Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  “Now this was a long time before he was a big hit, you know,” Haley recalled to interviewer Ken Terry. “He was a big tall young kid. He didn’t have too much personality at that time…. The first time I remember talking to Elvis was in, I think, Oklahoma City. He was standing backstage, and we were getting ready to go on. And he came over and told me he was a fan of mine and we talked—an awful nice kid…. He wanted to learn, which was the important thing. I remember one night he went out and did a show and asked me what I thought. I had watched the show, and I told him, ‘Elvis, you’re leaning too much on ballads and what have you. You’ve got a natural rhythm feeling, so do your rhythm tunes.’… He had the attitude which most young kids do that he was really going to go out there and stop the show and knock Bill Haley off the stage, which at that time was an impossibility because we were number one. And he went out and he was facing Bill Haley fans…. When I came back after doing my show he was kind of half crying in the dressing room, very downhearted, and I sat down with him and I told him, ‘Look, you got a lot of talent,’ and I explained to him a lot of things. He and I buddied together for about a week and a half after that.”

  In other respects life on the road was just the usual form of insanity: shows increasingly marked by sheer, unrestrained pandemonium; crazy girls who would do anything just about anywhere and, not infrequently, the complications of jealous boyfriends; desperate drives to make the next show after staying up all night in the town where they had played their last one; two or three calls a day home, no matter what else was going on, or who else was around; firecrackers. “Elvis was one of those guys that had a lot of nervous energy,” said D. J. Fontana, the newest member of the band. “A superhyper guy—superhyper. Always jumping around or doing something. He never got tired, but when he did, he’d just crash eleven or twelve hours straight in those days. He was always doing something. We’d be driving down the road, we’d never get to a show date on time, because we’d stop every thirty miles to buy firecrackers. He’d make us stop at every other stand, that sucker would. I’d say, ‘We’ve got a bagful.’ And he’d say, ‘Well, you know, man, we might need some more.’ We’d stop and buy some more firecrackers just for something to do.”

  He was headlining his own show now almost everywhere. In West Texas it was the Elvis Presley Jamboree, with a supporting cast of up to a dozen that included Johnny Cash, Porter Wagoner, and Wanda Jackson. In Lubbock the young singer Buddy Holly, now actively looking for a recording contract of his own, opened the bill for him once again and sought his advice. In Houston he went to see Bob Wills with Tillman Franks on an off night and was amused when Wills told the promoter, Biff Collie, “Bring the young punk back.”

  He was finally getting used to it, up to a point. He no longer believed it was all just going to go away—even though in interviews he was still inclined, with becoming modesty, to say that he did. Part of him still didn’t believe that it was all really happening: the records, the shows, the success, the Colonel, the sex. But part of him—most of him—did. It was all over with Dixie, he realized. He didn’t want it to be, but that was the way it had to be. They had talked it over—over and over again. He never really told her that he had been unfaithful, but he knew that she knew. And he knew that she forgave him. It wasn’t a life for a decent Christian girl—sometimes when things got quiet or he was alone for a moment and had time to contemplate, he wasn’t so sure it was a life for a decent Christian of any sort—but, he thought, he could handle it. And if he couldn’t, if it got too much for him, he could always go back, couldn’t he? Dixie had told Gladys that it was over, and the two women had cried about it together, but they had agreed they would always be friends because they both loved him so. When she told her own mother, her mother was almost equally upset. “It was hard for my family to accept. They loved him dearly, too. Mother would say, ‘Well, what are you going to do if you meet somebody else and get married, and after you get married, Elvis comes back and says, ‘Hey, I made a mistake, and I want you to come and be my wife’? And I said, ‘Well, I’ll just divorce whoever I’m married to and go live with him.’ It was so simple in my mind. I thought: ‘That’s what I’ll do.’ ”

  The Presleys, meanwhile, had moved again, just around the corner this time, to 1414 Getwell, which got them off a busy thoroughfare, and they were angry at their former landlord anyway for trying to hold them up, Vernon felt, when they had expressed an interest in purchasing the Lamar Avenue house. Once again they were forced to move in Elvis’ absence, and once again Gladys wished that he could simply stop right now, buy a little business with the money he had made, marry Dixie, have three children. But she knew it wasn’t to be. And she clung to his telephone calls, they spoke to each other in a language all their own, as she proudly kept track of his growing fame. She kept up her scrapbook religiously. Just as she once saved all of his baby pictures and school reports and memorabilia, now she saved every story she came across that was written about him; she and Vernon looked at them again and again. “When Elvis was a youngster down in Tupelo, Mississippi, folks used to stop him on the street and say, ‘Sing for us, Elvis,’ ” read the latest, in Country Song Roundup. “And he would… standing on the street corners, in the hot Mississippi sun… or in church… or at school… anywhere someone wanted to hear him, he’d sing.” And in the Saturday, October 22, 1955, edition of the Cleveland Press, in Bill Randle’s column, next to Amy Vanderbilt’s and just above a review of a spoken-word recording of T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, was an item called “Turntable Topics,” which read: “Turning my life into a frenzy this week was a shooting company from Universal International Pictures. I’m not a Gable at acting, so I’m fortunate to be supported in this film short by Pat Boone, the Four Lads, Bill Haley and his Comets, and the phenomenal Elvis Presley. Called “Top Jock,’ the film will run about 15 minutes when it hits your movie house.”

  ELVIS PLAYED Cleveland’s Circle Theater once again, on Wednesday night, October 19, in an all-star country music jamboree headlined by Roy Acuff and Kitty Wells. The next day Randle’s film was scheduled to be shot at 1:00 in the afternoon at the Brooklyn High School auditorium in front of the school’s three thousand students, and then at 8:00 that night at St. Michael’s Hall, at East 100th and Union. Randle had filmed a number of shorts before—with Peggy Lee and Benny Goodman and Stan Kenton—and in fact the idea was for this one to end up in New York with performances by Patti Page, Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, and other “legitimate” pop stars. But Cleveland was the jumping-off point and proved hospitable enough until Universal director Arthur Cohen balked at the idea of putting on Presley, after watching his Circle Theater performance and going through initial run-throughs at the high school auditorium the next day. According to Randle: “He thought he was ‘pitiful,’ completely unacceptable, not worth the time and effort to set up the numbers. I told him about the phenomenal response Presley was getting… but Cohen was adamant and proceeded to film the established stars as they went on.” Randle then consulted with cameraman Jack Barnett, who agreed to film Presley if Randle would pay for the overtime shooting himself. This proved to be an effective solution, and the show went on.

  Pat Boone never forgot the occasion of his first meeting with Elvis Presley. Boone, just twenty-one years old and a student at North Texas State Teachers College (he would transfer to Columbia University the following year), had grown up in Nashville and was married to Red Foley’s daughter, Shirley. He had already won Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, made frequent appearances on the Arthur Godfrey show, and had enjoyed success on two Nashville labels, achieving a national hit on Dot with a cover of the Charms’ “Two Hearts” earlier in the year. At the moment his new single, the El Dorados’ “At My Front Door (Crazy Little Mama),” was just beginning to climb the pop charts. Randle picked him up at the airport, “and on the way into town he told me about a kid on the show who was going to be a big star, I asked him who it was, and he said, ‘Elvis Presley, from Mem
phis, Tennessee.’ I said, ‘Oh yeah?’ I had lived in Texas, and I had seen his name on some country jukeboxes, and I wondered how in the world a hillbilly could be the next big thing, especially with a name like Elvis Presley. So I was curious, and sure enough, at the high school auditorium where we did this thing, he came backstage, and already he had a little entourage [probably Red and his cousin Gene]. Now, nobody in Cleveland had ever heard of him, so the fact that he had an entourage struck me as funny. I went over dressed in my button-down collar and thin tie and white buck shoes and introduced myself. He mumbled something I couldn’t understand, leaned back against the wall with his head down, and never looked me in the eye. So, I said, ‘Boy, Bill Randle thinks you’re really going to be big,’ and he said, “Mmm… mrrrbbllee…,’ sort of a country twang mumble. I just couldn’t tell what he was saying. He had his shirt collar turned up, and his hair was real greasy, and it was, well, he was always looking down, you know, like he couldn’t look up. I thought to myself, what’s the matter with this guy? I thought his performance would be a catastrophe, that he’d pass out onstage or something.”

  Elvis was glad to see Bill Haley, whom he had left in Texas just the previous week. DJ Tommy Edwards wanted to take a picture of the two of them together, and while they were backstage in the dressing room, Elvis remarked that he hoped these Yankees liked his music, giving Haley no indication that he had ever played Cleveland before. Randle introduced him to Mike Stewart, a big bear of a man who had been very successful in managing the Four Lads and would one day take over the United Artists label. Stewart was so impressed by both the boy’s talent and charm that he called Mitch Miller at Columbia Records the following day, only adding to the chorus of praise that Randle had started and that Miller clearly wished would go away.

  The show itself was a great success. Each act did four or five numbers, with Elvis, Scotty, and Bill (D.J. doesn’t seem to have made the trip) performing “That’s All Right,” “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” and his latest coupling, “Mystery Train” and “I Forgot to Remember to Forget,” which had entered the national country charts the month before. Pat Boone’s fears were not realized. When Elvis hit the stage in his tweedy brown jacket, red socks, white bucks, and white pleated shirt with boldly embroidered front, he looked to Boone “like he had just gotten off a motorcycle. He had his shirt open, and he looked like he was laughing at something, like he had some private joke, you know? He didn’t say anything, just went into some rockabilly type song, and the kids loved it. I was really surprised. Then he opened his mouth and said something, and it was so hillbilly that he lost the crowd. Then he sang another song and won them over again. As long as he didn’t talk, he was okay. It took me a long time to win that crowd.”

  It went pretty much the same at St. Michael’s, only with greater intensity. Unlike the scene at the high school, where the kids were restrained by the looming presence of their teachers (the athletic director, Mr. Joy, held the doors to keep the students away from Pat Boone), here the girls screamed without restraint and fought to get to Elvis and Boone as they performed. When Presley broke the strings on his guitar, Randle said, and then smashed the guitar on the floor, “it was mass hysteria. We needed police to get him out of the hall, clothes torn, a sleeve ripped from his jacket. Boone also got the same response. He said after the show that he had never believed what had happened could have happened to him. He said for the first time he felt he was going to make it all the way—like Pat Boone.”

  There was no question that Bill Randle had spotted a winner, and for the entire length of time that he was in negotiations for an executive position with Hill and Range (which ended in November, when he turned down the song publisher’s deal and decided to go with a more lucrative stock-option arrangement with the Cleveland radio station WERE), he had no doubt that he was still in the picture. The Aberbach brothers were clearly anxious for him to stay involved with Presley (or was that a ploy to get Randle to sign with them?), the film was just waiting on the New York shoot, and if they could successfully negotiate union problems there, it would emerge as the first movie short devoted to the new music, with the focus on what its subtitle suggested: A Day in the Life of a Famous Disc Jockey. Randle maintained good television and Las Vegas connections, which was where he thought the boy’s career should be headed. But reality now came jarringly face-to-face with Bill Randle. For Colonel Parker at almost exactly this time took fate into his own hands, went to New York and ensconced himself at the Warwick Hotel, where, armed with an impressively sweeping document from Vernon and Gladys Presley authorizing him to represent their boy (he had dictated its legalistic language to them in an October 20 telegram of his own), he for the first time formally entertained offers for an artist whose contract he did not, strictly speaking, formally possess. Four days later, on October 24, he contacted Sam Phillips, informing him of his new managerial status and demanding that he name his “best flat price for complete dissolution free and clear of the talent and recording services of Elvis Presley.”

  This was, finally, too much for Phillips. Up till then it had all been something of a dance whose consummation, if preordained, had not yet had to be squarely faced. Now with a hit record on his hands and new expenses cropping up seemingly every day on every front, Phillips felt as if not only his relationship with Elvis but the credibility of his record company was being undermined by this continuing atmosphere of uncertainty that he had himself allowed to be set in motion. “I was pissed off. I got so goddam mad, I called up Bob Neal and I said, ‘Bob, you know what the hell you doing to me?’ He said, ‘Aw, Sam, I ain’t doing nothing,’ and I said, ‘Goddammit, you’re associated with Tom Parker and he’s putting out this bullshit, after all of what I’ve been through to get this guy going, he’s putting the word out to my distributors that I’m gonna sell Elvis’ contract.’ I said, ‘Man, this is killing me, you’re not just messing with an artist contract here, you messing with my life, man. You just don’t deal with these people [the distributors] unfairly. They’re in this damn thing, too.’ I had worked my ass off—driven sixty-five to seventy-five thousand miles a year to gain their confidence, not only on Elvis but going back to the first damn releases on Sun. I said, ‘This could cost me the company.’ I said, ‘This has got to stop.’

  “So I called Tom Parker at the Warwick Hotel in New York, and he said, ‘Sa-a-am, how you doin’?’ And I said, ‘Well, I ain’t doing worth a damn.’ I said, ‘Look, Tom, this has been going on now basically for three or four months, but I thought nothing of it, ’cause I couldn’t get confirmation from Bob Neal that you good friends of mine would be trying to do me in—advertently or inadvertently.’ He said, ‘Oh, noooo, Sam, no, I don’t understand thaaaat.’ And then he said, ‘But would you be interested in selling Elvis’ contract?’ And I said, ‘Well, I just might could be.’ ‘How much you think you want for him?’ He didn’t say how much he was thinking—just how much would I take. So I said, ‘I hadn’t really thought about it, Tom. But I’ll let you know.’ So he said, ‘Well, look, think about it, and let me know.’ And I thought about it about thirty seconds and called him back.”

  The price that he named was $35,000, plus $5,000 he owed Elvis in back royalties, more than anyone had ever paid for a popular recording artist (by comparison, Columbia had paid $25,000 for the contract of Frankie Laine, an established star, in 1951). Thus formally empowered, the Colonel really got down to business with RCA and Hill and Range.

  To understand why Sam Phillips would want to sell Elvis’ contract in the first place one must understand a complex web of circumstances. To begin with, despite all the success that he had enjoyed in the last year, he was in somewhat desperate financial straits. The demands of manufacturing a hit record (out-of-control manufacturing costs primarily, which had to be paid up front with no guarantee that a great number of the records would not come back as returns from distributors with thirty or sixty days to pay) had stretched his limited resources to the break
ing point. In January he had written to his brother Jud: “I have told you repeatedly that Sun liabilities are three times the assets and I have been making every effort possible to keep out of bankruptcy…. Anyone less interested in saving face would have given it up long ago, but I intend to pay every dollar the company owes—including you—even while I know there is no possible way to ever get out with a dollar.”

  In October he finally managed to pay Jud off. He had also completed arrangements to open his first radio station, WHER, with a big band format and an “all-girl” lineup that featured both his assistant, Marion Keisker, and his wife, Becky, among the on-the-air talent. He was working around the clock and beside himself with worry over how he was going to keep his various enterprises afloat. Presley’s royalties were already overdue, and he didn’t doubt that Tom Parker, as his position became more entrenched, was unlikely to be as forbearing as Bob Neal about contractual niceties. More than anything else Sam Phillips was not about to be beholden to any man. He was not going to be known as the proprietor of a one-artist company—he had other artists to develop, he had a number that Carl Perkins had sung to him the other night on the telephone that he believed was going to be a bigger hit than anything he had put out to date, he had no hesitation about selling the damn contract. The only hesitation he had was turning the boy over to that damn barker who called himself Colonel, but, he reasoned, “any time you think you know what the public is going to want, that’s when you know you’re looking at a damn fool when you’re looking in the mirror. I thought, Well, if I can just get some money…. But I wanted Elvis to succeed so bad—and this is kind of a selfish thing, but I’ve got to say it—because I didn’t want them to be able to say, ‘Well, this was just a fluke.’ ”