“Suspicious Minds” is the song most people would name if you asked them for the greatest Elvis Presley record. It is also, oddly, one of the least typical things he ever made — and it was the last number one single of his entire life.
The story starts in a small Memphis studio in January 1969. Elvis had spent the decade making films he was ashamed of, and he was trying to rebuild. So instead of going to Nashville or Hollywood, he recorded at American Sound Studio with a producer he had never worked with and a band that didn’t work for him. Out of those few weeks came “In the Ghetto,” “Kentucky Rain,” and this.
It went to number one in America. It was his first chart-topper in seven years. And he would never have another one while he was alive.
Elvis Presley – Suspicious Minds (Official Music Video)
But people obsess over this song not for the studio version. It is what he did with it live.
On stage, Elvis turned “Suspicious Minds” into a kind of endurance event. He would drive the song up to a peak — and then stop the band dead. Then start again. Then push it higher. Then stop it again. Some nights it stretched to seven or eight minutes, far past the record, purely because he refused to let it end. And he threw his whole body at it: the karate kicks, the sudden drops to one knee, the spins, the held notes with the room screaming over the top.
Which brings us to 14 January 1973 and the most-watched performance ever filmed.
Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite was the first concert by a single performer broadcast live worldwide. It reached more than 40 countries and an audience estimated at over a billion people — more than had watched any single entertainer in history. Elvis had lost 25 pounds for it and wore the white American Eagle jumpsuit, studded with thousands of stones.
Elvis Presley – Suspicious Minds (That’s the Way It Is, Las Vegas, 1970)
And the version of “Suspicious Minds” he delivered that night has become the definitive one. It is the clip that keeps getting rediscovered, generation after generation — currently sitting around 133 million views online. It has been watched more times than most people alive have watched anything.
Why that one? Because it is the perfect meeting of song and moment. He is 38, physically at his best, at the absolute peak of his powers, singing a song about a relationship that cannot be saved — we’re caught in a trap, I can’t walk out — in front of more people than had ever watched anybody.
There is a bitter irony sitting underneath it, too. His own marriage was falling apart at exactly that point. Priscilla had left him eleven months earlier. The divorce would be finalized that October. So the biggest audience in television history watched Elvis Presley sing about two people trapped in something they could not fix, and almost nobody in that billion knew he was describing his own house.
The album went to number one, the last chart-topping record of his lifetime. And “Suspicious Minds” stayed in his live set until the end.
The last number one he ever had, sung to the biggest audience anybody ever had.