Christmas with Elvis, 1968

Baz Luhrmann’s enthralling and hypnotic Elvis (2022) depicts the making of the 1968 Comeback Special as an act of rebellion, which it indeed was, in more ways than the film has space to cover. We see “Colonel” Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), Presley’s notoriously corrupt manager, bring advertising executives to the special’s taping, promising them a jukebox show of Christmas carols. Instead, a leather-clad Presley (Austin Butler) goes through Heartbreak Hotel, Jailhouse Rock, Hound Dog and other classics, defying Parker’s wish for a corporate-friendly holiday show. By the sequence’s end, we see a Christmas set rolled in with a defeated Elvis singing Here Comes Santa Clause. But he pushes it away and goes into the passionate protest anthem If I Can Dream, while a humiliated Parker watches from the sound booth in a Santa hat. The sequence meets head on the challenge of any biopic — to honor the history of its subject without devolving into stenography; to dramatize the core of the real story without completely fabricating it.

Elvis did in fact sing a Christmas song during the ’68 Special, but his performance feels anything but Christmas-y. It is a subtle but astounding act of rebellion, especially given the appalling measures Parker took in real life to sabotage the production.

In a book released last year, the director of the special, Steve Binder, recalls his first meeting with Parker at the early stages of pre-production. In advance of the early morning discussion, Parker had asked Binder to bring a box of pastries, ostensibly to make it a working breakfast. When Binder arrived, Parker promptly took the box and in a bizarre attempt to establish their power dynamics, stowed it away in his briefcase.

Parker went on to brag about the deal he struck with the movie studios, which had turned Elvis into their money factory, generating twenty-nine films over the previous twelve years. For each one, Elvis would be paid a million dollars and allowed to leave each working day by the late afternoon. Otherwise, he would do whatever the production required of him. In the book, Binder rightly points out that this was a terrible deal, giving Elvis no control over the films’ creative decisions and future residuals, enabling hack screenwriters to populate them with mediocre songs for which they, and not Elvis, could collect royalties.

By the meeting’s end, Parker informed Binder that the special was already planned. He took out a flyer with a photo of Elvis in a red-and-green sweater next to a list of Christmas carols, the supposedly pre-approved setlist, and in a mob-like tone expressed his hope that Binder would deliver on that particular vision.

Parker’s expectations for the special and his dealings during the movie years are just two indications of how he felt about his client. Elvis, to him, was nothing more than a cash machine. Parker cared nothing about music, would even command engineers to fast forward songs on Elvis’ albums so that he could fit another one in for additional profits. He bragged that in all their years working together, he and Elvis had no personal relationship, had never had a meal together — as if it was indicative of the power the old bully held over the young, insecure artist. And most of the time, Elvis followed Parker’s directives, fearful that what had built up so quickly could just as easily fall apart. In the process, he suffered deeply from the profound boredom that comes with creative dissatisfaction.

But even in the grind of the money machine, Elvis found life in the songs he sang, bringing out the heart and spirit in the most lackluster of melodies.

Binder thankfully ignored Parker’s demand for a Christmas show and worked with Elvis to make sure the special centered around his dimensions as a musician and performer. At its core was a series of “sit-down” shows in which Elvis sat in a circle facing members of his original band — including guitarist Scotty Moore and drummer DJ Fontana — as they jammed through stripped-down versions of the songs Elvis most loved to sing. At first, this did not include a single Christmas song.

As Parker saw the special slipping from his grasp, he made increasingly desperate attempts to ruin it. One day, he called Binder and Elvis to his office. To satisfy his narcissism, he had cruelly made the two NBC interns assigned him dress up like Buckingham Palace guards and stand outside his door. He told Binder that he and Elvis were greatly concerned that there still wasn’t a Christmas song in the special. He gave his client a look.

“Aren’t you, Elvis?”

Elvis looked at the floor and forced out the words, “Yes, sir.”

As he and Binder left, Elvis gave the director a playful punch in the side.

“Fuck ‘em.”

He and Binder continued with their plans.

When Parker learned of the sit-down show, he convinced Binder to let him handle the audience, promising to fly in a young crowd from Memphis to make it more authentic than the “Hollywood crowd” Binder was likely to find. The day of the performance, Binder found only a handful of people lined up outside the studio in Burbank. He learned that Parker had handed out some of the tickets to NBC security guards and thrown the rest in the garbage. Binder was only able to fill the seats at the last minute by calling every rock DJ he knew on Los Angeles radio, who implored their listeners to run out to Burbank that afternoon if they wanted to see Elvis live.

So perhaps to placate his manager’s increasingly destructive tantrum, Elvis opted to sing Blue Christmas during the sit-down shows, a song first recorded by Doye O’Dell in 1948. In the broadcast of the special, he tells the audience, “I’d like to do my favorite Christmas song, of all the one’s I’ve recorded.” The young women surrounding the edges of the stage start to scream with excitement, not so much because they’re about to hear a Christmas song as that they’re about to be involved in Elvis’ favorite anything, as if he’s letting them share in one of his secrets. During the song’s opening lines, we see the camera cut to a teenage girl biting her nails, her hands shaking with excitement. (One imagines that if Elvis had worn the green-and-red sweater instead of the leather suit, sung a holiday medley instead of his classics, her reaction might have been a bit more subdued). As the song continues in a slow heavy swing, Elvis walks down the guitar in a bluesy, chromatic dissonance, giving his bandmates a mischievous smirk. It’s as if he's challenging them to see what other bit of dirt they can throw into this over-recorded jingle. He scoops up the opening lines of the second verse in a verbal hip-swing: “A-and, Whe-en, tho-ose bluuuuuueees…” In between each line, he bends the minor third of the low string, giving his bandmates a cut-it-deep frown, prompting guitarist Charlie Hodge to call out, “Play it dirty! Play it dirty!” He brings back that minor bend in the final verse, Hodge giving him an “Awwwww yeah!” The ladies in the audience continue their holiday-inappropriate screams throughout each verse until Elvis closes with a bit of off-beat funk, singing, “Blue, blue, blue…” puffing out the first syllable as if he’s about to go into the closing chorus of Blue Suede Shoes, each line synchronizing with that minor third. By the song’s end, it doesn’t feel like he’s played Christmas music at all — certainly not the kind of corporate-friendly jingle Parker hoped to profit from. Elvis makes it his own through the opportunities he finds to infuse the gentle carol with below-the-belt emotion. He and his band seem to understand how out-of-place a Christmas song sits with the rest of the show and so bring that song into the dissonance of the music that clicks with them and the room. Elvis turns the innocent, indoor sweater tune into a subversive, black leather swing. And from the confident smile he gives a lady in the audience at the song’s end, he seems to know that he’s gotten away with it.

While Elvis never directly stood up to Parker throughout the special’s production, he rebelled nonetheless through his music and his connection with the audience. It’s as upsetting to learn of the theft and humiliation to which Parker subjected him as it is bewildering to know that Elvis allowed it for so long. But as the ’68 Comeback Special continues to show us, Elvis was fundamentally an artist who knew how to bring out the emotional core of a song and make it stand on its feet. It was in those moments that he was truly free.

In the second of the sit-down shows, which was not included in the original broadcast, Elvis starts a different Christmas song, Santa Clause is Back in Town, but stops when he realizes that he doesn’t remember the words. The verse he finally does remember captures the heart of his Christmas rebellion at the ’68 Special:

I don’t got no sleigh with reindeer

No sack on my back

You gonna see me comin’

In a big black Cadillac