Earlier in the month, the latest Elvis movie, Wild in the Country, had divided critics while leaving loyal fans in little to no doubt about its lack of value.
Not only was it his only film to lose money during its initial
release, but the title song, rushed out to boost its prospects, only peaked at #26
on the US Billboard Hot 100—hardly up to his lofty commercial standards.
It all
turned around on a long session at RCA Studio B in Nashville. True Elvis fans
might enjoy “Kiss Me Quick,” “That’s Someone You Never Forget,” and “I’m Yours,”
but the two that scored solidly with the public were “(Marie’s The Name) His
Latest Flame” and “Little Sister,” which were released as a double single.
Both tunes
came from the songwriting team of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. The
duo, who managed to get hold of his attention in 1959 by sending a demo for “A
Mess of Blues” while still on his Army stint in Germany, went on to write 16
songs for The King. Amazingly, though, they never met the singer who turned
their compositions into hits.
Elvis tweaked “Little Sister” slightly, cutting the tempo in half and slowing it down, according to Paul Simpson’s The Rough Guide to Elvis. By the third take, he liked the groove so much that he told his backup musicians to “burn” on the next take.
That was the one that turned out to be a keeper,
confirming Pomus’ hunch that, while Bobby Darin had decided it wasn’t for him,
it would be the kind of nasty blues that Elvis did so well.
“His Latest Flame” proved a harder nut to crack. Elvis and his musicians were floundering in the studio, uncertain how to proceed.
None of the attempts to
start it on different instruments seemed to click, until someone called Pomus
to see what he would play the piano portion. The songwriter was surprised to
hear that his intro was three bars long rather than four.
From that
realization sprang the eventual solution: a Latin flavor with a Bo Diddley
beat. Tom Petty, asked by Rolling Stone Magazine for the Elvis tunes that most influenced him, described how this one came together from what
originally had been “kind of a mess”:
“An
acoustic guitar and a snare drum played with brushes carry the rhythm, but when
the six-string bass comes in and the piano goes up to the high register, the
whole thing jumps out of the speaker.”
I don’t
have the technical knowledge to explain this process remotely as well as Petty
did. All I know is that I never grow tired of hearing this, and it is easily
among my half-dozen favorite songs by The King.
(Five of
those musicians, by the way, were participating at the same time and in the
same RCA studio in another recording session of a classic: Roy Orbison’s
“Cryin’.” Talk about catching lightning in a bottle!)
Technically, Presley’s was a cover version of this Pomus-Shuman composition: Del Shannon had already released it as a single and cut from his debut album, Runaway With Del Shannon.
But Presley’s interpretation is the one that, more likely than
not, you’ll hear on your favorite oldies station, because once the “His Latest
Flame/Little Sister” double single was released in August, it shot into the top
5 in the Billboard charts and all the way up to #1 in the UK.
The
following year, Elvis lured his fans back to the movies with Blue Hawaii,
another formulaic profit-maker that generated additional soundtrack
sales. By now, he was tiring of plots that sidetracked him from his ambition
to become another James Dean.
But he
felt no such ambivalence about “His Latest Flame.” Even while making it, he
noted, “It’s a good song. I like it even if it takes us 32 hours.” He had no
reason to revise that opinion in the years to come.
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