With hit songs you feel it and just know it’s there. You didn’t know exactly what you were looking for in the sense of this kind of wording, or, that type of music.
It was a continual process of listening and evaluating the material. We would weed it down to 20 or 30 songs and then weed it down further to about 10 songs. or wherever we were, and Elvis and I started going over the material. “Freddy would send them to Memphis or L.A. “You’d get all the songs together for a session, anywhere from probably 50, 100, 200 songs,” Fike remembers. When there was a song he especially liked, he was almost a perfectionist about getting it just right.”Įlvis’s close friend, Lamar Fike, headed up the Nashville division of Hill & Range between 19. On songs that he was particularly fond of, he would make a real effort…sometimes he’d do 40 takes. Elvis would often adapt the arrangements inherent in the demos. Then there were times he’d want to hear it again and again. If Elvis didn’t like a song, he’d only play about eight bars and then he would take it off. “You couldn’t talk Elvis into doing a song he had to feel it. “He knew exactly what he wanted to do,” Bienstock affirms.
“It was either a terrific melody or a novelty kind of lyric idea like ‘All Shook Up.'” Elvis listened intently to demos and knew immediately if a song was right for him. “I knew what kind of songs Elvis liked and what I thought might capture his attention,” Bienstock remembers. His arms piled high with acetates, Bienstock was a constant presence at all of Elvis’s recording sessions, plying the artist with demo after demo. From then on, he was responsible for presenting songs to Elvis and acted as his A&R musical lifeline. In 1956, Freddy Bienstock was hired by powerful New York publishing firm, Hill & Range (formed by Austrian brothers, Julian and Jean Aberbach) as a songplugger. But how was Elvis presented with songs in the first place? Just listen to the wide stylistic swath of genre hopping material Elvis recorded during his career-from Junior Parker’s amphetamine-paced rockabilly classic “Mystery Train” and the poppin’ perfect panache of Otis Blackwell’s “All Shook Up,” to the down-and-dirty blues swagger of “Reconsider Baby” and the operatic grandeur of “It’s Now or Never.” And then there are more controversial, socially-conscious anthems (“If I Can Dream” and “In the Ghetto”) and introspective ‘70s fare like “Separate Ways” and “Always On My Mind.” Right away, you can hear the breadth of a master stylist who breathed new life into every song he cut. Like a musical geneticist, Elvis drew from every strand of DNA in a songwriter’s work, which ultimately helped shape his own distinctive personal interpretation. In my new book, Writing for the King, I spoke to over 140 songwriters whose work was recorded by Elvis, and most remarked about his uncanny ability to capture the essence of a song and make it his own.