Me and a Guy Named Elvis

by Jerry Schilling

  “No, E. I’m going to leave. I’m going home.”

  I moved over to the house, where Dean Nichopoulos had been staying with Elvis, and spent the night there. In the morning, I heard the phone ring. Dean came by my room to let me know that Elvis was on the line for me.

  “Hello?”

  “Jerry, how’s it coming with those condos?”

  He wasn’t being sarcastic, or pretending that nothing had happened. He didn’t know anything had happened. The night before was a complete blank to him.

  “Elvis, I’ve always said our friendship is more important to me than this job.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I didn’t want to get into it again, but I told him I was going back to L.A. “Look, Elvis, I just need a change. No hard feelings.”

  He seemed a little surprised, but accepted it. “Well, I guess you have to do what you have to do,” he said.

  Maybe it would have been just as easy for me to pretend that the night before hadn’t happened. But it had, and even in the cold light of the morning after, it felt right to follow through on my decision. I didn’t see any way to balance our friendship with the way things were working around him now. If I stayed, I felt I’d end up with no choice but to become either a complete yes-man or a pain in the ass. I didn’t want to be either one to him. If Elvis and I had any chance of remaining true friends, I had to get out of there.

  I’d enjoyed the managing I’d been doing for the Sweet Inspirations, and thought maybe I could pursue that work further. I got in touch with Tom Hulett and asked if he had any contacts that might help me learn more about the management side of the concert business. Tom was still promoting Elvis’s shows, and he told me that before he set anything up for me he’d have to check with Elvis. At the time, all I knew was that Elvis told Tom he didn’t have a problem with Tom helping me. Years later, Tom would reveal that Elvis told him he was willing to pay half my salary if it would help me get a better position.

  Tom set up a meeting for me with Caribou Management, a firm founded by musician Jimmy Guercio (no relation to Joe) that was having success with acts such as Chicago and the Beach Boys. I got a meeting with some Caribou executives, Howard Kaufman and Larry Fitzgerald, over at the firm’s Melrose offices. They had somebody else they wanted me to meet—a young, smart woman from New York. She sounded very savvy about the music business, and began asking me what sounded like job interview questions in a kind of roundabout way. I suddenly figured out what she was getting at.

  “Are you asking me if I’d have any trouble working for a woman?”

  She smiled. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m asking you.”

  “I don’t have any problem with that.”

  “All right, then. You’re working for me. We’re flying to Colorado tonight.”

  I’d just been hired by Elizabeth Joel to be a tour manager for her husband, Billy. Billy Joel had already found some radio success with “Piano Man” and “Captain Jack,” but his career had hit a lull. He decided that the best way to move forward was to build from the ground up again, touring small venues with his own kick-ass band. Billy and his musicians had based themselves at Jim Guercio’s Caribou Ranch, a live-in, state-of-the-art recording facility set in some beautiful foothills of the Rocky Mountains, where they were just finishing up work on the Turnstiles album.

  My first night at the ranch, the most important job I was trusted with was to shuck the oysters the musicians would have for dinner. But I hit it off with the guys, and got along with Billy right away, though our respective North Memphis and Long Island figures of speech sometimes confused the heck out of each other. He played up the tough-guy side of his personality, but you knew right away you were dealing with not only an exceptional musical talent but a very smart guy. After the ranch, we headed to New York City, where Billy began to put his touring show together. I got some precious office space—half a table in the back room of Billy and Elizabeth’s apartment—and became very involved in the process of finalizing an East Coast tour. I spent many nights getting to know Billy better down at JP’s Tavern, and I have to give the piano man credit for turning me on to a pleasure I hadn’t sampled in all my years with Elvis: I never had a martini until Billy Joel ordered one for me.

  I was able to see Myrna before she went on the road again with Elvis. But he and I hadn’t spoken yet. I was worried about him, but I was also extremely busy with my new work, which seemed to present a hundred new details and difficulties every day. We launched Billy’s tour in the spring, piling Billy, the band, and all the gear into one big temperamental bus and heading out for college towns and a number of important showcase clubs (such as the Bottom Line in NYC, the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C., and the Ritz in Memphis). It should have been a rough transition for me, after all those years of chartered planes, penthouse suites, and unlimited room service. Now we were sleeping on couches and hoping we had enough money to get fries with our burgers. I loved every minute of it.

  By the time I’d signed on with Elvis, he was already an established star. Touring with Billy, I could feel the buzz and excitement building show by show—maybe something close to what Elvis felt in those earliest days with Scotty Moore and Bill Black. At soundcheck, our touring soundman, Brian Ruggles, would get the band’s sound dialed in just right, and Billy’s lighting designer, Steve Cohen, would work out some way to get the most theatrical impact out of a venue’s system. At show-time, I’d watch Billy and the band win over a crowd song by song, working up the emotions with some of the gentler ballads, and then providing some rock-and-roll release on the tunes powered by Liberty DeVito’s rock-steady drumbeats and Richie Cannata’s wailing sax. In a way the applause at the end of the night felt like it was for Billy, the band, and the rest of us, too. We were all part of the same hardworking team.

  Billy enjoyed just about every show he played, but there were certain kinds of gigs that he came to hate—the shows where he was an opening act for a bigger group. One night, he opened for the Beach Boys, another Caribou act, at the open-air Pine Knob Theater in Detroit. I watched from the side of the stage as Billy tried to get into the first few songs, but he got upset as he realized he basically had no crowd to play to—the people were still finding their seats or lining up at the concession stands. He tried to keep it interesting, making faces, singing in different voices, playing all sorts of crazy runs on the piano. None of it mattered much, though. Nobody was listening. I felt bad for Billy—I’d quickly become a fan as well as an employee, and I knew how much his songs depended on an emotional connection with the audience. Much later that night, he came to my hotel room looking very distraught, and swore that he would never be an opening act again.

  The show hadn’t been without its benefits for me, though. I enjoyed having the chance to watch how the tour organization of the bigger group worked. The Beach Boys hadn’t ever made much of an impression on me. Compared to the R & B stuff I grew up listening to, their music seemed light and easily dismissed. “Help Me, Rhonda” was no “Roll with Me, Henry,” and I much preferred “Don’t Be Cruel” to “Be True to Your School.” But there was no denying the connection they had with their fans, and I was greatly impressed with the smooth way the band’s support staff managed the show. I met their tour manager, Rick Nelson (not the singer), and talked with him a bit after the show, when we had to settle up payment for Billy. We said we might get in touch again when we were both in L.A. at the same time.

  The last show of Billy’s tour at the Cellar in D.C. was one of the great ones, with Billy headlining and playing encore after encore for an enthusiastic house. But I had another reason for considering our stop there an important one: Elvis was in town. He had a show at the Capital Centre Arena in Landover, Maryland, a day after our show, and I called Joe Esposito and asked if I could come see Elvis. Joe made the arrangements.

  I was waiting in the backstage area of the arena when the bus bringing Elvis to the show pulled in, uncharacteristically running late. As I
waited for those bus doors to open, I realized just how eager I was to see him, but how nervous I was, too; it had been six months since I’d walked away—was he seeing me just as a courtesy, or, like me, did he really miss an old friend? The worries melted away as soon as he stepped off the bus steps and looked my way. Before we could even get hellos out, we were in a big hug, and that’s all it took to sweep Vail away. As we talked on the way to his dressing area, he seemed up and sharp and strong. We had only a few minutes before showtime, but he didn’t try to rush things between us. In fact, when somebody stuck their head in the room and told Elvis that a top-name rocker was still waiting to see him, Elvis made it clear that the rocker would have to wait. Elvis would say hello to Elton John when he was done talking to Jerry Schilling.

  The show itself was a good one. It was exciting to see the band working away and Elvis knocking out another audience. There were still a few of the old faces around Elvis—Joe, Red, Sonny, Rick, and David Stanley—but there were newer ones, too: Dave Hebler, the karate instructor Elvis had met through Ed Parker, and Linda Thompson’s brother, Sam, an ex-deputy sheriff from Memphis, were also working steadily for Elvis now.

  I went back with Elvis to his hotel suite later, and at one point played a tape of a Billy Joel song for him that I thought would give him a good idea of Billy’s talents as a songwriter. The song was “You’re My Home,” from Billy’s first album. I’d thought the song was strong, but now, as Elvis and I listened together, I felt like it was putting into words things that I could have never said to my friend.

  Well I never had a place to call my very own…

  That’s all right…’cause you’re my home.

  I could see that Elvis liked it very much. When the song was over, he was quiet a moment. Then he said, “Can I hold on to this? I’d like to record it.”

  “Sure, E.”

  Billy’s Turnstiles album had been picking up a larger global audience than Billy was aware of, and Walter Yetnikoff at CBS Records decided that what had begun as a national tour ought to go international. Shortly after D.C., we headed to Australia for a string of dates. I was extremely happy for Billy, and very excited to be tour-managing the overseas dates. I also thought about the fact that after all that had gone on between Elvis and the Colonel on this issue, it turned out that it wasn’t that hard at all to put an international tour together if an artist’s support team wanted it to happen.

  I was home in L.A. for a few days before heading out with Billy again, and I got a call from Rick Nelson. He invited me to be his guest at a Beach Boys concert at Anaheim Stadium, and I accepted. It was a big show for the band, celebrating the release of their new album, 15 Big Ones, and was an emotional one for the band’s fans, because it marked a return to the stage of the band’s brilliant, troubled songwriter, Brian Wilson. A huge BRIAN IS BACK banner hung across the stage, and whenever Brian chipped in a harmony or played a bit on his piano, the crowd went wild.

  I’d had an interesting encounter with Brian just the year before. I was with Elvis at the RCA Studios in L.A. as he rehearsed his band for a March Hilton engagement. Things were moving along quite well, when suddenly the studio doors flew open and in walked a huge, bearded, sloppily dressed guy. There was always plenty of security around the studio on Elvis nights, so it startled everybody that such a big, strange guy could have gotten into the place. Before anybody had a chance to react, the big guy walked right up to Elvis and said, “Hi. I’m Brian.” Elvis said hello, not having any idea who “Brian” was. And I could tell that Elvis was angry at us—he did not like anybody interrupting his recording or rehearsal sessions. None of us knew who “Brian” was, either. Elvis was angry that someone had gotten through security, but he was also curious. This guy was big and burly, but gentle and childlike, too, and I know Elvis sensed something special about him. Just about anybody else that walked into Elvis’s studio like that would have been promptly thrown out. But Elvis let Brian stay. He didn’t know what to make of him, but he gave him his full attention.

  “Elvis, I’m recording next door,” said Brian. “Would you come over and listen?”

  “Yeah,” said Elvis. I could tell he was wondering what this guy might possibly play for him. As Brian left the studio, Elvis and a few of us followed. We got to the recording studio down the hall, where Brian had been working on some solo demo recordings with producer Terry Melcher (who also happened to be Doris Day’s son). Terry and Brian cued something up and played it. Brian eyed Elvis intently. “Elvis, do you think we got something?”

  Elvis waited just a beat, then gave his answer. “No.”

  That was the end of the personal interaction. For the rest of the night, two of the most brilliant talents in rock and roll worked side by side in separate studios.

  Watching Brian and the Beach Boys perform in Anaheim, I started to understand that their sunny music had a depth and power I hadn’t picked up on before. While the banner was for Brian, and it was singer Mike Love who led the group on stage, I could tell that it was Brian’s brother Carl who was in control of the music—and the level of the band’s musicianship was unbelievable. When the bandmembers put their voices together for their complicated five-part harmonies, the beauty of the sound could give you goose bumps. And there was that connection between band and audience that, though quite different, was as heartfelt as what Elvis had with his fans. The whole scene was pretty wild, and despite the harmony onstage, there were some backstage dramas between factions of the band that obviously weren’t getting along too well. I couldn’t imagine being the guy who had to pull a show like this together. At one point I leaned over to Rick Nelson and said, “I’m glad I don’t have your job.”

  Elizabeth Joel was with us for the first few dates Down Under, including some triumphant debut shows at the Sydney Opera House (Billy was the very first pop act to play there). She oversaw all the press Billy did to kick the tour off, then flew back to the U.S. and gave me strict instructions not to let Billy do any more press. Those first shows were great, but Billy quickly became frustrated that he wasn’t getting more radio support and didn’t seem to be selling many records. He came to my room one night looking depressed. I’d picked up some news from an Australian CBS executive that I thought might help him out.

  “Billy, what I’m hearing is that if you do some radio press before the last few shows, you’ll have a certified gold record over here. Elizabeth doesn’t want you doing more press, but why don’t you talk to her about it?”

  He thought a moment.

  “You’re my tour manager, Jerry?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And am I on tour right now?”

  “Yeah, Billy.”

  “Then you’re my manager. Set up the press.”

  I went to work over the next week setting up the radio interviews, and by the time Billy’s Australian tour ended he had his first international gold record. Billy was thrilled, but I don’t think Elizabeth was too happy with my insubordination. When Billy got ready for his next tour, I wasn’t asked back.

  But I wouldn’t be out of work for long. Rick Nelson was looking for an assistant tour manager for a fall Beach Boys tour, and felt I was the right guy for the job. He gave me the call. I didn’t like the idea of stepping down from tour manager to assistant tour manager, but I made a deal with Rick—if he’d let me sit in on the box office settling-up with promoters and venue owners after each show, I’d be his assistant. Rick said that would be all right. I was working for the Beach Boys.

  I’d also heard about some huge changes in the Elvis world. Just a couple weeks after I’d seen Elvis at the show in Maryland, Red West, Sonny West, and Dave Hebler had been fired. I didn’t know much about Dave’s situation, but it seemed to me that Elvis, Sonny, and Red had been growing apart for some time. For all the years they’d been together, the old camaraderie just wasn’t there anymore, and I think Sonny and Red were both frustrated with Elvis and irritated by the atmosphere that had developed around him. I’d stepped away in or
der to maintain a friendship with Elvis. It seemed that maybe Red and Sonny had stayed long enough to let things turn ugly.

  I went out with the Beach Boys to do some dates in Canada before the U.S. tour began. We flew from Canada to Florida, and I was at the Miami airport doing my best to watch over the huge amount of gear and luggage coming through customs, when a rough voice barked out at me.

  “Where’s Rick Nelson?” It was Dennis Wilson, Brian and Carl’s brother—the strikingly handsome wild-man drummer of the group.

  “He’s already at the hotel, Dennis. Making all the room arrangements.”

  “Well, come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  “I’ve got to watch all this stuff.”

  “Let the roadies watch it. You come with me.”

  I made a quick call to Rick, to see if it was OK to leave my post. Having dealt with Dennis himself, he was very understanding. “He’s your boss,” Rick told me. “Go with him.”

  Dennis and I threw our own bags in a limo and headed to our hotel. Dennis instructed me to get cleaned up and meet him in the lobby. I made myself presentable, and when I went back downstairs I almost didn’t recognize Dennis. He’d transformed himself from a good-looking surfer dude to an incredibly sharp leading man. And he now let me know that he and I were going to paint the town together. We got back in the limo and headed to the Forge, the city’s most upscale nightspot. My first night with Billy Joel, I was shucking oysters for the band. My first week with the Beach Boys, I was eating caviar and drinking thousand-dollar bottles of wine with the drummer.

  There weren’t any other nights like that one—helping to manage a big act like the Beach Boys on the road was a huge job, and I was usually so busy that I didn’t even have time to listen to the performances. I continued to appreciate the shows the band put on, but most of the time I was probably the only guy in the venue who couldn’t tell you what song the guys were playing. I did start to know the band, though. Brian Wilson had been struggling against some pretty frightening personal demons and was not a guy you could sit and have any kind of regular conversation with—it seemed like what he really had to say came out in his music. But for all he’d been through, there was something touchingly open and incredibly honest about Brian—something Elvis had recognized. I enjoyed any chance I had to spend time with him. The lead singer, Mike Love, a cousin to the Wilsons, was a curious mix of frontman, spiritual-seeker, and bottom-line businessman. He had become very involved in transcendental meditation, but he was also the guy most concerned with selling records and selling tickets to shows. He could be charming when he wanted to be and could have a great sense of humor, and I saw that his drive was a key part of the band’s commercial success. Rhythm guitarist and vocalist Al Jardine was a great singer and a steadying presence in the group, although he could occasionally drive an assistant tour manager crazy with long lists of requests and suggestions before each performance. Carl Wilson, Brian and Dennis’s youngest brother, was the quietest of the band members. But I could see that, in many ways, he was the strongest. Brian was the songwriter, and Mike was the showman, but Carl was truly the heart of the group, and any decisions about music had to go through him. I didn’t know all the group’s songs yet, but the ones Carl sang always grabbed at me. Early in Elvis’s career, he had been accused of making “devil music.” People often said Carl had the “voice of an angel.” I was glad I could work on both sides of the fence.