One movie rolled into another and by this point, for Elvis, boredom was turning to frustration. Producer Hal Wallis had consistently rejected opportunities for Elvis to star in movies with any substance. Wallis and Parker saw Elvis as a vehicle for a very well-defined “type” of movie, and that meant scripts that played it safe. Roustabout, for example, was originally written with Elvis’s character dishonorably discharged from the Army. Wallis nixed it because he didn’t want “depth” in his Elvis movies. The template had worked well in Blue Hawaii and, to a lesser extent, Girls Girls Girls. It had worked well in Viva Las Vegas too; there was no need to rock the boat as far as Wallis was concerned. In fact, the producer had very little regard at all for Elvis’s movies, telling an interviewer that he saw them as a financial necessity in order to have the money needed to make the real, “artistic” pictures.
But artistic pictures were exactly what Presley wanted when he first signed a movie deal nearly a decade before. Elvis had to watch while parts he was interested in were given to others which then went on to achieve success. The 1964 film Becket won the Oscar for best screenplay; it was produced by Hal Wallis and written by the man who penned Girls Girls Girls. Elvis was being passed over by people with whom he had direct Hollywood connections. They were getting the glory while he was stuck making rubbish like Girl Happy. And even though the soundtrack to Roustabout managed to hit number one on the LP charts, it was a pyrrhic victory; the surrounding competition was simply weak at the time of its release and the album itself never even cleared 500,000 units sold. Elvis’s career trajectory was still angling downward.
And speaking of Girl Happy, work began on that musical-comedy only a few weeks after Roustabout finished shooting. And like the others, this one offered nothing Elvis could sink his teeth into. Three songs are noteworthy from the soundtrack: “Puppet on a String” is a simple ballad, good enough better albums from years earlier, GI Blues or Blue Hawaii. It wasn’t remarkable but it was good enough that Elvis bluffed his way through it, almost convincing himself that it wasn’t terribly out of date.
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“Do Not Disturb,” however, was a song over which Elvis labored through thirty takes. Unlike the persistent work put into “Don’t Be Cruel,” this was not a labor of love. Elvis frequently cursed at himself, the song, and its writers, throughout the multiple takes, as he struggled to get a handle on the odd chord changes that occur throughout. The master ended up being a Frankenstein’s monster-splicing of multiple takes just to stitch together a workable version. Gordon Stoker, of the Jordanaires (who provided backing vocals on countless Elvis records) said that, during the recording of these terrible songs, Elvis would constantly inch back away from the microphone until at one point he was almost up against the wall, as though he was ashamed to be singing the nonsense lyrics and dated melodies.
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And then there’s the title track, which, on the one hand, is no more or less remarkable than so many others like “Girls Girls Girls” or “Kissin Cousins,” but one thing makes this song an oddity. The engineers, or perhaps record producer George Stoll, sped up the master, changing the pitch of Elvis’s voice, making him sound almost like a chipmunk. The effect is weird and off-putting. If a faster version was needed, why wasn’t one simply requested and recorded? Speeding it up seems like a lazy way to go about things, unless the desire was to make Elvis sound younger… There was no question his voice was becoming deeper and more growling that it had in the past, and it would still be a few years before his song selections caught up to his deeper vocals. In the meantime, he was singing childish ditties with the voice of a thirty-year-old.
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As if it wasn’t already apparent that Elvis’s handlers had no concern about how rapidly the musical tastes of the 1960s were changing, Girl Happy (both the movie and the soundtrack) was finished in the summer of 1964, and wouldn’t be released for another year. In the meantime, Elvis was free to return to Graceland. He had no tour-dates to fulfill. He had no studio albums to promote. He had nothing to do but return home to his live-in girlfriend and stew about the career that was slipping through his grasp while groups like The Beach Boys, The Beatles, and The Four Seasons were taking their place (formerly his place) at the top of the musical mountain.
As Elvis closed the door on his tenth anniversary as a singer/entertainer, it was never more apparent that he was no longer a serious force to be reckoned with. Just after Christmas, Billboard released their list of the top “Hot 100” singles of the year, and for the first time since the chart was created (in 1958), Elvis’s name was nowhere to be found.
As he looked ahead to his next ten years, and turned the page to 1965 (and beyond), there was little hope the future would get any better, at least not without himself taking initiative…
