“Are You Lonesome Tonight?” is one of the saddest songs Elvis Presley ever recorded. It went to number one in 1960, and it is about a heartbroken man begging to know whether the woman who left him still thinks about him. There is nothing funny anywhere in it. Which is why the most famous version of it in existence is one where he laughs so hard he physically cannot finish the song — and there is a very good reason he was messing about with it in the first place.
The date was 26 August 1969, at the International Hotel in Las Vegas. Elvis had come back to live performance after eight years away and was playing two shows a night to packed rooms. When you sing the same slow ballad that many times in a row, something in you starts looking for trouble.
So instead of the proper line — do you gaze at your doorstep and picture me there — he sang: “Do you gaze at your bald head and wish you had hair?”
He immediately started giggling at his own joke. And then the universe delivered a punchline nobody could have scripted. A man in the front row took off his wig and started swaying it about in time with the music.
That was the end of Elvis Presley. He fell apart completely. He tried to keep singing, cracked up, tried again, cracked up worse. And what makes the recording genuinely one of the funniest moments in music is the woman standing behind him. His backing singer was Cissy Houston — yes, Whitney Houston’s mother — and she carried on singing her soaring, deadly serious part exactly as written, refusing to acknowledge that anything unusual was happening. Her total professionalism made him worse. At one point he shouts “sing it, baby!” at her while completely losing it, and she goes for the high notes.
Elvis Presley Are You Lonesome Tonight Laughing Version
Elvis’s bodyguard Red West was there that night, and he added a detail that makes it even better. According to him, the joke started because Elvis had spotted two girls in the audience trying to yank the man’s toupee off his head. He was already watching the whole thing unfold before he changed the line.
He staggers to the end in pieces and then delivers the perfect closing remark, believing he has just wrecked one of his most beloved songs in front of a paying room: “That’s it, man. Fourteen years right down the drain.” It had been roughly fourteen years since his first hits.
Now here is the part that explains everything. This was not a one-off. Elvis messed about with that song constantly. On other nights he sang “now the stage is bare and I’m standing there — without any hair!” On another he stopped dead in the middle of the spoken section and asked, “honey, who am I talking to?” According to Red West, there was a reason for it. Colonel Tom Parker had personally asked Elvis to record the song as a favor, because it was a favorite of his. So for years afterward, Elvis took the mickey out of it on stage as a running private joke at his manager’s expense.
He was completely wrong about ruining it, by the way. The recording sat in the vaults for years. When it was finally released in the early 1980s, the laughing version became a UK Top 30 hit.
Of all the flawless, perfectly sung recordings Elvis Presley made in his life, one of the best loved is the one where he could not sing at all — because a stranger waved a wig at him and the King of Rock and Roll turned into a giggling wreck.