This Was Elvis Presley's Least Favorite Hit Song He Recorded
No matter what you do for a living, and no matter how talented you are, there are going to be days when you look at your work, shake your head, and think "I should look into another line of work, since I'm clearly not good at this anymore." The upshot is this: for most of us, tomorrow is another day, and the missteps of the past are behind us.
But it doesn't always work that way for singers. Get famous enough and attach your name to a piece of music and there's a chance you'll be performing it in front of the buffet at Caesar's well into your golden years. Or, in Elvis's case, until you're 42 and your heart explodes on a toilet.
According to Music Weird, there was one tune in particular that the King "didn't want to record," "didn't like," and "sang as rarely as possible" — timeless musical tale of a hunk, a hunk of burning love, 1972's "Burning Love."
Lord have mercy
The story, as recounted by Music Weird, goes something like this – in the early to mid-1970s, Elvis was moving away from bluesy rock classics, skewing more towards melancholy ballads. The shift became more pronounced as his marriage to Priscilla Presley soured, eventually ending in 1973. It was music producer Felton Jarvis who pushed Elvis to record "Burning Love," presumably hoping to bring something upbeat into the mix after a three year dry spell on the charts. Whatever the thought process, it became Presley's last big hit, peaking at number two on the Billboard Top 100, with Chuck Berry's "My Ding-A-Ling" locking it out of the top spot. It was a different time.
Aside from having a lot of feelings, the King had another reason for disliking the number. According to Memphis Mafia regular Jerry Schilling's book "Me and a Guy Named Elvis," Presley couldn't keep track of the song's frantic, disjointed lyrics. "Elvis," he writes, "who had close to a photographic memory when it came to books, scripts, lyrics—always insisted that he needed a lyric sheet to perform 'Burning Love.'"