You can read the previous installments in this series here:

PART FIVE: TEN YEARS IN…

If 1962 represented the surrendering of Elvis Presley as an artistic force to be reckoned with, 1963 was the messy aftermath. Presley kept busy in the recording studio and on movie sets, but little of his work made an impact. An album’s worth of studio material was recorded, but ignored and multiple soundtracks were recorded but offered little for music lovers to sink their teeth into. Movies were filmed and movies were released, with scripts ranging from bad to laughably bad. But the bottom dollar returns on the investments put into the work was worth it enough not to change course.

Even though the soundtrack was recorded months earlier, in 1962, the It Happened at the World’s Fair movie and accompanying soundtrack came out in April of ’63. The movie only grossed two million dollars and failed to connect with audiences the way Blue Hawaii had done two years earlier. Even the flimsy Girls Girls Girls made more money, not to mention had a much more robust soundtrack. Both Girls Girls Girls and Blue Hawaii both had big fourteen and thirteen-track albums released alongside their films, but It Happened at the World’s Fair came with a sparse ten-track record. The total time of the album clocked in at only twenty-one minutes, enough to fit on a single LP side.

Colonel Parker’s hopes to release the album with a booklet of full-color photos were dashed when RCA said that such a release would mean selling the album for a higher price. Parker knew not to test the limits of Elvis’s fanbase with a too-short album at too-high a price. Instead, it was decided that, in the future, they would work to produce albums that gave fans more for their money. That strategy was first implemented with the Fun in Acapulco album, for which eleven songs were recorded in January of 1963.

Unfortunately, the actual quality of the songs was not much better than on the It Happened at the World’s Fair album. At least that album had the very good “They Remind Me Too Much of You” ballad, and the almost-hit single “One Broken Heart for Sale.” Fun in Acapulco‘s soundtrack had little to hang its hat on; there was “Bossa Nova Baby” (an upbeat samba tune originally recorded by Tippie and the Clovers in 1962). It had a fun sound but nonsense lyrics. That’s basically the theme of the whole album: It has a fun sound but embarrassingly silly lyrics throughout. Songs like “The Bullfighter Was a Lady” and “There’s No Room to Rumba in a Sport’s Car” speak for themselves; you don’t even need to get past the titles to know what you’re going to get with the music. Still, Elvis was clearly having fun recording the material, which elevates it above the World’s Fair album and later soundtracks to come. Nevertheless, there wasn’t a hit record to be found. “Bosa Nova Baby” reached number eight on the Billboard Hot100, more due to the fact that there was a short-lived “Brazilian music” craze sweeping across the radio at the time, rather than anything remarkable about the song itself.

Let’s not even get into the fact that the song is Brazilian, yet is featured in a movie about Mexico…filmed at Paramount’s Hollywood backlot…and banned in Mexico!

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After recording Fun in Acapulco, Presley returned to Nashville for what was, by this point, an annual tradition. These studio sessions had started in the Spring of 1960, resulting in the flawless Elvis is Back! album. A year later they released the good (but not as good as the previous) Something for Everybody, and then the “not even as good as Something for Everybody” album Pot Luck a year later. The trend was pointing downward, but even though there were again some stinkers in the bunch, Elvis’s 1963 bucket of songs to record contained a few diamonds in the rough, as well as a couple of obviously-instant hits.

The most famous song recorded during the session was “Devil in Disguise,” easily the last big song Elvis would release until “Suspicious Minds” at the end of the decade. The song is memorable for ho it plays against your expectations. It begins like a sequel to “She’s Not You” (smooth, playful, light), but then, twenty seconds in, it turns into a pure rock and roll track. After drowning in toothless pop tunes, “Devil in Disguise” was a true return to form. Record buyers and DJ’s responded to it as well; the song reached number three on the Billboard Hot100 and even cracked the Billboard R&B top ten charts, being the last Elvis record ever to do so.

Incidentally, the song went to number one in the UK and was played on the BBC show “Jukebox Jury” where guest-judge John Lennon bashed the song and its singer as “basically Bing Crosby.” This was still a year before Beatlemania hit the US, so his words meant little to listeners in the states. They ate up the album, which went straight to gold, selling over 500,000 copies.

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There were a few other songs too that Elvis really made something out of. Otis Blackwell (who had supplied Elvis with “All Shook Up,” “Return to Sender,” and many more) offered fun rocker with a wordy title, “Please Don’t Drag That String Around.” There was also “Witchcraft” (not to be confused with the Frank Sinatra hit), which mimicked the tempo-changing style of “Devil in Disguise,” only where that song starts as a ballad and then turns into an uptempo number, “Witchcraft” starts off up-tempo and then shifts to an even more rapid pace, making for a fun two minutes.

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By the end of the two-night session, fourteen tracks were finished. It was enough for a full-length album as well as two independent singles. It wasn’t up to the quality of the 1960 work, but it was on par with studio albums released since then, if not the best work he’d recorded since Something For Everybody.

A November release was planned but the album never materialized. Originally, Parker informed RCA that the Fun in Acapulco material would be cut down to an EP and that the May studio session would be Elvis’s third LP of the year (his first was It Happened at the World’s Fair, and Elvis’s Golden Records Volume 3 was the summer release). But then, Parker had a change of mind, and decided to chop up the studio recordings and scatter them among various other projects, turning them into B-sides of singles, as well as “bonus recordings” on soundtracks that needed a little extra kick to ensure strong sales.

Because Parker’s entire business philosophy with Elvis revolved around the cycle of movies bolstering soundtrack sales, which in turn bolstered movie ticket sales, it’s understandable why the greedy manager would put a priority on soundtracks over studio albums. He stood to make more money from a successful movie than he did a successful studio album; the importance of making art was no longer a debate, after all. Thus the 1963 recordings were broken up like the remnants of Alexander’s empire. It wasn’t until 1990 that an official release of the material was made available, dubbed “For the Asking” (the Elvis Presley “lost album”).