Vernal, Utah is where something as cryptic as love itself prompted her to turn on the car radio.
This was something she had not done in years. She had drifted away from listening to the car radio, quite strange given how there had been a time she would not have considered driving without it.
On came a familiar song by an unfamiliar artist.
It wasn’t Elvis at his most masterful, gently moving through Can’t Help Falling In Love with a soaring tenderness. It was a woman she didn’t know. This woman had turned one of her favorite songs into something morbid, a dirge so slow it seemed as if might come to an end at any moment.
She considered it despicable. That woman had filed a breathtaking song down to something mournful. That wasn’t how Elvis would have treated the song and it was not how he would have treated her.
She knew Elvis wanted to make sure nothing could possibly come between them, that nothing could dislodge their love. She understood that while he couldn’t explain why, Elvis was determined to give this love his best shot.
His vulnerability took on an intensity beyond all comprehension. His caress was a noble confession, a difficult admission, a coming clean against all odds.
She wondered why Elvis would ask if love might be considered a sin. She didn’t associate love with sin. How could it be?
And how could Can’t Help Falling In Love be considered a performance, although she knew it was.
That was her conflict. Driving through Vernal, Utah with the car radio on for the first time in years, she knew it. She grasped the inherent pathos, a woman swept away into a bittersweet world where parsing the ingredients of fantasy always brought her back to the same place.
If it was indeed a performance that day, March 23, 1961, at Radio Recorders, in Hollywood, down in the city’s shadows below Griffith Park, what had actually taken place?
She wondered how Elvis had managed to escape the mixing console. How he pierced the confines of the four concrete walls of that nondescript low-slung building on Santa Monica Boulevard.
She had gone to great lengths to learn what she could about it. Hal Blaine was in the studio that day. So were The Jordanaires, Scotty Moore, Floyd Cramer and Boots Randolph.
Elvis had been out of active duty for a year when he sang Can’t Help Falling In Love. He sang it the same day one of our C-47 transports went down somewhere in Laos. One of the men onboard was captured. As an indistinguishable conflict in Southeast Asia gathered steam, Major Lawrence Bailey became America’s first POW of the Vietnam war.
She left Vernal, Utah behind. She kept listening to the car radio for the first time in ages and wondered where all those radio stations had gone.
