In March 1972, Elvis Presley walked into a Hollywood studio in one of the worst slumps of his career. He hadn’t had a Top 10 single in nearly two years.
His marriage had collapsed the month before. Somebody put a rocking, up-tempo song in front of him called “Burning Love” — and Elvis flatly didn’t want to do it. It took almost every person in that room to change his mind. The song became the last Top 10 hit of his lifetime — and one of the most famous records he ever made.
The reason he resisted is simple and rather sad. Priscilla had left him in February. He was in mourning, and what he wanted to sing about was heartbreak. In those same sessions he threw himself into the sad ones — “Separate Ways,” “Always on My Mind,” and Kris Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times.” A bouncy rock song about being on fire with love was the last thing he felt like performing.
Burning Love (Official Audio)
Everyone else could see what he couldn’t. His producer Felton Jarvis pushed hardest, but he wasn’t alone — Joe Esposito, Jerry Schilling and Red West all told Elvis the same thing: this is a hit. His band, who were in the studio with him for the first time, were fired up about it too. Elvis stayed unconvinced.
It’s worth clearing up one myth here, because you’ll see it repeated everywhere. People say Elvis hated the song. His close friend Jerry Schilling has corrected that directly: “Elvis didn’t hate the song; he just wasn’t in the mood for it. He knew everyone felt that he should do it; he was a reasonable man.”
So he did it. Six takes. And somewhere in the middle of a song he hadn’t wanted to sing, Elvis improvised a line that nobody had written and that the entire world now knows by heart — the “hunka hunka burning love.” It wasn’t in the lyrics. He made it up on the spot.
Elvis Presley – Burning Love (Aloha From Hawaii, Live in Honolulu, 1973)
The record came out on August 1, 1972, and shot to number two on the Billboard Hot 100, his biggest American hit since “Suspicious Minds” three years earlier. Critics called it his great return to rock and roll. It was the last of his 38 Top 10 singles.
Here’s how completely he failed to see what he’d done. Three months later, at a press conference in New York, Elvis was asked why he didn’t record more rock and roll. He answered that a good rock song was “hard to find.” He had just recorded one of the decade’s most beloved rock records and apparently had no idea.
He never really warmed to it either. His friend Jerry Schilling noted something telling: Elvis had an almost photographic memory for lyrics, scripts and books — and yet he always insisted he needed a lyric sheet to perform “Burning Love.” As the record climbed the charts, he quietly dropped it from his live shows. The song that gave him his final hit was the one he could never quite bring himself to love back.