Meeting Elvis Presley: Hollywood 1968

by Thomas Dimopoulos

SARATOGA SPRINGS - The King wore black.

For one brief televised moment in 1968, Elvis Presley emerged from the shadows and into the spotlight before the eyes of the world. That shining moment transcended the 15 years of his career prior, and the decade of excess that followed.
Elvis has been dead for more than 25 years.

“It’s a strange thing, how frail we all are,” singer Bobby Dick said from his residence in South Glens Falls. He was referring to singers and artists in all walks of life, but in this particular instance, he was talking about Elvis Presley.

“Elvis was deeply affected by the Beatles Invasion,” Dick said of Presley’s state of mind in 1968. “He was concerned whether or not people would remember him in a credible light.”

That turbulent year brought more than concerns about the Beatles. On April 4, 1968, 39-year-old Martin Luther King was felled by an assassin’s bullet as he leaned over a motel balcony in Memphis.
In New York City, thousands of demonstrating students were taking over their Columbia University campus uptown, while a few dozen blocks south a new rock musical called “Hair” was staging its debut.
In the next few months, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy would be gunned down in Los Angeles, and a clash of mammoth proportions would take place at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

By the spring of 1968, the 33-year-old Presley was a money-making machine - more of a commodity than a credible artist - to his manager, Col. Tom Parker.

His records were either pale re-issues or critically dismissed efforts. And Presley’s appearance in dozens of movies was mostly forgettable, straining his standing as a true artist.

The star that once illuminated the entire world was a decade gone from its brightest point. A new generation was evolving with its own musical heroes and its own social and cultural needs and desires. All that remained from Presley’s former glory was the fading vapor trail of a dying star.

It was at this critical juncture that Bobby Dick met Presley on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, Calif.

“My brother was visiting me from New York City,” said Dick, whose own star was rising with his band The Sundowners.
Dick’s band formed earlier in the decade, and had performed with the likes of The Rolling Stones, The Who and Jimi Hendrix. The band was in California recording with longtime RCA music engineer Bones Howe, who had worked with Presley in earlier years.

“We were talking about our record while Bones’ partner, Steve Binder, was in meetings with Elvis about the ‘comeback’ TV special they were planning. Howe knew I loved Elvis, so he told me to hang around for a while, until Binder and Elvis were done with their meeting,” Dick said.
Binder had produced music-based series like the 1960s series “Hullabaloo” and feature film, the T.A.M.I. Show.

He would go on to win a cabinet-full of Emmy Awards, and had his hand in everything from the creation of Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert, to Jane Fonda’s “Complete Workout” video, Pee Wee’s Playhouse, and the feature film “Give ‘Em Hell Harry.”

“While we were waiting, Bones told me stories about Elvis in his early days,” Dick said. “How Elvis was totally in charge of the recording sessions and everything that was going on in the studio. On certain songs (where they didn’t use drums), there’s a tap-tap rhythm sound you can hear on the record. That’s from Elvis telling the musicians to tap out the rhythms on the back of the guitar, and then record that sound right into the microphone,” Dick recalled of the conversation.

“Of course, Elvis had some real quality people and musicians around him at the time, like the Jordanaires and Scotty Moore - but Elvis was the one totally in charge of the sessions. He knew the sound that he was after,” Dick said.

The Jordanaires are the vocal quartet that backed Presley on nearly every recording session from 1956 to the late 1960s.
Guitarist Scotty Moore backed Elvis on that famous July 1954 night when the first recording -
a cover version of “That’s All Right (Mama)” - was taped at Sun Studios in Memphis. Moore’s guitar is also the sound behind the songs “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and “Blue Suede Shoes,” among others.

“In those days, Howe was the one running around, turning the knobs, and adjusting tape,” Dick said. “That’s the way it was back in the pre-digital days, the days of 2-inch tape.”

Howe’s then-rare tape editing skills found him work with artists like Pat Boone, B.B. King, and Frank Sinatra. In the mid-1960s, he made the transition from engineer to producer and helped create hits with The Mamas and the Papas, The Turtles, and The Fifth Dimension.

Howe’s involvement with Elvis in 1968 was his first venture into music production for film. Years later, he would go on to similar projects with musicians Tom Waits and Meatloaf, and film directors Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg.

“So here we are, with Bones Howe after our meeting,” Dick sets the scene. “And we left the office and got into the elevator. And just as the doors are closing, I hear (Dick adopts his best Elvis voice) ‘Hold on there.’ Then the doors close and it’s just the three of us - my brother, Elvis, and myself in this elevator. He gets in and says ‘Hey, how ‘ya doin’ there.’ He was very nice and we talked for awhile, maybe 15 minutes or so,” Dick said. “I was so star-struck.

'I wanted to say to Elvis ‘why are you wasting your time doing those movies when there is such great material out there being written?’ I mean can you imagine how great it would be hearing Elvis singing something like “MacArthur Park?” I wanted to say so much to him. I just talked and talked - I am told - and never got to say any of those (musical) things. I was just so star-struck. So we hung out for awhile and talked,” Dick continued, “right there in front of the office building on Sunset Boulevard (where the photo was taken).” And from those meetings, they planned that TV special. And when he did it, dressed all in black, he was great. It was a real special comeback.”

The recordings took place in Hollywood in late June and were set to air on Tuesday, Dec. 3.
The Dec, 3, 1968 issue of The Saratogian carries a cover price of a dime. The day’s advertisers included Star Kist Tuna (36 cents for a 6-1/2 oz. can) at the Price Rite Central on Church Street. Country Style Spare Ribs were 49 cents a lb. at Slim’s on Route 29, and $4.77 at Daw’s Toy Store could get you either Twister, Battleship, or Kreskin’s ESP board game. A 3-bedroom colonial “stone beauty” on Geyser Crest was for sale at $27,900, and GE in Schenectady was hiring general utility workers at $2.70 per hour to start, with “plenty of opportunity for future advancement.”

The TV special aired at 9 p.m. for 60 minutes, preceded by “Julia”- where Groucho Marx made a cameo appearance, and followed by Brigette Bardot’s American TV singing and dancing debut at 10 p.m.
In the most notable portion of the broadcast, Elvis appeared in black leather pants and jacket with upturned collar.

He was tan, fit and with strong vocal range, seated with Scotty Moore (“who has been playing with me since 1912,” Elvis quips) and longtime drummer D.J. Fontana. It was an early predecessor of today’s “unplugged” shows, and it is perhaps, the most clearly defining moment of the delivery of all the talent that Elvis promised. TV Guide called the Binder/Howe Production “the second greatest musical moment on television, next to the Beatles debut on Ed Sullivan.”

“The thing that bothers me now is all the things you read and hear about his marriage and his personal life,They never seem to give Elvis the credit he deserves.” Dick said.
“I mean, he could sing anything! His falsetto was very close to his regular voice. Now I don’t have my falsetto anymore,” Dick said laughingly: “I lost it singing too many Bruce Springsteen songs. But Elvis had a great baritone, and a great range.”

For Bobby Dick, it began in 1950s Brooklyn.

“You could say my mother was one of those Italian stage mothers,” he said. “I got to appear on the Ted Mack Hour,” he says of the amateur talent show. “I sang Eddie Fisher tunes - ‘Oh My Pa-paaa’,” - he demonstrates soundly. “I sang well but I didn’t win. I came in second place to a guy that played spoons. But he was a very good spoon player.”
A few years later, Dick picked up the electric bass and began performing with a rock ‘n’ roll quartet called The Sundowners.
“I was in between eras,” Dick said. “A leftover from the Elvis era, and on the cusp of the Beatles.” The group blended both influences into their repertoire and found themselves sharing the stage with some of pop music’s biggest names.
They toured with Dion, and with The Ronettes. They shared the stage with Tina Turner at the Hollywood Bowl and the Dave Clark Five at the R.P.I. Fieldhouse in Troy. The even shared a rehearsal stage with James Brown at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.

In the spring of 1965, their name was on the bill at Albany’s Palace Theater during an appearance by the Rolling Stones.

“When we got to the Palace, man, we were ready to go,” Dick said of The Sundowners spiffy duds. “With our Nehru suits and Cuban-heel boots. Then the Stones showed up - and they looked terrible. They had that road look - you know the one, too many shows, not enough sleep, and suddenly a zit pops out from who-knows-where. Their hair was all crooked and standing up on one side from leaning against the bus window,” he laughed. “But you know, I thought, ‘ah, these guys just got in, give ‘em a break,’ you know, some time to get themselves together.”

Eventually the Stones emerged from their private chambers. “Finally they come down to go on stage and they looked worse. I said, ‘Whoa, what went on in that dressing room?”‘
The show went on (there were two performances that day) and the Stones were great, Dick said. There was a near-catastrophe that involved girls throwing their jellybean weighted undergarments at the stage.

“Mick Jagger got hit on the side of the head and he asked the girls to stop,” Dick said. He added that the show was well worth the $2.50 admission.
“We were the cover band’s cover band. We played with The Who at the Anaheim Convention Center, and they were magnificent,” Dick said. “They were more like The Sundowners in that they were players and singers. The guys were serious musicians, although by that time they were starting to get pissed off at Keith Moon. He was a great drummer, but he’d be falling down off his drum seat (while he played). He just didn’t know when to quit.”

A scrapbook of images captures the era: Bobby Dick and Davey Jones, hanging out with Jimi Hendrix; posing with Dick Clark in one, and talking to Elvis Presley in another. A friendship with the Monkees during their heyday led to a particularly memorable performance in 1967 at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens.

“The Monkees were being maligned at the time for being a bubble-gum group,” Dick said.

“They thought they would get more credibility by having someone like Jimi Hendrix playing with them. But when Jimi came on stage and started playing (as well as exhibiting gestures and movements that must have been shocking to a 1960s teeny-bop audience) the fans just wanted their Davey Jones. They started chanting ‘We Want the Monkees! We Want the Monkees!’

"Well, Hendrix looked right at them and gave them the finger. Then he threw his Stratocaster into the audience,” Dick paused for a moment. “Somebody must have caught it,” he continued. “It would be interesting to know what ever happened to that guitar.”

Dick pondered what his future holds.

“What in the world am I going to do five years from now? It’s the same question I asked myself five years ago.”
For the Glens Falls resident, it appears that the road will go on indefinitely. A busy schedule has the band performing nearly every other day.

“We are the tramps of rock ‘n’ roll,” Dick laughed.
Dick talked about a lot of the great rock ‘n’ roll music - now 50 years old - that has come and gone, as well as the influence of blues and country music. And of course, the Beatles.

“The Beatles get a lot of talk about early rock ‘n’ roll,” Dick said, “but you know, when they asked the Beatles - it’s like John Lennon said: ‘Before Elvis, there was nothing.’ Elvis is the one who brought everything to the forefront.”

Originally published in The Saratogian, July 16 & Aug. 11, 2002.