Producer who insisted on multiple takes to make Elvis great

1937-2016

CHIPS Moman, who has died a day after his 79th birthday, wrote songs for Aretha Franklin and produced records for Bobby Womack and Wilson Pickett, among many others; but he was probably best known as the producer of Elvis Presley’s 15th studio album, From Elvis in Memphis (1969).

Moman’s recording sessions with Elvis also produced the hit singles Suspicious Minds, Don’t Cry Daddy, Kentucky Rain and In the Ghetto and marked a musical renaissance for the singer, who had spent much of the ’60s in the creative doldrums.

The producer was approached by Elvis’s people, who were keen to capitalise on what became known as the ’68 Comeback Special, a televised appearance in which the star jammed informally in front of a studio audience.

Elvis agreed to a 10-day recording session with Moman starting on January 13 1969. To begin with, things did not look promising. The King had a cold and Moman objected to the size of his entourage (which was obediently reduced). “When I told him he was off pitch,” Moman later recalled, “his whole entourage would nearly faint.” For the first song of the session, Long Black Limousine, Elvis’s tone is rasping, coarsened by his cold, but the result, after nine takes, is raw and powerful. It soon became clear that Moman (described by Elvis’s biographer, Peter Guralnick, as “a flinty-eyed man of fierce intelligence”) had captured the spirit and spontaneity of Elvis’s performance on the 1968 TV show.

Despite his worries about how his fans would react to a “message song”, In the Ghetto became Elvis’s first top 10 hit in four years. It took 23 takes, Moman gently encouraging both singer and band throughout.

In 2009, the critic Bruce Eder said that along with Elvis Presley (1956), From Elvis in Memphis was Presley’s “greatest album” and “one of the greatest soul albums ever cut”.

Lincoln Wayne Moman — known as “Chips” because of his love of poker — was born on June 12 1937 in LaGrange, Georgia. After leaving school at the age of 14, he hitchhiked to Memphis to join a cousin, who was working as a house painter. FIERCE INTELLIGENCE: Chips Moman loved playing poker

While strumming a friend’s guitar during a break from his painting, he was approached by Warren Smith from Sun Records, who asked him if he wanted a job. Soon he was on the road as part of Gene Vincent’s rockabilly band, but after a car accident he returned to Memphis, where he began writing and producing songs, the first of which was Fool in Love.

For Moman, “making the record itself” was all that mattered. “From the day I went into the Gold Star Studio in California, I never cared about anything else.”

Latterly, Moman lived and worked in his home town of LaGrange. He is survived by his second wife, Jane, and by a son and daughter. — © The Daily Telegraph, London