Las Vegas, Nevada. September 12th, 1972. 11:40 p.m. Elvis Presley’s midnight show at the Las Vegas Hilton was already 40 minutes in when he saw Dean Martin sitting at table 7, not the front row, not the seat of someone who wanted to be noticed. Table 7 was the kind of placement that said, “I chose to be here, not to be seen here.
” Slightly off center, close enough to hear everything, far enough from the stage that the spotlight wouldn’t find you unless you wanted it to. Elvis had learned something in the 3 years since that night. He had learned that Dean Martin showed up in rooms on his own terms, which meant that if Dean Martin was at table 7 tonight, there was a reason, and the reason belonged entirely to Dean.
He didn’t spotlight him, didn’t acknowledge him from the stage. He registered the presence and kept performing. And in the part of his mind that was always running calculations, even in the middle of a show, he began thinking the last time Dean Martin had been in his audience. August 1969, the International Hotel, a night Elvis was still not entirely comfortable thinking about.
Elvis had made an assumption. The assumption was simple. Dean was there. The crowd was enormous. The moment was too good to waste. The assumption was the Dean would go along with it because everybody went along with things on a stage in front of 2,000 people. Social gravity, the weight of the crowd, the impossibility of refusal.
He had been wrong. Not wrong in a way that had cost him the show. The 1969 comeback run had been extraordinary. had reestablished him as a live performer, had done everything Colonel Parker said it would do commercially and more, but wrong in a way that had stayed with him. That had surfaced in quiet moments when he was honest with himself about the difference between what he intended and what he actually did.
Dean had said it directly backstage, which was the way Dean always said things. You put me on the spot. You asked in front of everyone so I couldn’t say no. That’s not respect, Elvis. That’s manipulation dressed as an invitation. Elvis had argued that it wasn’t manipulation, that he had meant it as an honor.
Dean had let him finish and then said, “The intention doesn’t change the effect. You still used public pressure. That’s still a demand, and I don’t respond to demands.” Three years ago, Elvis had thought about it more than he expected to, which was why when one of his security team approached table 7 during the intermission between his first and second sets, Elvis had been very specific about what the message said.
It said, “I’d like to ask you up on stage tonight. I’m asking privately, so you have a real choice. If the answer is no, no is fine and I won’t mention it. If the answer is yes, I need one more thing from you. Tell me what you want to sing and I’ll make sure the band is ready. Your call. E.
He had a man wait at the table for the response. The man returned with a cocktail napkin. On the napkin in Dean Martin’s handwriting, five words. Yes. I picked the song. Elvis read it then read it again. He didn’t know what song Dean hadn’t said. The instruction was clear. Tell me what you want to sing and I’ll make sure the band is ready.
But Dean had answered only the first part. Yes, the second part. What song? Dean had kept. Elvis thought about this for a moment. He could go back. Ask for the song title. Make sure the band could prepare. He didn’t go back. Five words on a cocktail napkin. Yes, I pick the song. Elvis sent a private note.
Dean answered, but Dean didn’t say which song. Elvis could have asked. He didn’t. He handed Dean the microphone and had no idea what was about to happen. Before I show you what Dean sang and why Elvis knew every single word, if you love these stories about the real moments between two legends that nobody planned and nobody forgot, subscribe to this channel. This is what we do here.
The stories that didn’t make the set list. the moments that happened between the songs and hit that like button because what Dean sang that night still matters. Now back to Las Vegas. September 12th, 1972. The second set is beginning. Dean Martin is at table 7 and he has a song in his pocket that nobody knows about yet. He had asked for a real choice.
Dean had given him one, and Dean had kept the song for himself, which was, if Elvis thought about it correctly, exactly what Dean Martin had always been asking for, the right to arrive with something of his own. The second set began. Elvis moved through it. He was good in 1972, better in some ways than the 1969 comeback, more seasoned, the performance less hungry because the comeback hunger had been satisfied, and what was left was something closer to mastery.
The Hilton shows in 1972 were some of the finest performances of his career. The band was tight, the connection with the audience real. 40 minutes into the second set, he approached the microphone between songs and looked toward table 7. I have someone here tonight, Elvis said. Someone who was in this city before I was, someone who taught me something a few years ago that I needed to learn.
Advertisements
He paused. 3 years ago, I invited Dean Martin on stage and I did it the wrong way. I put him on the spot, assumed he’d just come along because that’s how I work. spontaneous in the moment. Trust the energy. A small pause. Dean doesn’t work that way. A knowing murmur through the audience. The story had circulated.
Vegas was a small town in the ways that mattered. So this time I asked him privately, gave him a real choice. No crowd pressure, no spotlight on the table before he answered. He looked toward table 7. Dean, you gave me a yes and you said you’d pick the song. Come on up. The spotlight found table seven.
Dean Martin stood. He was 55 years old. He had been performing in this city for 22 years. He was wearing a dark suit, no tie. It was after midnight in Las Vegas in September, and he had his own show at the Riviera that he’d finished an hour ago. He looked like a man who had come from one show to watch another, and had not expected to be standing up in the second one.
But he stood and he walked toward the stage with the unhurrieded certainty of a man who had decided something and was now executing the decision. Elvis met him at the stairs, shook his hand at the top, not the handshake of a host greeting a guest, something more equal than that. Two men on the same level, which was somewhat novel.
Elvis had very few encounters that felt genuinely equal. “You’ve got it,” Elvis said. He extended the microphone not the way he’d extended it in 1969, not a waiting expectant gesture, not a test, but actually placed it in Dean’s hand. The difference was real. In 1969, the microphone had been an invitation that was actually a demand.
Tonight, it was simply being given over. Dean’s choice, Dean’s song, Dean’s moment. Dean took it. He held it for a moment, looking out at the Hilton showroom. 2300 people. The room Elvis Presley had made famous. The room that had defined the Las Vegas residency format for a generation of performers.
He turned to the band leader. Do you know that’s a Moore? The band leader blinked. Of course, key of G. Slow tempo. I like it a little slower than the record. Dean looked at the pianist. Follow me for the intro. I’ll give you the tempo. He turned back to the audience. The silence in the room had a specific quality.
Not the expectant silence before a performer begins. That silence was familiar to everyone here. This was something different. The silence of 2300 people absorbing the information that Dean Martin was about to sing. That’s Amore on Elvis Presley’s stage. Dean’s song, not Elvis’s, Dean’s.
The piano began slow, exactly as Dean had asked. Dean started to sing. His voice in 1972 was the voice the records captured, but deeper now, more worn in, carrying 20 years of Vegas shows and recordings in its texture. He sang the opening lines the way he had always sung them, not as performance, but as conversation, the words landing like something being said rather than something being demonstrated.
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s a room still. This was not what anyone had expected. An Elvis Presley Las Vegas midnight show, the set list of which contained Elvis’s greatest hits and nothing else, had just pivoted without warning to 1953 to Dean Martin’s signature to an Italian love song written before rock and roll existed and performed now by the man who had made it immortal.
In the fourth row, a woman reached across the table and took her husband’s hand without looking at him. the automatic gesture of someone responding to music without deciding to respond. On the stage, Elvis stood to Dean’s right. He had stepped back slightly, the instinctive choreography of someone who has been joined on their stage and knows that the joined person is now the center, and he was watching Dean sing.
And then something happened that nobody in the room expected. Elvis started humming. Not performing a hum, not adding a vocal flourish, just humming. The melody under Dean singing barely audible. The involuntary response of someone who knows a song so well it comes out of them without instruction. A woman in the front row heard it, looked at Elvis, looked back at Dean, looked at Elvis again.
Elvis was singing quietly under his breath. But the words were coming. When the stars make you drool just like a pastor fazul, that’s a mo. Dean heard it, turned slightly. A look passed between them. Not surprise exactly, but recognition. The look of two people discovering they share something neither knew they shared. Dean moved the microphone between them slightly.
Not handing it over, not demanding participation, just opening the space. Elvis looked at the microphone, looked at Dean, he sang. Not under his breath. His actual voice. The voice that had sold a 100red million records. The voice that had changed what popular music could be. The voice that had made 2,300 people pay $200 a seat.
That voice joining Dean Martin’s voice on that’s Amore. The effect was extraordinary in its strangeness and its rightness. These were not voices that should have worked together. The Italian American kuner from Stubineville, Ohio, and the southern rock king from Tupelo, Mississippi.
The swing era and the rock era. the easy elegance and the dangerous energy. Nothing about this should have cohered, but it did because Dean’s voice wasn’t performing and Elvis’s voice wasn’t performing. Something else was happening. The thing that happens when two people sing a song they both genuinely love in the company of each other.
Not a duet in the formal sense, not an arrangement, just two voices finding the same melody from different directions and arriving at the same place. When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s a moray. The audience didn’t react with cheers. The audience went very still, the way it does when something is happening that feels too real for cheering to be the right response.
The song ended for three full seconds. Nothing. Then applause. The kind that builds from scattered to total. The kind that has a rougher texture than ordinary applause. the kind that means something was just witnessed rather than simply enjoyed. Dean looked at Elvis. There was something in Dean’s face that his audiences almost never saw.
Not the performed warmth, not the constructed ease, but the actual thing underneath both of those. The thing the ease was built to protect. You know this song, Dean said. Into the microphone to the room, but directed at Elvis. My neighbors in Memphis were Italian, Elvis said. Sarrento family, Three Doors Down, played this constantly.
I must have heard it a thousand times before I ever made a record. Why didn’t you tell me that in 1969? Elvis laughed. The real laugh, not the performers laugh, not the Elvis smile. The laugh that happened when something landed genuinely. You had your hands in your pockets. Didn’t seem like the right time.
The audience understood the reference. The laughter was knowing. Dean looked at Elvis for a moment. Then he handed the microphone back. Not dropped it, not placed it at a stand. Handed it directly. Elvis’s hand to Dean’s hand to Elvis’s hand. The completion of something that had been interrupted 3 years ago.
You earned this one, Dean said. He walked to the stairs down back to table seven. He sat, picked up his drink. The show continued backstage after the second set. Elvis found Dean before he could leave. Dean was near the exit talking to one of Elvis’s band members about tempo. A brief professional conversation.
Dean noting that the pianist had rushed slightly in the second half of the night and what the adjustment would be. Elvis waited until the conversation finished. Why that song? He said. Dean turned. The question was direct enough that Dean gave it a direct answer rather than a deflection.
My mother sang it, Dean said, not the original recording before that. The melody is older than the recording. She knew it from Italy. She sang it in the kitchen in Stubenville when I was a kid and she didn’t know anyone was listening. He paused. I recorded it in 1953 because it was the only way I knew to carry it with me when she wasn’t there anymore.
Elvis said nothing. You asked me the right way tonight, Dean continued. Privately, no pressure. My choice on the song. When someone asks the right way, you give them something real, not a performance. Something actually real. Elvis processed this. The 1969 thing, Elvis said finally. I’ve thought about it.
I know you were right about all of it. I know I was using you, telling myself it was an honor when really I was using the crowd to make you do what I wanted. Dean nodded. Yes, I’m sorry. The actual thing, not just the apology I gave you then. Dean looked at him for a moment. I know you are.
That’s why I said yes tonight. He picked up his jacket from a chair and why I brought the real song. Elvis looked at him. There were things he wanted to say about the performance, about what it had felt like to hear Dean sing in his show, and to find himself singing a song from the street in Memphis when he was 7 years old, about how strange it was that two men from completely different worlds could meet in an Italian love song from before either of them was famous.
About the feeling of the borrowed microphone and the borrowed melody, and the moment when he hadn’t performed, but simply sung. He didn’t say most of it. What he said was, “Dean, why did it feel like that?” Dean put his jacket on. “Like what? Like something real? I’ve been doing this show every night for 8 weeks.
Every night it’s good. Sometimes it’s great. But tonight, that 3 minutes, it was something else. Why Dean considered this?” Because neither of us was trying to be anything. I wasn’t trying to be Dean Martin. I was just singing my mother’s song. And for about 3 minutes, you weren’t trying to be Elvis.
You were just a kid from Memphis who knew the words. Elvis was quiet. The trying, Dean said. The trying is what gets in the way. When you stop trying to be Elvis and just sing, the real thing comes through. The thing people actually respond to. He looked at Elvis. You know this. You’ve always known this.
That’s what you did in ‘ 68 on the special. That’s what you did on opening night in ‘ 69. Actually, for most of the show, the leather, the movement, the energy, that wasn’t a performance. That was you, the real thing. But then it becomes the performance, Elvis said. You do it real and then people want it again, and you do it again, and by the third time, it’s a costume, Dean said. Yeah, I know.
The word landed with a weight that Elvis recognized as personal. Dean Martin, who had been performing ease for 22 years, who had made effortlessness his signature, understood from the inside what it meant to have something real become a costume, to have authenticity calcify into persona.
How do you, Elvis started, keep it, Dean said. I don’t always, but I try to remember the difference. The difference between Dino and Dean, the difference between the song and the performance of the song. He paused. Tonight I was just Dino. For 3 minutes in your show in front of your audience, I was just a barber’s son from Ohio singing Something My Taught Me, Elvis nodded slowly.
That’s what you gave me tonight, Dean said. By asking right by handing over the microphone and stepping back. You gave me the space to be Dino instead of Dean. And that’s worth more than any duet. He extended his hand. Elvis shook it. the handshake of two men who had arrived somewhere together, neither sure exactly when the arriving had happened, or what it meant going forward, only that the distance between them was different now than it had been 3 years ago, and different again from what it had been at the beginning of the evening. Dean left. Elvis stood in the backstage corridor for a moment. The noise of the casino beyond the doors, the particular energy of a Las Vegas midnight, the ongoing unstoppable commerce of the city. He thought about his neighbors in Memphis, the Sarrento family. Three houses down, the smell of Sunday sauce through the window in summer, a voice singing something he didn’t understand the words to, but knew the feeling of. He had been
7 years old. He had carried that feeling for 25 years without knowing he was carrying it. And tonight, a man from Ohio had brought it out of him in the middle of a Las Vegas show by singing the song that contained it. He went back to his dressing room. He didn’t call the colonel, didn’t talk to Joe Esposito, just sat in the chair and thought about what Dean had said about the difference between the song and the performance of the song.
He thought about it for a long time. The show he did the next night was different. Not visibly different to the audience, but different in the way that Dean would have recognized if he’d been watching. Fewer moments of Elvis performing Elvis. More moments of Elvis simply being present. Small adjustments in how he held himself between songs.
Small adjustments in how he talked to the crowd. A version of what Dean had described. Remembering the difference between who you are and the costume you’ve assembled around who you are. It didn’t last. Nothing lasts completely. The colonel had his opinions. The audience had its expectations. The jumpsuits and the choreography and the apparatus of being Elvis was too large and too established to be dismantled by one conversation after midnight in September.
But it was there, the awareness of the difference, the memory of 3 minutes when he hadn’t been trying to be anything and something real had come through. August 16th, 1977. Elvis died. Dean heard the news at home. He sat with it for a while in the way he sat with difficult things quietly, privately, without the performance of grief that the moment seemed to demand.
He thought about September 12th, 1972. About the napkin and the five words, yes, I pick the song. About the room going still when the piano found the opening notes. About Elvis humming under his breath and then not under his breath. about two voices that shouldn’t have fit together finding each other in the same melody.
He thought about what Elvis had asked him. Why did it feel like that? He thought about his own answer because neither of us was trying to be anything. He called Graceland. He didn’t send flowers this time. He asked to speak with someone, anyone from Elvis’s family. He was eventually connected to a member of Elvis’s inner circle, someone who had been there through the years.
Tell them Dean said that the last time I heard Elvis really sing, not perform, not be Elvis, just sing was September 12th, 1972. He sang an Italian love song he learned from his neighbors when he was 7 years old. And in that moment, he was just a kid from Mississippi who loved music. Tell them I never forgot it. He hung up.
That night, he performed his own show at the MGM Grand. Toward the end, without announcement or introduction, he sang That’s Amore. He sang it the way he always sang it, with the practiced ease of a man who had been performing for 40 years, and knew how to make performed ease look like genuine ease.
But underneath it, in the breath before the melody, in the small hesitation at the word that he always let land, was the thing the ease was built over. the kitchen in Stubenville. His mother’s voice, the song before the record, before the career, before the character named Dean Martin had been assembled over the character named Dino Crochet.
The audience applauded the way they always applauded. They heard the performance. What Dean was hearing was something else. September 12th, 1972. 2,300 people, a napkin with five words, a piano beginning at the tempo Dean asked for, two voices finding the same melody from different directions, and for 3 minutes, the most genuine thing either of them had done on a Las Vegas stage in years.
That was the story, not the story of the mic he wouldn’t touch. That story belonged to 1969, to a lesson about boundaries and preparation, and the difference between an invitation and a demand. This was the story of the mic he did take. Three years later, on his own terms, with his own song, the song his mother taught him that Elvis had learned from his neighbors that both of them had been carrying without knowing they were carrying it, waiting for the right night and the right question and the right kind of asking to bring it out. Yes, I pick the song. Five words on a napkin. Everything that followed
