Me and a Guy Named Elvis

by Jerry Schilling

  Because of his success at the Louisiana Hayride shows, Elvis was finding himself booked on some bills with top country artists, as he was at these shows. The flyers around town listed Faron Young, Martha Carson, and Ferlin Husky as the headlining acts and had “Memphis’s Own Elvis Presley” down at the bottom of the bill. Those other acts didn’t mean anything to me—I was there for Elvis. Most people inside the auditorium seemed to feel the same way, too—there was a buzz and an energy, not to mention a fair amount of female squealing, that couldn’t be mistaken for anything but Elvis-generated excitement. I don’t remember much about the Faron Young or Ferlin Husky performances except that the crowd was as attentive as could be expected and clapped where it was supposed to.

  It was when Elvis took the stage that the place just about exploded. I’d never heard such a human-made roar as Elvis, in loose slacks and a fancy tailored jacket, strapped on his guitar and took his place in front of a mike, flanked by Scotty with his guitar and Bill with his bass. But as soon as they started playing—and as soon as Elvis started moving—the energy that came off that stage was even bigger than anything the crowd was throwing back at it. For a guy who hadn’t been on that many big stages yet, and for a guy with so much wild energy to burn, he handled the show like a real pro, moving around and working the crowd masterfully, making sure that everybody got plenty of what they’d come for. This guy wasn’t just a kid with some records out: He was an entertainer.

  I’d heard Elvis sing on record and on the radio, and I’d seen him move on a football field, but the musicality and physicality I saw come together on that stage was something else. I was already impressed by the way the guy walked and the way he threw a football. And I liked his records. But it was a shock to see the way he threw himself so completely into the music as a stage performer. Those crazy legs shook and trembled, his arms pinwheeled, he tossed his body around like he was nothing more than a rag doll with a great head of ducktails. And he treated his mike stand like it was the object of a passionate seduction—sometimes holding it close with tenderness, sometimes just dragging it across the stage like a worked-up wild man dragging his mate off to the nearest cave. His moves were more outrageous than anything I’d ever seen or heard of, but they were also perfectly timed and executed. It had an effect on me—I hadn’t felt this much adrenaline pumping through me since I’d seen Rocky Marciano knock out Joe Louis on the Friday Night Fights over at Aunt Jinky’s.

  People had been calling Elvis “The Hillbilly Cat.” What I saw up on stage was a hungry tiger.

  The Ellis crowd loved every minute of it. Everything the records had promised, the show delivered. We even had the thrill of seeing good old Dewey Phillips share the mike with Elvis for a while. Maybe there were some people around me who had just come to see Ferlin Huskey, but I don’t remember seeing a face that wasn’t smiling at the end of Elvis’s four-or five-song set. It felt like the first great meeting of a secret club. Being an Elvis fan at this point was a little unusual. But all of us “unusual” people had come together in downtown Memphis and felt the first life-changing rumble of rock and roll’s big bang. We walked out of that auditorium absolutely knowing that we’d been witnesses to the start of something new and explosive. Elvis wasn’t going to just be a voice on the radio or records anymore—he was out in the real world, and, to those of us who welcomed him, that world began to look and sound like a much more exciting place.

  The “usual” reactions to Elvis weren’t as positive. A crowd of supporters was regularly coming to watch Elvis play ball at the park, but almost every Sunday there’d also be cars full of guys driving by the park just for the chance to heckle him, with something along the lines of “pretty boy” being the insult of choice. I’d also heard that a couple of times guys had blindsided Elvis, pretending to come up to him for an autograph and then taking a swing at him when they got close enough. Or calling him over to a car for an autograph, throwing a punch, and then driving away. Occasionally carloads of young sailors from the Millington Naval Base north of Memphis would make the trip to Guthrie just to drive past and yell, “Hey, sideburns!” at the degenerate rock and roller they’d heard about. Incidents like that led Elvis to rely more and more on guys like Red West to stick around him and play some real-life defense for him.

  At one of our bigger games in the spring of 1955, we’d been playing for a while when a couple of very large men showed up and asked if they could get in the game. They explained that they were semipro players, had heard about the Elvis games, and wanted to be a part of it. The rest of us were not so eager to play with these big guys, but as far as Elvis was concerned, these players were stepping onto his turf and he wasn’t going to stand down. He wanted them in. We worked out the teams again to include them and got set to play. On one of the first offensive drives, Elvis was taking a break from quarterbacking duties and was on the line blocking. When the ball was snapped, this 200-pound-plus semipro hit Elvis hard and ran right over him. Elvis took his time getting up—he was obviously a little shaken.

  Now, we played tough at these games, with all-out effort, and we regularly knocked the hell out of each other. But the point was that everybody got knocked around—nobody ever specifically targeted Elvis. You wouldn’t think twice about hitting him if that’s the way the play went, but nobody was ever going out of their way to try to hurt him. From the look of that semipro player’s first hit, it seemed that maybe these guys weren’t so interested in playing ball for fun—they were going to teach “Pretty Boy” Presley a lesson.

  As we got back into a huddle, it was clear that Red West was furious. “I’ll take that son of a bitch out,” he said.

  “No, Red,” said Elvis sharply. “Damn it, no. Just play the game.”

  We ran a few more plays, and it was the same thing each time—Elvis got a tremendous hit from this charging rhino. But Elvis made a point of hopping up a little faster each time and just shaking it off. It got to a point where the day just didn’t feel like fun anymore. All the regular players were furious, and we were all telling Elvis that the game couldn’t go on like this, but he wouldn’t hear it. He wanted to play through. I found myself lined up next to Elvis, with the same big guy ready to charge at him again.

  “Hit me from the left side,” said Elvis.

  “What?” asked the rhino.

  “Hit me from the left side.”

  “Why?”

  “I got a few bones over there that ain’t broke yet,” said Elvis.

  The big guy started laughing, and by the time the ball was snapped he was laughing hard enough that he didn’t have the strength to steam-roll Elvis. After the play, we took a break and the guy went over to his fellow rhino. In a few minutes they walked back toward Elvis. Now the big guys were all smiles.

  “Excuse me, Elvis,” said the one who’d been knocking him down. “We sure did enjoy the game. Hope there aren’t any hard feelings.”

  Red was still ready to lunge at them, but Elvis just shrugged.

  “No hard feelings,” said Elvis. “Just bruises. Good luck with your season.”

  Their big faces lit up like they’d just been blessed by the Pope. They started to walk away, when the guy who’d been knocking Elvis down turned around and came back.

  “Uh, just one more thing, Elvis? Our wives are over there—can we bring them over to meet you?”

  “Sure,” says Elvis. “Bring ’em over.”

  As Elvis signed autographs for their wives, it all came together for me; if he had let Red and the rest of us go after these guys, then he would have ended up with some more enemies. Instead, he took a little punishment and ended up with four new fans. There were a lot of people in Memphis that wanted to knock Elvis down, figuratively and literally, but what I saw happen on that field with the semipro guys was something I’d witness over and over again: A lot of people thought they had something against Elvis, but I never saw anybody who spent any time with him walk away not liking him.

  As my eighth-grade year started i
n the fall of 1955, I felt a bit like I was living in two worlds—there was school, home, and everything in the ordinary world. Then there were Sundays at Guthrie Park.

  One day, early in the school year, the worlds collided. I was out on the playground behind the school during lunchtime, not doing much of anything (I’d become more careful about playground ballgames since one of my football passes had knocked the headwear off a very startled nun). When I heard the roar of a motor coming down Woodlawn Street, I looked toward the street and saw a vehicle that would have turned heads anywhere but certainly stood out around Holy Names—a big, beautiful, pink Cadillac. In the driver’s seat was Elvis, steering with one arm on top of the steering wheel. I was surprised, and very happy, to see him pull a quick left on Looney Avenue—the street that bordered the Holy Names playground—and pull up to the curb.

  “Hey, man,” Elvis called out.

  Didn’t seem like there was any other Holy Names grade schooler he could possibly be calling to. I took a couple of steps toward him. He’d gotten out of the car and was leaning against it, drumming his fingers on the hood and peering past me at the school. I could sense that the playground behind me had become a little quieter.

  “Hey, Elvis. What are you doing over here?”

  “Just came from Humes. Seeing how the place is holding up.” Elvis smiled past me and waved at somebody. I heard giggles.

  I was standing just yards away from first-graders and hopscotch grids, racking my brain for something to say that would make me sound solid, older—just a little bit cool.

  “I heard your shows are going great.”

  Elvis let loose a laugh. “Yeah, well—we’re just having some fun.”

  We stood there a few more moments, not talking about much of anything. He kept smiling past me. And I kept hearing those giggles. He slapped at the car hard and spun away.

  “Gotta go. See you later, Chief,” said Elvis.

  “See ya. At the next game,” I said.

  He went back around the car, flung open the driver’s door, and, just before climbing in, gave a casual wave to the playground. I heard more giggles behind me.

  Elvis came by Holy Names a few more times that fall, and I was always proud of the fact that I was the kid Elvis came over to talk to. Years later, it occurred to me that while, from my perspective, those playground visits were about me and Elvis, from his perspective the visits served another purpose. Holy Names was a boys and girls grade school, but an all-girls high school. For those of us too young to go out to the likes of the Eagle’s Nest, the coolest music you could hear was at the Holy Names High School dances on Saturday nights. Elvis’s first girlfriend had been from Holy Names, and during his time at Humes, he went to plenty of those Holy Names dances. The grade school and the high school were in two separate brick buildings on the same lot, but they shared the same playground. The point is, when Elvis pulled up to that curb, he wasn’t thinking about talking to me. He was thinking about checking out a playground full of Catholic high school girls.

  Just across Thomas Avenue from the perilous Hurt Village was a little shotgun shack that had been turned into a hamburger joint and candy store called the Stand. It was just a couple of blocks away from Holy Names, but it felt like a tougher part of town, and I liked the feel of walking over there to get my lunch. On a chilly March afternoon in 1956, I was in the Stand, about to pull the cap off a bottle of Coke with the built-in opener on the big metal pop machine in there, when a new song started playing on the jukebox. The voice was unmistakable. Rich. Confident. Soft and strong at the same time. It was Elvis, singing a new song called “I Was the One.”

  She lived, she loved, she laughed, she cried…

  I was used to hearing Elvis rock, but here was an Elvis song that grabbed me in a whole different way. It went straight for the emotions, and hit like a fist to the gut. I’d recently been dumped by my first “girlfriend”—Loretta Cuccia, a real looker from Holy Names’s rival school Little Flower—and here was Elvis singing out all those tangled feelings that I hadn’t been able to put into words.

  Who learned the lesson when she broke my heart—I was the one.

  That was exactly what I wanted to tell Harvey Vaughan, the tough Golden Gloves champ my girl had moved on to. I stood frozen at the Coke machine until the song was over. A beautiful tune, packed full of truth, sung from the heart. I took a swig of my Coke and went back to my burger over at the counter. It occurred to me that Elvis Presley wasn’t just getting by on cool. This guy could really sing.

  A few days later at the Stand I heard the A-side of the “I Was the One” single—a song called “Heartbreak Hotel.” If the B-side had grabbed me, the A-side just blew me away. With “Heartbreak Hotel,” Elvis seemed to be inventing his own kind of music from scratch—that song didn’t sound like anything else on the jukebox. It rocked, but it was haunting, too. When Elvis sang “feel so lonely” in that odd, hiccupy way, it cut right through you. And I wasn’t the only one blown away by the song—within a few weeks it was at the top of the pop charts, giving Elvis his first number-one hit.

  I wasn’t following record-label politics back in 1956, but the release of “Heartbreak Hotel” marked Elvis’s debut as an RCA recording artist, having moved on from Sun Records and producer Sam Phillips. The usual line on Sam is that he “discovered Elvis,” but that doesn’t quite give Sam credit for the care and guidance he applied to the young singer. Elvis showed up at Sun Studio wanting to croon ballads—the first thing he recorded there was the sweet, non-rocking “My Happiness.” Elvis thought that was the kind of tune serious singers were supposed to sing. Sam’s ear picked up on the potential in Elvis’s voice, and he encouraged the young singer to break away from the standard pop approach. When you go back and listen to “Good Rockin’ Tonight” or “Mystery Train,” there’s both an excitement and a mystique to the sound that still holds up after decades of listens. The music Sam encouraged and captured in the humble, no-frills storefront of Sun Records still sounds extraordinary.

  Sam is supposed to have said, “If I could find a white boy who could sing like a black man, I could make a million dollars.” The quote has sometimes been referred to as if it were some kind of devious strategy on Sam’s part. But if he did say anything close to that, it was simply a statement of fact about race and music in 1950s Memphis. Sam knew that there was a huge audience of white kids hungry for the excitement they heard on the black R & B records, and he also knew that, given the deep-seated anger and fear that white society had when it came to matters of race, it was going to take a white voice with a black feel for the music to ever fully “cross over.”

  But I think people forget how much Sam loved R & B, and what a fearless pioneer he was in putting all his energies into making great records for artists like Rufus Thomas, Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner, and B. B. King. Today those artists are seen as brilliant talents, and Sun Records has achieved respected, iconic status. But back when Sam Phillips was spending long nights in that little storefront studio with groups of black musicians, he was doing something that made him a target for the most vicious kinds of personal attacks. Sam didn’t spend the roughest years of his life recording all those great black artists wishing they were white. His passion for exciting music was stronger than any regard for color lines or a “sensible” career path, and his dedication to that music and those artists made him a despised outcast to much of the Memphis business community. It’s hard for anyone looking at the music world today to imagine what he went through—but to stand up and do what he did makes him, at least to me, rock and roll’s ultimate hero.

  I had a chance to see Elvis perform again over at the Chisca Hotel in March of 1956, after I heard about a special show Dewey Phillips was putting on in the hotel’s basement lounge, the Chickasaw Ballroom. Elvis was performing as a special guest with the Sy Rose Band. I dragged my old witness Frankie Grisanti along with me to see Elvis in action, promising him that—after what I’d seen at Ellis Auditorium—it would be worth th
e trip downtown. But when we got to the Chisca, we ran straight into a major obstacle: Alcohol was going to be served in the Ballroom, and tickets were not being sold to minors.

  I’d spent enough time crawling through the sewer pipes of North Memphis for Saturday kicks to know that there was usually more than one way to get where you wanted to get. So Frankie and I backed away from the main entrance to the Chickasaw and casually slipped into a service hallway. We snuck around past laundry chutes and water heaters until we got to a little area around the other side of the ballroom—a hallway with a big soda machine and a door that led right to the stage.

  We watched as much of the first show as we could through the crack in that door, but the biggest thrill came after Elvis finished his first show, when he headed offstage right toward us. We scattered from the door just as he came through.

  He was sweating something fierce and a little out of breath—looking like he’d gotten a more intense workout than he did at any of the football games. I don’t know if he nodded at us or if he was just getting his hair back in place, but he acted like it was the most natural thing in the world for Frankie and me to be in that basement hallway. There wasn’t a place to sit, so he just leaned up against one of the big basement pillars.

  “Get me a Pepsi, would you?”

  “Sure, Elvis.”

  I brought him the cold bottle, and he tipped his head back and chugged away. The sweat was just pouring off of him. And I remember noticing that, as sharp as he looked in his black pants and red jacket, he still had a bad patch of acne on his neck. He was human.