Elvis Ignited

by Kealing, Bob;

  “There are naturally an abundance of clean-living, unscandalized homebodies in the entertainment world,” the editorial board writer concluded. “But apparently the constant exposure to the temptations that go with ‘show business’ have exploded any moral sense many of them were trained to in their childhood.” The holier-than-thou attitude of editorial writers and columnists of the day, based on innuendo and secondhand information, is appalling.

  In an era when all-night fast food places were not yet the norm, Presley and his bandmates caught a lot of late-night meals at truck stops and spent a lot of early mornings slugging down black coffee in local diners. In Sarasota the boys took a liking to a breakfast place on Washington Boulevard, the Waffle Stop, showing up the morning of their appearance at the Florida Theater, then returning once more the day after.

  Waitress Edith Barr Dunn watched a group of men pull up and vault out of a convertible pink Cadillac, no doors necessary. Wearing black high-waisted trousers, a white shirt with cuffs rolled at the wrists, and his coiffed jet-black hair, Presley took a seat on a stool at the far end of the counter, followed by his bandmates.

  “If you give me good service, I’ll give you a good tip,” Presley promised the attractive early-thirty-something waitress. He ordered three eggs, three bacon strips, home fried potatoes, and three glasses of milk. “Ma’am,” he continued, typical of the way he addressed older people even though in this case the twenty-one-year-old was flirting, “your skirt should be shorter because your gams are too pretty … you have a nice smile.”

  True to his word, Presley left a fifty-cent tip. The second morning he toyed with Barr Dunn again. “If you remember what I ordered yesterday, I’ll give you another big tip.” After another meal of bacon and eggs, and signing two 8 × 10 photos, Presley and the boys were back in the Cadillac headed northbound on the Tamiami Trail for the night’s show just over the state line in Waycross, Georgia.

  As time progressed and Presley’s star rose, owners of the Waffle Stop made sure everyone knew he had stopped there twice on his march to fame, to eat breakfast and flirt with Barr Dunn, who came to be known as the “Queen of the Waffle Stop.” Well into her nineties, people continued to ask what it was like meeting the young Elvis.

  To say Barr Dunn was unimpressed with him is an understatement. “I thought he was conceited,” she recalled decades after she served the king of rock and roll. “He was just a flirt.” As for the photos Presley left behind the second morning he came in, Barr Dunn didn’t think much of them: “I stuck ’em on the service station where we kept all the syrups.”

  Today big signs blaze to people passing by the Waffle Stop, “Elvis Ate Here.” Kitschy memorabilia items adorn the walls; an animatronic plastic head of Presley in dark sunglasses greets patrons with funny quips. It’s fun, to be sure. But there’s also a certain sadness about the place—not because it’s old, not because it seems frozen in yesteryear. It’s as if the restaurant is an homage to the caricature Presley became, rather than a celebration of the flirtatious and dynamic working musician Presley was at the time he passed through, on the brink of enormous hits and history-making television appearances. And there’s little or no mention of the men who were with him; the two who split the atom with Presley at the birth of rock and roll, Scotty Moore and Bill Black.

  Though the Waffle Stop is bigger than it used to be, you can still sit right at the curving breakfast counter where Presley sat decades ago; a quick stop along the ghost road where his Cadillac streaked toward north Florida and another history-making concert to be emblazoned in the mind of a nine-year-old boy destined to make music history himself.

  9

  The Florida-Georgia Line, February 22–26

  Waycross, Jacksonville, Pensacola

  As Presley continued to barnstorm Florida in 1956, both girls and boys were moved in profound ways by seeing him; in some cases akin to a religious experience, or a milepost in time from which there was no going back. “He prowled the stage like a big jungle cat,” wrote the late Memphis music legend Jim Dickinson in his memoir. “I talked about the show for months. I described it in detail to friends and family whenever I got a chance, spreading the new religion of the King of Rock and Roll, or as George Klein would say, ‘Elvis himselvis.’”

  Presley’s backing band had a similar effect on the lives of ambitious young would-be musicians. Norbert Putnam, who went on to play bass on numerous Presley recordings, including his 1973 Stax sessions, said of Bill Black: “He was my first bass hero. He was a god to me.”

  “Scotty Moore was my icon,” wrote Keith Richards, recalling the night he heard Moore’s stark, echo-heavy licks on “Heartbreak Hotel” via Radio Luxembourg. “I’d have died and gone to Heaven just to play like that. How the hell was that done?”

  On February 22, 1956, nine-year-old Gram Connor waited for Elvis Presley and his band to complete the five-hour, 320-mile drive from Sarasota to tiny Waycross, Georgia; one of two dates over the state line during Presley’s third Florida tour. As “Heartbreak Hotel” started to get more and more airplay, Presley made the song a dramatic, one-syllable opening to his live shows:

  “Weeeeell …”

  With that the audience of about five hundred jammed into Waycross City Auditorium shrieked in unison. Sitting close to the front of the stage, fourth grader Gram Connor was fascinated. “He came on and the whole place went bonkers,” he recalled, “It all penetrated my mind.” The next day the Connor boy started slicking back his hair with Brylcream and wearing bright clothes, more like Presley’s stage wardrobe. This scenario played out over and over as young boys across America were moved by Elvis Presley’s unique star power; by the raw sexuality in his movements and obvious effect it had on young girls. For boys like Gram Connor, being like Elvis became the roadmap to coolness—and girls.

  “From that day on,” local Waycross musician and music historian Billy Ray Herrin said, “Gram started learning as much as he could about rock and roll and he began to write songs.” He held Saturday morning music parties for the local kids and started performing like Elvis on his front porch. This was no mere ripple effect of seeing Presley; it was as if Elvis cannon-balled right offstage into a tide pool of impressionable kids; latter-day musicians, songwriters, and soon-to-be lifelong devotees.

  After the loss of his father, Gram’s mother remarried and Gram Connor became Gram Parsons. In 1959, after moving from Waycross to Winter Haven, Florida, Parsons joined a succession of garage bands sprouting up all over the peninsula. Call it the Elvis effect, and as Presley’s star grew, that effect became magnified in ways even Presley himself could not have imagined. The line-up Parsons saw that night in Waycross—Presley, Charlie and Ira Louvin, and Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters—formed a foundation for the unique genre-bending brand of music Parsons pioneered; he was the first musician to go full-on into synthesizing country and rock music.

  The author with Charlie Louvin in Waycross, Georgia, inside City Auditorium prior to its renovation. Courtesy of Mike Robinson.

  In 1968 America’s most important band at the time, the Byrds, hired Parsons as a side man and, thanks to his vision, recorded the first full-length country rock record in Nashville. They made history as the first rock and roll band to perform live at the Grand Ole Opry. As with Presley’s less-than-stellar outcome there in 1954, the Byrds were so ahead of their time that the audience didn’t know what to think and gave them a tepid reception at best.

  When Parsons recorded GP, his first of two landmark solo records in 1972, as an homage to the man who had inspired him, he hired Presley’s backup musicians known as the TCB Band (short for Takin’ Care of Business) and an unknown folk singer named Emmylou Harris. Parsons is considered the avatar of country rock or alt-country and launched Harris’s Country Music Hall of Fame career. Though Parsons died at just twenty-six in 1973, his contributions to contemporary music are far-reaching.

  The organizer of the annual Gram Parsons Memorial Guitar Pull in Waycross, Georgia, s
ays the spirit of Gram Parsons and young Elvis are intertwined. “To say Gram Parsons was impressed with Elvis Presley would be putting it lightly,” event organizer Dave Griffin said. Many musicians who come to Waycross to play the tribute event perform Elvis songs that Parsons covered, “in tribute to two music icons.”

  In 2009 Charlie Louvin, who opened for Elvis that historic night in 1956, returned to Waycross to headline the memorial concert to Parsons. Though the inside of City Auditorium had fallen into disrepair, and the stage upon which both he and Presley performed was boarded up, Louvin took a seat in front of it and recalled the rise of rock and roll’s crown prince. “I always thought Elvis was a fad,” Louvin opined, “until I saw women as old as my mother outside the rail fence down on their knees pulling grass out of Presley’s yard. I knew then it wasn’t a fad. He was huge; big as you could get.”

  Not wanting to lose the spirit of that historic Presley-to-Parsons musical connection, Waycross city leaders embarked on a $1.5 million renovation of the 15,000-square-foot 1937 auditorium. By 2015 City Auditorium was reborn; the stage where young Elvis performed is once again shiny and wide open for all to use and admire, framed in brown with a white wall backdrop. In the Waycross venue where it happened, the history of young Elvis forging his way through the south to fame and passing the torch to young Gram Connor is well preserved.

  In 1956 the pause in a little railroad town just over the Georgia border was another of many one-nighters for Presley and the boys, on a road with no clear destination beyond the next gig, and then the next. As they neared the end of the third Florida tour, the workload was getting to Presley. Since the nationally televised Sunday night performance on February 19 in New York City, his tour had been a blur. Each stop meant multiple headlining shows then back in the car to cover hundreds of miles overnight to make it to the next stop. By the time he had traveled from Waycross back down to Jacksonville, Florida, on Thursday the 23rd, Presley collapsed. The doctor at Baptist Memorial Hospital diagnosed exhaustion and told Presley to get some rest. Upon his release, Presley smiled and said the constant attention from nurses made getting rest a tough order to follow.

  The Elvis Presley show went on as scheduled on Friday night. During the two-night Jacksonville stand, Presley performed “Heartbreak Hotel,” the song about to vault his career into the stratosphere, live in the town where it had been written and recorded in Mae Axton’s front room just six months previously. On Saturday the band embarked on a mind-numbing twelve-hour, eight-hundred-mile road trip from northeast Florida to Shreveport in the northwest corner of Louisiana for the Saturday night Louisiana Hayride show.

  To up-and-coming musicians, the Hayride represented the chance to become known in a way the more heralded and exclusive Opry did not. The Hayride did not require performers to be established and have hit records; they could play electrified instruments and be who they were, in contrast to what the Opry folks expected them to be. The Hayride nurtured Presley in the formative days of his career, and he remained under contract to perform there until the end of the year. By this time in 1956, the logistics of getting there to fulfill his obligations could be hell.

  Live on KWKH-AM from the Shreveport Memorial Municipal Auditorium on the same show where Hank Williams first gained a radio audience in 1949, and where Presley’s future guitarist James Burton started playing when he was just fourteen, on February 25, 1956, Presley blasted out “Heartbreak Hotel” as far as the 50,000-watt signal would take him. Shortly after Presley and his band were off the air, they loaded up and headed back east to fulfill one more tour stop in the Sunshine State.

  As an example of how Presley was still a megastar-in-waiting, during this entire frenetic week in and around Florida, there was minimal press coverage. Although his big new single was gaining airplay, “Heartbreak Hotel” did not enter the Billboard charts until the week after the end of his third Florida tour. Presley was still on the brink, grinding out a living and catching fire by word of mouth one broadcast, one disc jockey, one promoter, one concert, one small town at a time. When Tom Parker booked Presley for his first-ever concert in Pensacola, it had to spark bittersweet, even harrowing memories; part of Parker’s reinvention meant burying his past in the Florida panhandle town.

  10

  The Promoter and Deserter

  February 26, 1956

  Pensacola, a picturesque maritime town on the western reaches of Florida’s panhandle, home to the navy’s world-famous Blue Angels, has a history rife with storybook tales of sunken ships, deadly hurricanes, and tragic endings. A generation before he booked Elvis Presley to play the town’s stately bay front auditorium in 1956, Tom Parker endured the most trying episode of his life here, leaving him broken in many ways. The fact that he bounced back to build such a mythic, successful career based largely on deceit and outright lies is testimony to his resiliency, guile, and work ethic. As a young soldier he brought it all on himself.

  In September 1932 U.S. Army Private First Class Parker slipped away from Fort Barrancas, a stark hilltop battery overlooking Pensacola Bay: a serious military transgression. The Army listed him as AWOL and after a week stripped Private Parker of his first-class rank. After a month Parker was classified as a deserter; a criminal who had turned his back on his sacred duty to country. His biographer Alanna Nash speculated that Parker had run off with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circus, which happened to be passing through town at the time Parker left his post.

  Bay front Municipal Auditorium, Pensacola. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/64409.

  It was five more months before he returned to the base, hat in hand, asking for leniency. Twenty-three years to the month before he returned to Pensacola backing the young man well on his way to becoming the country’s new rock and roll sensation, Tom Parker was thrown into the guardhouse jail at Fort Barrancas to serve a sixty-day sentence in solitary confinement. For a natural-born schmoozer and future showman brimming with wanderlust and ambition, Tom Parker was left to contemplate his desertion, having landed himself in a personal hell.

  When Parker reemerged from the dark, dank miserable place in April 1933, he was an emotional and psychological wreck. Doctors at the base deemed him psychotic and prone to emotional outbursts and transferred him to psychiatric lockdown at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Staff doctors there concluded it was not just the jail stint that had caused twenty-four-year-old Parker to come unhinged; they diagnosed him with “Emotional instability” and “Psychosis, psychogenic depression.”

  In 1933 the United States Army officially branded Tom Parker a psychopath.

  By August doctors approved Parker’s return to society but never again as a soldier. Within two years he had drifted back to Florida. In Tampa, where traveling circus and carnival shows spent warm winters, people of questionable backgrounds could join with few questions asked. This was how the military misfit and illegal alien began to build the Tom Parker persona into a remarkable, larger-than-life American success story.

  All those years later, in 1956, the nightmare he had gone through must have been on Parker’s mind as he performed advance work for Presley, showing up in Pensacola a day or two early to visit radio station disc jockeys and newspaper offices. He must have flashed back to the harrowing memories of his imprisonment in the military fort carved into the bluff guarding Pensacola Harbor, a fort with cavelike brickwork staircases and claustrophobic low-slung ceilings. Spending week upon week confined in such a frightening place dating back to the late eighteenth century, where paranormal activity is routinely reported, had to make Parker feel lost among the ghosts of doomed soldiers in a modern-day medieval dungeon. It’s easy to see how anyone, no matter how strong psychologically, could go mad. After his solitary confinement there, even the low moments of his sometimes hardscrabble promoter’s life still had to be far better in comparison.

  For weeks and months at a time Parker withstood the grind of life on the road, sta
ying in run-down motels away from his devoted wife Marie, performing the thankless duties that come with building an entertainer’s career. Parker’s zeal for work so transient can be better understood knowing he came from nothing. His monumental success once the gates of hell reopened at Fort Barrancas was every bit as unlikely as Presley’s.

  Parker’s vocal critics, like Ira Louvin, and those who didn’t trust him, like Scotty Moore, would have given anything to know the truth about “Colonel” Tom Parker. Louvin tried and failed to get extra money for artists opening for Presley. This humiliating chapter in Parker’s past would have provided validation of the mistrust Moore and Gladys Presley had felt for Parker ever since he inserted himself into Presley’s career and began to isolate the entertainer from anyone deemed a potential adversary or rival in promoting Presley.

  To Moore, the straight-laced, no-nonsense guitarist, honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy, this would have been what he needed to get Parker out of the picture like a bad memory. In the ultra-conservative days of Communist paranoia fueled by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, when critics’ scorn of Presley’s effect on American youth reached its zenith, Parker’s past would have been blood in the water to any number of critics. Had Parker’s secrets, his desertion, psychological diagnosis, and illegal alien status gotten out, they would have derailed and doomed the Presley phenomenon before it ever got off the ground. Gladys Presley would never have approved of her boy being associated with someone once labeled a psychopath. Presley’s place in American music history—if he achieved one at all—would have been far different had Tom Parker’s past been exposed.

  Even in an era long before instant online background checks and decades-old military records being just one Freedom of Information Act request away, it is still remarkable that Parker was able to bury it all. By the time Presley’s first headlining tour reached the panhandle of Florida, that crisis was but a distant memory for his gruff, hard-charging manager.