“Are You Lonesome Tonight?” is one of the saddest songs Elvis Presley ever recorded. It went to number one in 1960, and it’s about a man begging to know if the woman who left him still thinks about him. There is nothing funny in it anywhere. Which is why the most famous performance of it in his entire career is one where he laughs so hard he physically cannot get through it — and it happened in front of a paying audience in Las Vegas.
The date was August 26, 1969, at the midnight show at the International Hotel. Elvis was weeks into the run that had brought him back to live performance after eight years away, and he was doing two shows a night. When you sing the same ballad that many times, something in you starts looking for mischief, so when he reached the line “Do you gaze at your doorstep and picture me there?”, Elvis swapped it for something he made up on the spot: “Do you gaze at your bald head and wish you had hair?”
He immediately started giggling at his own joke. And then, right at that exact moment, the universe delivered a punchline nobody could have written. A man in the audience—accounts say he was in the front row and was also bald—took off his wig and started swaying it about in time with the music.
Are You Laughing Tonight Live Elvis Presley
That was the end of Elvis Presley. He completely lost it. He tried to keep singing, cracked up, tried again, cracked up worse. What makes the recording genuinely one of the funniest things in music, though, is the woman standing behind him. His backing singer was Cissy Houston — yes, Whitney Houston’s mother — and she carried on singing her beautiful, soaring, deadly serious soprano part exactly as written, refusing to acknowledge that anything unusual was happening at all. Her total professionalism only made him worse.
Listen to the band too: apart from the drummer, they stay tight as anything while their lead falls apart.
Elvis staggers through to the end in pieces, and then delivers the perfect closing line. Believing he had just destroyed one of his most beloved songs in front of a packed room, he says: “That’s it, man! Fourteen years right down the drain.” It had been roughly fourteen years since his first hit records.
Elvis Presley – Are You Lonesome Tonight? (Official Audio)
He was completely wrong, of course. He hadn’t ruined anything — he’d created something. Elvis often played with his own lyrics live; even in the 1968 Comeback Special, he changed a line in “Love Me Tender” from “you have made my life complete” to “you have made my life a wreck.” Keeping it loose was part of the fun for him. But this one was special. The recording sat in the vaults for years, and when it was finally released in 1980, three years after his death, the laughing version became a Top 30 hit in the UK.
That’s the strange, lovely thing about it. Of all the perfect, polished, note-flawless recordings Elvis Presley made in his life, one of the most loved is the one where he couldn’t sing at all — because a stranger waved a wig at him and the King of Rock and Roll turned into a giggling twenty-something who couldn’t pull himself together.