the importance of “in the ghetto” – part 2

Es­ti­mated reading time is 15 min­utes.

THIS SECOND PART of “The Im­por­tance of ‘In the Ghetto’ ” is a follow-up to the pre­vi­ously pub­lished “The im­por­tance of In The Ghetto.” This piece here is a sort of ad­dendum of bits and pieces that can be as­so­ci­ated with In The Ghetto the record. It in­cludes an ac­count of my pur­chase of the record in April 1969, an in­tro­duc­tion to the song as Mac Davis con­ceived it and Elvis recorded it, and my re­sponses to some of John’s key points.

Scat­tered throughout are some tid­bits on Elvis’s final movie and his at­tempt at “se­rious acting.” A third part will in­clude a discog­raphy with a gallery of im­ages along with record col­lec­tors’ in­for­ma­tion (a price guide). 

In the mid-’60s, I felt an oblig­a­tion to keep buying Elvis’ in­creas­ingly mediocre of­fer­ings to keep his pro­file ac­tive on the Top 40.

My buddy Jimmy Peipon and I went record shop­ping, not some­thing that we usu­ally did to­gether. We ended up at Joe Nar­done’s shop, a space that he rented from Wayne’s De­part­ment Store in Ed­wardsville (with wall space!). The day that we were there was some­time in April 1969 and we were both there for the same reason: to buy Elvis Pres­ley’s new single, In The Ghetto.

There was a dif­fer­ence though: for me, buying the new Elvis record was the pre­dictable pat­terned be­havior of the Elvisad­dict (not then di­ag­nosed as a per­son­ality or so­cial disorder).

I had al­ready lived through Do The Clam (1965), Frankie And Johnny (1966), Long Legged Girl With The Short Dress On (1967), and A Little Less Con­ver­sa­tion (1968). So this was just an­other Elvis score for me and yet not: first, it was the follow-up to the ex­tra­or­di­nary If I Can Dream and, second, I had al­ready heard it on the radio and it was fantastical!

To read “The im­por­tance of In The Ghetto,” click here.

 

Elvis RecordStore 800 trim

First thing I did was email Joe Nar­done back in Wilkes-Barre and re­quested a pic­ture of his shop from the ’60s. Nope! Like most of us, he lost all of those things in the Great Flood of ’72. So I went looking through the In­ternet for photos of Joe’s shop that may have been posted by an old em­ployee or cus­tomer. Nope! So I set­tled for an image of a small shop in 1967 that at least cap­tures the per­sonal feel that such shops had back then.

Weird scene in the basement

Keep in mind, that there was no an­tic­i­pa­tion prior to buying the sin­gles above (1965-68), simply a sense of oblig­a­tion, an oblig­a­tion to Elvis to keep buying his in­creas­ingly mediocre of­fer­ings to keep his pro­file ac­tive on the Top 40.

Be­gin­ning with If I Can Dream and the with the Mem­phis sin­gles—In The Ghetto, Sus­pi­cious Minds (es­pe­cially Sus­pi­cious Minds!), Don’t Cary Daddy, and Ken­tucky Rain—there was a great deal of an­tic­i­pa­tion and the pleasant sort of butterflies-in-the-tummy ef­fect that such forward-looking ex­cite­ment causes.

Jim, on the other hand, had never bought an Elvis record be­fore. While we were both nerdy kinda guys, his older brother John was pretty hip when it came to knowing what was up in the world of rock. A diehard Stones fan (a group that I loathed at the time), he had a friend in Cal­i­fornia send him copies of tapes from the Doors’ first album be­fore it was released.

Lis­tening to that music in late 1966 when we were just 15 was a weird scene, al­though not in­side a gold mine but in the Peipon’s base­ment. There, John had his craft shop—he worked won­ders on cheap WWI model air­planes with paint and fishing line (as guy-wire)—and hideaway.

“This per­for­mance of In The Ghetto is Elvis at his best and could easily prove one of his all-time biggest item!”

So Jimmy was ex­posed to a lot of cool music and for him to want an Elvis single was great. Maybe it would be the gateway drug into Elvisdom and he would dis­cover the tran­scen­dent Sun sides of 1954-55 and the ex­tra­or­di­nary 1956-57 Victor record­ings and ELVIS IS BACK and Hell’s Belles maybe even HIS HAND IN MINE, the only gospel music that I owned.

Any­thing was pos­sible that day in ’69.

There it was on Joe’s wall, in one of the metal pockets that held a 45 face out. The Top 40 ac­cording to WARM (“The Mighty 590”) took up the top four rows on Joe’s wall and In The Ghetto was on the bottom row. It may have been the WARM Pick Hit of the Week but it didn’t make no know-how to me!

I just pulled all of the records out of the pocket, picked the two mintiest (a term that had little meaning at the time as col­lec­toritis was still years in the fu­ture for Amer­i­cans in gen­eral) pic­ture sleeves out of the stack, handed one to Jim and we each paid Howard 79¢ (plus a few pen­nies tax) and that was that.

As we left with our records (and I as­sume that we bought others as we were both into the con­tem­po­rary scene and ’69 was a heady ear for rock music), I was left to wonder about the blurb on the pic­ture sleeve that told me that Elvis’s new album FROM ELVIS IN MEM­PHIS was coming soon! 1

 

Mac and Elvis in the ghetto

Mac Davis pub­lished In The Ghetto under his pseu­donym Scott Davis. He had al­ready had four songs recorded by Elvis in 1968: A Little Less Con­ver­sa­tion for the movie Live A Little, Love A Little in March; Noth­ingville and Mem­o­ries for the Singer Presents Elvis tele­vi­sion spe­cial in June, and Clean Up Your Own Back­yard for the movie The Trouble With Girls in October.

An­other one of his songs, Don’t Cry, Daddy, would be Elvis’s third hit from the ’69 Mem­phis ses­sion. Ac­cording to Davis:

“It’s a simple matter of growing up with a little boy whose fa­ther worked with my fa­ther. He lived in a part of town that was a dirt-street ghetto. I grew up in Lub­bock, Texas, and it was a ghetto in every sense of the word, but we didn’t use the word back then. I was trying to come up with a song called The Vi­cious Circle—how a child is born, he has no fa­ther, and the same thing hap­pens. The word ghetto be­came pop­ular in the late ’60s to de­scribe the poor parts of town.” (Mac Davis, 2002)

Davis pub­lished the song as In The Ghetto (The Vi­cious Circle) but RCA re­ceived per­mis­sion from Davis to drop the sub­title be­fore giving the song to Elvis. Re­leased as RCA Victor 47-9741 and backed with Any Day Now (a track that I would have no dif­fi­culty in ar­guing as Elvis’s best-ever performance).

Bill­board’s re­view said that “This per­for­mance is Elvis at his best and the vital lyric line is right in today’s selling bag. This one could easily prove one of his all-time biggest items.”

Above is a video of the stereo mix of the recording from the 20 #1 HITS album; below are the song’s lyrics. I have laid the lyrics out as I hear them and see them, al­though my layout dif­fers greatly from most of those online.

As the snow flies, on a cold and gray Chicago mornin’ 
a poor little baby child is born in the ghetto.
And his mama cries,
’cause if there’s one thing that she don’t need
it’s an­other hungry mouth to feed in the ghetto.

People, don’t you understand?
The child needs a helping hand!
He’ll grow to be an angry young man someday.
Take a look at you and me, are we too blind to see?
Do we simply turn our heads and look the other way?

Well, the world turns, and a hungry little boy with a runny nose
plays in the street as the cold wind blows in the ghetto.
And his hunger burns,
so he starts to roam the streets at night
and he learns how to steal
and he learns how to fight in the ghetto.

Then one night in des­per­a­tion the young man breaks away.
He buys a gun and he steals a car,
he tries to run but he don’t get far.
And his mama cries,
as a crowd gathers ’round an angry young man
face down on the street with a gun in his hand in the ghetto.

And as her young man dies,
on a cold and gray Chicago mornin’
an­other little baby child is born in the ghetto.
And his mama cries . . .

In The Ghetto de­buted on the Cash Box Top 100 on May 3, 1969. It peaked at #1 on June 28, 1969, on the Cash Box Top 100, spending five weeks in the Top 10. Alas, it only reached #3 on Bill­board, but that is the number everyone bandies about these days.

 

Elvis ChangeHabit still

At the an­nual Amer­ican Med­ical Ag­gre­ga­tion’s Doc­tors & Their Pa­tience With Pa­tients Ban­quet, Dr. John Car­penter was pre­sented with the award for Best Side­burns of 1969. Here he shows the ‘burns off and ex­plains their origin and con­cep­tion to two new vol­un­teers for the good doc­tor’s clinic in an inner New York City neighborhood.

Important decisions

The next few para­graphs con­tain quotes from John’s ar­ticle (in rusty-brown print) fol­lowed by my re­sponses in normal black type. Please keep in mind that I am in near-total ac­cord with John on 90% of his opin­ions, ob­ser­va­tion, in­ter­pre­ta­tions and—and what else?—oh yeah, his opinions.

“If Elvis did any­thing so tran­scen­dent that it can’t quite be de­nied, we must rest eter­nally re­as­sured that he was the last person re­spon­sible for it.”

Agreed. This un­be­liev­ably ig­no­rant (just plain stoopit?) at­ti­tude or be­lief was common for decades—DECADES!—among rock­writers and his­to­rians who should have known better. The litany went like this: the amazing Sun record­ings were es­sen­tially the cre­ation of Sam Phillips and/or Scotty Moore. While Sam did go on to do some amazing work with Jerry Lee Lewis, he never came close to the Elvis sides. And Scotty went on to be­come a foot­note in most his­to­rians’ notebooks.

1956

The RCA Victor sides were a re­sult of Steve Sholes’ not in­ter­fering with Leiber and Stoller in the studio and the “ge­nius” of the Colonel every­where else.

1960

The post-Army come­back was the in­cred­ible band that backed Elvis in Nashville (Hank Gar­land, Bob Moore, Boots Ran­dolph, and Floyd Cramer sup­ple­mented Elvis’s reg­ular crew) and engineer/producer’ Bill Porter’s studio savvy.

1966

The HOW GREAT THOU ART SES­SION ses­sions were owed to the en­thu­siasm of new pro­ducer Felton Jarvis while the NBC tele­vi­sion spe­cial Singer Presents Elvis was the brain­child of Steve Binder.

1969

The Mem­phis ses­sions were the product of the vi­sion of Chips Moman.

Only in the ’70s do these folks allow Presley the dig­nity of cred­iting him for his cre­ations. And then they dump on him: this de­spite THAT’S THE WAY IT IS and ELVIS COUNTRY (recorded in 1970) and HIS HAND IN MINE (1971) and Burning Love and Al­ways On My Mind (1972) and Promised Land and Lovin’ Arms (1973) and yada yoda blah blah blah.

“Sit down with any of the nu­merous edi­tions of Elvis’ late-’60s Mem­phis ses­sions, then close your eyes and try to guess which vo­cals were per­formed with and without laryngitis.”

Agreed. John wrote this in re­sponse to a critic who re­marked that Elvis owed his re­mark­able per­for­mance in Mem­phis to an ill­ness that curbed his post-Army ex­cesses. 

 

Elvis_RollingStone

The July 12, 1969, issue of Rolling Stone (#37) gave Elvis the cover and fea­ture story. Ti­tled “Elvis Presley On Set: You Won’t Ask Elvis Any­thing Too Deep?” by William Otterburn-Hall, it ad­dressed Presley on the set of his latest movie, Change Of Habit. Please note that while it took Elvis five million-selling sin­gles and four million-dollar al­bums in an eighteen-month pe­riod to qualify for the cover of Rolling Stone.

There was no bandwagon

The laryn­gitis part is ap­par­ently true; it de­layed the ses­sions while Elvis stayed home and re­cu­per­ated (Moman and the band laid down in­stru­mental tracks—the time was paid for and work needed to be done.) 

“Recording and re­leasing In The Ghetto in the early months of 1969 may have con­sti­tuted the single most im­por­tant se­ries of de­ci­sions in Elvis Presley’s ca­reer. Hence, the first single re­lease from the Mem­phis ses­sions was a huge de­ci­sion. If it didn’t meet or ex­ceed the suc­cess of If I Can Dream then the mo­mentum built by the crit­ical and rating suc­cess of the tele­vi­sion spe­cial would be ef­fec­tively broken. Elvis would run the very real risk of finding him­self back on the side­lines for good.”

Agreed.

Es­pe­cially if the de­ci­sions were Elvis’s, which every source as­sures us that it was the singer who se­lected all of his major sin­gles since signing with RCA Victor in 1955. And the follow-up single was Clean Up Your Own Back­yard, per­haps the best sound­track recording in six years and a worthy follow-up to the so­cial con­scious­ness of If I Can Dream and In The Ghetto.

In hind­sight, his­to­rians un­fa­miliar with his­tory often take a ca­sual ap­proach to Elvis singing a “protest song” (al­though it would be more ac­cu­rate to call it a song of so­cial consciousness).

They dis­miss him as too little or too late or merely riding a bandwagon. 

But there was no band­wagon of so­cial con­scious­ness or protest songs in 1968-69. Dylan had left them be­hind in ’64 and no other folk-related mu­si­cian was get­ting songs of this na­ture played on Top 40 radio.

No one.

The only protest song to top the Bill­board or Cash Box charts was Barry McGuire’s Eve Of De­struc­tion in 1965!

In Jan­uary 1969, when Elvis de­cided to cut Mac Davis’s song, the biggest hits in the country were Marvin Gaye’s tale of be­trayal I Heard It Through The Grapevine, Diana Ross & The Supremes and the Temp­ta­tions’ de­c­la­ra­tion of in­tent I’m Gonna Make You Love Me, Tommy James & The Shon­dells’ wistful dream of love to be Crimson And Clover, the Doors’ ridicu­lous plea for some form of con­tact Touch Me.

Songs that can be con­sid­ered to ex­hibit some so­cial con­scious­ness in­cluded Sly & The Family Stone’s Everyday People, the Temp­ta­tions’ Cloud Nine, Diana Ross & The Supremes’ Love Child, Joe South’s Games People Play, and Elvis’ If I Can Dream.

That was it.

So it wasn’t that an av­enue for record­ings of white singers ex­pressing aware­ness and con­cern for black teenagers in the coun­try’s inner cities sud­denly came into vogue. In fact, elim­i­nate In The Ghetto and the songs the record­ings meet that cri­teria that were get­ting se­rious AM air­play were ef­fec­tively zero.

Keep in mind that 1967 was the year that psy­che­delia began get­ting some se­rious air­play and ’68 was the year that bub­blegum music had its fif­teen min­utes of fame so there was no re­cent his­tory of such songs to point to. In fact, there is no real his­tory of protest songs or so­cial con­scious­ness songs ever having much im­pact on the Top 40.

Even if you count Peter, Paul & Mary’s ver­sion of Dy­lan’s less-than-rabble-rousing Blowin’ In the Wind, the only protest song to ever top the charts was Barry McGuire’s Eve Of De­struc­tion in 1965!

Fi­nally, if we con­sider so­cial con­scious­ness songs as a sub-genre, then Elvis Presley was one of the leading artists in that cat­e­gory in the ’60s: with If I Can Dream, In The Ghetto, and Clean Up Your Own Back­yard he scored three Top 30 hits, placing him ahead of PP&M and Dylan and McGuinn and McGuire (who were still a-gettin’ higher) and I could go but will end here be­cause I have never ever read any­where else that Mr. Presley was at the head of his class in this par­tic­ular school . . .

“My friends re­ally didn’t un­der­stand why any white person would vote for any­body but George Wallace.”

This state­ment was not only common in the South but wher­ever there were large pockets of racist whites. (Not that racism is con­fined to any group of people; hu­mans are pre­dis­posed to xeno­phobia via evo­lu­tion, oth­er­wise, we prob­ably wouldn’t have survived.)

 

Elvis Ghetto sheet davis 300

Sheet music for Mac Davis’s ver­sion of In The Ghetto re­tains “The Vi­cious Circle” as its sub­title. It was pub­lished by Screen Gems/EMI Music and Elvis Presley Music in 1969.

Back in the real world

But among Democratic-leaning voters in the North­east, Wal­lace was be­yond creepy, the epitome of that which was hor­ri­fying and re­volting about our Southern Amer­i­cans: a white man that ac­tively sought of­fice by keeping down the black man and who had mil­lions of supporters.

Of course, these people are still with us today, many of them in the latest ver­sion of the “D0-Nothing” 113th Con­gress of these here (dis)United States of America.

“But at least some things can be ra­tio­nally as­sumed: per­haps the most im­por­tant is that, by the late ’60s, Elvis had kept him­self in the game—something that ought to give pause to those who off-handedly dis­miss his movie career.”

I don’t agree with John here: by 1967-68, Elvis was not only not having hits on the Top 40, but he also wasn’t selling any LPs ei­ther. While it was common to blame it on the heady com­pe­ti­tion of the second half of the ’60s, but that simply was not the case. Presley was to­tally out to lunch by most record-buyers and movie­goers’ terms.

His take on the con­sen­sual re­ality of pop­ular cul­ture was so askew that his movies had been tagged “Elvis movies,” a sub-genre of B- (bee minus) films that ex­isted in a world of their own. As Roy Carr and Mick Farren summed up the Kissin’ Cousins single of 1965: “The single her­alded yet an­other atro­cious movie. In an­other galaxy, the Rolling Stones is­sued Not Fade Away” (Elvis – The Com­plete Il­lus­trated Record, 1982).

 

Elvis ChangeOfHabit publicity photo 1200

FEA­TURED IMAGE: The photo at the top of this page of Elvis and Mary Tyler Moore was cropped from this pub­licity photo for Change Of Habit. The movie was con­ceived in 1967 and was sched­uled as a star­ring ve­hicle for Moore when she signed on in late 1968. She gra­ciously sur­ren­dered that po­si­tion to Presley when he agreed to come aboard in Jan­uary 1969.

Co­in­ci­den­tally, it was in Jan­uary ’69 that Elvis recorded In The Ghetto at Amer­ican Sound Studio in Mem­phis. Two things have al­ways sur­prised me: first, that Colonel Parker did not make In The Ghetto a part of the sound­track for Change Of Habit. Cer­tainly, the in­clu­sion of a world­wide hit record would have se­cured the movie far more free (the Colonel’s fa­vorite word) pub­licity than the in­clu­sion of an­other sin­gle’s B-side.

Second, that more people (read rock-writers and his­to­rians) have NOT pointed out the ob­vious and in­ten­tional con­nec­tion be­tween the song’s theme (a tough, short life in the ghetto)—which was al­most cer­tainly short-listed as a single while still a demo, meaning in no later than Jan­uary ’69—and the movie’s premise (inner-city neigh­bor­hoods need free clinics for the tough, short lives of their inhabitants).

Also, movies about the ex­pe­ri­ences of real black Amer­i­cans in real white America were scarce as black major league sports owners then. The very idea that Elvis-bloody-Presley would make a movie that even broached the topic should have had so­cial and movie critics talking. 3

 

Elvis GoldSuit 1959

POST­SCRIP­TU­ALLY, I want to thank John Ross for granting per­mis­sion for me to use his work and to mo­ti­vate me to ad­dress some of the is­sues sur­rounding Elvis and the ’69 Mem­phis ses­sions in gen­eral and the first single from those ses­sions es­pe­cially. And rec­om­mend that everyone check Change Of Habit out of the li­brary and give it a look-see . . .

 

____________

 

FOOT­NOTES:

1   James John Peipon was one of the few people that I grew up with that ful­filled his life­long am­bi­tion (he may have been the only person I knew with a life­long am­bi­tion!), that was to be a doctor. He has been a pe­di­a­tri­cian for ages and it suits him well: when I went back east for my 25th high school re­union, Jim and his wife stood out as the couple who ap­peared most con­tent with them­selves and their place in life. (I did not ask him if he ever de­vel­oped a greater love for the music of Elvis Presley.)

2   While it is usu­ally only Elvis com­pletists who seek out the Gold Stan­dard Se­ries, I want to point out that many of these reis­sues are very hard to find, es­pe­cially the black la­bels with Nipper on the left side (1965-68), which sell for $25-50 apiece, and the or­ange la­bels (1969), which sell for $50-100 each.

3   In the movie, Dr. Car­penter gives soothing phys­ical and emo­tional at­ten­tion to a little girl who may be an ex­ample of autism decades be­fore its rise to promi­nence as yet an­other malady of life in the Atomic Age.

 


 

2 thoughts on “the importance of “in the ghetto” – part 2”

  1. Hey Neal, sorry for the delay checking in...been a zoo of a day. Anyhow...Really won­derful piece. I’ve got a great love for record col­lecting sto­ries and your per­spec­tive cer­tainly adds a new di­men­sion to my orig­inal take. I didn’t buy my first 45 until 1976 so I missed this pe­riod en­tirely (was about eight years old and not in a house where any­body re­ally lis­tened to the radio even though my mom was a huge Elvis fan). 

    I take your point about Elvis’ ca­reer being in real jeop­ardy in 67-68, with nei­ther the records or movies doing well. I was re­ally thinking about the whole 64-68 pe­riod in the sense that the movies at least gave Elvis some sort of cul­tural pres­ence during the mid-sixties cat­a­clysm (com­pared to this 50s con­tem­po­raries) which I do think made a come­back a bit more plau­sible. De­bat­able maybe but that was how I saw it when I wrote the piece...

    One thing I have to con­fess is that the six­ties’ movies are a weak area of my Elvis ed­u­ca­tion. I’ve seen (and mostly love) the fifties’ movies and the sev­en­ties’ con­cert films. But I’ve only seen a handful of the six­ties’ movies and one I haven’t seen is Change of Habit, which is some­thing I ob­vi­ously need to cor­rect post-haste! I ac­tu­ally had no idea it ad­dressed the themes you dis­cuss and you make some ex­cel­lent points about the op­por­tu­ni­ties missed by both the suits (in­cluding the Colonel) and the pe­riod critics....I’ll link to this from my site in the morning so you can get both of my readers over here, too. We might be launching a movement!

    And very much look for­ward to seeing part 3....love your vi­suals. (man, I didn’t even know E made the cover of Rolling Stone in the come­back period!)

    Reply
    • JR

      Hope it was a nice day for zooing. We had clouds and rain all day. Got a lot of typing done.

      Based on what I have read of yours, we have about ten years sep­a­rating us. And they are a BIG ten years when it comes to Elvis. Ba­si­cally, Elvis made all his fans in the ’50s, most of whom stayed with him during the first cuppla years of the ’60s.. Then two things happened:they got molder and mar­ried and Elvis got older and predictable-bordering-on-boring. By ’68, most of his orginal fans were long gone.

      Then there were the younger ones like me who came into it all in the mid ’60s. We were the ones that loved Elvis enough to sit through KISSIN’ COUSINS and HARUM SCARUM and EASY COME EASY GO. I am telling you, a good dose of acid would not have made them a better viewing. e bought the in­creasing lousier sound­track al­bums. Yada yoda blah bleh!

      The NBC spe­cial and Mem­phis ses­sions made up for it all, but you had to have been there in 1966-68 to know how em­bar­rassing it was to be an Elvis fan when the Bea­tles Beach Boys Byrds Dylan Kinks Stones Who Yard­birds etc were making ex­citing mean­ingful music. But I cans save all this for a post some day.

      You do need to sit down and watch every Elvis movie from G.I. BLUES through CHANGE OF HABIT and listen to the sound­tracks al­bums that ac­com­pa­nied them. It’s an ed­u­ca­tion and I don’t doubt that when you watch DOUBLE TROUBLE and re­member that it came out with SGT. PEPPER and the Summer of Love you will have your post-psychedelic mind blown by ts sur­real ir­rel­e­vance and near schizoid lack of con­nec­tion to con­sen­sual reality. 

      It took me 18 months of blog­ging to stop being afeared of learning to post im­ages on my sites and just do it! It’s been fun and my posts look soooooooooooooooooo much better now.

      So, for now, rock­ahula, baby!

      NU

      PS: The second BIG ex­plo­sion of “new” Elvis fans in the US was in the wake of his death, but that too is an­other story for an­other time . . .

      Reply

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