The Top 20 Album Elvis Presley Openly Made Fun of While He Recorded It, Marking an Important Change in His Career

When considering what element of an album contains the most comprehensive information about an artist’s career, we most often gravitate toward the songs themselves. But how an artist approaches a specific album—how experimental or safe, how challenging or simplistic, and so on—can reveal just as much about an artist’s trajectory as what they’re singing about. This is especially true of Elvis Presley’s thirteenth soundtrack album, Paradise, Hawaiian Style.

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As its numerical value would suggest, Presley was deep into his film and music career by the time he released Paradise, Hawaiian Style in 1966. The album coincided with the movie of the same name, in which he starred with Suzanna Leigh. Songs like “Queenie Wahine’s Papaya” and “A Dog’s Life” certainly fit the campy, tropical theme, but they did little in terms of artistic inspiration.

According to Ernst Jorgensen’s book, Elvis Presley: A Life In Music, The Complete Recording Sessions, Presley often complained through the final sessions of his movie soundtrack era. Sometimes he would deliberately change his body position to make the engineer’s job harder.

Elvis Presley Still Managed to Get a Hit, Even if It Was Begrudgingly

One of the benefits—and downfalls—of Elvis Presley’s mid-1960s career is that his star power was so overwhelming, virtually anything he did would be at least somewhat successful. For example, his thirteenth soundtrack album, Paradise, Hawaiian Style, peaked at No. 15 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart. And indeed, a Top 20 album was nothing to sneeze at. But these kinds of albums were wearing Presley down, both emotionally and creatively.

Presley no longer felt like he had control over his career, especially as rock ‘n’ roll evolved away from him as he was neck-deep in musical rom-coms. In Ernst Jorgensen’s musical biography, Jordanaires singer Gordon Stoker remembered Presley backing up “so far from the microphone that the engineer would put the mike he was recording on as close to the wall as possible, and he [Elvis] would lean against the wall. How many times have I seen him sit as far from the microphone as possible? They put a soundboard around him to pick him up. The material was so bad that he felt like he couldn’t sing it.”

In this way, Paradise, Hawaiian Style (and the other soundtrack albums of the time) showed Presley beginning to diverge from his role as a song-and-dance man. He no longer wanted to do whatever the record label or his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, told him to do. While it took Presley a while to catch back up with rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-1950s, he eventually found his footing through his ‘68 Comeback Special, aired on NBC in early December.

Unsurprisingly, “Queenie Wahine’s Papaya” didn’t make that set list.

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