Elvis Presley's Kind of, Sort of World Tour

Last year's expanded reissue of Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite adds new perspective to the singer's final television special

Welcome music lovers to a new edition of ‘Listening Sessions’!

One unofficial rule I have for ‘Listening Sessions’ is to write about an artist only once a year and there have been two artists whom I have written about each year since I started this Substack in 2021: Gordon Lightfoot and Elvis Presley. We’re halfway through the first month of 2024 and here I am writing about Elvis already this year (and I will be writing about Elvis for a second time this summer, flouting my own rule, as part of what has become an annual tradition of a long-form essay on some aspect of his music). This time around, I have written an adaptation of a piece I contributed to Kees Mouwen's (a long-time friend of this publication) 2023 edition of his annual Elvis Day By Day anthology. It’s a review of the expanded edition of Elvis’ live album Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite, released by Sony in August 2023.

The Honolulu concert, which was broadcast live to much of Australia and Asia on January 14 1973 and on tape delay to much of the rest of the world (in the United States, it would not be shown until almost three months later on April 4) was arguably the last event in which Elvis truly pushed himself and the last time he would be on television during his lifetime. Aloha From Hawaii was positioned as a way for the singer to perform outside of the United States without actually having to leave the country (something that had a lot to do with Colonel Tom Parker being an illegal alien). The concert is good but falls short of the heights of his shows in Las Vegas in 1969 and 1970 as well as his performances at Madison Square Garden in June 1972. That being said, the music is an interesting way to consider, what one must always do when writing about Elvis, the compromises and choices that the singer made. I hope you enjoy the essay.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

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When the sight of Elvis Presley taking the stage of the Honolulu International Center at 12:30 a.m. Hawaii time on January 14, 1973 was beamed to television sets in Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, South Vietnam, the Philippines and Australia, the stakes were lower than the last time the singer was on TV. Singer Presents … Elvis, broadcast on NBC on December 3, 1968 and soon to be christened The ’68 Comeback Special, was the make-or-break moment for Elvis. If it hadn't been the triumph that it ended up being, the renaissance that followed would likely have never materialized even as the music he had been making in Nashville since the spring of 1966 was often inspired, manifesting Elvis’ renewed artistic sensibilities.

Instead, the impetus behind what was to be called Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite was more contrived, illustrative of the compromises that were an ongoing theme in the arc of Elvis’ recording career. Most, if not all of them, stemmed from Colonel Tom Parker. Performing a concert that would be seen throughout a significant portion of the planet as it happened was to be a way for Elvis to perform overseas without actually having to leave American soil, something that Col. Parker, who assumed a new identity à la Don Draper in 1929 when arriving in the States from the Netherlands and was an illegal alien, assured would be a longstanding ambition that Elvis would never realize.

When Aloha From Hawaii eventually aired in the States on April 4, it would be the third and ultimately final time he would be on TV since the last of his appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show sixteen years earlier. Indeed, Aloha From Hawaii can arguably be seen as the last time Elvis significantly pushed himself to do something new.

By the start of 1973, the momentum which has been lit by the success of The ’68 Comeback Special had been largely extinguished. Even as his powerhouse version of Dennis Linde’s ‘Burning Love’ had just completed its run up the charts, narrowly missing the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100, it was also his first solid hit in two years. Elvis had, as David Cantwell astutely noted in his liner notes to the 2022 collection of live recordings and rehearsals for the documentary Elvis On Tour, resisted hitting the road as an oldies act and instead, gradually crafted a live show that mixed past glories with his spin—often dramatic and expansive, occasionally in excess—on contemporary songs that approximated Elvis’ fusion of blues, soul, country, rock and gospel: Tony Joe White’s ‘Polk Salad Annie,’ Three Dog Night’s (by way of Hoyt Axton) ‘Never Been to Spain,’ Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Proud Mary’ and Kris Kristofferson’s ‘For the Good Times,’ among others

Bejeweled and bedecked in jumpsuits, complete with cape, Elvis was a thoroughly American superhero. A personifacation of the decadent outpouring that often bursts forth upon the attainment of the American Dream. The immensity of the sound and the attendant spectacle of Elvis live could be, at its zenith, the closet justification there is for Elvis to be crowned as The King. In writing so, I’m thinking in particular of the sequence from the opening fanfare of Richard Strauss’ Also sprach zarathustra to the aforementioned ‘Polk Salad Annie’ from his matinee performance at Madison Square Garden on June 10, 1972—22 minutes of music in which the collective force of Elvis and those accompanying him barely relents for even a second. The immensity of what was taking place is staggering even from the distance of 52 years. Imagine what it would have been like to see in the flesh.

And yet, like much of the art that centres around the American Dream, the cost extracted from Elvis was exorbitant. His music began to be catalogued haphazardly. ‘Burning Love’ and its flip side, the pleasing country ballad, ‘It’s a Matter of Time,’ anchored a budget release padded out with old movie songs to cite one particularly egregious example. But, even the albums that demonstrated a modicum of care were becoming generic collection of songs—something, to be sure, that was not solely a phenomenon confined to Elvis.

Underlining these outward signs of stagnation was a plainer truth: Elvis’ voice was changing. By the late sixties, it had evolved into a powerful, rich and versatile instrument. It could be profoundly resonant (think of his second gospel album, How Great Thou Art), raw (the sit-down and stand-up shows for The ’68 Comeback Special), intimate (‘In the Ghetto,’ for but one example) and almost operatic (his powerhouse cover of ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’).

But, starting in 1971, his voice got, for one thing, thinner. It necessitated Elvis mustering up an exaggerated bravado to have it punch through (for example, compare ‘Padre,’ an overbaked version of a song recorded by Tony Martin that had long been an Elvis favourite, with ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’). His ability to sustain long phrases also began to falter; a long lyrical line would sometimes peter out before it had concluded. These diminishments in his instrument would continue for the rest of his life. His emotional power, in contrast, would remain intact.

This shift in the dynamic balance of Elvis’ vocals dominates Aloha From Hawaii. The concert has, for the first half-century since it was released, been heard in a sound that can be best described as distant and mushy, the equivalent of hearing a copy of a copy of the show tape. In 2022, engineer Matt Ross-Spang, a Memphian and old-school music maker as well as an old soul who has been mixing the Elvis catalogue with distinction since the middle of the last decade, got his shot to remix the concert. The finished product was first released on Follow That Dream, the collector’s label for Elvis’ recorded ephemera. In August of last year, it was, in addition to remixes of the rehearsal show that took place two days earlier and a short session to tape extra songs for the US broadcast of Aloha From Hawaii in the early hours of January 14 after the Honolulu International Center was cleared of concertgoers, issued more widley as a three-CD boxset (plus a Blu-ray disc of footage of all three).

Ross-Spang’s remix of Aloha From Hawaii is, in a word, stunning. The gauze and fuzziness of the music is gone. He places the listener in the middle of all the action.

What has always been especially noteworthy about the show, beyond the technological feat of broadcasting it, is the setlist that Elvis devised—the most unique since he had returned to live performances in 1969. There were, of course, the anchors of what had become the foundation of an Elvis concert: the opening ‘See See Rider,’ the showstoppers ‘Suspicious Minds’ and his cover of Mickey Newbury’s ‘An American Trilogy,’ and the closer, ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love.’ Surrounding them were a few tastes of his fifties hits—far fewer than usual—and a collection of songs that were rarely played or had never been performed by Elvis before. It’s these songs that form Aloha From Hawaii’s primary area of musical interest and Ross-Spang’s expansive remix puts an exclamation mark on them.

On ‘Burning Love,’ which Elvis only performed infrequently, the Sweet Inspirations and J.D. Sumner & the Stamps Quartet (only one backing vocal group would not do for Elvis live) burst out of the speakers during lead guitarist James Burton’s solo. The crescendo on the bridge of Elvis’ cover of George Harrison’s ‘Something’ with drummer Ronnie Tutt’s volcanic toms now sounds truly momentous. The poignancy of Jimmie Rodgers’ ‘It’s Over’ is more finely rendered and the staggering emotional quality of ‘What Now My Love’ with an ever-escalating bolero beat is properly astonishing.

To be sure, the show is not a revelation in the way that some of Elvis’ shows in Las Vegas in 1969 and 1970 were or his run at Madison Square Garden where he felt he had something to prove to the discerning, tough New York crowd. Elvis seems nervous and jittery when addressing the crowd. During the rehearsal show, he quipped, “I need all the help I can get” when contemplating the prospect of being beamed live across Asia and Australia just two days later. The climax of ‘Suspicious Minds’ with its cycling of crescendos and diminuendos at the end had become an exhausted routine by the start of 1973 while ‘An American Trilogy’ still had the lustre of novelty.

An intimate, unhurried ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ erases the distance between singer and listener, transmitting the barrenness of Hank Williams, Sr.’s lyrics (one wishes Elvis had sung all four verses instead of just three) directly. Elvis communicates the bravado of ‘My Way’ almost as precisely, obviating, as much as one plausibly can, the immutable association the song has with the lounge lizards of Las Vegas.

By the numbers, Aloha From Hawaii was a triumph. One-and-a-half-billion people were estimated to have tuned in—about 38% of the world’s population at the time. When it was released as a double album, it became Elvis’ final chart-topping album on Billboard. Also a benefit for the Kui Lee Cancer Fund, it raised $75,000, three times more than hoped.

The rehearsal concert—a brisk affair of 19 songs totaling just 56 minutes of music—is interesting insofar as it is hearing something that one would not have otherwise had a chance to if it had not been recorded for posterity—that's just a longer way of saying it is historically, rather than musically, significant. That being said, Ross-Spang’s remix brings an equilibrium to the sound that had hitherto been weighed heavily in favour of Tutt’s drums.

The final disc includes the complete session taped after the Aloha From Hawaii telecast. Four of the five songs performed were, perhaps not surprisingly, from Elvis’ soundtrack to Blue Hawaii, the movie that codified what became known as the “Elvis movie”: cheap, breezy productions to bring the singer to one’s local movie theatre and to sell albums and singles. Each: the title track, ‘No More,’ ‘Ku-U-I-Po’ and ‘Hawaiian Wedding Song,’ are lumbering and uninspired here. The fifth song, Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘Early Morning Rain,’ which Elvis had recorded first in 1971, was a spontaneously choice, providing the only spark of energy and engagement.

Amid the inherent glumness of getting through a task about which no one felt particularly interested, gallows humour pervades. When recording ‘Blue Hawaii,’ Elvis quips to Aloha From Hawaii director Marty Pasetta, “I’ll always remember you for this.” During ‘No More,’ Elvis says, “ain’t this fun” prompting someone else to yell, “look at it this way, we finish these and we get the rest of the day off.” Being a fly on the wall is astounding. Save for some of the session tapes from his soundtrack sessions in the mid sixties as well as an infamous session in Nashville in January 1968 in which Elvis was extremely edgy and floridly profane, there is no more definitive and frank account of Elvis mocking the work he often found himself having to do.

There's a revealing moment from the presss conference announcing Aloha From Hawaii. It took place at the Hilton in Las Vegas on September 5, 1972, the day after Elvis had concluded his summer residency there. He marvels at a promotional stand that has been placed at the front of the stage where he and Rocco Laginestra, then president of RCA, will meet the press. At the top of the stand is “hear Elvis on RCA records and tapes.” Below that is what looks like rows and rows of buttons with a country where Aloha From Hawaii will be brodcast printed on each. Elvis points to the button with Greece on it and then to the U.S.S.R. and finally to Japan. The prospect of performing physically in these countries was, for Elvis, always out of reach even if Aloha From Hawaii allowed Elvis to kind of, sort of, do so. And that’s really what Aloha From Hawaii is about: a piece of the puzzle of the career choices that Elvis made and those he didn’t or, more pointedly, wasn’t able to make.

If you’re not yet a subscriber of ‘Listening Sessions,’ I hope you'll click the button below to subscribe and get each edition delivered straight to your inbox. I publish a long-form essay on music three times a month, every 10 days or so.