“I was missing the contact with a live audience,” Elvis says in this show, and at every show during his first engagement at The International Hotel in Las Vegas. Apart from two shows in 1961 and the recent TV show, Elvis hadn’t performed on stage for 11 years. After years of increasingly worse movies and diminishing record sales, Elvis had just managed to turn his career around with his 1968 TV special. The show had aired on December 3, 1968, and it was a surprising reminder to the world of just how magnetic a performer Elvis Presley still was. Just weeks later Elvis recorded more than 30 songs in Memphis, some of the best work of his career, and the return to live performances on July 31, 1969 was the third step of his resurrection as an artist.

These releases help to chronicle Elvis’ triumphant return to the stage, just 50 years ago this summer!