I met the Colonel when Elvis was recording some song I'd written for one of his movies. Elvis was just having fun with the gang and all the Memphis boys and Colonel Parker was sitting over here in like a theater seat.
Don't Cry Daddy is a pretty sad song. He got to the end of it and it was just real quiet and Elvis says, I'm gonna cut that someday for my daddy. And, by God, he did. He lived up to his word.
Every performer who ever performed in rock and roll or even close to it is lying if they tell you that they weren't influenced in some way or another by Elvis Presley. He turned the world around.
First time I saw Elvis was at the Lubbock County fairgrounds in Lubbock, Texas. He was on the back end of a truck. There was about 1500 screaming kids.
I didn't have a lot of communication with Elvis. You had to go through a barricade to get to Elvis. It was people hanging on every word, and I felt very uncomfortable a lot of times.
I had always wanted to write a song called, The Vicious Circle. I always thought it was like, the kids are born there, they grow up there, they die there.
I was out on the golf course, a guy came riding out in a golf cart and said, Did you know that Elvis died? And I just said, Well, there you go. It was like I had kinda been expecting it.
I'm sure that Elvis was happy for me. I think he was the kind of guy that enjoyed other people's success, especially if he had something to do with it.
There was a chance for me to write one song for the section where Elvis sat in his black leather outfit and sang the old hits. At eight oclock the next morning I had written Memories.
