Most of Elvis Presley’s records were made the usual way. He went to a studio, the band set up, the tape rolled.
But one time the studio came to him.
In the 1970s, RCA, his record label, hauled its recording gear into Graceland, his home in Memphis. They set it all up in the den, the room fans now know as the Jungle Room. Elvis sang right there in his own house, with his band around him and the family upstairs.
One of the people upstairs was his little girl.
Lisa Marie Presley spent part of her childhood living at Graceland, and she shared the second floor with her dad. So when the house turned into a studio, she was right in the middle of it, whether she knew it or not.
We know what happened next because of Angie Marchese. She’s Graceland’s longtime archivist, the vice president of archives, which means she looks after the photos, papers, clothes and recordings Elvis left behind. In 2024 she told the story to The American, a UK publication, in an interview with Michael Burland.
Before we get to Lisa Marie’s part, it helps to know just how unusual those home sessions were, and Graceland’s own video on the Jungle Room sessions is a good place to start.
Graceland’s own look at the Jungle Room sessions
Years later, Marchese sat down with Lisa Marie and played her some of the recordings from those Jungle Room sessions.
These were tapes of her father, made inside the house she grew up in. And Lisa Marie knew exactly what she was hearing.
“I remember when this happened,” Lisa Marie told her.
It turns out that a piece of Elvis’s furniture was in the wrong place. His organ was upstairs, and for the session it needed to be downstairs. There was just one problem. It wouldn’t fit through the door.
So they took the door off. With a saw.
And that’s what woke Lisa Marie up.
Here’s how Marchese says Lisa Marie told it: “They woke me up trying to saw the door off to get the organ from upstairs to downstairs,” she said, “because it wouldn’t go through the door.”
Think about that from a child’s side for a second. You’re asleep at Graceland, and you wake up to the sound of grown men sawing through a door in your own house, all so your dad can play his organ in the den.
Marchese’s own take on it was short and sweet. “It was her dad.”
Marchese shared one more small detail from the same sessions. “Elvis took a time out and called the guys up, one by one, to his dressing room and gave them shirts out of his closet.”
So the band got new shirts, and Lisa Marie got a story she was still telling decades later. Not bad for a recording session at home. The sawed-off door never made it onto any record, but thanks to Lisa Marie it made it into Graceland’s history.