Producer on Elvis Presley

“When I came on the sound stage and met him for the first time, he was like a mannequin, sitting there, so still and I thought, “Wow they have a mannequin that looks just like Elvis!” He got up, shook hands with me, and said “Nice to know you, Sir.” He was just as polite and nice as he could be. We talked about a lot of different things. He was interested in karate, which I had studied with Chuck Norris many years before. He was also interested in many of the books and writings I was involved in. He told me about his reading of Gibran's The Prophet, as well as certain things I had no idea I was going to use later, years after he passed away. I did a lot of the things that he told me in the Kurt Russell TV biography, where I had to write in an annotated script, which meant you had to take note of where each thing came from in the margins (almost like a bibliography). The legal department didn't know how much could be done without being sued, so they wanted to have every part of it locked down. It was a lot of Elvis...”

“But what struck me most was his quality of genuine humility – humility mixed with intense determination. He was, innately, one of the most introverted people who had ever come into the studio, but for that reason one of the bravest, too. He reminded me of many of the great early blues singers who had come to SUN, in fact his insecurity was so markedly like that of a black person. On July 5, 1954, he sang everything he knew – pop stuff, spirituals, just a few words of [anything] he remembered. He watched me intently through the glass of the control room window – I was no longer taping, and in almost every respect this session had to be accounted a dismal failure, but still there was something. Every so often he looked up at me, as if for approval: was he doing all right? I just nodded and said "You're doing just fine. Now just relax. Let me hear something that really means something to you now." Soothing, crooning, my gaze locked into his. Finally they decided to take a break. It was late, he was clearly discouraged, and everybody had to work the next day. Maybe, I thought, they ought to just give it up for the night, come back on Tuesday and try again. Scotty and Bill were sipping Cokes, not saying much of anything. I was doing something in the control room and, as Elvis explained it afterwards, "this song popped into my mind that I had heard years ago, and I started kidding around with [it]. It was an up-tempo song called "That's All Right, Mama", an old blues number by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup. "All of a sudden," said Scotty, "Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them. I think I had the door to the control booth open so I stuck my head out and said, 'What are you doing?' And they said, 'We don't know'. 'Well, back up,' I said, 'try to find a place to start, and do it again.'”