History:
No one can say for sure the exact date, but a little research suggests that on or about June 24, 1968, Elvis experienced one of the landmark moments in his life -- almost as important as July 5, 1954, when he ripped into Arthur Crudup's "That's All Right" during a break in the Sun Studios. It was probably that fateful day in '68 that The King took television director Steve Binder, who was in charge of his upcoming Christmas special, up on an earlier bet: to walk out of the NBC studios, down to Sunset Boulevard, in the middle of a bustling weekday afternoon, and see if he'd get mobbed.He didn't.
As Dave Marsh points out in his excellent bio Elvis, Binder knew Los Angeles in the late Sixties was too cool for celebrity gawking, especially for an old-schooler like Elvis: even if the few L.A. pedestrians there recognized The King, they'd have gone out of their way not to acknowledge it. But Presley didn't know that. To him, it merely proved what his dwindling box office receipts and lack of chart hits had been telling him since the Beatles showed up: he was old news. He knew it already, had already been talking about using the special as a way to take back control of his image. But now he felt a keener urgency.
Besides, the country he'd taken by storm was tearing itself apart, fraught with questions that songs like "Hound Dog" and "Don't Be Cruel," much less "(There's) No Room To Rhumba In A Sports Car" and "He's Your Uncle, Not Your Dad," could never answer. Elvis, therefore, spent much of 1968 planning to prove to the world that he still mattered, even if he had to do it between contractually-obligated movie shoots. The Colonel, former carny huckster that he was, knew the money was dwindling away, but couldn't say why or how to stop it; Elvis would once again have to dance with the girl who brought him, as the saying goes, and call on sheer talent and charisma -- a process he'd already started in the studio -- to win his homeland back.
Next... Elvis 1968 timeline
