Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  Scotty, D.J., and Bill were watching the clock with increasing apprehension as the three-day session came to a close. They had been promised the opportunity to record some instrumentals on Elvis’ time when the session was over. Actually, the idea had been kicking around for close to a year now, but this time they had a firm commitment for studio time, and they had worked up some tunes, and Elvis was even talking about playing piano on one or two. When it came down to it, though, Elvis felt tired, or was simply not in the mood, and Tom Diskin came into the studio and said, “That’s it.” Scotty and Bill protested that they had a deal, but Diskin told them Colonel said they could do it another time and told everyone to pack up, unmoved by either their anger or protestations. Bill hit the roof, muttering to himself and slamming his electric bass into its case, while they waited for Elvis to stand up for them—but he never did. He didn’t say a word, in fact, and, as had so often been the case, seemed to slide out of the situation without even acknowledging that he knew what was going on.

  Scotty and Bill went back to the hotel, but the gnawing feeling of resentment wouldn’t go away; it just grew stronger and stronger until, finally, later in the evening, they wrote up a letter of resignation which each of them would personally sign and send. They had expected more from Elvis, they had expected to share in his success, and here they were still only making two hundred dollars a week on the road and responsible for their own expenses. They were in debt, they needed financial help, they just wanted some fucking respect. Within the formal constraints of a letter they were barely able to touch on their long-standing feelings: the fact that they had had only one raise in two years; the cutback in personals to the point that they had played only fourteen dates so far this year; the way in which the Colonel had prevented them from making any endorsements and, as they saw it, simply “squeezed us for a matter of dollars”; the way in which they had been cut off from all access to Elvis—it was almost as if, Bill felt, they were no longer even permitted to talk to him.

  When they approached D.J. with the letter, he declined to sign it. He felt that he had been treated fairly, he explained; he had come in as a salaried employee, he had always gotten paid, he had no real complaints. “Bill was pretty pissed, but I explained my reasons, and they said, ‘Okay, don’t worry about it.’ ” Then they had the letter delivered to Elvis at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

  Elvis read the letter, shook his head, said “Aw, shit,” and passed it around. He obviously couldn’t believe that Scotty and Bill would do something like this to him, that they would humiliate him, in front of the world, in this fashion. It flashed through his mind that maybe this was the beginning of the end: first Dewey, then them. Where was their fucking loyalty? Then he was pissed off. If they had just come to him, he told the guys and anyone who would listen, they could have worked something out. Now he would never take them back. They had probably been hired by someone else—Ricky Nelson or Gene Vincent or one of them. He was wild with grief. Anita, who had arrived from Memphis only that evening, tried to console him. Colonel and Diskin stayed out of his way—the boy would work it out for himself, Colonel said, while Steve Sholes expressed the hope, several times, that the separation would be permanent. In Sholes’ view Elvis could do better, he could get better musicians, brighter musicians, quicker learners, any day of the week.

  The last couple of days in Hollywood were bittersweet. Elvis showed his girl the sights and, before he left, gave her a ring to signify his feelings. He bought it in the Beverly Wilshire jewelry shop, and it was described as eighteen sapphires surrounding a diamond and “very expensive” by “bug-eyed” hotel employees. It was just a “friendship ring,” Anita said, showing it off proudly to reporters, but, secretly, she felt differently.

  The news of the split with Scotty and Bill had reached Memphis by the time Elvis got home on September 11. He called Scotty the following day and offered a raise of $50 across the board, but Scotty said that he would need $10,000 in addition to the raise, if only “out of the kindness of [Elvis’] heart,” just to get out of debt. Elvis said he would think about it, but in the meantime Bob Johnson sniffed out the story and interviewed Scotty and Bill for a feature that ran the next day in which both musicians expressed their disappointment, and described the disagreement, in sorrowful but explicit terms. The crux of the matter, said Scotty, was that “[Elvis] promised us that the more he made the more we would make. But it hasn’t worked that way.”

  Elvis’ reaction was not surprising: he felt even further betrayed and released a statement to the newspaper to accompany an interview in which he told his side of the story.

  “Scotty, Bill, I hope you fellows have good luck,” Elvis’ statement read. “I will give you fellows good recommendations. If you had come to me, we would have worked things out. I would have always taken care of you. But you went to the papers and tried to make me look bad, instead of coming to me so we could work things out. All I can say to you is ‘good luck.’ ” So far as promises were concerned, Elvis said, “I have a good memory and I don’t remember ever telling them [anything like] that.” To Press-Scimitar reporter Bill Burk, Elvis spoke of “certain people close to him who have tried to persuade him to drop his musical group during the last two years. He would not name these people, but said he told them he would not because they were good musicians and because of sentimental reasons. ‘We started out together,’ he said, ‘and I didn’t want to cut anyone out of anything…. These boys could have had a job with me as long as I was making a dime.’ ”

  Their resignations, he told Burk, came at a particularly crucial time. “He plays the Tupelo Fair (which he called ‘my homecoming’) Sept. 27. He said he just received the dates of his next tour, which will be in October…. Elvis said he would immediately begin auditioning for a new guitar player and bass player during the two weeks before the Tupelo Fair. ‘It might take a while,’ he said, ‘but it’s not impossible to find replacements.’ ”

  “We’re both pretty stubborn,” Scotty conceded to the press. “I guess he can be stubborn longer because he’s got more money.”

  HE ARRIVED IN TUPELO with Anita and his parents, along with Cliff, George, Lamar, Alan, and another friend, named Louis Harris. There was as much excitement in town about his upcoming appearance as there had been the previous year, but it was of a different sort, and mindful of his generous donation toward a youth center, the lead editorial in the paper offered an admonitory note to the community to “Let Our Welcome for Elvis Be Truly Warm.” Elvis had been “the best ambassador any town could have,” declared the Tupelo Daily Journal, and “he needs to feel appreciated in at least one community in America for just being himself.” The paper was full of stories about the riots in Little Rock over school integration, and there was even a story with a Memphis dateline about white students from still segregated Humes High School jeering at Negro students on their way to nearby Manassas, but in Tupelo, the paper noted on the front page, while the annual 4-H Club style show would be held in front of the grandstand, “the Negro junior Jersey show will start at 10 A.M. in the Negro section of the fairgrounds.”

  Mr. Savery, the fair manager, had them all over to dinner, and Jack Cristil from WELO spent as much time interviewing Anita as he did Elvis. Did they have marriage plans? the reporters all shouted at him at the press conference in the tent before the performance. “I haven’t found the girl yet,” he said, staring straight at Anita with a look meant just for her. After a slow advance sale, the grandstand was filled to capacity; the band—with Nashville’s Hank “Sugarfoot” Garland on guitar and Chuck Wiginton, a friend of D.J.’s from Dallas, on bass—sounded tight; Colonel made sure that they put up a big banner announcing that Jailhouse Rock was coming soon; and he worked the crowd, and himself, up into the usual frenzy. But somehow it wasn’t the same. It didn’t feel right, he told D.J. afterward. Garland was a helluva guitarist, but you could tell the difference on “Don’t Be Cruel”; Garland could really play, but he didn’t hit that intro the way tha
t Scotty did.

  A feeling of melancholy had stolen over him, as if, somehow, it was all coming to an end. He felt badly let down by Scotty and Bill—he didn’t understand why they had done this to him. And even though things were back to normal with Dewey as of last week, he wasn’t sure they could ever really be the same again. He had stopped by Sun, but things were different there, too, with Marion gone. She and Sam had had a big fight, and she had gone off and enlisted in the air force. The draft was hanging like a dark cloud over his head. Every day there were stories in the paper about it, and reporters wanted to know what he was going to do.

  The week after the Tupelo homecoming, he decided to take them back. Scotty and Bill played a miserable two-week engagement at the Dallas State Fair and then formalized the arrangement, with everyone swallowing his pride a little and the Blue Moon Boys returning on a per diem basis. There were no hard feelings, Scotty said. It was a matter of money all along. For Elvis, though, it would have been hard to say what it was exactly. One day he heard “Jailhouse Rock” on the radio and declared, “Elvis Presley and his one-man band,” with a rueful shake of his head. It seemed like everything was plunging headlong forward, and he didn’t know how to hold it back.

  WALKING IN A DREAM

  October 1957–March 1958

  PORTRAIT.

  (ALFRED WERTHEIMER)

  HERE. READ THIS!” said a reporter, shoving a magazine article into Elvis’ hands. “Rock ’n’ roll smells phony and false,” declared Frank Sinatra in the story’s text. “It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration, and sly, lewd, in plain fact, dirty lyrics… it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth….[It] is the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear.”

  And what was Elvis Presley’s response to that? he was asked, standing in front of a roomful of reporters. It was an hour before his October 28 performance at the Pan Pacific Auditorium, which would mark his Hollywood debut. “I admire the man,” said Elvis. “He has a right to say what he wants to say. He is a great success and a fine actor, but I think he shouldn’t have said it. He’s mistaken about this. This is a trend, just the same as he faced when he started years ago. I consider it the greatest in music,” Elvis added mischievously, throwing the reporters a little off balance. “It is very noteworthy—and namely because it is the only thing I can do….”

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  “You can’t knock success,” declared Elvis and went on to answer questions about his income, his sideburns, his draft status, and any plans he might have for marriage, before taking the stage in gold jacket and dress pants at 8:15.

  He was determined to impress his celebrity-studded audience, and he did. In front of a sold-out, paid attendance of more than nine thousand (at the Colonel’s insistence, even Hal Wallis was required to buy his own ticket), he flung himself about, “wiggled, bumped, twisted,” and at the conclusion of the fifty-minute performance rolled around on the floor with Nipper in a manner longtime critic Jack O’Brian of the New York Journal-American declared “far too indecent to mention in every detail.”

  The audience went wild, but the newspapers took a somewhat dimmer view. “Elvis Presley Will Have to Clean Up His Show—Or Go to Jail,” declared one headline, while O’Brian characterized the music as “a terrible popular twist on darkest Africa’s fertility tom-tom displays” and Los Angeles Mirror-News entertainment editor Dick Williams noted: “If any further proof were needed that what Elvis offers is not basically music but a sex show, it was proved last night.” His performance, wrote Williams, resembled “one of those screeching, uninhibited party rallies which the Nazis used to hold for Hitler,” and many parents who had attended with their children, including actors Alan Ladd and Walter Slezak, expressed equal outrage to authorities and the newspapers. The result was that the Los Angeles Vice Squad contacted the Colonel, who told Elvis that he would have to cut out some of the dancing and in general tone down his act. What was Elvis’ reaction? the Colonel was asked. “This isn’t the first time,” said the Colonel. “You know, they done it a couple of times before.” Did Elvis complain about not being able to dance? “Naw, he didn’t complain…. He just said, ‘Well, if I don’t dance tonight, maybe I don’t have to take a shower tonight.’ ” “Colonel Parker said that?” declared Elvis incredulously. “He couldn’t have! You see,” Elvis explained, genuinely upset, “I take a shower every night, whether I dance or just sing.”

  When the police showed up with movie cameras on the second night, the show was considerably toned down, and the only person to object was Yul Brynner, “whose bleeding heart,” wrote Jack O’Brian, “led him to protest [the censorship] as if it were an invasion of someone’s privacy.” Brynner, declared O’Brian olympianly, was “ridiculous.” Elvis, for his part, kept his own counsel.

  Still, he felt good about it. He had done what he did best in front of a town in which he was only beginning to feel comfortable—and it had caused just as much of a stir as it would have in Memphis or Saskatchewan. The single of “Jailhouse Rock” was currently at number one, the film had just had its world premiere in Memphis at the same theater where Elvis had ushered as a teenager and was scheduled to open in theaters throughout the country the following week, and the Colonel had estimated that, with the deal they had with MGM, Elvis was likely to make more than two million dollars when it did. As he said to one reporter who raised the question of what he would do if his popularity were to decline, “You can’t stay on top forever. Even if I stopped singing tomorrow, I’d have no regrets. I had a ball while I was there.”

  There was a party that night at his suite, and everyone was there: Sammy, Nick, Vince Edwards, Venetia, Carol Channing, Tommy Sands, a whole bunch of pretty girls, even seventeen-year-old Ricky Nelson showed up, riding the crest of his first big Imperial hit. Elvis knew that Ricky was friendly with Scotty and Bill, but he and Ricky had never really talked, and Ricky was just hanging around on the edge of the party when Elvis pushed his way through the crowd, picked him up in the air, and said, “Man, I just love your new record.” He loved The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, too, he watched it all the time, he told Ricky, and he wondered whether Ricky’s brother, David, was here tonight. When Photoplay editor Marcia Borie told Elvis that Ricky was about to go out on tour for the first time and could use some advice, Elvis took Ricky aside and filled him in. “You’ll never know how much tonight has meant to me,” Nelson told Borie later in the evening. “Imagine Elvis Presley watching our show. He repeated episodes I’d even forgotten about. He remembered them word for word. And he gave me some great tips about things to do on my tour. I still can’t believe it.” Cliff, Nick, and Sammy Davis, Jr., entertained the guests with impressions, and Elvis’ date for the evening was Anne Neyland.

  One week later he sailed for Hawaii. The three shows scheduled there were the last of a broken six-day tour (San Francisco, Oakland, Hollywood, and Hawaii) that seemed to have been arranged at the last minute and was elongated even further by the four-day boat ride. The Colonel and the Jordanaires and the band, of course, all flew over, but Elvis stuck to his promise to his mother not to fly unless it was absolutely necessary. There was one small surprise at the dock: Billy Murphy showed up with his bags packed just as the ship was about to sail. Elvis had invited him sometime earlier, but there had been no further discussion of the subject, and now a mild flurry of confusion arose before someone finally purchased a ticket for him. Other than that, the cruise was a dull one, made up of typical tourists and retirees and a notable absence of eligible girls. Cliff, who continued to aspire to Hollywood hipness, followed Billy around to the point that Murphy finally told him, “Cliff, you’re colorful and you’re interesting, but you’re ninety percent exaggeration and ten percent lies.” Which kind of took the wind out of Cliff’s sails and gave the others something to chew on. When they finally ar
rived, Elvis enjoyed his first view of Hawaii; the Colonel’s old pal, Lee Gordon, who still had hopes of getting Elvis to Australia, promoted the shows with his usual flamboyance; and Elvis even went down to the beach in shorts on the last night to sign autographs.

  They were back in Hollywood by November 17, with nothing, really, to do. The Colonel didn’t want him making any recordings—RCA had more than enough in the can—and the new movie deal with Twentieth Century Fox had fallen through when Hal Wallis refused to release Elvis from his contractual obligation to make another picture with Paramount first. There was no further touring planned, and he had no particular reason to be home, so he returned to Las Vegas, where he had spent a couple of weeks in October going out with showgirls and catching every act in town. On this visit he met a fresh-faced, twenty-one-year-old singer named Kitty Dolan, whom he formally “dated,” as he had dated Dottie and June before, as well as the stripper Tempest Storm, to whom he announced, at an appropriate moment, “I’m as horny as a billy goat in a pepper patch. I’ll race you to the bed.”

  It was a strangely unsettled time. The draft wasn’t going to go away, his career seemed to be in a temporary state of limbo, even the tour—with the exception of his appearance at the Pan Pacific—had been without any real luster. There had been the usual riots, there had been the usual challenge of provoking the crowd into a frenzy, of teasing them until they were aroused past the point of turning back—but there was nothing new. It was all something he had done before, all just the playing out of a masquerade. For the first time in a long time he was no longer sure what was supposed to happen next. Perhaps the one real surprise had come in San Francisco when security guards came backstage to tell him that there was a rabbi outside insisting that he had to see Elvis. George scrutinized the scribbled note and realized to his astonishment that it was Rabbi Fruchter, his old rabbi from Temple Beth El Emeth, but he couldn’t for the life of him figure out how Rabbi Fruchter would know George was there or what the connection with Elvis might be. “Elvis said, ‘Oh, we used to live underneath him on Alabama Street, he was really nice to me, he’d loan me money, and sometimes he’d ask me to turn on the lights for him on Saturday.’ So I went and got him, and Elvis hugs him and shakes hands with him, and at the press conference he introduces Rabbi Fruchter, and the reporters all look at this rabbi, and they just couldn’t relate!”