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50th Anniversary Event Viewing Special
Singer Presents...Elvis (a.k.a. the '68 Comeback Special)
Originally aired December 3, 1968
Wiki said:
Singer Presents...Elvis (commonly referred to as the '68 Comeback Special) is a television special starring singer Elvis Presley, aired by NBC on December 3, 1968. It marked Presley's return to live performance after seven years during which his career was centered in the movie business. Presley was unhappy with his distance from musical trends of the time, and the low-quality movie productions he was involved in.
Initially planned as a Christmas special by the network, and Presley's manager Colonel Tom Parker, producer Bob Finkel transformed the idea. He hired director Steve Binder to update Presley's sound, and to create a special that would be current and appeal to a younger audience. Filming took place in June 1968 at NBC's Burbank Studios. The show consisted of a sit-down section, stand-up numbers and two musicals. The sit-down session showcased Presley in an informal setting, surrounded by fans and small band. The stripped sound, and intimate atmosphere would become the forerunner to MTV Unplugged.
The special garnered good reviews when it aired, topped the Nielsen television ratings for the week, and was the most watched show of the season. Later known as the "Comeback Special", it re-launched Presley's singing career and his return to live performance.
The original broadcast was an hour, or about 50 minutes without the commercials. The version that I rented on iTunes clocked in at 1 hr, 14 mins., so some of it is obviously expanded material. But I'll review what I was able to watch...and yes, it seems that the Elvis VEVO at this point has individual clips of every performance in the special, leaving out only some transitional bits from between numbers.
Opening the special is a production number based on a "Trouble/Guitar Man" medley:
Love the pan out to reveal that Elvis is standing within his giant, red-lit name. Intentional or not, one could read some symbolism in that...the man is dwarfed by his legend.
After a hard edit (likely the location of the first commercial, though the rental version at least has more hard edits than there would have been commercial breaks), we proceed to the special's first "sit-down" performance...appropriately enough, of the song that served as Elvis's first single in 1954,
"That's All Right".
Another hard edit separates this from a second sit-down performance, of
"Baby What You Want Me to Do". I got good laughs when he interrupted the song to start poking fun at his trademark sneer (which comes up again later).
The King said:
I got news for you, baby, I did 29 pictures like that.
There are two versions of the song in the home video version, making me think that one of them is added. I suspect that it was this one, given the brevity of the actual performance and the hard edits surrounding it.
The first stand-up performance is a medley consisting of three very familiar early smashes,
"Heartbreak Hotel," "Hound Dog," and "All Shook Up". The arrangement definitely gets a bit Vegas lounge here. I found that I liked the sit-down performances a lot better because they were both more intimate and more faithful, given their simple, acoustic arrangements. Whereas the stand-up numbers are generally overproduced. In the complete special, there's a pretty large ovation between that and the next number, which are the first two consecutive performances not separated by a hard edit. The unnecessary rearrangement of
"Can't Help Falling in Love" sounds a bit schmaltzy.
Another hard edit separate that from the next stand-up number,
"Jailhouse Rock," which features a more enjoyably faithful arrangement. This segues without interruption into another stand-up performance of an early hit,
"Don't Be Cruel". To my mild annoyance, it's a bit overarranged, distracting from the faithful core performance. We proceed uninterrupted into the next two numbers,
"Blue Suede Shoes" and "Love Me Tender":
Note how Elvis has a little fun with the lyrics. Again they take some liberty with the arrangement, but in this case maybe it works, because I found myself getting unexpectedly misty-eyed in the middle.
The hard edit following this string of uninterrupted performances was likely an original commercial break spot. After a presumed word from our sponsor, we come back to more stand-up and a fuller version of
"Baby What You Want Me to Do" with a long guitar intro.
A spoken intro filmed at a sit-down session, which includes an obligatory nod to the Beatles (all indications are that Elvis couldn't stand them), precedes another unique production piece, a medley of "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," "Where Could I Go," "Up Above My Head," and "Saved" that uses dancers and a group of singers whom the credits would indicate are the Blossoms, consisting of Fanita James, Jean King, and Darlene Love:
There's your gospel,
RJ! I think that this one has to have been in the original, both for the trouble put into it and for the intro tacked onto it, which they likely wouldn't have bothered with for restored footage.
A hard edit takes us into another sit-down number, "Lawdy, Miss Clawdy":
When looking up information about the special, I caught multiple references to this particular performance, suggesting that it's one of the more highly regarded ones. According to the closed captioning, he's singing "Tornell Darlin'" rather than "little darlin'"...the delivery of the line and post-song chatter gives me the impression that there was probably a story behind that bit of business that got cut.
The VEVO clips leave out a seamless segue that includes Elvis complaining about how hot his leather outfit is before proceeding into
"Are You Lonesome Tonight?" This is where he brings up the sneer again. He also briefly mocks the spoken bridge from the original recording. This performance highlights the contrast between the acoustic sit-downs and the stand-up arrangements. This song easily could have been overdone in the other format. Instead, it gets a much more intimate spotlight.
A hard edit leads into another sitdown number,
"Trying To Get To You". He really wails in this one. The next hard edit leads to a number that I know wasn't in the original broadcast,
"Tiger Man". I read that this one was inserted into the rerun broadcast in place of
"Blue Christmas," which alas isn't in the home video version. Instead, "Tiger Man" segues straight into the next song,
"When My Blue Moon Turns To Gold Again," with a brief bit of fun in-between (not included in the VEVO clips) of Elvis doing a couple of impromptu lines from "MacArthur Park".
A hard edit leads to the previously-posted performance of
"One Night"...and the full home video version indicates that there's nothing missing in that clip, it actually opens just like that, though it seems clear that we're catching a performance already in progress. Technically this is one of the sit-down performances, though Elvis opts to stand up for it. This seamlessly blends into a performance of a new song that will be his next charting single, "Memories":
A beautiful song that already hit the buttons for me...the performance here of Elvis sitting on the edge of the stage surrounded by audience members really put it over the top, getting me choked up at one point.
Hard edit to another production-piece medley, this one clocking in at nearly 13 minutes. Referred to on the VEVO as
"Guitar Man Production Number," it consists of segments of that song interspersed with various others, including "Nothingville," "Let Yourself Go," "Big Boss Man," "Little Egypt," and "Trouble". Apparently this one wasn't in the broadcast version, as I'd read that a production number involving a bordello scene was filmed but cut. There's also the redundancy with the broadcast intro's use of "Trouble" and "Guitar Man"; and the length of this segment would account for a good part of the running time difference between the original broadcast and the home video. Other interesting elements include how the dance number after "Big Boss Man" seems martial arts-inspired--Kung Fu Mania was still a few years ahead of us here--and the performance of "Trouble" transitioning from the set production into a stand-up leather suit performance that continues into the final "Guitar Man" segment. Overall, this production is definitely the sort of thing you'd expect to see in a music/variety special of the day, apart from going into territory that offended either the censors or the sponsors, I forget which.
All that's left is the previously posted iconic performance of Elvis's then-new single,
"If I Can Dream"...which is all the more powerful in its proper place as the special's finale.
In the home video version, at least, the expanded credits play a longer performance of "Guitar Man" with Elvis standing inside the letters. An odd bit of business--the credits include performances by Andy Williams ("Downtown") and Phyllis Diller (a medley of various songs including "I Get a Kick Out of You" and "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair"). Were these in the original broadcast version, giving viewers even less Elvis material?
Anyway, I'm definitely glad that I took the opportunity to absorb the home video of this piece of history in its entirety.
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I'm having a real hard time picturing that.
I left out that Barney used gas to put out the person in the back seat so that he could poke out of the compartment and do the switcheroo. There were scenes of people trying to open a pre-existing compartment there, so maybe it was some extra-big bit of luxury limo business that the IMF repurposed.
Vacation? Movie part? Contract dispute?
As with the previous Tara-centric episode, he was in it, but not featured prominently in the story.
IMDB needs to get better intel.
Wiki.
I am outraged and offended by the negative representation of Hippie Culture on this show.
Really? I think it's kinda cute.
Get Happy?
Smart Days?
Research indicates that he may be Oliver $ (Dollar), a German record producer. Apparently Music Choice lets the Millennial intern do the image searches.
And I didn't get any good Google results until I spelled out the last name...then I found that it certainly was him...other iterations of the same picture popped up. Never hoid o' him.
