In an interview early the following year Presley called the jump to RCA “my biggest thrill.” He credited Parker with much of his success: “I don’t think I’d have ever been very big if it wasn’t for him. He’s a very smart man.” It was that sense of undying loyalty and obligation that ended up metastasizing Parker’s influence in his career, binding Presley to him forever.
Photos and documents on the wall at Sun Records in Memphis commemorating Elvis Presley’s move to RCA records. Photo by author.
In an accompanying photograph Gladys Presley gives her son a congratulatory peck on the cheek. Looking on smiling, in a conservative suit and tie and with his hand on Mrs. Presley’s shoulder, is the balding, portly man who made it all happen, the one-time Tampa dogcatcher turned kingmaker, Tom Parker.
For all of 1954 Presley reported $916.33 in income as a “semi-skilled” laborer. His wages in 1955 reflected all of Presley’s hard work as a regional touring musician, jumping to $25,000. Other estimates have him making twice that much. Thanks largely to Parker’s deal making, in 1956 Presley would earn $100,000 just to appear in his first film. Varying reports put his income anywhere from $280,000 into the millions.
Early in ’56 Floridians had front-row seats to Presley’s moonshot to fame. The “Hillbilly Cat” became “Kid Dynamite,” transitioning from ballparks and livestock pens in smaller central Florida towns to ornate theaters in larger cities, cutting a much wider swath through the entire Sunshine State. Presley now had the confidence of knowing there were mountains of cash waiting on his path to stardom, guaranteeing that he would never have to return to the Memphis projects or a workaday life.
“In January 1956, the music of Elvis Presley was loosed upon the earth by one of the world’s largest record companies,” wrote author William McKeen. “The Elvis revolution had begun.”
Presley’s very first big-time recording session included the odd song that started with Tommy Durden’s morning paper inspiration, was written in Mae Axton’s living room, and was recorded there by Glenn Reeves, who wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. For so long, people have fixated on finding the real so-called Heartbreak Hotel where the anonymous man in the song died. It was nothing more than a figment of Mae Axton’s imagination. The genuine history, however, involves the little house on Dellwood Avenue in Jacksonville where the song was written and recorded in a single day.
Axton capitalized on the success of “Heartbreak Hotel” to pursue a songwriting and record-producing career. She divorced, moved to Nashville, and founded her own label, eventually becoming a beloved figure in the music business. Her son Hoyt Axton went on to become a successful singer and actor who also wrote a song Presley recorded, “Never Been to Spain.” Axton also tried to launch Reeves with other songs, but he never charted as a recording artist, moving on to a decades-long successful career in broadcasting and concert promotion.
Durden never again came close to that level of songwriting success; he was okay with that, outwardly at least: “I have come to the conclusion,” said Durden, “that the good Lord only allows one ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ to the customer.”
III
1956
Headlining
Concert handbill featuring Red Robertson’s photo with Presley headlining his first Florida tour. Courtesy of Linda Moscato.
8
February 19–21
Tampa, West Palm Beach, Sarasota
For Presley’s third Florida tour, February 19–26, 1956, he was eight months and light years removed from the twenty-year-old unknown who had stood at the railing in Daytona Beach, gawking at the ocean for the first time. During a grueling two-day, seven-show stand to begin this run, Presley returned to familiar territory; the Hesterly Armory in Tampa. Posters heralding his return featured Red Robertson’s iconic photo taken in the same building. This time and tour, Tom Parker’s playbill left no doubt that Presley was the star: “The most talked about new personality in the last ten years of recording music,” the headline screamed. The full-on tsunami of Presleymania was coming, a handful of milestone national television appearances and a string of million-selling records away.
Presley now topped a stellar roster of musicians including the first family of country music, Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters. The godfathers of high lonesome harmonies, Charlie and Ira Louvin, headliners in their own right, also warmed up crowds, which grew more fervent for Presley at each stop. In another indication of how Scotty and Bill assumed more subservient roles as the backup band alongside drummer D. J. Fontana, they were now called the Blue Moon Boys and not listed by name.
The year 1956 had gotten off with a bang; the young singer celebrated turning twenty-one back home in Memphis on January 8. Two days later he strode into RCA’s Nashville recording studio for the first time to begin his first session there. It had to be a combination of intimidation and satisfaction for Presley; only two years previously he had bombed during his first Nashville appearance at the Grand Ole Opry. From Sam Phillips’s tiny Sun studio in Memphis, Presley was now in the big time. Guitar great Chet Atkins and piano master Floyd Cramer were there to fatten the sound alongside his regular bandmates.
These were far more workmanlike and rigid sessions compared to Sun’s loose let’s-have-a-cheeseburger-then-record-something atmosphere. During that session Presley tore through Tommy Durden and Mae Axton’s dark tale of woe, “Heartbreak Hotel,” following Glenn Reeves’s version and taking it to a new level of rock, blues, and sex appeal.
Parker landed Presley his first national television exposure, booking him for a half dozen appearances on the CBS showcase, Stage Show. On concert playbills Parker made sure to add that Presley was now working with the Stage Show’s producer, comedy great Jackie Gleason. On January 27, the day before Presley’s first nationally televised performance, RCA released “Heartbreak Hotel” as a single.
Live from CBS Studios in New York City, Cleveland disc jockey Bill Randle introduced Presley to his first-ever national television audience. “We think tonight that he’s going to make television history for you,” Randle correctly predicted. All the months of touring had built up to this moment, and Presley was in total command belting out “Shake, Rattle and Roll.”
Presley’s early Stage Show performances paved the way for his landmark appearances later that year with Milton Berle, Steve Allen, and Ed Sullivan. Presley’s contract called for him to receive $1,250 for his initial Stage Show performance then bumped up to $1,500 for the final engagements of a successful run.
For all the criticism leveled at Parker for his disastrous business deals in Presley’s later years, in these early days his shrewd wheeling and dealing in getting Presley to a major label, on national television, and to the brink of major stardom is undeniable. Neither of Presley’s two previous managers, Bob Neal and Scotty Moore, had the contacts, the business acumen, or the nerve to do what Tom Parker had done in such a short time.
Presley was no longer the Hillbilly Cat oddball, the dynamic performer but square peg to country music fans and fellow performers. He was now creating his own brand of music and his own fan base. Presley’s elevated status and non-traditional sound caused resentment among some of the stars now warming up for him.
Just before the tour reached Florida, the hot-tempered, hard-drinking Ira Louvin confronted Presley. As the young star quietly played one of his favorite gospel songs on a piano backstage, Louvin asked “why do you play that trash” out there? Some versions of the story have Louvin using a racial slur to describe Presley and his music.
“When I’m back here I play what I like,” Presley shot back. “When I’m out there I play what they like.”
In a 2009 interview Ira’s brother Charlie Louvin said the two never came to blows, but it was close. Ira’s criticism would prove costly to the brothers from Alabama. The Louvins’ gospel tunes were always among Gladys Presley’s favorites. “We went by her house and delivered our new album to her personally,” Charlie Louvin recalled. Because of Ira’
s harsh criticism of him, Presley never recorded a Louvin Brothers song, and Charlie felt it was due to that backstage confrontation.
“That cost our catalogue millions,” he lamented.
Parker drove the musicians hard. When a promoter oversold the show, Parker scheduled an extra concert without bothering to inform or compensate the performers. Determined not to be pushed around, the volatile Ira Louvin demanded that they be paid. Not about to be taken to task by a petulant musician, Parker canceled the extra concert, leaving hundreds of fans in line disappointed.
When Presley debuted “Heartbreak Hotel” on the February 18 episode of Stage Show, band director Tommy Dorsey insisted his orchestra accompany Presley. No matter how hard the young star pushed the tempo and intensity of the song, the orchestra could not or would not keep up. A trumpet solo in the middle was more like Taps for the song itself. Like Presley’s first visit to the Opry, his first nationally televised performance of “Heartbreak Hotel” was a flop. Some artists on the current tour, jealous of the young star overshadowing them, delighted in watching Presley’s song fizzle on television.
After the show, Presley and the band faced a grueling fifteen-hour drive from New York to Tampa to make the Sunday afternoon matinee show. “All we knew was drive, drive, drive,” Moore recalled. Another new face to Presley’s touring company was familiar; his old Memphis school chum and protector Red West, brought in to help handle the driving and security. West was among the earliest of Presley’s entourage of constant companions; employees who became known as the Memphis Mafia.
In the days before luxurious tour buses where you could stretch out for some decent rest, in February 1956 it was still a bunch of men crammed into a sedan driving all the way down the eastern seaboard without the benefit of super highways. After three shows in Tampa, the band was due for four more the next day across the state in West Palm Beach. Sleep or no sleep, Presley’s growing fan base expected the same raucous energy for the seven shows he was due to perform in the next forty eight-hours. With that kind of breakneck schedule, one can understand why some performers were tempted to use artificial stimulants to keep going.
In Tampa, headlining a concert still only meant a twenty-minute performance for Presley, perhaps stretching to a half hour. Despite the so-so rendition of “Heartbreak Hotel” on Stage Show, the single was starting to get some airplay. In a matter of days it would begin a climb to the top of the Billboard charts.
Red Robertson’s photo of Presley taken at Tampa’s Hesterly Armory in July was now the centerpiece of concert advertisements by the Nashville-based Hatch Show Prints. Original versions of the now classic playbills used to advertise Presley’s 1956 concerts nationwide are highly collectible and can sell for tens of thousands of dollars.
More than 200 miles across the midsection of Florida, in West Palm Beach, was Presley’s first theater venue; some referred to these as palaces. Tom Parker booked his young star and aspiring film actor in them as a way to stoke the fires of interest from West Coast film studio executives. As Parker’s biographer pointed out, “Booking him into all of the Paramount-controlled theaters in Florida and up the East Coast, where the singer packed every one he played, the word couldn’t help but get back to Paramount’s top brass.” As Presley’s singing career took off that year, for better or worse, so did his acting. By the time he made his first appearance with Ed Sullivan late that summer, Presley was beginning work on his first film, Love Me Tender.
The Palms Theater at the corner of Clematis Street and Narcissus Avenue seated fourteen hundred. That meant well over five thousand people watched Presley during the course of two matinee and two evening concerts; the schedule called for shows at 2:00, 5:00, 7:00, and 9:00 p.m.—the first time Presley was called upon to perform four Florida shows in a single day. Given the amount of adrenaline and energy required for his concerts, on the heels of an already long week, that one day in West Palm Beach was grueling even by Presley’s standards.
“All the girls were hooting and hollering,” remembered Joyce Maloney of Lake Worth, who was nineteen when she and a friend saw Presley perform at the Palms. “He was doing something that no one had ever done before, rocking and rolling and doing all these gyrations.”
After his second matinee Presley ducked out of the theater, and on the street he ran into Jim Ponce, who had just completed his day shift as front desk manager at the Pennsylvania Hotel, where the artists were staying. “Where can someone get a beer?” asked Presley, who was never much of a drinker. Ponce told the young singer he was headed down the street to the Marine Bar, a hangout for working-class painters and truck drivers in the tony downtown district of West Palm Beach.
“Can I go with you?” asked Presley.
As the two strode in that direction Presley, fresh from performances in the frigid Carolinas and New York City, said he liked being in West Palm Beach, especially for the warm weather. When the two men arrived at the Marine Bar, the bartender’s reception of Presley was icy, demanding proof that the singer really was twenty-one.
“Don’t you know who this is, this is Elvis Presley?” Ponce told him. After all, his name was on the Palms’ marquee. “I don’t care who he is,” the unimpressed bartender replied. “He needs a card.”
Dejected at being unable to help Presley grab a beer between performances, Ponce walked him back to the hotel. Within moments an abrupt and unhappy Tom Parker appeared. Without saying a word to Ponce or even having the courtesy to acknowledge his presence, Parker demanded to know where Presley had been and ordered him back into the hotel.
To Ponce it was clear that Presley hadn’t told anyone where he was going before he tried to step down the block for a cold drink. He still had a pair of evening concerts to perform, and the teetotaling allbusiness Parker acted like an angry parent. “He came on so heavy,” Ponce said of Parker. “Elvis sort of cowed down a little. He acted like he was scared of him.”
Generations after what he calls his “two-block walk with Elvis,” Jim Ponce remembered how he was able to spend time with Presley, even go into a crowded bar with him, without anyone taking a second look. Though Presley’s star was beginning to rise fast, no one stopped him for a picture or autograph. Remarkably, despite performing four shows in one day to five thousand fans, he was still able to walk the street between shows like the blue-collar worker he used to be.
“I’m ninety-seven, no wait, ninety-six, no need to rush things,” deadpanned Ponce, who was waiting for his clothes washer to click off. “I guess at the time I was disappointed I didn’t get to drink a beer with him,” he recalled of that late afternoon walk with Presley. The former hotel man of seventy years had another regret. “I thought my God, I should have saved the sheets he slept on.” Many hotel managers did just that, and cut them up and sold them to rabid fans looking for any souvenir of Presley.
The same held true for that no-nonsense bartender who refused the young singer a drink. Some weeks later, when Presley became much better known, the bartender asked Ponce: “When I turned that young man down, was that really Elvis Presley?” Ponce assured him it was and pointed to the elevated piano behind the round bar. “I said, ‘he most likely would have been singing for us.’” The stunned bartender was left to ponder what could have been, the afternoon he bounced Elvis Presley from the Marine Bar in West Palm Beach.
Within hours of the evening’s last performance, Presley and his road warrior bandmates traversed the heart of south-central Florida once more, around the state’s largest inland body of water, Lake Okeechobee, bound for Sarasota and four more shows, 175 miles away. To keep them company in such a desolate part of Florida, all-night disc jockey Jerry Wichner spun top-forty tunes on WINZ-AM out of Miami (pronounced “Myam-uh” by locals). Truth be told, Wichner did much more talking than spinning and quickly became a late night fixture to love struck teens and a legion of other dedicated listeners. Within the first seventy-two hours of his latest Florida tour, Elvis Presley performed eleven shows in three cities on two coas
ts. Later in the week, more shows were booked to the north, crisscrossing the Florida-Georgia border.
Another grand movie palace awaited Presley’s arrival in Sarasota. Located at 61 North Pineapple Avenue, the Mediterranean Revival–style Florida Theater made the transition from silent films to talkies. Vaudeville legends like W. C. Fields and Will Rogers performed when it opened as the Edwards Theater in 1926. On January 31, 1952, Dorothy Lamour, Betty Hutton, and Charlton Heston attended the world premiere of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, filmed the year before in Sarasota. Today the theater, with its grand three-story atrium, is home to the Sarasota Opera.
This theater, with its elegant environs, represented the most ornate Florida venue Presley had headlined to date; quite a step up from performing on a flatbed trailer in a livestock pen. A bastion of culture, especially in the winter season, Sarasota had a muted response to Presley. Ads in the Sarasota Herald listed show times of 2:15, 4:30, 7:45, and 9:45; tickets were 76 cents for the early shows and a dollar apiece for the evening concerts. Although “Heartbreak Hotel” had been out for weeks, the ads list “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” and “Mystery Train” as singles fans would recognize. There is no indication that Presley’s arrival drew as much as a small preview article.
“The biggest commotion Elvis created here,” remembered Sarasota County’s archivist Mark D. Smith, “was when he broke a string and a young girl was sent dashing down to Roehr’s Machine Shop, then on Main Street, for an ‘A’ string for his guitar.” An editorial in the Sarasota Journal noted Presley’s allegedly less than kind behavior toward a group of female fans backstage. Without giving a hint of specifics about the offenses in question, the editorial was but a glimpse of criticism to come.
Elvis Ignited Page 7
