Elvis Said His Las Vegas Residencies Gave Him a ‘New Life’
After a series of career disappointments, Elvis Presley made a massive comeback with a string of residencies in Las Vegas. Night after night, he played to adoring audiences. These shows revitalized him and made him feel excited about her career for the first time in years. When speaking to a reporter, Elvis said that he felt the concerts gave him a new life.
Elvis played a string of successful shows in Las Vegas
For years, Elvis had felt disaffected with his career. He hadn’t performed live in years and felt stuck acting in movies he hated. After a comeback special in 1968, though, his luck changed. In 1969, he played a show at the International Hotel in Las Vegas that turbocharged his career.
After proving that he could still perform like he had in the 1950s, the audience at the hotel exploded into applause. He even forgot the lyrics to four songs, but nobody seemed to mind.
“They wouldn’t shut up,” Elvis’ guitarist John Wilkinson said, per Time. “All through the first song they kept shouting and cheering, they couldn’t get enough of him.”
Per the book Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick, the LA Times called the performance “flawless.” Frank Lieberman of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner proclaimed that the “new decade will belong to him.”
Elvis could also tell how monumental the performance had been. When speaking to Lieberman, he admitted that the show in Vegas had given him “a new life. I was human again. There was hope for the future … I was able to give some feeling, put some expression into my work.”
The day after the first show, Elvis signed a five-year contract with the International Hotel. He also began touring for the first time in years.
Priscilla Presley said Elvis was terrified before his Las Vegas shows
Elvis’ Vegas show was a success, but he had been terrified to get onstage. While he didn’t directly say this, everyone around him could tell.
“You could see the sweat just pouring out of him before he went onstage,” his road manager Joe Esposito said. “He was always nervous before a show, but he was never nervous like that again.”
The immense stress made Elvis irritable.
“He wasn’t the kind of person who’d come out and say ‘I’m scared,'” Priscilla Presley wrote in her book Elvis and Me. “Instead I’d see it in his actions, his leg shaking, his foot tapping. He held in his fears and emotions until at times he would explode, tearing into anyone who happened to be around.”
The musician’s first show in the city was a disaster
Given the way Elvis’ first show in Las Vegas went, it’s not all that surprising that he was stressed. In 1956, Elvis took the stage to a completely uninterested audience. Per the book Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick, a guest of New Frontier vice president T. W. Richardson yelled, “Goddamn it, s***! What is all this yelling and screaming? I can’t take this, let’s go to the tables and gamble.”
Elvis vowed to never play a venue like that again.
“I don’t want no more nightclubs,” he said, per EW. “An audience like this don’t show their appreciation the same way. They’re eating when I come on.”
Of course, over a decade later, he would play in a very similar venue to rave reviews.
