On the first three days of September 1956, Elvis Presley walked into Radio Recorders in Hollywood with his road band and cut almost an entire album. Presley was already a major star, and he was in charge of the sessions. Elvis Presley released Elvis on October 19, 1956.
The record that came out of those sessions was simply called Elvis, though fans knew it as Elvis Presley No. 2. It arrived on RCA Victor on 19 October 1956, in the same year as his debut. The cover showed only his first name, a choice that said everything about how fast he had become a star.
Presley running the sessions
Producer Steve Sholes handled the paperwork, but the facts of those sessions point to Presley running the show. He picked the songs, set the feel, and pushed his touring group, Scotty Moore, Bill Black and D.J. Fontana, plus the vocal quartet The Jordanaires, to recreate the loose, live energy of their earliest Sun Studio recordings. Rhythm and blues and country collided in the same breath, just as they had on 'That's All Right, Mama'.
He was not playing it safe with the material. Presley chose three covers of Little Richard songs, raw rock and roll that demanded speed and nerve. He also asked for two new songs written for the sessions, 'Paralyzed' by Otis Blackwell and 'Love Me' by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. The same duo had written 'Hound Dog', the single that had just topped all three Billboard charts, pop, R&B and country.
Tracklist and the piano mystery
The original tracklist ran just under half an hour, twelve songs that moved from 'Rip It Up' to 'Old Shep', a country weeper from 1941 that Presley had sung at a fair as a boy. Some accounts say he played piano on 'Love Me', 'Old Shep' and 'How's the World Treating You'. The archives at RCA Victor list no pianist on most tracks, and Gordon Stoker of The Jordanaires later claimed he played piano on most songs, and he is known to have played on 'Rip It Up' and 'Anyplace is Paradise'. The mystery is part of the record's loose charm.
The album hit the top of the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart and stayed there for four weeks. More remarkably, Presley became the first artist to have two albums reach No. 1 in the same year. The speed of it all, two chart-topping LPs in 1956, made clear that rock and roll was not a passing novelty.
Chart performance and later reissues
In Britain the record appeared in 1957 on His Master's Voice with a different cover and the title Elvis Presley No. 2. It climbed to No. 3 on the UK Albums chart and eventually earned a silver certification for 60,000 copies sold. The American original went gold in 1960 and platinum in 2011. The original album runs just under half an hour, a tight burst of rock and roll and country. In 2005, the album was remastered using DSD technology by sound restorer Kevan Budd, giving it a fresh clarity.
The 1999 expanded reissue added six bonus tracks, including the singles 'Hound Dog', 'Don't Be Cruel' and 'Love Me Tender'. That last song came from a session at 20th Century Fox Stage One on 24 August 1956, weeks before the Hollywood album sessions. It fit the same story: Presley moving fast between a film set and a recording studio, making hits as he went.
Elvis was not just a follow-up to a successful debut. It was proof that Presley could do it again, under pressure, with his own people around him and his own instincts calling the shots. The album that came out of three days in Hollywood still sounds like a band in a room, chasing something new.
The album that came out of three days in Hollywood still sounds like a band in a room, chasing something new.