In 1974, an Elvis Presley album appeared in shops with a very strange warning printed on the cover: “A Talking Album Only.” That was not a joke or a marketing gimmick. It was a legal necessity. The record is titled Having Fun with Elvis on Stage; it runs for about 37 minutes and contains no songs. No “Hound Dog.” No “Suspicious Minds.” Not a single complete piece of music. It is thirty-seven minutes of Elvis Presley talking, mumbling, and giggling between songs that have been edited out.
It is also, according to a long list of critics, the worst album ever released by a major recording artist.
Here is why it exists: pure Colonel Tom Parker. By the 1970s Parker had built a company called Boxcar Enterprises to control Elvis merchandise — T-shirts, programs, posters, anything he could sell at concerts. Parker owned 56 percent of it, which meant he kept the lion’s share of everything it made. There was only one product he could not touch: records. Elvis’s contract with RCA gave the label the rights to all of his music.
So Parker read the contract very carefully. And he decided he had spotted a hole in it. As he saw it, RCA owned the rights to Elvis’s singing voice — but nobody had said anything about his speaking voice.
Having Fun With Elvis On Stage – FULL ALBUM
So he made an album out of it. Boxcar Records went through live tapes from Las Vegas, stripped out every song, and kept only the bits in between. It was released as two tracks, called “Side A” and “Side B.” At first it was sold only at Elvis’s own concerts, where fans buying a program could also pick up an album of their hero clearing his throat.
Listening to it is a genuinely bewildering experience. You get Elvis introducing songs that never arrive. You get bursts of applause that get cut off mid-clap. You get him humming “well… well… well…” which, in the real concerts, was how he led into a song. Here it just leads into nothing. There is a joke about his underwear being too tight. At one point, the screaming is so intense that he says, “It’s getting a little wild in here, boy,” and laughs.
The reviews were savage. AllMusic gave it one star and described listening to it as being like watching a car crash that had somehow driven into a carnival freak show. In 1991, two critics wrote an entire book called The Worst Rock and Roll Records of All Time — and put this album at number one.
Then came the twist Parker had not planned for. RCA reviewed its contract and pointed out that any recording of Elvis made while he was signed to them belonged to RCA, including his speaking voice. Parker’s loophole did not exist. A deal was struck, RCA took it over, and it was released properly in October 1974.
And here is the daftest part of the whole story. It sold over 100,000 copies. Elvis himself is said to have hated it and wanted it withdrawn. There is one genuinely lovely stretch buried in it, though — around eight minutes into Side A, he stops joking and talks honestly about his childhood and what he wanted to be before he became a singer. Four minutes of real Elvis, hidden inside the worst album ever made.