Elvis Is Back, Movies 60-67

Presley returned to the United States on March 2, 1960, and was honorably discharged with the rank of sergeant on March 5.   The train that carried him from New Jersey to Tennessee was mobbed all the way, and Presley was called upon to appear at scheduled stops to please his fans.    Back in Memphis, he wasted no time in returning to the studio.    His first recording session, on March 20, was attended by several representatives of RCA; none had heard him sing for two years, and there were inevitable concerns about his ability to recapture his previous success.    The session was the first at which Presley was taped using an advanced three-track machine, allowing stereophonic recording, higher fidelity, and postsession remixing.    A second session in early April yielded two of Presley's best-selling singles, the ballads "It's Now or Never" and "Are You Lonesome Tonight?"    Many of the other tracks recorded during the two sessions appeared on Elvis Is Back!    Greil Marcus described its defining sound as full-on Chicago blues "menace, driven by Presley's own super-miked acoustic guitar, brilliant playing by Scotty Moore, and demonic sax work from Boots Randolph.    Elvis's singing wasn't sexy, it was pornographic." Released only days after the second session, Elvis Is Back! reached number two on the album chart.

Presley returned to television on May 12, as a guest on The Frank Sinatra-Timex Special, an ironic move for both stars given Sinatra's not-so-distant excoriation of rock and roll.    Also known as Welcome Home Elvis, the show had been taped in late March—the only time all year Presley performed in front of an audience. Parker, who had made the arrangement months in advance, secured an unheard-of $125,000 fee for six minutes of singing.    He hoped that the appearance would help boost Presley's popularity with Sinatra's older, pop-oriented following; still, he made sure that 400 Presley fan club members were in the studio audience.   The broadcast drew an enormous viewership.

G.I. Blues, the soundtrack to Presley's first film since his return, was a number one album in October.    His first LP of sacred material, His Hand in Mine, followed two months later.    It reached number 13 on the U.S. pop chart and number 3 in Great Britain, remarkable figures for a gospel album.    In February 1961, Presley performed two shows for a benefit event in Memphis, raising over $60,000 for 24 local charities.    During a luncheon preceding the event, Presley was awarded a plaque by RCA for worldwide sales of over 75 million records.    Another benefit concert, raising over $62,000, was staged on March 25, in Hawaii, after Parker read an article stating that no "permanent memorial stands in salute to the dead of Pearl Harbor".    It was to be Presley's last public performance for seven years.

Parker had by now pushed Presley into a heavy moviemaking schedule, focused on formulaic, modestly budgeted musical-comedies.    Of the 27 films Presley made during the 1960s, 15 were accompanied by soundtrack albums and another 5 by soundtrack EPs.    The rapid production and release schedules of the films—he frequently starred in three a year—affected his music.    According to Jerry Leiber, the soundtrack formula was already evident before Presley left for the Army: "three ballads, one medium-tempo [number], one up-tempo, and one break blues boogie".    As the decade wore on, the quality of the soundtrack songs grew "progressively worse".    Julie Parrish, who appeared in Paradise, Hawaiian Style (1966), says that Presley hated many of the songs chosen for his films; he "couldn't stop laughing while he was recording" one of them.    Most of the movie albums featured a couple of contributions from respected songwriters such as the team of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman.    But by and large, according to biographer Jerry Hopkins, the numbers seemed to be "written on order by men who never really understood Elvis or rock and roll." Whatever the quality of the tunes, some observers argued that Presley generally sang well, with commitment, and always played with distinguished musicians and backing singers.    Rock critic Dave Marsh disagreed: on most of the soundtrack recordings, to his ears, "Presley isn't trying, probably the wisest course in the face of material like 'No Room to Rumba in a Sports Car' and 'Rock-a-Hula Baby.'"

In the first half of the decade, three of Presley's soundtrack albums hit number one on the pop charts, and a few of his most popular songs came from his films, such as "Can't Help Falling in Love" (1961) and "Return to Sender" (1962).     ("Viva Las Vegas", the title track to the 1964 film, was a minor hit as a B-side, and became truly popular only later.)     But, as with artistic merit, the commercial returns steadily diminished.    During a five-year span—1964 through 1968—Presley had only one top ten hit: "Crying in the Chapel" (1965), a gospel number recorded back in 1960.    As for non-movie albums, between the June 1962 release of Pot Luck and the November 1968 release of the soundtrack to the television special that signaled his comeback, only one LP of new material by Presley was issued: the gospel album How Great Thou Art, recorded in May 1966 and released in 1967.    It won him his first Grammy Award, for Best Sacred Performance.    As described in The New Rolling Stone Album Guide, Presley was "arguably the greatest white gospel singer of his time [and] really the last rock & roll artist to make gospel as vital a component of his musical personality as his secular songs."

Shortly before Christmas 1966, more than seven years since they first met, Elvis proposed to Priscilla. They were married on May 1, 1967, in a brief ceremony in their suite at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. The flow of formulaic movies and assembly-line soundtracks rolled on. It was not until October 1967, when the Clambake soundtrack LP registered record low sales for a new Presley album, that RCA executives recognized a problem. "By then, of course, the damage had been done", as historians Connie Kirchberg and Marc Hendrickx put it. "Elvis was viewed as a joke by serious music lovers and a has-been to all but his most loyal fans."