Tom Jones on Meeting Elvis, Recording With Bacharach, ‘Panty Magnet’ Phase
Tom Jones has thought a lot about Elvis Presley. As a teenage fan growing up in a small village in South Wales, Jones used to tell his rock & roll friends in the Fifties: “I’ll meet Elvis one day.” No one believed him.
Now 75, and decades after becoming Presley’s close friend and witnessing the iconic rocker’s physical decline, Jones is talking again about Elvis. He’s on a small stage at Apogee Studio in Santa Monica, California, for an intimate performance hosted by KCRW-FM and recorded for broadcast and streaming December 22nd. The live audience is limited to 180.
During an onstage interview with DJ Anne Litt, Jones tells funny stories of his surreal first meeting with the King of Rock & Roll and how the pair sang to each other in a shared hotel bathroom. But soon, he’s back at the microphone singing “Elvis Presley Blues” by Gillian Welch.
“I was thinking that night about Elvis, the day that he died, the day that he died,” he starts, to a quivering tremolo guitar, his voice solemn and pleading. The sound couldn’t be further from the bold and brassy pop songs that launched Jones’ career as a hit-maker in the Sixties and Seventies, starting with the Number One 1 U.K. hit “It’s Not Unusual” in 1965. This is more like a sermon. “And he shook it like a holy roller, baby/With his soul at stake …”
His time with Presley is just one story Jones shares in his just-released autobiography, Over the Top and Back. It coincides with a new album, Long Lost Suitcase, the third in a series of releases produced by Ethan Johns that reintroduce the singer as a raw and soulful interpreter of stripped-down folk, blues and rock & roll. Both the book and album have taken him back across the decades, recounting all the people and places that he’s seen.
“It still boggles my mind,” Jones tells Rolling Stone, sitting in the offices of Apogee before his performance. His hair and goatee have gone gray, and on his right hand is a ring with the flag of Wales. “I’m still like, ‘Was it me? Did I fuckin’ dream it all?'”
The day he first shook hands with Elvis was in 1965 on the lot of Paramount Studios in Hollywood. Presley had asked to meet the young Welsh singer, whose new single was “With These Hands.” At the studio, Jones could see Presley “walking towards me,” he recalls, and then begins a vocal impression of Elvis singing, “‘With these hands…’ Oh, fuck.”
“He said to me, ‘How the hell do you sing like that?’ And I said, ‘Listening to you, for one thing’ — and Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Mahalia Jackson, and things that he was influenced by. He said, ‘Yeah, but I was brought up there. I went to black gospel churches. Is there anything like that in Wales?’ I said, ‘No, I was listening to it all on the radio.’ Like all of us did in Britain.”