I can't sleep and turned to youtube for inspiration, idly searching for various things in hopes of falling asleep in the process. One of the things I found, though, woke me right up again -- a clip of Elvis Presley singing a gospel song from his last concert tour, less than two months before his death at 42.
Elvis died just over two weeks short of 30 years ago, and his last tour ended on June 26, 1977, in Indianapolis. The clip below comes from his June 19, 1977 concert in Omaha (the TV special it was shot for included footage from Omaha and from Rapid City, two days later).
I've heard hundreds of recordings, soundboard and audience-recorded, from Elvis' '70s shows. The last Omaha show is among a very few that is hard to listen to...Elvis is very obviously sick and should not have taken the stage. He probably should not have toured at all for at least a year, though he managed to pull out some stellar performances during that year, but Omaha was a low point.
The CBS editors didn't use much of the show in the final televised product, relying mainly on footage from his much peppier concert two days later (it's a pity the last two concerts of that tour weren't filmed, because by the end of the tour Elvis not only was in far better form and more energized but looked better and slimmer). Listening to the 1997 Omaha concert is, to tell the truth, heartbreaking. But then Elvis did something amazing: he sang "How Great Thou Art," in the massively powerhouse approach to the gospel song that he'd adopted a couple of years before (his 1966 studio recording was far more moderate), and it was like he put a whole show's worth of energy into that one song, like he knew he was flagging but he pulled out all the stops for this song. It was like he, for a moment, suddenly came alive in the midst of what was a painful concert for him.
I love Elvis' gospel music and I find it pretty inspiring, despite lacking any particular modicum of Christian faith, and maybe that's part of what provoked Elvis to gather together energy that plainly was not present to its usual degree and knock one out of the stadium. It's not only
the shining moment of this concert but, I think, a pretty darned hot performance of a powerful song from a man who was the greatest performer to ever tread a concert stage and who by this point was dying far, far too young from abuses genetic and self-inflicted.
Here it is...clearly Elvis was hardly in top physical form (and so many seem to get pretty cruel about that, undoubtedly more than usual because Elvis was a rock 'n' roll Adonis for almost all his short adult life), but I'd urge you to try to see beyond the physical decline to the voice and the showmanship that remained intact to the end:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZMpogh1SsYAdios.