When the music stopped, Elvis Presley would go find his guitar. Then he’d go find Darlene Love.
“Whenever we had a break, he would go, ‘Darlene! Do you know this one?'” she remembered years later. “He’d go get his guitar, and I’d say, ‘Yeah. Come on, let’s sing it,’ and we’d go off in the corner to sing it.”
It was June 1968, in Los Angeles. Elvis was getting ready for a TV special on NBC, his first real live performance in seven years, and Darlene was one of the singers hired to stand behind him.
Her name might not ring a bell, but you’ve probably heard her voice. She sang lead on the No. 1 hit “He’s a Rebel,” even though the producer, Phil Spector, put another group’s name on the record. Her trio, the Blossoms, sang backup on a long list of 1960s hits. In 1968, the group was Darlene, Fanita James and Jean King.
At first, they were just extra voices. “The choir was originally all white,” Darlene remembered. “So they took the Blossoms with three black girls and put them in with the mix to make it sound more gospel. We thought that was going to be the end of it.”
But during the recording sessions, Elvis and Darlene got to talking about church music. She had grown up singing gospel, and so had he.
“Eventually he decided the Blossoms should be in the 1968 special,” she said.
The man she got to know was a long way from the swaggering movie star. She called him “a little shy, very introverted.” He hadn’t faced a live audience in years and kept asking, “How do I look? Do I look all right?”
“When you talked gospel with him, though, he was just like a friend sitting down talking,” she said.
In another interview, she described those jam sessions. They’d run through old church hymns like “Amazing Grace” and “Sweet Hour of Prayer,” with the Blossoms wrapping their harmonies around his voice.
“There’s something we had with Elvis that others didn’t have,” she said. “It was fun to be wanted by someone like Elvis Presley.”
Some of that church feeling made it onto the special.
Elvis Presley Gospel Production Number (’68 Comeback Special)
Darlene was so thrilled that she snuck into the audience to watch the other tapings.
The special aired on December 3, 1968. It was the most-watched show of the season, and people still call it the night Elvis came back.
Elvis had his own view of that word. “He’d say, ‘How can this be a comeback, when you think about it,'” Darlene recalled. “‘Comeback? I’m here. I haven’t been anywhere.'”
The Blossoms worked with him again the next year on his final acting role, a movie called “Change of Habit.” He treated them far better than Phil Spector had, she said. “With Elvis, he wanted us to work, and we got paid well.”
He flirted a little, too, maybe a tap on the shoulder or a quick shake of the hips. She admitted she was too scared to do anything about it.
Decades on, Darlene talked about those days in an on-camera interview of her own.
Darlene Love Remembers Elvis Presley
“I always say he left us way too soon,” Darlene said. “He is where I plan to go one day, so I’ll see him again.”