By the summer of 1968, a lot of folks had written Elvis Presley off. He’d spent most of the decade making movies instead of music, and the radio belonged to the younger acts now. Then NBC handed him a TV special, and a young director named Steve Binder got the job of making the world fall for Elvis all over again.
Binder had an idea that sounded risky back then. Instead of a big glitzy stage, he wanted Elvis sitting down with his old bandmates, close enough to touch, playing the songs that made him in the first place. He planned two small tapings in late June at NBC in Burbank, maybe 250 to 300 people in each. He had NBC print up the tickets.
Then he asked Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager, how many tickets the Colonel wanted.
Parker wanted all of them.
Steve Binder ran the whole show. Here he is years later, talking about Elvis and the Colonel, the man who controlled everything around him.
The special’s director on Elvis and Colonel Parker
In Binder’s telling, the Colonel didn’t leave him much room. “I want all the tickets,” Parker said. “And if you give me all the tickets, that means all of ’em. You can’t have any, NBC can’t have any, Singer can’t have ’em, nobody gets ’em.” Binder believed the Colonel had promised to fly in busloads of fans from Memphis to fill those seats.
Then taping day came. Binder drove up to the gate and found almost nobody. The tickets had never gone out. Whatever the plan had been, the room that was supposed to be packed was nearly empty, and the cameras were about to roll.
So the crew did the only thing they could think of. They went out and grabbed strangers.
Binder later said it plain. “We had to pull people from everywhere at the very last minute. We went over to Bob’s Big Boy and asked people eating their breakfast if they wanted to come over to NBC to see and hear Elvis. We got disc jockeys to broadcast a message to get over to NBC Burbank.” People eating at a Bob’s Big Boy, a burger spot right down the road, got asked if they felt like watching Elvis Presley that afternoon.
They said yes. And those are the faces you see ringed around him, close enough to feel the heat off him, grinning like they can’t believe their luck. Most of them probably couldn’t.
The special aired December 3, 1968, and it worked. Elvis was back, and he looked like he was having the time of his life.
Watch one of those sit-down numbers, and for a second look past Elvis at the people crowded in all around him.
Elvis performing “That’s All Right” at the 1968 sit-down taping
Hard to believe some of them had been finishing a meal an hour before.