we speak?” He looked embarrassed, and then amused, reached into an inner pocket of his bomber jacket and brought out a roll of duct tape. We were crying with laughter. I had actually been joking with my question, but out came the roll of duct tape. “Darlin’, guess what time it is,” he said to me at one point. I felt like we had been there for two hours, so I said, “9?” “It’s 2 a.m.” he replied. We finally left the bar and went back to my place. He was a Southern boy, a pilot, and he opened doors for me, not only when leaving the bar, but when I went to get out of the car at my apartment. That was the one that really impressed me, because you really only see that in movies now: a girl sitting in the car waiting for the guy to walk around and let her out.

Anyway, I bring him up because when we settled into his car to drive back to my place, he popped in a cassette tape, saying, in his beautiful drawl, “Have you heard this? I think you’re gonna love this.”

And it was the “Are You Lonesome Tonight” laughing version, and as we drove back to my place we laughed the entire way, laughing every time Elvis laughed. We listened to it twice.

No matter how many times I hear it, it never gets old.