By 1972, Elvis Presley had been famous for sixteen years. He had made 31 films, sold hundreds of millions of records, and conquered Las Vegas. And there was one glaring hole in all of it. He had never performed a proper concert in New York City. Not once. He had appeared on television there in the fifties, but he had never stood on a New York stage in front of a paying audience.
In June 1972 he finally did it — and he did something nobody had managed before.
The venue was Madison Square Garden, then considered the most important performance space in America. Colonel Tom Parker booked three shows. All three sold out instantly, so a fourth was hurriedly added. Across the weekend of 9, 10 and 11 June, roughly 20,000 people came to each performance — a total of about 80,000 people.
Elvis became the first entertainer in history to sell out four consecutive shows at the Garden.
Elvis Presley – Live at Madison Square Garden 1972
He was genuinely nervous about it, and for a specific reason. New York had never really loved him. In the fifties, the New York critics had been the harshest in the country, sneering at him while the rest of America screamed. He was walking into the one city that had been most reluctant to accept him, sixteen years later, to find out whether it finally would.
Then look at who turned up to watch. Sitting in that audience across those four nights were John Lennon, George Harrison, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Elton John, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. The entire aristocracy of rock music came to see the man who started it.
The entrance is the bit people still talk about. After the support acts and a short interval, the lights dropped, the fanfare played, and Elvis came bounding out in a white jumpsuit with a gold-trimmed cape. One reviewer described what followed perfectly: for the first three or four minutes, he moved through a series of poses, doing almost nothing, while twenty thousand camera flashes went off at once, turning the Garden into a giant stop-motion light show.
Elvis Presley As Recorded at Madison Square Garden, Album
RCA were not going to let this pass. Producer Felton Jarvis was told to record it, and they chose Saturday 10 June because it was the only day with two shows — the afternoon performance could be treated as a rehearsal, with the evening one as the real thing. The album, “Elvis: As Recorded at Madison Square Garden,” was in shops just nine days later, which was almost unheard of at the time. It went gold within weeks and is now certified triple platinum.
And the afternoon show? It sat in the vaults for a quarter of a century. It was finally released in 1997, twenty years after his death, under the title “An Afternoon in the Garden.”
There is one more thing worth knowing about that weekend, because it explains everything about the man. On the afternoon of 9 June, hours before he walked onstage in front of the toughest audience of his life, Elvis sat down at the New York Hilton and gave a press conference — and he was funny, self-deprecating and entirely at ease. Then, by several accounts, he spent the time before the first show pacing backstage, so nervous he nearly did not go on.