Jerry Scheff was Elvis’s bass player. He played for him from 1969 to 1973, then came back from 1975 to 1977.
And one night, up in the air, he asked Elvis a question.
They were on Elvis’s plane, the Lisa Marie. Jerry later told Arjan Deelen of Elvis Australia how it went. “One night we were sitting in the Lisa Marie, and I asked him: ‘How come you don’t do rock ‘n’ roll songs anymore?’. And he said something like: ‘I can’t find any that I like’. So I went home and wrote ‘Fire Down Below’.”
That’s a bass player taking his boss at his word.
Jerry’s song was called “There’s a Fire Down Below.” He took it to Felton Jarvis, Elvis’s record producer. “I played it for Felton Jarvis, and he said: ‘Oh man, yeah!’. So he set it up.”
The chance came 50 years ago this weekend. On Saturday night, Oct 30, 1976, running into Sunday, Oct 31, RCA brought its mobile recording equipment to Graceland. The band set up in Elvis’s den, the room known as “The Jungle Room.” Jerry was on bass, James Burton was on guitar and Ronnie Tutt was on drums.
Then the session stopped. About an hour later, Elvis sent for Jerry.
“He called me up to his bedroom about an hour after that, and said: ‘Listen Jerry, you guys go ahead and cut a track on it, and I promise I’ll put my voice on it’.”
So they did. The band played Jerry’s song 14 times.
Elvis didn’t sing on any of them. The session log says it plainly: “Elvis never recorded his vocals.” Still, Jerry had a finished track and Elvis’s word. The 14th take was the final pass that night, and it’s as close as anyone got to the record Jerry hoped to hear.
The band’s 14th take of “There’s a Fire Down Below,” with no vocal
Felton Jarvis didn’t give up on it, either. According to an Elvis Australia review, Jarvis “apparently carried” the track “with him in spring, 1977, hoping to persuade Elvis to record a vocal track for it.”
The vocal never came. Fans did finally get to hear the instrumental, though, when it was released on the Follow That Dream CD “The Jungle Room Sessions.” It’s the last track on the album.
Those same den sessions gave Elvis songs for his “Moody Blue” album, including the rocker “Way Down,” recorded the night before, on Oct 29. Jerry saw the funny side of that. “Maybe my luck was that my song didn’t come up before ‘Way Down’ came up,” he said.
Years later, Jerry played it himself. Going by its title, this clip has him with Elvis’s old band and singer Terry Mike Jeffery.
Jerry Scheff and Elvis’s old band play the song he wrote
Music clearly ran in the family. Jerry’s son, Jason Scheff, grew up to be the bass player and lead singer of the band Chicago from 1985 to 2016.
Elvis never did get back to that song. Jerry kept the story, though, and he told it just the way it happened, right down to that call up to Elvis’s bedroom an hour after the music stopped.