MARTY LACKER: The reason Elvis was cutting so many crappy songs is that most of them came from Hill and Range. Colonel insisted on that because he got a piece of the action. That’s the way he structured Elvis’s publishing companies from the beginning.
LAMAR FIKE: Jean and Julian Aberbach, who owned Hill and Range, were old friends of Colonel Parker back in the Eddy Arnold days. That’s the reason that they were able to get in the position they did with Elvis.
MARTY LACKER: The Aberbachs owned a publishing company called Bay Music. A lot of the demos Elvis got were from Bay, and they were crummy ol’ European songs, really old-fashioned sounding. They were ten or fifteen years behind American music. And those were the songs that Elvis was handed to record because the Aberbachs wanted to get double mileage out of them.
LAMAR FIKE: Hill and Range was always a major publishing company. But I built it into a very powerful company in Nashville, and I’m proud of that. I spent nine years there, from ’63 to ’72, and I was making $50,000 a year, which was a lot of money then. And even though Elvis was Hill and Range’s biggest source of income, I could maintain my independence from Elvis through this job.
Hill and Range gets criticized a lot for what it did with Elvis, but I think Hill and Range served Elvis well. In the late sixties, I gave him two songs that did great for him. A kid named Darrell Glenn wrote a song called “Indescribably Blue” that was a big single for Elvis in ’67. And another one of my writers, Eddie Rabbitt, came up with “Kentucky Rain,” which was Elvis’s last million seller and fiftieth gold record.
In the seventies, two other Elvis hits came out of that office. We had a song called “T-R-O-U-B-L-E” that Jerry Chesnut wrote, and “It’s Midnight,” which Jerry and Billy Edd Wheeler wrote together.
MARTY LACKER: You need to understand the scenario. Lamar was in Nashville, the Aberbachs and Freddy Bienstock, who was their nephew, were in New York, and Colonel was in L.A. If Lamar had been able to tear himself away from Bienstock and the Aberbachs and the Colonel more often, the way he did with some of those tunes that weren’t strictly Hill and Range’s, like Jerry Chesnut’s stuff, Lamar probably could have gotten Elvis some damn good songs.
LAMAR FIKE: Freddy was the manager of Hill and Range, and he became the liaison between Hill and Range and Elvis. He would bring me a set of demos, and I’d go through songs and find the ones that I thought Elvis would like. Sometimes Charlie Hodge would do it, too.
MARTY LACKER: The Aberbachs never came to the recording sessions. It was always Bienstock. Freddy’s a pretty wealthy man, so he probably doesn’t give a shit what anybody thinks of him, but I didn’t like him. He acted sort of like the Colonel. He was one way to your face and another way to your back. I don’t think he cared about Elvis that much, either.
BILLY SMITH: Hill and Range was great in the beginning. But they became stagnant in later years. Colonel just got too greedy.
MARTY LACKER: In the early years, the Colonel was fine. But after a while, Elvis should have had things like his own record label, distributed by a major company. No other artist had that at the time. But how many other artists sold a million records?
LAMAR FIKE: Colonel could have set up deals like that, but he didn’t. Because he structured the deals for his own benefit, and his friends. Colonel got away with murder. He didn’t own a piece of every one of the companies, though. Elvis owned 50 percent of Gladys Music, and he owned 50 percent of Elvis Presley Music. Jean and Julian Aberbach owned the other 50 percent. Managers don’t normally take a piece of the publishing, but Colonel got a piece of everything Elvis got because his contract was based on the gross. Hey, you’ve got to give him credit. He had a hell of a gravy train, and he kept it that way.
MARTY LACKER: The demos of those Bay Music songs were almost the only demos that Elvis would get to hear. Any new song had to be sent to Colonel Parker’s office so Parker and Bienstock could listen to it. That way, they’d send Elvis only what they wanted him to hear.
LAMAR FIKE: After a while, the demos got so locked that Elvis literally became a parody of himself. Because Elvis would just ape whatever the demo singer was doing. And a lot of times, the demo singer was trying to sound like him. So Elvis would end up copying a guy who was copying him.
MARTY LACKER: In the fifties and the sixties, demos were made just the way the song was written, with the songwriter’s arrangement. And a lot of times, the arrangements were fairly good. Except that didn’t mean that that’s the way the final product should be. Elvis would put his own final touches in there.
Then, when he was doing the stuff with these Nashville pickers, the creativity wasn’t there. They would sit around and read music or do that crude numbers thing [a rough chord chart and musical shorthand known as the Nashville Numbers System], and that’s the way it would come out. And because there was no real creativity, after a while, Elvis just lost his fire in the studio.
Look at all those years he didn’t have a hit record! In ’60 and ’61, he was flying high, with five number one singles—“Stuck on You,” “It’s Now or Never,” “Are You Lonesome To-night?” “Surrender,” and “Cant Help Falling in Love.” Then in ’62 and ’63 he had “Good Luck Charm,” “Return to Sender,” and “(You’re the) Devil in Disguise,” which went to one, two, and three, in that order, on the Billboard chart. Finally, in ’65, he had “Crying in the Chapel.” But then, it was four long years before he got up in the top five again, with “In the Ghetto.” And that was like a lifetime away.
LAMAR FIKE: Marty thinks Elvis would have made more money if he’d had better songs. That’s crazy. Elvis would have made more money if Colonel had taken less commission. Elvis had one of the strongest catalogs of any artist who ever recorded.
If Elvis was unhappy, you have to remember that the only person who could change that situation was Elvis. He had to sit up and say, “What the fuck are you people doing? Do something to straighten it out!” But he didn’t have the balls.
About the only thing I think Hill and Range really screwed up on was failing to have Elvis affiliated with either ASCAP or BMI as a writer so that Elvis could get the money that was coming to him for airplay. That was rectified, but not until after Elvis’s death. Elvis didn’t really write anything, but he had those credits. In the early days, they’d ask the writer to give Elvis part of the credit, and, of course, part of the writer’s royalty.
MARTY LACKER: That’s another reason the songs got so shitty. In the early years, when Elvis was the surest thing going, every songwriter and publisher wanted him to cut their song. So the Aberbachs and Bienstock and the Colonel would go to that person and say, “Elvis will record your song if you give us 25 percent of your copyright.” Sometimes it was a third, and sometimes it was 50 percent.
It may not have been fair to the songwriter, but in those days it was good business. Otis Blackwell, one of the greatest songwriters on the planet, gave up part of “Don’t Be Cruel,” “All Shook Up,” and “Paralyzed.” Elvis is listed as the cowriter, and they never met.
As the years went on, the Aberbachs and Colonel continued that practice. But by then, a lot of artists had come along and sold large numbers of records because Elvis opened the door for a lot of people. So all of these songwriters now had a lot more candidates to sing their songs, although there’s not a one of them who wouldn’t have wanted Elvis because it meant instant sales and because they wanted to be able to say, “I’ve really made it—Elvis Presley is cuttin’ one of my songs.”
But after a while a lot of them started balking at giving up 25 or 50 percent of the copyright. They didn’t have to do it anymore. Lamar doesn’t see anything wrong with any of this. But you’ve got to understand—he was working for those people, for the Aberbachs and the Colonel. I see a lot wrong with it. It isn’t even done anymore.
LAMAR FIKE: This criticism of Colonel isn’t totally warranted. Every manager wants to tie a situation together where the artist does his own songs and has his own company. You want to put the wagons in a circle. And this is what we did with Elvis. When you have that amount of influence, the funnel is controlled at your end.
You always try to get deals. That’s how Gladys Music and Elvis Presley Music were built. Everything was kept within the framework of the company because that’s where your money is made. The most money Elvis made at any particular point is when those publishing companies were sold. Copyrights are worth a lot of money.
MARTY LACKER: Keeping everything inside of the company might have been good for Hill and Range, but it wasn’t good for Elvis. It wasn’t until the late sixties and early seventies that he was exposed to contemporary writers or even a good source of songs again.
LAMAR FIKE: Elvis just ignored things, hoping they would go away. That’s how he was kept in control until the latter years when his sales declined. Then he got confrontational. So we had to retreat and change our tactics.
Until then, it was a locked deal. We assigned writers that we knew we could get the publishing on. And we didn’t let a lot of outside people in.
MARTY LACKER: As an example, Ivory Joe Hunter wrote “My Wish Came True,” which was BMI’s Song of the Year in 1959. Well, years later, Ivory Joe came back with another good song and said, “I’d like to get this to Elvis.” They gave him the same crap about the publishing, and Ivory Joe said, “No, I ain’t gonna do it.” Well, Elvis never got to hear the song.
The same thing happened later on in the early seventies with Dolly Parton. Elvis loved her “Coat of Many Colors.” He saw her singing it on TV, and he put the word out that he would like to record it. Well, when they called Dolly, she said, “I’d love for Elvis to do the song, but you’re not getting 25 percent of my publishing.”
LAMAR FIKE: The songs declined somewhat through the years. I’ll admit that. Especially the movie songs. But musicals are musicals. It’s hard to come up with great songs for crap.
MARTY LACKER: Hill and Range had these people writing songs for the movies. The Aberbachs and Bienstock would send them a script and say, “We need a song in this scene, and we need a song here.” And a lot of times, they came up with some of the dumbest damn songs you’ve ever heard. Like “(There’s) No Room to Rumba in a Sports Car.” After the Colonel and Bienstock picked the music from the demos, Elvis and Joe Esposito and I would go upstairs in Elvis’s office next to his bedroom at Graceland and play these songs. Red would be up there a lot, too.
We’d put these demos in stacks marked “Yes,” “No,” or “Maybe.” I’d say 99.9 percent of the time, the “Yes” stack was tiny, and even those songs were borderline. So after a while, a lot of the “Maybes” went back into the “Yes” pile. You can imagine what the “No” stack was like.
Not all the songs during the early sixties were terrible. There were exceptions. Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman wrote “(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame,” and “Little Sister,” and “Surrender,” and “Suspicion,” and “Viva Las Vegas,” although the last one was the only song used in the movies, I think.
Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote for Gladys Music in addition to their own companies, and in the fifties they did the stuff for King Creole, Jailhouse Rock, and Loving You. They wrote the whole score for Jailhouse Rock in one afternoon at the Gorham Hotel in New York. That was some of their best work, actually, aside from “Hound Dog,” which they originally wrote for Big Mama Thornton.
They wrote for Elvis for years after he made “Hound Dog” a pop hit. But in the sixties, their contributions, like for Fun in Acapulco, and Viva Las Vegas, weren’t as memorable, because they became less enthusiastic about writing for Elvis’s pictures. Jerry said he thought they were “dopey,” and they decided not to do anymore, even though it was like money in the bank. But every once in a while, they’d submit songs that got used in Elvis’s films that they’d recorded with other people, but that hadn’t been big commercial successes. Like “Girls! Girls! Girls!’ and “Little Egypt” [from Roustabout], which the Coasters had done, and “Bossa Nova Baby” [from Fun in Acapulco], which they’d done with the Clovers. They just recycled those songs for Elvis’s movies.
Ben Weisman, who was a Hill and Range writer under Jean Aberbach, cowrote with several guys, particularly Fred Wise. Ben came up with a few good songs, like “Got a Lot o’ Livin’ to Do,” and “Don’t Ask Me Why,” and “As Long as I Have You,” and “Rock-a-Hula Baby,” which is marginal, I guess. But considering he wrote fifty-seven songs that Elvis recorded—more than anybody else—he didn’t exactly bring in a treasure trove of classics. He wrote a lot of the real junky movie songs, like “He’s Your Uncle, Not Your Dad,” and “Do the Clam,” and “Change of Habit.”
LAMAR FIKE: I’ve known Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller since ’57. Mike says it was hard enough to write songs for Jailhouse Rock and Loving You. But to find inspiration after those . . . well, that was a challenge.
MARTY LACKER: The quality of the material didn’t matter to Parker and Bienstock because not only did they get money for the songs used in the movies, but then the songs were repackaged as movie soundtrack albums and some of them were released as the singles.
Part of the reason Elvis died at forty-two was the way those people fucked him around. If Elvis had gotten what he had coming to him financially, he probably wouldn’t have been in the frame of mind he was in at the end. It’s hard to imagine, but there were times when he was that far from being dead broke.
LAMAR FIKE: Good God! Marty blames Hill and Range for Elvis’s whole demise! That’s bullshit. I saw a lot of those pill bottles, let me tell you. And not a one said “Hill and Range” on it.