If you ever saw Elvis in the 1970s, or even just caught it on TV, you know the sound. That huge, slow build of horns and drums that rolls in before he ever steps on stage. It makes the hair on your arms stand up.
That piece of music is called “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” Most folks know it as the theme from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
But how did a space movie end up starting every Elvis show? That part comes down to one quiet moment in a dark theater.
Back in the summer of 1970, a conductor named Joe Guercio teamed up with Elvis and led his orchestra of around 30 musicians in Las Vegas and out on the road. One night Joe and his wife went to see a reissue of “2001” at the movies.
When that big theme thundered out of the speakers, his wife leaned over and whispered something in his ear.
She said, “You’d think Elvis was about to enter.” In another telling she put it a little differently: “Don’t you get the feeling Elvis is about to walk out?”
That was the whole idea, right there in one line.
Joe took it back to Elvis and suggested it as his opening music. And that was that. From that point on, Guercio said, Elvis “never walked out to anything else.”
Here’s the best way to feel what she felt. This is the opening of Elvis’s famous 1973 “Aloha from Hawaii” show, where that very theme plays as he walks out.
The “2001” theme as Elvis takes the stage in Hawaii, 1973
Listen to the way it builds. It climbs higher and higher, and the crowd starts to roar before they can even see him. By the time Elvis actually appears, the whole room is already on its feet.
That’s exactly what Joe’s wife pictured sitting in that movie seat. A sound so grand that only one man could possibly walk out to it.
It’s funny to think about. A composer wrote that music long before anyone had heard of Elvis, and a film director later used it to open a movie about outer space. Then it took one woman in a dark theater, leaning over to her husband, to connect it to the greatest showman of them all.
Every single time you hear those opening notes now, you’re hearing her idea.
So the next time that theme comes on, turn it up loud and imagine the house lights going down. That feeling you get is the exact feeling she described to her husband that night.