Whats the story behind Roustabout?
When Elvis made a movie, many writers were asked to submit songs for his films. Elvis would choose the ones he liked and then record them. Otis and I wrote a song for the 1964 movie Roustabout and Elvis recorded it. Movie producer Hal Wallis listened to the song but he objected to the lyrics because they had Elvis saying he wanted to tell his boss to ‘stick it in his ear’. Mr. Wallis demanded that a new song called Roustabout be commissioned from other writers so our version never made it into the movie. Q: So what happened to the song? I had a copy of it on acetate and forgot all about it. This happened almost 40 years ago. When did you realize that you had something unique? Well, I didn’t really think about it all these years. Then recently during an interview with a New Jersey newspaper reporter, I mentioned having a copy of a song I wrote that Elvis recorded for a movie but was never used. A few days later I got a call from BMG’s Elvis Presley producer Ernst Mikael Jorgensen, who h
