That giant last note is the part everybody waits for. When Elvis reaches the end of “It’s Now or Never,” his voice climbs and swells like an opera singer’s, and it still gives people goosebumps.
Getting there wasn’t easy, even for him.
The song was already a hit at home. It reached No. 1 in America on Aug 15, 1960, and stayed there for five weeks. In Britain, though, fans had to wait. The release was held up for months over the rights to the song. When it finally came out, it went straight in at No. 1 on the chart of Nov 3, 1960, 66 years ago this week. It stayed on top for eight weeks and became Britain’s Christmas No. 1 that year. The record has reportedly sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.
So how did that famous ending come together? It started on a spring night in Nashville.
On April 3, 1960, Elvis went into RCA Studio B with engineer Bill Porter. An engineer is the person running the recording equipment and getting every sound onto tape. The session ran from 7:30 in the evening until midnight.
Elvis’s official music site, elvisthemusic.com, tells what happened. “When at one point he had trouble achieving the full-throated operatic cadence with which the song concludes,” the site says, “the engineer, Bill Porter, suggested they could always splice the ending.”
In plain words, Porter was offering to cut the tape and attach the big finish from a different try. Elvis could get the ending right once and be done with it.
Elvis wouldn’t hear of it.
“I’m going to do the song all the way through,” Elvis insisted, “or I’m not going to do it at all.”
This complete early take from that same April 1960 session lets you hear him do exactly what he promised, start to finish, ending and all.
Elvis singing a full early take in the studio, April 1960
Aaron Schroeder, one of the men who wrote the song, saw how much it mattered to him. He recalled that Elvis “wanted everything to be right, almost to the point of having tears in his eyes.”
Now for the honest footnote, because the session tapes tell it plainly. The record you know wasn’t one unbroken performance. Follow That Dream, Elvis’s own collectors’ label, lists the released master as “spliced from takes 4 & 2.” So in the end, two of his full performances were joined together to make the single.
That doesn’t take anything away from what he did in the room. Every time Elvis stepped up to the microphone that night, he sang the whole song, big ending included. He never took the shortcut Porter offered. The pieces that went on the record were his own complete takes.
Pay close attention to the final note on the finished record below, because that’s the part he had such a hard time with that night.
The finished record of “It’s Now or Never”
Bill Porter’s idea made perfect sense from behind the glass. A lot of singers might have taken him up on it and let the tape do the work.
Elvis stayed at the microphone and kept singing it all the way through instead. By midnight he had sung it start to finish more than once, and two of those full takes became the record that topped the charts on both sides of the ocean.