The Final Years

February 1976-May 1976

Elvis was losing control.

He hadn't recorded any new material in almost nine months, and with RCA wishing to maintain its three-album-per-year release schedule, new songs were sorely needed. Elvis ignored pleas to go to Nashville or Hollywood to record and didn't want to go back to Stax in Memphis, either. So, in the first week of February 1976. RCA began moving $200,000 worth of recording equipment into Elvis' Graceland mansion. If Mohammed wouldn't go to the mountain, then the mountain would go to Mohammed.

Elvis' road band was flown in from Los Angeles, and several top Nashville studio men David Briggs on piano, Bobby Emmons on electric piano and Norbert Putnam on bass -- were called. Everyone was waiting for Elvis to come downstairs and sing.

Felton Jarvis was producing the sessions as usual, and he kept moving nervously back and forth between the den and the big RCA mobile truck parked outside. The jokes never stopped, but by midnight, everyone was getting anxious. Elvis sent word that he was sick and had a doctor in attendance. Red and Sonny West and Dave Hebler explained Elvis' behavior another way. In their book, Elvis: What Happened?, they tell a sinister story about a plan Elvis had to kill the city's top narcotics dealers. They contend this is what kept Elvis holed up in his bedroom.

Red said Elvis summoned him to his room, where he had a huge arsenal of automatic weapons, pistols, rifles and rockets strewn all over the floor.

Elvis handed Red a list of names and a packet of photographs and implied that they'd been given to him by the Memphis police. "Elvis had it all planned," Red wrote. "He wanted myself and Dave Hebler and Dick Grob, the former cop [who had gone to work for Elvis some years earlier], to go out and lure them, and he said he was going to kill them."

Elvis told Red and Dave that he would use the recording sessions as his cover. They'd set up the target, he'd sneak out of the house the back way, make the hit and return swiftly to Graceland, where he would then go downstairs and sing. Red shook his head and said it was pretty heavy.

"Hell," said Elvis, "the cops want them."

Somehow, Elvis was diverted, chemically or conversationally His fantasy was set aside. And the recording session finally began.

In seven days, Elvis sang a dozen songs. It wasn't easy getting even that much out of him. Ten of the songs appeared on the album From Elvis Presley Boulevard. The lyrics, as a lot, were sad, and Elvis' performance, though adequate, clearly showed his failing strength and health.

Elvis' moods continued to swing wildly. When he first saw the recording setup in his den, he said, "Let's leave it, I like it better this way than with the furniture." A few days later, he stood in the den facing the huge playback speakers, his eyes glazed, pointing a shotgun. "The sound's no fuckin' good in those things!" he croaked. "I'm gonna kill the motherfuckers and put 'em out of my misery." He cocked the shotgun and took unsteady aim. Some of the musicians got the gun away from him, and a few minutes later the session was canceled. Some nights, he seemed remote, disconnected. Other nights he failed to show up at all. Finally, on February 9th, RCA packed up its gear and returned to Nashville, happy to have what it had.

March 1917-April 1977

Elvis' small fleet of jets was aimed at many of the cities where his oldest and most loyal constituency lived -- Phoenix, Amarillo, Norman, Abilene and Austin. This was the territory he traveled in the Fifties when he drove from city to city with Scotty Moore and Bill Black ("the Blue Moon Boys") to appear in noisy, crowded honky-tonks and on the backs of flatbed trucks. This is where he was a young star on the Louisiana Hayride radio show. It was this region -- the panhandle of West Texas, Arkansas, north Louisiana -- that gave little Sun Records an entice galaxy of stars besides Elvis: Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Conway Twitty, Charlie Rich, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash.

That was 1955. Now it was 1977. More than twenty years had passed and, to the people who lived in the region, Elvis had come to epitomize the American dream. They, too, were -- or had been -- poor. Generally, they were working-class people, and they wished to get out of their box, to live the fantasy life that Elvis had come to represent. He was what every woman wanted and every man wished to be. It didn't even matter that he had grown fat.

At first, the tour was just like the others. Some shows were good, some were fair and some were miserable. Elvis did his best, but nowadays his best was much less than it was when he was younger. At some concerts, Elvis performed like an old man. At times it seemed he had only the loosest control of his voice and muscle coordination. He dropped lyrics, mumbled introductions and very nearly stumbled around the stage.

On March 31st, following a so-so show in Alexandria, Louisiana, Elvis' private plane took him to Baton Rouge for a concert at Louisiana State University As was customary, the show started before he left the hotel for the coliseum. All the usual acts performed: the Sweet Inspirations first, then J.D. Sumner and his youthful Stamps, and finally Jackie Kahane, with the predictable jokes. Elvis usually arrived during the intermission that followed the comedian's monologue. Tonight he didn't.

There was chaos backstage. Elvis' hotel room was called.

A half-hour passed. There were more calls. Finally, it was decided to cancel the rest of the show, to say that Elvis was too sick to go on, that he was under a doctor's care and was being flown back to Memphis to be hospitalized.

It wasn't untrue. Dr. Nick returned with Elvis to Memphis on the Lisa Marie. Within hours of arriving, Elvis checked himself into a two-room suite on the sixteenth floor of the Baptist Hospital. This time, Maurice Elliott announced to the press that Elvis was being treated for "exhaustion."