A Man Took Off His Toupee In The Front Row. What Elvis Said Next Destroyed 2,200 People.

The song link :   • Are You Lonesome Tonight? (Laughing Versio...   Twenty-six nights into the greatest comeback in music history, Elvis Presley walked onto the stage at the International Hotel Las Vegas for the midnight show on August 26, 1969. The show had been perfect. Then he reached the spoken bridge of Are You Lonesome Tonight. A man in the front row had taken off his toupee and was waving it. Elvis sang: "Do you gaze at your bald head and wish you had hair?" Then he started laughing. And he could not stop. For the next four minutes, Elvis Presley tried and failed to finish one of his most beloved songs. He got through half a line before losing it again. He begged his backup singer for help. He bent over the microphone gasping. The entire room of 2,200 people went with him. Behind him, Cissy Houston — thirty-four years old, one of the greatest voices in American music, mother of a daughter named Whitney who would not be born for another year — never missed a single note. While Elvis collapsed with laughter, she sang the song exactly as it was supposed to be sung. Not one note wrong. Not one moment of wavering. At the end, when the applause came up, Elvis leaned into the microphone and said the only thing he could say. "That's it, man. Fourteen years right down the drain." The recording sat in RCA's archive for eleven years. In 1982 it was released as a single in the UK and reached the top twenty-five. Millions of people have listened to it since. Every single one of them has laughed. This video tells the full story — where the song came from, how Elvis recorded it in total darkness at 4am in 1960, what the comeback shows meant, who Cissy Houston was and what she did that night, and why four minutes of a man laughing on a stage in Las Vegas became one of the most beloved recordings in rock and roll history.