Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  Steve Sholes was practically beside himself when he heard how the session had gone. He had told the Colonel, how many times had he told the Colonel, he had told Tom over and over again that more preparation time was needed, RCA had a schedule to maintain, he was under increasing pressure to have the second album ready by April 15 for scheduled fall release. “I know you have Elvis on a heavy personal appearance program and I certainly can’t blame you,” he had written back in February, “but the main purpose of this letter is to point out that we still must get a number of additional recordings from Elvis in the near future.” They had gotten not a single one in the intervening months, and now here it was mid April and Tom was still not listening, it was obvious that the boy was not listening (if he was even capable of listening), and Sholes wondered more and more if Nashville was the right place to even try to record him. Chet was his protégé, he had made Chet his Nashville a&r man, but it was obvious that Chet and the boy were not hitting it off at all; he could tell from Chet’s noncommittal report, not to mention the fact that they had gotten only the one song, that something was wrong. He waited a couple of weeks, then fired off yet another letter to Tom, complaining once again that attention should be turned to the recordings—but it was like trying to stop a runaway train. At the Nashville session Elvis had been presented with a gold record for “Heartbreak Hotel,” and the album had already sold more than 362,000 copies: Sholes was being strangled by his own success.

  The session might have continued if there had been a better feeling to it, but Elvis and the boys were anxious to get home for a few hours after being away so long, and Chet just had the one three-hour slot booked anyway. They took their chartered plane back to Memphis that afternoon and on the way ran into some turbulence. This time, Scotty said, “Bill’s going berserk. He’s scared to death, really he would have jumped out of the plane if he could have. Elvis said, ‘Just hang on, Bill, when we get to Memphis we’re turning this thing loose.’ Then we caught a commercial flight to wherever we had to be the next day.”

  They continued their Texas tour: San Antonio, Amarillo, Corpus Christi, and Waco, where Elvis gave a brief interview on Tuesday night, shortly before going onstage, to Waco News-Tribune reporter Bea Ramirez. “What do you want to know about me, honey?” he said as he stared out at the four thousand screaming teenagers from backstage, “half scared,” wrote Ramirez, “and half unbelieving.”

  “Elvis, have you any idea just what it was that started the girls going crazy over you?”

  “No, I don’t. I guess it’s just something God gave me. I believe that, you know. Know what I mean, honey? And I’m grateful. Only I’m afraid. I’m afraid I’ll go out like a light, just like I came on. Know what I mean, honey?”

  Presley has a way with that “honey” business. When he talks, he looks straight ahead, or sort of dreamy like in no direction at all. Then he turns with that “know what I mean, honey?” His face is close, real close. Right in your face—almost….

  “Elvis, I hear you walk in your sleep.”

  “Well, I have nightmares.”

  “What kind?”

  “I dream I’m about to fight somebody or about to be in a car wreck or that I’m breaking things. Know what I mean, honey?” (I don’t have any idea what he means.)

  “Where are you from?”

  “From Memphis, Tennessee.”

  “Oh yes, that’s where all the hillbilly singers come from, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe so, but I’m no hillbilly singer.”

  “Well, have you typed yourself, I mean your type of singing?”

  “No, I don’t dare.”

  “Why?”

  “Cause I’m scared, know what I mean, honey? Real scared.”

  “What of?”

  “I don’t know… I don’t know. Know what I mean, honey?”

  At this point I thanked him for his time and started to make a beeline for the door. He grabbed my hand, sat there looking sleepy-eyed into my face and fanned his long lashes while he said:

  “Write me up good, will you, honey?”

  On Saturday night, April 21, they played two shows at the City Auditorium in Houston. At the end of the first show, when the crowd wouldn’t leave, Elvis left the predominantly female audience with the thought that “it’s been a wonderful show, folks. Just remember this. Don’t go milking the cow on a rainy day. If there’s lightning, you may be left holding the bag.” As the Houston Chronicle reported, “Four thousand females just died.” After the show, with the first open date in weeks in front of them, Scotty and Elvis and Bill headed for the Club El Dorado across town, where blues singer Lowell Fulson was headlining. Fulson, who had had a big hit the previous year with “Reconsider Baby,” was a regular at the Club Handy and the Hippodrome in Memphis and a big favorite of Dewey Phillips’. During the break Scotty introduced himself and Elvis, and Fulson called them up onstage for a couple of numbers during the next set. For Scotty it was a highly memorable experience. “I remember me and Lowell standing up toe to toe, getting down on some blues.” One of those, recalled Lowell, was Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” “I don’t know what the other one was. Anyway, Elvis sounded good, and the house accepted it, so he [Scotty] said, ‘What do you think of him, what do you think of the boy?’ I said, ‘Well, one thing, he’s a pretty boy, and the women will make him. He won’t have to work too hard.’ He got a big bang out of that. He laughed for a good while.”

  On the next day, a Sunday, they boarded a flight to Las Vegas.

  THE LAS VEGAS BOOKING appears to have come about as something of a last-minute arrangement, since there were no advance notices in the trades. Elvis was booked in for the first two weeks of a four-week Freddy Martin engagement in the thousand-seat Venus Room, at the New Frontier Hotel, at $7,500 a week, which the Colonel was said to have demanded in cash because, as he told Time magazine, “no check is good. They got an atom-bomb testing place out there in the desert. What if some feller pressed the wrong button?” Bill Randle, the Cleveland DJ who had remained in the picture up to this time (Steve Sholes pointed out to the Colonel in March what a great job Randle was doing for them, to which the Colonel responded somewhat acerbically that he had eyes of his own), occasionally claimed credit for setting up the contract, and he may well have had a hand in it, but the Colonel had his own contacts, and even with so little lead time the Colonel left nothing to chance. When Elvis arrived in Las Vegas, there was a twenty-four-foot-high cutout of Elvis Presley standing out in front of the hotel beside the casino entrance—it was the same action photograph, taken in Florida in the summer of 1955, that graced the cover not only of his first album but of the song folio and any number of additional publicity items. His name was up on the marquee, just below comedian Shecky Greene’s, as “Extra Added Attraction Elvis Presley,” and in the print ads as “The Atomic Powered Singer.”

  It was the first sit-down gig of his career. As fellow promoter Gabe Tucker wrote, even the Colonel appeared to be taken in by this newfound elevation in status, which followed statements to his colleagues that he needed to find a whole new kind of venue for his act suitable to Elvis’ phenomenal success. Bandleader Freddy Martin, who specialized in pop arrangements of the classics (he started with Tchaikovsky but branched out to Grieg, Rimsky-Korsakov, movie themes, and Khachaturian as well), had been enjoying hits consistently since 1933 and featured a $40,000 floor show, including a seventeen-piece orchestra, twenty-eight singers, twin pianos, dancers, ice skaters, and selections from Oklahoma! On opening night, New Frontier vice president T. W. Richardson, who according to Gabe Tucker had first heard Elvis in his hometown of Biloxi and contacted the Colonel about the booking the month before, invited a bunch of friends up from Houston to catch the show. Elvis was the closing act, and as the Freddy Martin Orchestra played their arrangement of “Rock Around the Clock,” the curtain rose to reveal a very nervous, very out-of-place hillbilly quartet. Scotty and D.J. and Bill were all wearing light-colored sports jackets, dress p
ants, bow ties, and white shirts, while Elvis was dressed neatly in loafers, dress pants, and black bow tie, with a light-colored, western-cut checked sports jacket with a dark-cowled collar. From the opening notes of the song that he introduced as “Heartburn Motel” to his stammered attempts to thank Freddy Martin for the nice introduction, you could hear a pin drop. When Elvis started singing, Tucker related, one of Richardson’s guests “jumped up from their ringside table and shouted, ‘Goddamn it, shit! What is all this yelling and screaming? I can’t take this, let’s go to the tables and gamble.’ ”

  “For the first time in months we could hear ourselves when we played out of tune,” said Bill Black plaintively. “After the show our nerves were pretty frayed, and we would get together in pairs and talk about whoever wasn’t around to defend himself.” “They weren’t my kind of audience,” said Elvis. “It was strictly an adult audience. The first night especially I was absolutely scared stiff [but] afterwards I got a little more relaxed and I finally got ’em on my side.” “We didn’t even know we were failures,” said Scotty, but after that night, reported Billboard, they no longer closed the show.

  Nonetheless he persisted. He played out the full two weeks, and as hometown reporter Bob Johnson wrote, “Elvis, who has played hard audiences before, kept right in there busting guitar strings and shaking his legs and the rafters…. And the ice began to break.” Bill Randle, who viewed the engagement almost as a social “embarrassment,” had arranged to have some of the performances filmed, and Hal Wallis showed up to check out his investment. Judy Spreckels, the attractive twenty-four-year-old divorced sixth wife of sugar king Adolph Spreckels, II, whom Elvis had met briefly in California, showed up and served as his “secretary” and aide-de-camp. Curiosity-seeking celebrities like Ray Bolger, Phil Silvers, and Liberace were prominent in the audience, and there is even a film of Elvis and Liberace clowning it up for the cameras. Liberace, one of his mother’s favorite performers (Elvis made sure to get the flamboyant showman’s autograph), is pretending to play Scotty’s guitar, while Elvis flings himself into it, throwing his head back and laughing easily as he sings, perhaps, “Blue Suede Shoes.” Not about to be upstaged, Liberace draws a square in the air, pointing at his brother George. It is, in many ways, a picture of perfect innocence.

  They played what Elvis calculated to be twenty-eight twelve-minute shows (two shows a night, at 8:00 and midnight, for fourteen nights), and the rest of the time he was free to do as he liked. He and his cousin Gene, whom he described as his “utility man” and who had replaced Red on this tour, rode the Dodgem cars at the local amusement park almost every day, and in two weeks Elvis estimated that he spent more than a hundred dollars on rides for himself and his friends. He lounged around at poolside, flirted with the girls, went to the movies, caught as many acts as he could, stayed up all night long, and if he felt any doubts he kept them to himself. “One thing about Las Vegas pleased Elvis,” wrote Johnson, who went out to report on the event, “it never goes to sleep. He had company during those long night hours, and night had become like day to him.” It was like being in a city where you played dress-up all the time. Every time he entered a room he created a stir, the showgirls fawned on him, you never knew what was going to happen next. But he didn’t drink, he didn’t gamble (“It don’t appeal to me,” he said, explaining why he “never dropped a nickel in a slot machine”); whatever he was doing, whether it was what his mother had raised him to do or not, he wasn’t hurting anybody. One time he missed an appointment with United Press reporter Aline Mosby because he was at the movies, a Randolph Scott western, but he made it up to her. He saw the Four Lads again and met former teen sensation Johnny Ray for the first time (both were discoveries of Bill Randle’s; Elvis had met the Four Lads at the Cleveland show that Randle had filmed). He caught a little bit of Liberace’s show at the Riviera, and he went back again and again to catch the lounge act at the Sands, Freddie Bell and the Bellboys.

  The Bellboys, a highly visual act who provided both action and comic relief, had had a minor hit the previous year with a song that had been a huge rhythm and blues success for Duke/Peacock artist Big Mama Thornton in 1953. “Hound Dog” had been written by two white teenagers, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who specialized in rhythm and blues, and was a very odd choice for a male performer, since it was written from a female point of view. Nonetheless, it was the showstopper of Bell’s act, even retaining some of the original’s rhumba-flavored beat, and it sparked a determination on Elvis’ part to incorporate it into his own show. “We stole it straight from them,” said Scotty. “He already knew it, knew the song, but when we seen those guys do it, he said, ‘There’s a natural.’ We never did it in Las Vegas, but we were just looking on it as comic relief, if you will, just another number to do onstage.”

  On the first Saturday of the engagement the New Frontier scheduled a teenage matinee especially for Elvis Presley fans. Proceeds from the show were to go toward lights for a youth baseball park, and finally there was some semblance of Elvis Presley normality. “The carnage was terrific,” wrote Bob Johnson in a story that was headlined “The Golden Boy Reaches for a Star While the Music Goes Round and Round and—”: “They pushed and shoved to get into the 1000-seat room, and several hundred thwarted youngsters buzzed like angry hornets outside. After the show, bedlam! A laughing, shouting, idolatrous mob swarmed him…. They got his shirt, and it was shredded. A triumphant girl seized a button, clutched it as tho it were a diamond.”

  They played out the rest of the engagement with increasing confidence. Mr. Martin was more respectful, even if he retained a little bit of a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward the whole thing. “We should have five minutes’ silence now,” he announced after Elvis’ act. “Makes me wonder if I’ve been wasting my time for the last twenty years.” One of the casino owners, Mr. Frank Williams of Osceola, Arkansas, gave him an eight-hundred-dollar watch with diamonds for the numbers, and Elvis reciprocated with half a dozen letters of thanks. Even the Colonel, who was initially discomfited by what amounted to the first misstep in a series of otherwise perfectly calculated moves, seemed finally to have come to terms with the value of the experience. In Scotty’s view, “I think in one sense it was good, because it was completely different. That’s what’s funny about Vegas. People that were there, if you’d lifted them out and taken them over to San Antonio, the big coliseum, they’d have been going crazy. It’s just a different atmosphere. But we had a ball out there. We really did.”

  On the last night, which was recorded by a member of the audience and released by RCA twenty-five years later, Elvis still sounds nervous, self-conscious, glad to be done with it all—but aware that he has carried it off. “Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen,” he says as the polite applause dies down. “I would like to tell you, it’s really been a pleasure being in Las Vegas. This makes our second week here, and tonight’s our last night, and we’ve had a pretty hard time—stay… ah, had a pretty good time while we were here.” He introduces “Blue Suede Shoes” by saying, “This song here is called, ‘Get out of the stables, Grandma, you’re too old to be horsing around,’ ” and when that doesn’t get much of a laugh he turns to the orchestra leader and says, “Do you know that song, Mr. Martin? You do? You know that one about ‘Take back my golden garter, my leg is turning green’?” When Martin calls him back graciously for an encore, he says, “Thank you, friends, I was coming back anyway.”

  “Like a jug of corn liquor at a champagne party,” declared Newsweek. “Elvis Presley, coming in on a wing of advance hoopla, doesn’t hit the mark here,” reported Variety. Life headlined its April 30 story “A Howling Hillbilly Success.” Any publicity, said the Colonel, was good publicity. “Heartbreak Hotel” was at number one; “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” had just been released to advance sales of 300,000; RCA Victor reported that Elvis Presley’s records accounted for half of their pop sales; and he was going home to the new house he had been able to purchase with his earnings for hims
elf and his parents. They could write whatever they liked, there was no stopping him now. He really believed that.

  He was back in Memphis two days later and stopped by the newspaper office on Tuesday night. “Man, I really like Vegas,” he announced. “I’m going back there the first chance I get.” He was nettled at a report that a Halifax radio station had given all of its Elvis Presley records away in hopes that it would hear no more. “I didn’t know that there were any radio stations in Nova Scotia” was his first reaction, reported the newspaper. “The more they try to ban the stuff, man, the more they’ll have to listen to. I mean, man, a lot of people like it, man, it’s really hot right now.” Then he reminisced about his start in the business just two short years ago. “I was strumming the guitar in Mississippi before I ever came to Memphis,” he said. “My father bought one for $12—it was the best investment he ever made.” And then he was off into the night in his “Kelly green frontiersman shirt, black trousers and doeskin loafers,” whether on his Harley motorcycle, one of his three Cadillacs, or the three-wheeled German Messerschmidt he had recently purchased, the paper didn’t report. He was going to be headlining the big Cotton Carnival bill at Ellis Auditorium one week from tonight, and he had gigs booked in Minnesota and Wisconsin starting on the weekend, but for now he was just going to ride around town.