Elvis At 827 Thomas

American Sound Studio stood at 827 Thomas Street, a windowless one-story building in North Memphis where Elvis Presley made what many count as the best records of his later career. Chips Moman, who had worked at Stax, founded it with Don Crews in 1964, and his house band, the Memphis Boys, cut more than a hundred hits there. On January 13, 1969, a month after his television comeback, Elvis arrived for his first Memphis session since 1955. Friends George Klein and Marty Lacker had pushed for it. He had spent most of the decade making soundtrack albums. Over eight nights in January and six in February he cut more than thirty songs, enough for two albums. In the Ghetto took 23 takes. In the small hours of January 23, between about four and seven in the morning, he recorded Suspicious Minds, a song Moman had already tried with its writer, Mark James. His business people wanted half of Moman's publishing, and Moman threatened to halt the session rather than give it up. RCA's man on the spot sided with Moman. The song reached number one on the Hot 100 in November 1969, the last of Elvis's eighteen chart-toppers there. A false fade-out added later in Las Vegas stayed on the record; Moman called it a control thing. Moman sold the building around 1972 and left Memphis, and it was torn down in the late 1980s. A historical marker went up at Thomas and Chelsea in August 2014, with Moman attending.