Later in the evening, at about two in the morning, Elvis sat down at the piano and began messing around with some songs he’d been playing at home since the 1950s. Ivory Joe Hunter was a black singer from Texas who’d been a regional star since the 1940s. He started out as a blues singer but found early success as an R&B artist. In the 1960s the 50+ year-old singer/songwriter switched to country music. Throughout it all Elvis was a fan and recorded many of his songs over the years (such as “My Wish Came True,” “I Need You So,” and “Ain’t That Loving You, Baby”).
It wasn’t on the schedule but upon hearing Elvis’s playing, Felton asked him if he wanted to record and Elvis agreed. Two of Hunter’s songs were recorded here, with “It’s Still Here” played first. Elvis stripped away the country trappings of Hunter’s 1964 version and presented the song as a naked piano ballad. He did the same with Hunter’s other song “I Will Be True.” After that Elvis performed a song he played to himself frequently while in the Army, the 19th-century German-American folksong, “I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen.” His voice is again not as strong as it was on older piano-focused numbers like “Anything that’s Part of You” but you can hear the sincerity in the work and that elevates it.
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As pleasant as the songs were, however, they weren’t the kind of songs that could chart high or sell much, so focus returned to music that RCA and Felton Jarvis hoped could be a hit. “I’m Leavin'” was the one they pinned their hopes on, but it was no “Suspicious Minds.” It was another ballad albeit with a little more punch in the production than what the bone-dry “Until it’s Time for you to Go” offered. It at least cracked the top-thirty. The final single recorded before taking a month off was “It’s Only Love.” Although not much of a rocker, it was at least an up-tempo pop song, but though it hit #19 on the Adult Contemporary chart, it failed to climb higher than #51 on the Hot100.
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Eight more songs were needed in June, mostly to finish up the Gospel album, though two (“Until it’s Time for you to Go” and “I’ll Be Home on Christmas Day”) were remakes of previous masters in an attempt to improve them. Two Gospel songs stand out from this session: “Put your Hand in the Hand” and “I, John” were fun up-tempo numbers with the former offering the best single appeal (it peaked at #2 for the Canadian band Ocean) and the latter offering Elvis’s most lively recording of the whole year.
Neither were released as 45s.
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The last thing Elvis recorded in the studio in 1971 was an initially-unreleased version of “My Way.” Elvis had been obsessed with the song since Sinatra made a big hit out of it. What’s interesting is that Sinatra hated the song; he thought it was self-indulgent and only sang it so frequently because his fans demanded it. Elvis, on the other hand, thought the song was a musical biography of himself. After working on it for five hours a master was completed but Elvis was not satisfied with it and ordered it shelved, promising to do it right in front of a live concert. He may have been on to something, as the studio version feels hollow whereas the many live recordings had more passion as Elvis fed off the applause and adoration of the live crowd. It makes sense: A song all about patting yourself on the back works better when thousands more are cheering you on.
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With studio work done, Elvis refocused his attention on live performing. It would soon be a grind as tiresome for him as movie shoots were, but in 1971 he still enjoyed the thrill. It was during a two-week engagement in Lake Tahoe in July that he added Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathustra” as his big entrance number. The song was made famous a few years earlier by Stanley Kubrick who used it in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s big and bombastic, toeing the line of eye-rolling parody without crossing it. It was perfect for Elvis in the ’70s. Who knows why that particular song was chosen, of all things, to be his walk-out music, but Elvis was famous for getting random (obscure, weird) ideas in his head, and more often than not he made them work. The song would come to be as iconic to him as it was to 2001, so either his instincts were right and the song was always meant to be a glorified entrance theme, or Elvis just made it work by sheer force of will (and repetition repetition repetition).
August brought with it another return to Las Vegas, where the International Hotel had been renamed “The Hilton.” Midway through the engagement, Elvis received the “Bing Crosby Award” from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (the group that presents the Grammy’s every year). Elvis was the sixth recipient since Bing Crosby won the inaugural award in 1963. The honor is not an annually-given one, but instead is presented to “performers who, during their lifetimes, have made creative contributions of outstanding artistic significance to the field of recording.”
It would later be renamed “The Bing Crosby Lifetime Achievement Award.”
On the one hand, it was a splendid accomplishment for Presley to be honored in such a way, especially considering he had only won a single proper Grammy award in his seventeen-year career (A “Best Gospel Recording” win for “How Great Thou Art” in 1967). On the other hand, the man was only thirty-six years old. He remains, in fact, the youngest “Lifetime Achievement Award” winner in Grammy history. It’s one thing to be honored for all you’ve accomplished in your field of expertise, but getting a lifetime achievement award is supposed to be a capstone on a finished, or at least nearly finished career. The average age of all other recipients is sixty!
Certainly, the man had achieved much, basically embodying the phrase “living the (American) dream.” He grew up in absolute poverty, but managed to skyrocket to superstar-status before he was twenty. And yet, looking back on his “lifetime” of “achievements” one has to pause to reflect on them from the man’s own perspective. How did Elvis himself view his life thus far? He spent a third of his life being shuffled from one movie shoot to the next, only to start the 70’s trading movies for Vegas shows. The thrill of a live performance was soon to wane, and his recent pop culture resurgence was already disappearing.
A month before, the street on which his Graceland mansion was located was officially renamed “Elvis Presley Boulevard” in his honor. Days later his Tupelo, Mississippi childhood home was transformed into a museum.
Once things start getting named after you and museums start getting opened to chronicle your history, a lifetime achievement award is sure to come. But should it have? Such honors typically signaled the end of a career and the period of reflection that comes with retirement. Was Elvis finished? He should have had another three decades left in him, but in 1971 everyone was acting like he was done. His career was being talked about in the past tense, despite new material being released every couple of months. Barely more than a year ago he had a number-one record and everyone was saying “Elvis is back!” Now they looked at him as though he was a novelty act, riding on the coattails of the past in the twilight of his career.
It would be a presumption that followed him for the rest of his life; no matter what big releases he offered up, no matter what new ground he broke, no matter what hit records he recorded, from this point on Elvis would always be “an oldie.”
And then there was his personal life, which was slipping away from him too.
