by Bob Stanley
The mid-fifties American cultural landscape was dry tinder for Elvis. He had a rapport with his generation that nobody – not Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra or anyone – had had before. Early TV appearances show him to be amused and impressed by his own power over the teenage audience. On an Ed Sullivan performance, filmed from the waist up in a panicked attempt to contain him, he sends himself up by hiccuping a line on ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ (‘at least please a-te-le-phone-ahh!’), and closes by pulling an outrageous Valentino pose that drowns out the last few lines of the song with ear-shredding screams. He took Rodgers and Hart’s ‘Blue Moon’ (UK no. 9 ’56) and gave it an eerie falsetto reading, already sounding like his own ghost, thoroughly spooking America in 1956. There was none of the artifice of the torch-singing balladeer: on Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s ‘Love Me’ he throbbed, groaned and choked with such visceral physicality it prompted interviewer Hy Gardner to ask him, ‘What about the rumour that you once shot your mother?’
True, Bill Haley had done the groundwork, jump-starting the hillbilly sound by borrowing heavily from R&B. Crucially, Elvis didn’t just get out his library card – he accentuated the rough edges, the danger of R&B, turned it from a nudge-nudge sound for streetwise black folk into something that threatened the social fabric of the USA. ‘Hound Dog’, his first out-and-out rocker, was a song written by Leiber and Stoller for R&B singer Big Mama Thornton. Her version breathes fire, no question, but lurches like a drunken bloodhound alongside Elvis’s cover: so intense and beautiful, he turned it into two minutes of sustained viciousness and sheer malicious glee.
It seemed like Elvis came from nowhere, and that was pretty much the case. He was a country boy, born in Tupelo, Mississippi, a town of fewer than ten thousand inhabitants. He loved to sing in church, played a little guitar, and called people ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’. His folks moved to Memphis when he was thirteen and developing an interest in clothes – he started to wear his hair long and greased back, a waterfall pompadour in the style of a truck driver. At the same time he bought his clothes at black stores, hung out in the black-music heartland of Beale Street, and loved the blues sounds he heard. Cutting a record for his mother at Sam Phillips’s Sun Studio, he told an inquisitive receptionist, ‘I don’t sing like nobody.’ She was impressed enough to pass Presley’s name on to Phillips, who teamed him up with local boys Scotty Moore and Bill Black. Together they cut an old Arthur Crudup blues song called ‘That’s All Right’ in 1954. The sound was hillbilly but it rocked hard. They followed it with another five singles on Sun, all blending country tunes (‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’, ‘I Don’t Care if the Sun Don’t Shine’) with R&B (‘Mystery Train’, ‘Good Rocking Tonight’) as if it was the most natural thing in the world. On stage at the Louisiana Hayride Elvis gyrated, wore a pink shirt and peg slacks. He looked raw, sounded rawer, and girls melted.
The person behind the curling lip, the real Elvis, remains nothing as remotely straightforward as the image. The fact he survived his stillborn twin brother, Jesse Garon, may conceivably have led to feelings of guilt and incompleteness from the beginning. It could also explain the strong ties Elvis had to his mother (who almost died giving birth) and his pack of surrogate brothers – the Memphis Mafia – who lived with him at Graceland even after he married. When his mother died aged forty-two, just as Elvis was set to do a stint in the army that he was convinced would destroy his career, the sense of isolation only grew.
One of his Memphis sidekicks was Jerry Schilling, who was just twelve years old when he met Elvis, playing football, in 1954. By 1965 Schilling was in his hero’s employ, at a time when Elvis had been eclipsed by the Beatles and Bob Dylan and was rapidly becoming an anachronism who churned out irrelevant, vapid movies. His post-army career had begun most promisingly in 1960 with Elvis Is Back!, arguably his best album: during the sessions he covered light opera (‘It’s Now or Never’), superior teen pop (‘The Girl of My Best Friend’), Johnnie Ray (the camp, flirtatious ‘Such a Night’) and dirty blues (‘Reconsider Baby’ and ‘A Mess of Blues’, a number-two single in the UK), an outrageously broad range for anyone but a master craftsman. Then in 1961 the mediocre GI Blues became a huge cinema hit, the crass pre-school novelty ‘Wooden Heart’ an international number one, and suddenly Elvis was living in Tinseltown. ‘He wanted to grow like any of us,’ said Schilling, ‘but the machinery wasn’t built that way.’ Trapped by his manager Colonel Tom Parker into a Hollywood contract that required three movies a year, there was barely time to sing enough songs for the soundtracks, let alone anything worthwhile; by 1965, the year of Rubber Soul and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, the erstwhile King Rocker was singing ‘Do the Clam’ and ‘Petunia the Gardener’s Daughter’. No wonder he was looking for a way out.
That option arrived in the unlikely guise of a hairdresser called Larry Geller. ‘We were just good old boys,’ said Schilling of the Memphis Mafia. ‘We talked about girls, football, but Elvis was a real thinker. Larry gave him an outlet. He could explore his spiritual side.’ Soon Geller and Elvis were investigating ‘numerology, astrology, Indian philosophy. Most of the guys didn’t want to read a book. They gave Larry a rough time.’
One day in 1966, staring at clouds, Elvis became overcome with emotion – a cloud had begun looking like Joseph Stalin, then mutated into Jesus. How could he carry on making those dumb movies, he asked Geller, after seeing the face of God? When the story got back to Colonel Parker, he told Elvis to get off his religious kick; a hurt Elvis snarled back, ‘My life is not a kick.’ The Colonel’s response was to oust Geller from the Presley camp and force his singer to perform the demeaning ‘Yoga Is as Yoga Does’ in his next movie.
The obvious way out of the Colonel’s grasp wasn’t an option. While girls fell at his feet, Elvis was unlucky in love. During his army duty he thought he had found the real thing with a young teenager called Priscilla Beaulieu but, just as he promised himself to her, he met the actress Ann-Margret on the set of Viva Las Vegas in 1964 and, according to many, discovered what true love was all about. They even discussed marriage.1
And yet Elvis and Priscilla married in ’67, then divorced in ’72. Biographer Paul Simpson calls this the ‘golden age of Elvisness’ – it included his first (and only significant) refusal to bow to the Colonel’s demands, when he concocted the electrifying 1968 ‘comeback special’ with TV producer Steve Binder rather than sing a bunch of corny Christmas songs, as well as his return to Memphis to record such classics as ‘In the Ghetto’ (US no. 3, UK no. 2 ’69) and ‘Suspicious Minds’ (US no. 1, UK no. 2 ’69). The divorce, though, seemed to be a tipping point. He began to immerse himself in autobiographical ballads (‘Always on My Mind’, ‘Separate Ways’) and self-pity. At one of his Vegas shows that year, the spotlight fell on Ann-Margret in the audience. ‘Leave the light on her, man,’ mumbled Elvis, ‘I just want to look at her.’
While the songs of these twilight years are often dismissed as schmaltz, they are just as much a part of the real Elvis as ‘Jailhouse Rock’ or ‘Hound Dog’. Elvis’s taste in music extended way beyond the R&B/hillbilly fusion that made his name; his record collection at Graceland stretched from Eddy Arnold and Judy Garland to the Animals, Otis Redding and Max Bygraves. His admiration for both hillbilly singer Cowboy Copas and opera’s biggest pop star Mario Lanza informed his ability to switch from an ethereal falsetto on ‘Blue Moon’ to Neapolitan tenor on ‘It’s Now or Never’ and intense country soul on ‘Long Black Limousine’. Asked to name his favourite singers he usually plumped for Frank Sinatra, Roy Orbison or Roy Hamilton, yet gospel remained his music of choice and often brought out his best performances – the fire he poured into mid-seventies renditions of Hamilton’s ‘Hurt’ and ‘Unchained Melody’ was normally reserved for numbers like ‘How Great Thou Art’ and the show-stopping ‘American Trilogy’ (US no. 66, UK no. 8 ’72). Thankfully, late-period recordings like Roger Whittaker’s nautical ballad ‘The Last Farewell’ were an aberration – his taste in songs was usually as solid as
his taste in interior decoration was dubious.
As the possibility of touring outside the States was continually thwarted by Colonel Parker (an illegal immigrant, as Elvis discovered very late in his career), his frequent Vegas shows became punctuated by weird monologues,2 karate exhibitions and comedy. Once he rode on stage on the back of Mafia member Lamar Fike, with a toy monkey attached to his neck, and sang an X-rated version of ‘Love Me Tender’. It laid bare to the public the medication abuse that insiders had known about for years. After the Aloha from Hawaii show, his last real success, broadcast live by satellite to more than a billion people, a combination of pain pills, liquid Demerol and heavy-duty depressants caused an interaction that led to throat and lung congestion, and so to further medication. During his next Las Vegas engagement he saw six physicians as well as his two regular doctors. Their motives were questionable. One gave him a course of acupuncture that involved syringes.
‘I lost my friend early due to creative disappointment,’ said Jerry Schilling. His Memphis Mafia colleague Red West once asked, ‘How do you protect a man from himself?’ Elvis, surrounded by kowtowing buddies, was not good at taking criticism or interference; all the inner circle could do was hope for the best and fear the worst.
The wonder was not when he died, but the fact that Elvis could die at all. Only the deaths of John Lennon and Princess Diana have caused such shock and bewilderment since. In the 1981 documentary This Is Elvis, his later performances are almost physically painful to watch, the only explanation for why he is performing in public rather than lying in a hospital bed being that his manager, his doctors, his record company, his fans and anyone else who had seen his bloated face, heard him slurring on stage, couldn’t entertain the idea of Elvis ever dying. As you hear him struggle through ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’ (‘I was’, he mumbles on the intro, ‘and I am’) it seems that Elvis Presley was the only person in the world who was aware of his mortality.
1 Elvis wanted the Colonel to manage Ann-Margret – he had very positive feelings for her career, too. When the Colonel explained that his time would then be split fifty–fifty between them, Elvis thought it wasn’t such a good idea after all.
2 Most were about his divorce, occasionally they were about the hotel staff in Las Vegas, and once he had a go at Bill Cosby, who had just left the room to go to the toilet: ‘Where’s Bill … where’s Cosby? After that buildup the SOB left? The hell with him! I won’t pay him. No, he gets ten grand, whether he wants it or not. He can stick it up his nose.’
4
PUT YOUR CAT CLOTHES ON: SUN RECORDS AND ROCKABILLY
At the same time as he hijacked and twisted R&B, Elvis Presley destroyed country. He wore eye shadow the first time he played Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry and came off stage to be told: ‘We don’t use nigger music.’ Pretty soon the bigots had no choice in the matter: within a couple of years every country boy wanted to sing just like Elvis, and rockabilly – the rocked-up, itchy hillbilly sound – had laid waste to the niceties of Nashville country.
The musicians came from white farming families, picking up on the rhythmic country blues of their black neighbours, specifically Big Bill Broonzy and Leadbelly, whose ‘Pick a Bale of Cotton’ was effectively a rockabilly blueprint. Country music didn’t use drums, so rockabilly musicians would slap the double bass to get a rhythm going. This was the sound of white people losing their taboos, making music with a beat they could dance to. Maybe they had no job but they still wanted to dress up. They wanted to look sharp and they wanted to party.
Rockabilly was entirely about rhythm. Vocals echoed and doubled up, guitars played one note, the double bass twanged, everything bang on the beat, until the whole thing rattled and shook violently, the musical equivalent of a racing jalopy on the verge of breaking up into pieces. The production created not just the record but often the song – it’s hard to imagine Elvis Presley’s ‘Baby Let’s Play House’ existing without its strategic, rhythmic, bottom-of-the-well echo. Rockabilly sounded primal, greasy, and had the most pared-back subject matter of any pop genre: the constituent parts were clothes (Bill Beach’s ‘Peg Pants’, Carl Perkins’s ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, Dwight Pullen’s ‘Sunglasses after Dark’), cars (Curtis Gordon’s ‘Draggin’’, Sammy Masters’s ‘Pink Cadillac’, Hoyt Stevens’s ‘55 Chevy’) and teenage girls (Johnny Carroll’s ‘Wild Wild Women’, Sonee West’s ‘Rock-Ola Ruby’, Skeets McDonald’s ‘Heart Breakin’ Mama’). Sonny Fisher’s ‘Pink and Black’ combined the lot within its opening couplet: ‘I got a pink Cadillac, pink and black shoes, a high-school baby rockin’ to the blues.’
Even the lyrics were designed to aid the bone-rattling rhythm on songs like Wanda Jackson’s ‘Tongue Tied’ and Buck Griffin’s daffy ‘Stutterin’ Papa’. Beyond this, rockabilly just loved to celebrate its own existence: Glenn Reeves’s ‘Rockin’ Country Style’, Hoyt Scoggins’s ‘Tennessee Rock’ and Thumper Jones’s ‘Rock It’, which sounds very much like it was made by a man in dungarees. Did the older generation all despise the new sound, and all want to stick to their bluegrass and cowboy laments? Not according to Jimmy Murphy (‘Granpaw’s a Cat’), Mac Curtis (‘Grandaddy’s Rockin’’) or Marvin Rainwater (‘You Oughta See Grandma Rock’).
Chief architect of rockabilly was Sam Phillips and his Sun record label. He was born in Alabama in 1923. By 1952 he was cutting demos and masters for local blues singers (Howlin’ Wolf, B. B. King, Rufus Thomas, Bobby Bland, Junior Parker) in his small studio, and licensing them on to majors. Cutting out the middle man, he formed Sun in ’53, and then in July 1954 he released a single by Elvis Presley.
Phillips was shrewd. He knew he was selling a percentage of his uptempo boogie singles to white kids, but he knew none of them could relate to Junior Parker the way they could to a white teenager – someone who was one of them.
This was the point at which music previously regarded as outside of pop – unformed, too wild – suddenly flooded in: now there was control, calculation and intelligence behind it, not Elvis’s perhaps (though he was excruciatingly modest – and a man channelling Mario Lanza and Big Mama Thornton had more grasp of the situation than he let on), but certainly that of wily Sam Phillips, savvy medicine-show salesman and genuine modernist biblical prophet. There was a vast whirling sandstorm outside the Sun studio; Sam Phillips not only recognised this when no one else seemed to, but he managed to control the storm and consciously direct it through his door.
‘That’s All Right’ – Sun Records no. 209, credited to Elvis Presley, Scotty and Bill – was debuted by Dewey Phillips (no relation), Memphis’s most influential disc jockey, one night in July 1954. Elvis hid in a cinema, telling his parents to listen in. Forty-seven listeners phoned the radio station, demanding to hear it again. It was played seven times that night, and sold seven thousand copies in Memphis in the first week alone. Five Presley singles later, at the end of 1955 Sun sold Elvis’s contract and all the masters to RCA for $35,000.
Art and commerce, sacred and secular; having found the formula for mixing rocking blues and hillbilly – rockabilly – Sam Phillips rarely recorded another black singer. There were plenty of country hybrids and nutcases brought out of the woodwork by Elvis’s success – so, he rightly figured, why look any further?1
Let’s take a look at the assortment of characters Sam Phillips spent his time on from 1955 onwards. If Elvis was considered dangerous, then Jerry Lee Lewis was outright terrifying. He wore custard-yellow suits with black piping and had a sneer that spelt out sex and dirt and a regal arrogance. He was a mean, mean man. ‘We’re going to hell,’ he’d cry. ‘Fire and brimstone. The fire never dies, the burning never dies, the fire never quenches for the weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth. Yessir, going to hell. The Bible tells us so.’ He was nicknamed the Killer, largely for what he did to his poor piano, his golden curls of hair flying as he sweated, battered and molested the poor thing.
The piano on his first hit, ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ (US no. 3, UK no. 6 ’57)
, sounded like it could break through the floorboards; it made a roaring, echoing noise like ominous approaching clouds. The storm broke on ‘Great Balls of Fire’, a ludicrous, lascivious single that mixed camp, sex and intimations of eternal suffering for such sin: ‘You broke my will, but what a thrill!’
But a bigger storm was round the corner. Entering Britain in 1958, after hitting number one with ‘Great Balls of Fire’, he made the mistake of bringing his child bride, thirteen-year-old Myra Gail. Confronted by the press, she said she was fifteen because she thought it would sound better. Jerry Lee’s fans howled him off stage and the tour was cancelled after two shows. Here was an early example of the conservative strand in modern pop, of teenagers thinking they understood right from wrong, good from bad, cool from uncool. Quite possibly they were right on this occasion, and Jerry Lee did deserve derision for his obvious indiscretion, but there would be many future occasions where this teen conservatism was a lot more complex and problematic for the modern pop narrative.
Anyway, teenage Britain’s reaction to Jerry Lee and Myra Gail’s marriage killed the Killer, artistically and commercially. Nowadays he’d hire a lawyer, falsify Myra’s passport, do something, but this was 1958. After one more classic bopper, ‘High School Confidential’ (US no. 21, UK no. 12 ’58), his records lost their lick of hellfire. By the late sixties he’d regrouped as a singer of country weepies, and scored a whole new run of hits on the country chart. This didn’t matter. On stage, he was only in demand for the music he had made in the six months when he ruled the world: for that brief flash, that shortest of hit runs, rockers still adore him. ‘There’s only been four of us,’ he’d proclaim, ‘Al Jolson, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, and Jerry Lee Lewis. That’s your only goddam four stylists that ever lived.’