Elvis made a lot of records. Colonel Tom Parker, his manager, had a hand in most of the big decisions around them. But in the summer of 1974 the Colonel cooked up something nobody had ever seen before.
He released an Elvis album with no singing on it at all.
It went on sale right at Elvis’s Las Vegas shows, on a little label the Colonel ran himself called Boxcar. Fans bought it expecting, well, Elvis songs. What they got was 37 minutes of something else entirely.
So what was on it?
Every minute is Elvis talking. Joking with the crowd, telling stories, goofing around between numbers, with the actual singing snipped out. The whole record is the stuff that usually happens in the gaps.
Now for the why, which is the best part.
The Colonel had a theory. He figured RCA, Elvis’s record company, only owned the rights to Elvis singing. As one music magazine put it, “the label had no claim on spoken word.” So if the Colonel sold a record of Elvis just talking, he could do it on his own label and keep it all for himself.
RCA did not see it that way. They said they owned everything Elvis recorded, singing or not. There was a legal tussle, and RCA ended up putting the album out themselves, with the words “A Talking Album Only” printed right on the cover so nobody would feel cheated. Odd as it was, it still climbed to No. 9 on Billboard’s country album chart.
Here’s a taste of the kind of loose, on-stage joking that filled all 37 minutes. This clip is a fan upload of one of his most famous giggle-fits on stage, not from the album itself, but it’s the same Elvis and the same mischief.
Elvis cracking himself up on stage
Watch him completely lose it. That playful side of him is exactly what the Colonel bottled up and sold.
Elvis reportedly wasn’t thrilled about the whole thing and asked for it to be pulled from shelves. To this day it has never had a proper release on CD.
It’s one of the strangest items in the entire Elvis catalog. An album of a singer not singing, sold in a casino lobby, over a hunch about a contract. Only the Colonel.