On October 23, 1968, a new Elvis Presley picture opened in American theaters. It was called “Live a Little, Love a Little,” and hardly anyone remembers it now. The reviews weren’t kind and the crowds stayed home. Even the best song in the whole film barely made a dent, scraping to No. 69 on the charts before it slipped away.
That was 58 years today.
Elvis was 33 then and still cranking out movies, sometimes a couple a year. This one paired him with Celeste Yarnall, a young actress who played a character named Ellen. She took to him right away. Years later she told fans that their very first scene together was a kiss, and that neither of them even heard the director call “Cut.”
Yarnall sat down at a fan convention and told the story of that first day on the set.
Elvis’s co-star remembers filming their first kiss
“For me, it was love at first kiss,” Yarnall said. She called him warm and kind, talked about the jam sessions he held between takes, and summed him up in four words. “He was truly ‘The King.'”
But the real story here is that song. Mac Davis and Billy Strange wrote it, and Elvis recorded it in Hollywood back in March 1968. It came out as a single that September, backed with “Almost in Love.” Then it just sat there. No. 69, and gone, tucked inside a movie nobody was talking about. By the late ’60s Elvis was fighting to be taken seriously again, and a soundtrack tune from a middling comedy wasn’t going to do it. So the song got shelved in people’s memories for decades.
Here’s how it sounded the first time around.
The song the way it first appeared in 1968
The song was “A Little Less Conversation.” Yes, that one.
Thirty-four years later, in 2002, a Dutch producer named Tom Holkenborg, who works under the name Junkie XL, took the same song and built a big modern beat around it. Nike grabbed it for a World Cup television ad, the “Secret Tournament” spots that played all over the globe. A tune hardly anyone had noticed in 1968 was suddenly everywhere you turned. The “Elvis vs. JXL” remix went to No. 1 in the UK and topped the charts in more than 20 countries.
So the same song that flopped the first time became a worldwide smash the second time, years after Elvis was gone. A whole new generation that had never bought an Elvis record was humming it, and plenty of them had no idea it was 34 years old.
This is the version your grandkids probably know by heart.
The 2002 remix that went to No. 1 around the world
One more thing worth a smile. Watch “Live a Little, Love a Little” closely and you’ll catch Elvis’s own father, Vernon, in a quick uncredited cameo. A couple of his real-life buddies show up too, Red West and Joe Esposito, the guys who traveled with him just about everywhere. Not bad for a movie almost nobody went to see.