This page hosted by
Get your own TC: Tell us about what life was like on the road...
DB: I was always amazed...I mean, I was like a child at Disneyland. Everywhere we went, I never got tired of the travelling, I never got tired of the shows. I always had my bass in one hand and my acoustic guitar in the other, and when we checked into the hotel I'd have my acoustic guitar out quick as a flash and I'd sit around and play, 'cause I loved playing that old acoustic guitar. I'd be writing songs, singin' and carryin' on. And any of the functions we would have, like end-of-tour parties and stuff like that I'd always have my guitar there and we'd all sit around and I'd play songs that they could sing. I'd teach 'em songs and play'em songs most of 'em had never heard before. And this lead to me doin' a song one time on stage in Lake Tahoe.
This was when Elvis was so tired and he was pulling everybody out of the group to spread the show out and kill some time. Kathy Westmoreland had just sung this huge gospel number that was absolutely beautiful and it was so powerful with the orchestra. behind it and all that. Elvis was standing there not really knowing what else to do 'cause he'd pretty much lost his voice -- he wasn't hoarse, he'd just pretty much run out of gas. We had hit Tahoe at the end of a tour instead of just going like we had done before and staying there for two or three weeks. This was at the end of a tour and a was only for three or four days. Elvis was worn-out and this was the last night.
Well after Kathy finished her song, Elvis just kind of stood there and he was lookin' around at everybody with a sort of "What now'' look on his face. He had gotten completely away from the playlist and was wanting to stretch the show out and give people their money's worth while trying to rest himself a little bit so he could do the closing. And it was Tutt who said, "Let Bardwell sing." He said, "What?", 'cause he didn't know that I sang. But he looked up at Joe Guercio, and Joe said .."Yeah. Let Bardwell sing." So he introduced me to the audience and all this is happening so fast that I didn't know what the hell was going on; I didn't want to sing.
All I wanted to do was play my bass. But before I knew it, my bass was off of me -- they gave me his guitar, which hangs down around my balls, and Charlie Hodge passed me his vocal mike - which I never thought was turned on, but evidently it was - and he holds the microphone on the guitar. I still had no clue what I was going to do, but everyone was waitin' for me to sing. So I look over to where Glen D. (Hardin) and Voice were and it was Donnie Sumner who bailed me out; he says, "Do the 'Hurricane' song". It took me a little while to realize what he was talkin' about, but it was a song by John Prine about leaving your body to medical science it's called 'Please Don't Bury Me' and it's a comedy tune, it's a joke song. Before I knew it I got the chords started and I went into it. It's a song with goofy lines in it like "Give my feet to the footloose, careless and fancy free. Give my knees to the needy, don't you pull that stuff on me. Hand me down my walking cane, it's a sin to tell a lie. Send my mouth way down south and kiss my ass goodbye".
Well, by the time I'm into the second verse everybody's playin' 'cause all the boys in the band had heard me singin' the song in the dressingrooms. In hotel rooms and all over, and so they knew the song -- Elvis had no idea what was goin' on. He thought I was fixin to get up there and absolutely crumble and make a fool of myself, cause by then it was already startin' to get a little obvious that maybe he and I were gonna be partin' ways. But by the time we got to the end of the song and that last line about "Kiss my ass goodbye", the whole place just absolutely cracked up. Elvis cracked up too, he was laughin' real hard. And then the pay-off to all this involves Colonel Parker.
Now during the full year-and-a-half I was with Elvis, Colonel Parker never ever spoke to me. I'd ride the elevator with him and run into him in the hallway and stuff. and I'd always say, "Hey Colonel, how are you today?", but he never acknowledged that I even existed. And I always thought that was an asshole way to be. He was just a real cold asshole of a man. But after that show in Tahoe, Tom Diskin came to my dressing-room and he said, "I have a message for you from The Colonel." And I thought, "Oh shit, I'm fired" or something like that. He said, "The Colonel wants you to know that that's one of the funniest things he's ever seen at an Elvis Presley show." My mouth just dropped, I could not believe that after he'd never acknowledged I existed to my face that this man would send Tom backstage to tell me that.
Then I got a message from one of Elvis' go-boys that Elvis wanted me to bring my guitar up to the penthouse. I didn't understand what he had in mind, but I got my guitar and went on up there and he said to me, "I didn't know you're a singer". I told him. "Well I love to sing and write songs and stuff". So he asked to hear some of my songs. I played him a song I'd written for my sister's wedding called 'You And I', and boy, he made me play it over and over and over again. The penthouse was full of people all the hangers-on, all the bodyguards and a bunch of girls and Elvis kept saying "Play it again, play it again."
I honestly don't know how many times I played it for him, but everybody left the room -- it was so odd. He wouldn't let me play anything else and he made me play it over and over and over again. It ended up just me and him sittin' there, and finally he said, "I wanna record that song." Well, I couldn't believe it. That would've paid for my daughter's college education straight out! But if you remember, I told you earlier that I was tied up with Lou Adler and felt that he had the rights to anything I wrote during that five-year period. Colonel Parker wanted all of the publishing on it which I certainly would have given him - but Adler wouldn't hand it over. So they refused to cut the tune; that was a crying shame I couldn't believe it.
TC: Moving on to August 1974, a bootleg emerged recently that features a rehearsal taped at the RCA Studios in California and you're playing bass...
DB: Good God, that rehearsal tape is just nasty! I can't believe that somebody got a hold of that and put that out. Where do people get shit like that?
TC: That particular tape came from Ed Bonja, he was a photographer who I believe was related to Tom Diskin in some way...
DB: Oh yeah. I remember Ed.
TC: RCA issued 'The Twelfth Of Never' from that rehearsal tape as a single here in England last year and it made the Top 30.
DB: Really?!?! I'll be damned -- I knew nothing about that. The Top 30? Son-of-a-gun'
TC: Generally speaking, did he rehearse very much?
DB: I was always surprised that there wasn't more rehearsal than there actually was. It seemed to be more a case of getting everybody back together and jamming. What we would do we'd go into the studio and rehearse there and they'd roll the tapes. I figured what he was doing was gettin' the stuff on tape and then giving it a listen to see if he was gonna decide to keep it in the show or not. But on stage he'd sometimes just go off and do something we didn't know, something we hadn't rehearsed. You'd be following the playlist and then all of a sudden you'd jump sideways and do something else which meant that the orchestra would be frantically flipping through their books trying to find the sheet music. But the other guys like James and Tutt and Glen D, never seemed to falter. They always seemed to know exactly where they were. Glen D. in particular always knew where he was, and he would try desperately to bail me out and help me with the chord changes. Of the regular things he did, think 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' was probably my worst nightmare. God, that song's got all kinds of changes and stuff in it.
TC: He did some strange shows during that August - September '74 Vegas season. Can you remember the speech he delivered on drugs and his famous "I'll pull your goddamned tongue out by the roots" outburst?
DB: I remember that, yeah, and that was shocking. I'd forgotten about that and then you sent me the tape of it..boy, that's shocking.
TC: What makes it even more bizarre is that he was obviously high when he said it...
DB: Oh yeah. Just the fact that he was so out of it that he could use that "tear your tongue out by the roots" to segue into 'The Hawaiian Wedding Song' is the most incredible segueing I have ever heard. I just listened to that again the other day and he sounds as stoned as a friggin' goose. He really did hate talk and gossip and stuff like that, but it was always there and it's the stuff most people just ignore. But he seemed to be in particular bad shape at that point.
It was gettin' so bizarre around that time and he did some things on stage that were so odd and so out of character and irresponsible. We did a show in Baltimore one time and the first twenty rows or so were all dignitaries from Washington, and he was so stoned that his words were slurring, like his tongue was thick. I remember being absolutely amazed that he would dare come on stage like that. And remember in 'Enter The Dragon' that story about the bandage on his hand? Well I'll tell you what they told me, and I thought it was another odd thing but it was also fairly indicative of how delusionary he was - he was really getting somewhat scattered mentally at around this point. There was an abscess on his hand and it wouldn't go away, but one of the guys from Voice told me that he had actually tried to operate on his hand himself because the Bible says "physician heal thyself". He felt like he had the real power to heal and he'd taken a knife to that thing. And that's when it really got bad.
It was all getting pretty bizarre, it really was. It was a little better on the road because he didn't have the time to sit in one place and want to get a buzz on. But in Vegas he'd sometimes come out there and start goin' through all kinds of karate shit. He'd want to give karate demonstrations during the show and he'd get poor little Charlie Hodge and he'd throw Charlie's ass all over the stage. I felt so sorry for him, but he was loyal to Elvis and he always acted like it didn't bother him. But every now and then, instead of his regular costumes Elvis would come out there in a gi, and when he came out there in a gi we knew someone was gonna get their ass kicked!
TC: Did you ever get to socialize with him very much?
DB: Not very much, Trevor. There were a couple of times up in his penthouse when we sat and talked. We watched the sun come up so many times up there. There was one time when just Donnie Sumner and I were up there talkin' and everybody else had been and gone. Elvis came wondering out of the bedroom and he sat there with us on the couch, and we talked for hours. He was tellin' us all about Germany and how it was in those tanks with them on one side and the Russians on the other side, not really knowin' if we were fixin' to go to war or not. He was doodlin' on this magazine all the time he was talkin', and he was talkin' about all kinds of spirituality and God and not necessarily Christianity but that was part of it. It was the first inkling I ever had about how deeply spiritual I think he was. Even though he did drugs and carried on and all that kinda thing, I think that down in his bones he was a deeply spiritual man.
Well I tore those pages out of that magazine, I've still got 'em somewhere, and I took 'em to a woman one time who was into analyzing people's writing and stuff like that. I didn't tell her who it was, I just wanted to see if she could get any kind of feeling about all this writing, and she told me it was a person who had a lot of stress I their life but that they were very spiritual, they were a good person, and stuff like that. When I told him who it was she couldn't believe it.
There was this time and then one other time I was up there ane again, everyone else had gone and I was just about to leave myself and as I walked by the bedroom door he hollered at me. I didn't know if he we gonna tell me to get out of there or what, but he said. "C'mon in here". This was when he was with Linda Thompson, and they had a big ol' round bed in that master bedroom suite and Linda had some of those pajamas with the feet built into 'em with a flap on the back - kinda like old long johns. He had pajamas on too and they had wheeled him big cart up there that was just piled high with cut water melon. I sat there and watched him eat mo' watermelon than I ever saw anybody eat in my life. And we just talked and talked about all kinds stuff.
I was real nervous about being in there with 'em. I mean, I couldn't believe I was up in the bedroom with Elvis and Linda. And I noticed for the first time how much of a live wire he was, because that was about as relaxed as you could possibly get there. He was sittin' there eating all that watermelon and his legs were crossed, but that foot that was crossed was just vibrating like it was plugged in! Or something. Even in that state of relaxation he was so wired up.
TC: Were you ever around when any celebrities came backstage to see him?
DB: Oh yeah. One of my favorites was Barbara Streisand. I was pretty much smitten by that. Anytime anybody was in the audience they always came back to his receiving room after the show and the band was allowed back there so I got to see some people. I was always like a boy at a circus cause I was in way over my head. I really was probably the most least likely person to have ended up with that job. But I tried my best and my ear was good and I loved the man and I loved all the people in the show, but I just don't understand the way it went. Even though I did get very unhappy with the whole organization and everything, I still to this day love him dearly. He had a tremendous impact on me and I'm just so grateful to have been a part of it.
TC: Was playing bass for Elvis a well-paid job?
DB: Yeah, for back then it was good. I think James (Burton) and Ronnie were getting over 3,900 a week or so. Of course you didn't get paid anything unless you were working. There were no retainers or anything like that.
TC: Did they not mind you doing other things when you weren't working with Elvis?
DB: No, they didn't mind it at all - in fact they expected you to, then they wouldn't have to feel bad about not subsidizing you or not retaining you. All those guys were making six-figure sums in the studio 'cause they were such good in-demand players. I was makin' $40 a night at a West Hollywood steakhouse, playin' and singin'. When the Elvis thing came up I asked Tutt what to ask for and he told me to ask for $1,500 a week. Tom Diskin told me they'd pay me $1,000 and I told him I couldn't do it for that. I told him, "I'm sorry Mr. Diskin, but I'm working on my own solo career, doing a lot of recording, and for me to take time off from that it's gonna have to be worth it. I' ll do it for $1,500 a week but I'm not gonna do it for any less than that. He said "All right, we'll agree to that." I was surprised, but that's what happened.
TC: So how did it all work? Between tours would you go back and wait for a phone call from somebody like Tom Diskin?
DB: Yeah. At the end of the shows they tried to give us some kind of idea about where the next run was gonna be and if they had things already lined up then they'd try to give us some itinerary. But the way they worked it, you literally had to sign a contract for every performance - not every individual performance, but you had to sign a contract agreeing to say, 29 shows in Vegas or for the length and duration of a tour. That way if it got to the point where they didn't want you any longer it was all free and clear and nobody had anything to say about it. Which is exactly what happened to me - my contract option never got picked up again. And it really was time for me to go at that point, because I was really unhappy with the whole organization.
Just from a personal standpoint, I didn't like seeing what was happening to Elvis, and quite honestly I felt that part of his problem were the people he had around him. I felt they really should have been able to have a more positive influence on him than just be the old drab-ass, redneck good ol' boys that they were. There was very little spirituality in them and they seemed to only have fun at the expense of someone else - if they could make someone else look bad then they thought that was funny. I was amazed that The Colonel didn't try to have a much more stronger fatherly influence over him. I realize that E.P. was gonna pretty much do what he wanted to do and that he was real difficult to handle, but see I loved him as a fan - I'd always been a fan and it became extremely painful for me to watch him decline like that.
TC: Was the physical decline obvious to you in the period you were around him?
[NEXT]
Get your own