Forty years ago today, Dec 3, 1968, NBC aired the Elvis Presley Special sponsored by the Singer Sewing Company. It has since become known as the ‘68 Comeback Special, or just the ‘68 Special. It has stood the test of time as one of the most iconic performances of Elvis Presley’s career. It re-ignited his singing career and also started him touring and performing live concerts for the first time in seven years. This is how the televised special became known as the Comeback Special, Elvis was returning to touring and making rock-and-roll records.

As I said, the ‘68 Special has become iconic, not just for Elvis fans, but for the man himself. One of the more famous images of him is decked out in his all-leather suit strumming his guitar.

This special marked the first time Elvis had “gone electric” during a musical performance. In all previous performances he only played acoustic guitar.

Another iconic image of Elvis is in his all-white suit, standing in front of the immortal red ELVIS letters singing “If I Can Dream”

Although it aired on Dec 3 1968, the special was actually filmed in July 1968. Elvis had just returned from his honeymoon with Priscilla. While the Special was wildly successful, many people don’t realize that the original concept of the show was completely different.

Originally, the Special was conceived as a straight up Christmas special with Elvis singing nothing but Christmas carols. Director Steve Binder, however, saw the special as an opportunity to rescue Presley’s career from mediocre movies and soundtrack albums. Elvis was very open to this program change, but his manager kept complaining about the lack of Christmas songs. Even after the concept change, the special was going to be fully scripted and recorded without a live audience. But during rehearsals, the director enjoyed how Elvis would “loosen up” by goofing around and singing with his friends. The director asked Elvis if he would consider doing a live performance portion of the show. At first Elvis was concerned because he hadn’t performed live since 1961, seven years prior. However, after the director agreed to let his friends sit in with him on stage (as well as original band mates Scotty Moore and DJ Fontana) Elvis felt comfortable enough to give it a try. The live performances were filmed in four 1 hour shows. Two of the shows were the sit down “informal” sessions and two of the shows featured Presley standing and playing guitar by himself. These four shows came to be known as the Burbank Sessions and are considered the precursor to the “unplugged” shows that would become popular on MTV many years later.

The live concert shows would be edited together with scripted song and dance performances including a medley of Presley’s gospel hits, a semi-autobiographical number featuring the song Guitar Man and the aforementioned “If I Can Dream” performance.  Due to the last minute inclusion of the live performances, many scripted song numbers had to be removed for the Dec 3 broadcast.  One deleted number took place in a bordello to the song Let Yourself Go (see picture below).

Another was a performance of the song A Little Less Conversation that was remixed and released as a single in 2002 as well as becoming the theme song to a popular NBC show, Las Vegas. NBC would subsequently air two versions of the Elvis special.  One included a performance of Elvis singing Blue Christmas, the only seasonal song the director would approve, and another version that replaced Blue Christmas with a performance of Tiger Man.  All of these missing performances were later collected and released on the ‘68 Comeback Special 3-disc Deluxe Edition DVD. On this DVD you can watch the special as it originally aired in 1968, or you can watch each of the four 1 hour shows in their entirety as well as many of the rehearsals for the live action segments.  To celebrate the release of the ‘68 special DVD, several movie theaters had a special 1 hour showing of footage from the DVD. My wife and I found a theater in North Alabama that was showing it and we went. It was pretty awesome. Needless to say, I have this DVD set.

The special would become the highest rated TV special of the year and would succeed in revitalizing Elvis’ failing Billboard chart status.  Elvis would go on to do sold out shows in Las Vegas and begin his touring Elvis Presley Show concerts that would win him fans throughout the ’70s until his death in 1977.  RCA released the soundtrack for the show in 1968 including most (but not all) of the songs on the album NBC-TV Special.

Different configurations of the soundtrack performances would also be released over the years. Bootleg versions of the entire ‘68 Special performances were available for years under the title “The Burbank Sessions”. A definitive CD collection of the Special’s performances has yet to be released. I personally bought Memories: The 68 Comeback Special because it has the best track list and audio mastering.

This is one of my favorite Elvis performances and it’s amazing to think that the special is 40 years old today.

Get a lot more info on the Special as well as pictures, videos and downloads at the official Elvis 68 Special website.

Alright, now that I’ve eaten enough food to feed a third world nation for three months, it’s time for the three week slide into Christmas. I’m like a bottomless pit in November and December. I’m almost ashamed of the amount of food I eat during the holidays. Plus, I was sick most of last week so I couldn’t really do any running at the gym, or outside because it was a bit chilly. I’m going to have to get Steph to roll me out the door in the morning so I can get to work.

Anyway, I worked all weekend on the blog header you see up top. I had several ideas and I didn’t like how any of them turned out. This one finally just came together and I really like it. Maybe I’ll show you a few of the ideas that didn’t make it as a Christmas blog header this week.

Till then, I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. FYI…Auburn completely self-destructed in the Iron Bowl on Saturday. It was painful to watch. Best of luck to Alabama in the SEC Championship against Florida. Should be a fun game to watch.

I hope everyone has a pleasant and safe Thanksgiving.

….

Oh, and Kathy, be prepared to face not being ranked #1 after Saturday.  It’s inevitable.

Have a great holiday everyone and I’ll see you on the backslide into Christmas 2008!!

I joined Google’s Gmail service back in March of 2005. At that point, you could only join by invitation. I was able to find a guy that had a Gmail account on one of the tech websites I usually visit (PCMag.com) and got him to forward me an invitation.  Once I was approved and given a log on, I tried it out.  I was immediately in love.  Google Gmail is simple, elegant, and has TONS of space to store all of your emails.  It’s because Gmail started offering 2.5Gb of storage that Yahoo! Mail had to up their limit too.  While Gmail’s form factor, or interface, is minimal (which is typical Google), the functionality is fantastic.

Gmail has many cool features that I enjoy. Instead of folders, it uses labels. You can affix multiple labels to a message and search on these labels. Makes finding emails easier. Also, Gmail will sort your emails into groups. Emails with the same subject get stacked on top of each other into a message thread called a “conversation”. This lets you see all the emails pertaining to a subject instead of having to search through 15 separate emails for a piece of info. It also lets you see each email within the context it was sent. This particular behavior takes some getting used to, but I love it now that I am.

For the first few years Google added small items of functionality to Gmail, but the online interface remained the same.  When you logged on, this is pretty much what you saw.

You inbox is in the middle. On the left you have the other administrative folders and the lower left has the integrated Google Chat feature as well as your label list. Minimalist, but clean.

Then, just last week, Google updated Gmail to allow themes. I don’t remember how I found out, but I must have read something online about it. If you go to Settings–>Themes you’ll see a list of different “themes” with which to “skin” your Gmail page.   The one I like the best, and currently use, is the ridiculously awesome Ninja theme (are you surprised?).

That’s right, Google now has ninjas.  Glorious, glorious NINJAS!!  So freakin’ sweet, dude.  I’ll actually just sit and stare at my inbox for an hour just basking in the kick assitude (LOL…there’s that word again, remember it?) of ninjas in my Gmail.

There are several other awesome themes.  Check out the Gmail theme Desk.

This is probably my second favorite. Very cool representation of an actual desk top.

For you mainframe computer geeks, check out the Gmail theme, Terminal.

Very good approximation of an old-school “dummy” terminal. I tried this theme for a while, but it gets seriously old very quickly. I was ready to put my fist through the screen at around the 10 minute mark.

Those are some of the best.  Here’s the Settings screen which shows the thumbnails of all the different themes.

Most themes just change the colors, but at the bottom there are several that are photo based which work like my Ninja theme and the Desk theme to use pictures to change things up. There are a few beach themes that are cool and one called Bus Stop that has several interesting characters standing at a bus stop, Ben Franklin being one of them.  Bravo Google for giving a nice selection of new and different looks at our Gmail Inbox.

All in all, I’m excited about this update.  It was getting a little tired looking at the blue/white scheme with little or no change for the past (almost) 4 years.  If you have Gmail, check out your theme options, because there are plenty.  If you don’t have Gmail, that’s cool, but you’ll be less bad ass than everyone else.  Which is cool for some people.

I’m just saying.

So, every year, Winn-Dixie throws its employees a picnic and calls it Associate Appreciation Day. They have vendors come in and give out tons of free stuff. Pepsi and Coke show up and give out cans and bottles of free soda. Sometimes they even give out test flavors. Last year we got to try Squirt Citrus Power before it hit the shelves earlier this year.

At these picnics, Winn-Dixie will organize events that we, as employees, will participate in. One year they had a tri-sport challenge where you threw a football, shot a basketball and kicked a soccer ball to win prizes. Another year they organized a “Winn-Dixie Jacksonville Idol” karaoke contest. Usually management organizes their groups into teams and watches us compete.   Days before this event, these managers will start smack talking each other saying their department will win this, other departments are scared of their team, etc, etc.  It’s like the Associate Appreciation Day events are the equivalent of the “Coliseum Games” in Rome. We employees are the gladiators, the CEO and management team are the Emperor and Senate. The employees team up and compete in the “games”, trying to outdo each other and entertain management while they gorge themselves on food and drink. It’s fun for all.

This year there were several events and collectively it was called the Winn-Dixie Olympics.  I competed in two events; the tug-of-war and the obstacle course.  The tug-of-war almost became a blog article in and of itself.  Our team won 2 matches then was told we were eliminated because we didn’t beat our opponents quick enough.  I didn’t realize there was a time restriction.  We dispatched our first opponent in just over 7 seconds.  The second one took a little longer but not much more than 12 seconds.  We were all a little ticked that a team that went 2-0 was being eliminated. Come to find out later, we actually did win the Gold in that event.  I don’t know who fell asleep at the wheel, but I’m glad they finally recognized.  IT PeopleSoft came to REPRESENT, yo. Here’s the winning tug-of-war team:

Debi was filming many of the events and she got our tug-of-war victories on video and posted them to YouTube. The first match is here and our second victory can be found here. I am the lead guy on the rope with the red undershirt.

Do you recognize the team t-shirt? You should. It was scanned directly from a sketch I did a few months ago. I wrote about it in the blog article here.  The rest of the people on the Peoplesoft technical support team got together (spear-headed by Debi Wilson and Gina Ancira) and had my sketch scanned from Debi’s journal and made into a t-shirt (without telling me).  They then all wore the shirt one Friday and all showed up at my cube and presented one to me.  I was so surprised.  Very cool.  I can’t thank the team enough for doing that (SHOUT OUT:  Winn-Dixie PeopleSoft Financials and HR tech support!!!).  Anyway, so we had these kick ass shirts I designed sitting around and we decided to use them as our team shirt.  Old Skool not only referred to the removable data disk that’s on the shirt, but to the type of ass kicking we would be delivering to the other departments in the company.  The tug-of-war team was the first cog in the ass kicking machine that was Katz’s Kats (I didn’t come up with that name).  I believe Danny and Mike got to the finals in the balloon toss.  So things were moving along like gangbusters, that is, until…the obstacle course.

What can I say about the obstacle course?  It looked easy enough. Here’s a pic of the unassuming inflatable course.

I thought, “I’m in pretty good shape, this is going to be simple. Obstacle course, prepare to be my bitch”.  However, as Luke Skywalker says to the Emperor in Return of the Jedi, “Overconfidence is your weakness.”

I was supposed to run this course earlier in the day.  However, since the tug-of-war team made it to the “finals”, I missed my time.  Later on it would start raining and they would periodically shut it down.  I wouldn’t be able to get my run in until almost 2pm, which is when the whole thing ended.  And at that point, the obstacle course was slick with dirt and grime and rainwater.  i also was stuffed full of barbeque and soda having just eating lunch.  Completely ignoring these signs of impending doom, I asked the moderator if I could have a trial run. He let me and I took my first run. As I figured, I ran the course without much problem. The only part that concerned me was the end. You have to jump up and climb a steeper-than-it-looks incline and jump over to the other side to finish. However, this incline wasn’t a problem getting over on my trial run. When I got off, I was ready and confident that this obstacle course was about to be re-named Mrs. Holley.

Debi was with me and didn’t bother to record my trial run, as it didn’t count. Hindsight being 20/20, I wish she had recorded it. However, she did record my timed second run. And here’s how it went.

Not very well, as you can see. What I should have done is wait ten minutes or so before I did my second run. I expended all my energy on the trial run and had nothing left in the tank for my second run. As you can see in the beginning I tore through the first part, the problem comes when I hit the wall, literally and figuratively. I got to the top, holding onto the rope, and I immediately knew I didn’t have the strength to toss my sorry ass over the incline. But I tried anyway and didn’t make it. That first miss completely sapped whatever energy reserves I had and hence you see the second botched attempt. Pathetic. I was lucky I even made it over on the third. You can see, on the third try, how I almost fall again at the very top, but I catch it at the last moment. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t made it over that last time. I would’ve had to quit Winn-Dixie and move out of town. So embarrassing. Here I am walking away from the obstacle course, a lesser man.

I should go ahead and change my name to Mr Obstacle Course. Paxton Obstacle Course. Because that unforgiving, inflatable monstrosity behind me now owns me (or, more to the point, it PWNS me). Until next company picnic. Then all bets are off. There will be a reckoning. I assure you this.

To add to my insult, I had to call in sick the next day because I apparently overextended my shoulder running the course.  I had so much pain moving my left shoulder I could barely sleep that night, which is lucky because my sleep would probably have been filled with nightmares of a giant yellow, obstacle course having its way with me. I would have been waking up screaming, drenched in sweat regardless.

Debi posted the video of what is now known as “Agony of Defeat” on YouTube and it quickly made the rounds at Winn-Dixie.  My pain, on permanent display.  That’s okay, because it’s just fuel.  Fuel for the next time Obstacle Course and I meet.  A month before next year’s picnic I’ll rent my own obstacle course and put it in my backyard.  I’ll run that course every night for a month until I own it.  People will walk by and wonder why the hell Holley has a giant inflatable obstacle course in his backyard?  Is he crazy?

Yes I am.  Crazy like a fox.