Uncensored Elvis and blown chances with Glen Campbell’s MVP Carl Jackson

Deemed “the greatest banjo player in the world” by Glen Campbell, veteran Nashville producer Carl Jackson exclusively tells one of his biggest regrets and a naughty onstage incident between Elvis Presley and an oblivious female admirer incapable of containing herself. Meanwhile, back at the ranch…conjuring some sneaky accentuated rhythm licks on his most extensively played guitar, a 1956 J-200 Gibson acoustic, a lithe 34-year-old Presley returns to his roots on July 31, 1969. Shutterbugs were omnipresent for the opening night of his debut residency at the Las Vegas International Hotel after a wrongheaded eight-year absence from live performances to pursue Tinseltown. The Tiger Man is dressed in the black Herringbone jumpsuit only worn during this summer engagement. Image Credit: Elvis Presley Enterprises / appears in the book “Elvis: Vegas ‘69” by Ken Sharp

Twelve years in the saddle as Glen Campbell’s banjoist, rhythm acoustic guitarist, dobroist, and violinist, Carl Jackson was a shaggy-haired, multi-faceted Mississippian on the cusp of his 19th birthday in September 1972 when Campbell hired him for a debut trek down under. Talk about plunging into the flames head first — Jackson’s prior claim to fame had been a five-year stint in innovative bluegrass duo Jim & Jesse’s touring outfit — and now he was performing with an artist who commanded 20 million viewers on CBS’s recently cancelled Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour variety series.

Roughly a year after Campbell succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease as unflinchingly chronicled in the I’ll Be Me documentary, a serendipitous reading of a Billboard recap about the 2018 Capitol Congress, Capitol Records’ annual gathering for its staff and other music biz insiders built around special guest Paul McCartney, turned up a cliffhanger fragment. A “‘lost’ Glen Campbell album featuring a duet with Elvis Presley” was on the label’s impending release schedule.

Coincidentally prepping an interview with Bobbie Gentry: The Girl from Chickasaw County compiler Andrew Batt — charisma-oozing siren Gentry collaborated on vinyl with Campbell in the wake of the multiple Grammy-winning “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” — the…