Elvis Presley

by Williamson, Joel

  “It was when I was four years old, and he was on TV and he was kissing the polio poster child for that year. And I told my mother I’d give anything to be in her shoes. And I would to this day, still yet.

  “And I bought my ticket through a girl that lives here in Omaha. And I was very lucky because she got twenty the day that the tickets went on sale. And she offered me two, my sister and I, and I was thrilled because I have been waiting to see him for so long.” She shakes her head slowly back and forth, reflecting the exhaustion she had felt in that quest.

  “And I was supposed to go see him in Wichita, Kansas, December the twenty-seventh of last year, and I had to go in the hospital for emergency surgery and was unable to go. And so this means the world to me [shaking her head and smiling bravely], because [pause, eyes raised to the sky] he’s the greatest person that has ever walked and he sings beautiful and I would never pay to see anybody else, and I haven’t and I won’t. This is the only one, because I love Elvis with all my heart.”

  On the screen above, Elvis is singing while the Sweets and Kathy Westmoreland are singing and swaying:

  Is your heart filled with pain,

  Shall I come back again,

  Tell me dear,

  Are you lonesome tonight?

  PART I

  The Bubble

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE DREAM

  The Shell

  The girls first discovered Elvis in July 1954 in the Overton Shell, an open-air theater with a covered stage in Overton Park in Memphis. All sorts of entertainment happened at the Shell. In the days before air-conditioning, affluent Memphians might go there on a warm summer evening to enjoy a performance of The Merry Widow, the light opera that Jeanette MacDonald delightfully introduced to America on film in 1934.

  On this evening, Friday, July 30, the show was country and western. The bill was put together by Bob Neal, a popular Memphis radio personality and promoter whose early morning program reached listeners on farms and in villages far out into the hinterland while they were milking cows and cracking eggs on the edges of hot frying pans. The headliner for this evening was Slim Whitman, whose latest hit record was entitled “Indian Love Call.” Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records, had persuaded Neal to add Elvis to the program. During the previous four weeks, he had managed with amazing success the creation, the broadcast by radio, and the local distribution of Elvis’s first record. On one side Elvis had done a black blues song—“That’s All Right, Mama”—and on the other a country number—“Blue Moon of Kentucky.” He was now slated to do on stage what he had done on the record.

  Elvis was exceedingly anxious that the audience at the Shell might not appreciate his performance. In those days, country singers, such as those who achieved stardom on The Grand Ole Opry, broadcast from Nashville, Tennessee, on Saturday nights, did not do black songs. Furthermore, he had done both songs in a style that no one had ever heard before. These folks in the Shell had bought tickets to hear familiar and uncomplicated country and western music. What Elvis and his guitarist, Scotty Moore, and his bass fiddle player, Bill Black, were doing was not country. It was not hillbilly, not pop, not gospel, and not blues. It was neither black nor white, neither sacred nor—quite—profane. Yet it was somehow influenced by all these things.

  When Sam arrived at the Shell, he found an agitated Elvis waiting for him on the steps at the rear of the stage. Four decades later, he described the scene to Elvis’s biographer Peter Guralnick.

  “Man, I’m so glad to see you, Mr. Phillips … I—I—I—I just didn’t know what I was going to do,” Elvis stammered.

  Sam reassured Elvis. He was absolutely certain that the world would soon recognize their achievement, if not here, then elsewhere.

  When their turn came, Elvis and his two fellow band members stepped nervously onto the stage and faced an audience of some two thousand people. Stiffly, he adjusted the microphone, stepped back, and jumped into “That’s All Right, Mama,” the A-side of their record. It was a blues song recorded several years earlier by a black singer, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. Elvis raised up on the balls of his feet, leaned forward into the microphone, and curled his upper lip into the sneer that would become known around the world.

  “That’s all right, mama,” he sang, moving his whole body with the music, “any—wa-ay you do.”

  Sliding into the thick, thumping sound, Elvis stepped back from the mike, savaging the strings of his guitar and shaking all over while Scotty and Bill each took a turn doing the instrumental. They heard and saw the audience responding loudly and physically to their rendition of “That’s All Right.” Almost automatically, they swung into the only other number they had polished for their repertoire, the B-side of their record, “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Bill Monroe, the soon-to-be King of Bluegrass, had done it before in a high keening tenor, dripping with nostalgia for a rural and romantic past. Elvis, using his God-given rich and versatile voice, perfected by practice, gave it a different turn. Just as “That’s All Right” was not black anymore, “Blue Moon” was no longer hillbilly; it was joyous, country-come-to-town and damn glad to be there.

  The crowd in front of the stage broke loose. On stage, the performers themselves did not know what to make of the ruckus. “I was scared stiff,” Elvis later confessed. “Everyone was hollering and I didn’t know what they were hollering at.”

  Scotty Moore described the scene. “During the instrumental parts,” he said, “Elvis would back off from the mike and be playing and shaking, and the crowd would go wild, but he thought they were actually making fun of him.” Two years later, Elvis recalled that when he came offstage he asked his manager, “What did I do?” His manager told him it was the way he was “wiggling” his legs that caused all the excitement. Elvis took the hint.

  “I went back out for an encore,” he said, “and I did a little more, and the more I did, the wilder they went.”

  It was the girls who went wild, and Elvis gave them more of what they obviously wanted—the movement of his body. This was the beginning of a phenomenon that determined his early career, an amazingly intimate relationship between Elvis onstage and the women in his audiences. While the record had to do with race on one side and the loss of a rural past on the other, the stage performance had everything to do with sex and traditional gender roles.

  As it evolved over the next two years in the South, this performance by young white women in the Elvis venue was unprecedented in character and unmatched in magnitude. Huge crowds of women were determined to express themselves as sexual creatures in a highly visible public arena. In 1956 and 1957, they exported their revolution to young women in the North and West.

  Finding the Audience

  After the triumph at the Shell, Sam Phillips immediately booked Elvis for an appearance on The Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. This time, Elvis skipped the black blues song “That’s All Right,” but even his rendition of “Blue Moon of Kentucky” drew only polite applause. Undaunted, Sam promptly put Elvis and his band on the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport, Louisiana. The Hayride was less prestigious than The Grand Ole Opry, but its radio reach was wide, and it was famous for giving beginners a good start.

  On October 16, during the first of their two performances on the Hayride on Saturday evening, Elvis, Scotty, and Bill got much the same response as at The Grand Ole Opry. At the second show later that evening, however, they had a younger audience that exploded, shouting and screaming enthusiastically. They were on course again.

  When they were invited to return for second and third weeks, the composition of the audience in the 3,800-seat auditorium shifted in a remarkable fashion. “The young ladies started showing up,” recalled Frank Page, the avuncular, baritone-voiced announcer for the Hayride. As Page remembered, “Elvis wiggled his leg a bit, snarled a bit, and let his hair hang down.” The young women responded. Page said that “the audience changed as the demeanor of the act changed.” The act changed as the audience changed, too. Elvis would become notorio
us among fellow entertainers for that obsession, doing what the girls wanted him to do, envied and often hated for his success in achieving that goal.

  Recognizing Elvis’s entertainment value, the Hayride immediately booked him for a full year. He was to appear every Saturday night, do two shows of a dozen minutes each, and be paid $18. Meanwhile, Sam had brought Elvis, Scotty, and Bill—soon to be known as “the Blue Moon Boys”—back into the studio to produce a second highly successful record: “Good Rockin’ Tonight” backed by “I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine.”

  In the fall of 1954, Bob Neal took on the job of managing public performances by the Blue Moon Boys. He had no difficulty at all booking them into high school auditoriums and public meeting halls within driving distance of Memphis. What had been scattered appearances soon became well-organized tours in which the boys performed almost every night for a week or two, often driving at breakneck speeds to get from one engagement to the next. One ten-day tour, for example, began on Wednesday, January 12, 1955, at the municipal auditorium in Clarksdale, Mississippi, some seventy-five miles south of Memphis, moved west across the Mississippi River on the thirteenth to play in the Catholic Club Auditorium in Helena, Arkansas, then Marianna, Arkansas, on the fourteenth and the Hayride in Shreveport on the fifteenth. The tour then recrossed the river to play through northeastern Mississippi and northwestern Alabama at Booneville, Corinth, and Sheffield. It ended at the National Guard Armory in Sikeston, Missouri, on January 21.

  The Hayride was widely broadcast on Shreveport’s 50,000-watt radio station KWKH. Every Saturday night it reached up to twenty-eight states, and on the third Saturday of every month, 198 CBS stations carried the program. The Hayride opened the way for Elvis’s live performances over a broad territory in the South and West. Soon he was playing all over Texas, from East Texas towns such as Gladewater, Texarkana, and Houston to West Texas towns such as Midland and Odessa.

  Elvis was popular enough in Midland, where the more affluent people in the oil industry in the Permian Basin made their homes, but he was even more popular in Odessa, where the workers, vastly Southern and vastly white, lived. In Odessa, he headlined a show on January 4, and on February 2 he was part of a tour package that drew an audience of four thousand. For Elvis, this was a huge crowd. He earned $150 for that performance, an amount that would have seemed astronomically high to him only a few months before.

  February 6, 1955—six months into his career—was the day that marked a revolutionary change in the life of Elvis Presley. On that day, Bob Neal introduced him to the legendary promoter Colonel Tom Parker, the man who had managed the country singer Eddy Arnold to national success as a touring performer and an RCA recording star. Arnold finally rebelled against Parker’s drive for total control over his life as well as his work and fired him. Parker eventually entered into a partnership with another only slightly lesser star, Hank Snow, a diminutive Canadian with a guitar and a peculiarly nasal voice whose song “I’m Movin’ On” ranked No. 1 for twenty-one weeks on the country and western chart in 1950.

  The meeting between the Colonel, Elvis, Neal, and Sam Phillips occurred in a restaurant booth located in the Holiday Inn just across the street from Memphis’s Ellis Auditorium, where Elvis was performing. Phillips took a strong and immediate dislike of the always commanding Colonel. The Colonel yielded not an inch to Sam, and Sam soon left. Nevertheless, what came out of the meeting was a valuable new beginning for Elvis. Within two weeks, the Colonel began to book him for tours with stars from The Grand Ole Opry. On February 14, Parker included Elvis in a short tour with the Hank Snow Jamboree. The tour opened with two shows at North Junior High School in Roswell, New Mexico, moved through Texas, and ended on Friday, February 18, in Monroe, Louisiana, just in time for Elvis to appear on the Hayride in Shreveport the next night.

  Elvis, Scotty, and Bill were now running at a hectic pace. In February, they did twenty-two shows in twenty-three days, stretching from the American Legion Hall in Carlsbad, New Mexico, in the West to the high school auditorium in Ripley, Mississippi, in the east and from the Golden Cadillac Club in New Orleans up to Robinson Auditorium in Little Rock, Arkansas.

  On the Road

  Life on the road was exhilarating for Elvis, Scotty, and Bill, but it was also exhausting. With no planes and no trains, they would perform in the evening and drive night and day to get to the next engagement, Bill’s big bass fiddle strapped to the top of the car like some huge dead beast brought down by a hunter’s gunfire. Happily for the Blue Moon Boys, they had the loan of Scotty’s wife’s car—virtually permanently, it turned out, after three hundred thousand miles on the road. But Bobbie Moore missed tooling around Memphis in her brand-new 1954 four-door Chevrolet Bel Air with a white top, blue body, and white sidewall tires. It was not easy for her to commute to her job as a clerk in the huge regional Sears, Roebuck office in Memphis while the boys were on the road. Bobbie was the one who kept up monthly payments on the car and paid numerous repair bills. Ironically, Elvis later gave hundreds of cars and pickup trucks to friends, acquaintances, and even strangers, but he never gave one to Bobbie.

  When Bobbie’s car wore out, Elvis bought himself a 1951 Lincoln. He painted elvis presley—sun records on the door. They wrecked that one. Next, Elvis bought a 1954 Cadillac. This car burned while he was driving from Home, Alabama, to Texarkana, Texas, with a girl he had invited to join him for the trip. He barely managed to empty the trunk of the car before everything was consumed by fire. The guys were following behind in another car, and the troupe nearly missed getting to their next show on time. He bought a new 1955 pink and white Cadillac and had his name painted on the door.

  Linked to the Hayride and through Colonel Parker to The Grand Ole Opry, Elvis often toured with country and western performers who were well established and drew large and adoring crowds. One of these acts was a brother-sister team, Jim Ed and Maxine Brown, whose record “Looking Back to See (If You Were Looking Back at Me)” had just hit No. 1 on the country music charts nationally. Elvis attempted, without success, to woo Maxine.

  In late February, Colonel Parker added Elvis to another Grand Ole Opry tour with a star-studded ensemble that featured “Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters” and comic Whitey Ford, “the Duke of Paducah.” The Carters were RCA recording stars and the most talented and beloved female gospel group in America. “The Duke,” from Paducah, Kentucky, was country’s most adored comedian. “I’m going back to the wagon, folks,” he would shout out at the end of his semi-soliloquy in mock exasperation at having been in town. “These shoes are killing me.”

  Whitey’s tagline was loaded with meaning for audiences who lived in the country or, having been born and reared in the country, had moved to town. World War II, especially, had brought a lot of country folks to town either permanently or for the duration, who experienced the shock of urban living. Whitey’s line drew upon their deep and disturbing feelings about the strictures of town life versus the natural freedom of life in the country. The “back to the wagon” phrase drew upon a practice these people knew well. Into the 1930s and even the 1940s, some country people would hitch their mules and horses to wagons on occasional Saturday mornings and drive to town to hang out, chew tobacco, talk, or drink and play pool in “cafes” on the side streets, or even conduct a little business, while a self-ordained minister would preach the gospel on a corner of the square, and the women and children shopped and socialized.

  Whitey Ford, the Carter family, and other entertainers spoke powerfully to millions of plain white Southerners in a language that outsiders could sometimes admire but never fully understand. On tour, the Grand Ole Opry Show often drew audiences of several thousand. They had come to see and hear country and gospel singers, and early on there was a degree of shock at Elvis’s unique style. But adults did not walk out, and the teenage girls were increasingly numerous and increasingly explosive, a fact the press noted.

  Elvis’s music was different, just as Sam had wanted, and the huge po
pularity of two more new recordings (“Milk Cow Blues Boogie,” which came out in January 1955, and “Baby, Let’s Play House,” which appeared in April) clearly marked his success as a singer. But neither Sam nor anyone else had expected such a wildly emotional reaction on the part of the young women in Elvis’s audiences at the mere site of his body in motion.

  “I hadn’t thought of him in terms of a physical specimen,” Sam declared looking back. “I wasn’t thinking, ‘Is he going to look good onstage, is he going to be a great performer?’ ”

  Sam was so intensely focused on the sound of the music that he missed the sight. But then, Sam was a man and very conscious of his masculinity. “I was just looking for something nobody could categorize,” he said.

  The girls loved what Elvis did. Many other people either tolerated it condescendingly or hated it bitterly. Elvis himself could not understand why anyone would be upset by his onstage movements. “I jump around because it’s the way I feel,” he explained. “I can’t even sing with a beat at all if I stand still.” Movement came naturally with his music, he said, and both were innocent.

  The girls were innocent too, Elvis insisted, denying charges that they indulged in lascivious behavior during his performances. They were not bad girls, Scotty Moore agreed. They were not camp followers or groupies, he asserted. They were “all nice girls, well scrubbed, well dressed.”

  Even so, Scotty admitted, there was sex on the road, and a lot of it. Elvis was like a “young stud at a rodeo,” he said, and “they could have named him Man o’ War.” Elvis was highly active sexually, but Scotty somehow felt the need to deny strenuously rumors that Elvis was bisexual or homosexual. “He’d have been the first one to lay someone out if a man made an advance on him, I can tell you that,” he declared. “If he was prejudiced about anything, that was it.” Rumors about Elvis’s sexual orientation arose, he thought, because Elvis wore eye makeup. He started using mascara for performances, Scotty said. Afterward, “he just wore it all the time.” Then Scotty leaped to another thought. “Let’s face it,” he said, “the man was damned near too pretty to be a man.” Elvis looked like a girl and acted like a sexual superman; the girls looked innocent and acted like Jezebels. Good girls behaving like nymphomaniacs caused consternation among both friends and foes.