When people talk about Elvis Presley’s 1968 Comeback Special, they nearly always talk about the same two things: the black leather suit and the enormous closing number “If I Can Dream.” Both deserve it. But ask serious Elvis fans which moment from that night actually stops them dead, and a lot of them will name something else entirely — a song from 1955 that most people have never heard of, performed sitting down, on a tiny stage, with an audience close enough to touch him.
The song is “Trying to Get to You.”
To understand why it hits so hard, you need to know what that part of the special actually was. Director Steve Binder had noticed something during rehearsals: Elvis and his old friends would sit around in the dressing room with guitars, playing the songs they grew up on and telling stories, and it was loose, funny, and completely unlike anything in his films. So Binder built a small square stage, put the audience around all four sides of it — often described as a boxing ring with no ropes — and let them play.
Elvis Presley – Trying To Get To You (’68 Comeback Special)
And sitting on that stage with him were two men who had not played with him properly in years. Scotty Moore, the guitarist who was in the room when rock and roll was invented in 1954, and D.J. Fontana, his original drummer, playing a guitar case with his hands because there was no kit. These were the men who had been with him at the very start, before the films, before the Colonel took over everything.
So when Elvis reached for “Trying to Get to You” — a song he had recorded at Sun Records in 1955, when he was 20, and nobody outside the South had heard of him — he was going home.
What he does with it is extraordinary. He does not perform it politely. He attacks it. He is 33, in black leather, sweating under television lights, and he tears into a thirteen-year-old song with everything he has, half-shouting the ending. It is one of the very few pieces of footage where you can see exactly what made him dangerous in 1956, filmed in color, close-up, at arm’s length.
Elvis Presley – ’68 Comeback Special
And the reason it works is the room. There is no stage set. No dancers. No orchestra. Nobody is more than a few feet away from him. When he shuts his eyes and pushes, you can see the people in the front row leaning in.
Elvis had been terrified before that taping. He had not stood in front of a live audience in seven years, and minutes before going on, he told Binder outright: “Steve, I can’t do it.” Binder told him he had to. Elvis went out shaky, his throat dry — and then, over the course of that session, the fear drained out of him.
You can watch it happen. The sit-down show is a man remembering, in real time, that he is the best in the world at this. And “Trying to Get to You” is the moment it lands.
The official upload of that performance has been watched millions of times. Not bad for a B-side from 1955.