Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  As for the Wranglers, there was friction, Scotty said, right from the start. To begin with, they hadn’t realized they wouldn’t all be backing Elvis up, though, of course, that wouldn’t have worked, Scotty knew, because they hadn’t backed him on the record. Then, too, there seemed to be a resentment based not just on the reception that the kid got, which was nothing out of the ordinary, but on the way he looked, the way he dressed, his whole demeanor—which was. To Sam it was a revelation. He hadn’t looked at Elvis Presley as a “physical specimen. I wasn’t thinking, ‘Is he going to look good onstage, is he going to be a great performer?’ I was just looking for something that nobody could categorize.” That was what Sam saw at the club that night, and it was what the Wranglers saw, too—but their reactions were entirely different.

  Sam called Bob Neal right after the Bon Air appearance. Neal, the WMPS DJ, was putting on a “hillbilly hoedown featur[ing] favorite folk ballads in a sylvan folk setting” and starring, “in person, the sensational radio-recording star” Slim Whitman, of the Louisiana Hayride, who would sing his hits, “Rosemarie,” “Secret Love,” and, undoubtedly, “Indian Love Call.” The show was at the outdoor amphitheater in Overton Park, and Sam asked Neal if he could add this new Memphis act to the bill. Bob, the most affable of entrepreneurs, said sure, as long as Sam got the boy into the musicians’ union, which Sam had Marion immediately set about to do. He didn’t say anything about it to Elvis at first, because he didn’t want to get him too worked up—but he thought he would try to place an ad in the paper with the Poplar Tunes record shop the following week, assuming that it all worked out.

  Dixie came home on Sunday, too late to see Elvis that night. The first song that the family heard on the radio when they got back into town was “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” On Monday, Dixie called Elvis at Crown Electric first thing in the morning, and he told her to meet him at home after work, he didn’t want to have to go home and change and clean up and drive over to her house before seeing her. “I had on a pale blue fitted skirt and a red blouse, and his mom and dad and I were sitting on the porch. They were just so excited they couldn’t believe it, they told me about the studio and the record and the people calling and saying, ‘Is this your son?’ Then I saw him walking down Alabama Street, I could see him a block away, and I couldn’t wait for him to get there, and he couldn’t wait to get there. And when he came in we had to go over the whole thing all over again. And we had to say, Hi, how you doing? Good vacation? Did you get my telegram? Yeah, I did. And he said something about my outfit, and we were just very polite for a minute, and then he walked in the door like, ‘I’m going for a drink or something.’ And he said, ‘Come here just a minute, Dixie.’ So I got up and went in the door so we could get our kiss, because we hadn’t seen each other in so long—it had been two weeks!—but we were so polite about it, because we were right there in front of his mother and daddy. It was a sweet day, I can still visualize it, I kept thinking, ‘Please don’t let him change,’ but, you know, after that things were never the same.”

  They seemed the same for quite some time, though. Dixie rode with him on his route in the Crown Electric truck. They continued to see each other almost every night. They stopped by Dewey’s radio show once or twice and sat with Dewey while he screamed and shouted and carried on. One night Elvis put in a plug for Crown Electric, and the switchboard was so jammed with calls the next day that the Tiplers took Elvis off his route and had him answer the phone. The Tiplers were almost as excited about his success as Mr. and Mrs. Presley. They went out to see him the first night he played the club, bringing friends and employees, and were only disappointed that he was not allowed to sing more songs.

  Some nights there would be rehearsals over at Scotty’s, and Dixie would sit with the wives, Bobbie and Evelyn, older married women in their twenties (Dixie was still not quite sixteen), while they rehearsed. Once they stopped by the Sun studio, but Dixie found Sam a little frightening, not like Dewey, who put you right at your ease, even if he was a little vulgar. Sam was kind of off-putting, though—the force of his gaze, the way it locked in on Elvis, made it seem as if he didn’t have much use for, or interest in, Dixie, and as a result she was even quieter than normal in his presence. On the Saturday night after she got home they played again out at the Bon Air, but Dixie, of course, couldn’t go because they served alcoholic drinks, so she waited at home for it to be over. When he finally came by to pick her up, he had forgotten his coat, and she rode out to the club with him, but “it was like another world. The people recognized him, and he had to go back onstage and sing again. It was like I was sitting there, thinking, ‘I’m not really in this, I’m watching it somewhere.’ ”

  The following week, ads for the July 30 Overton Park show started to appear. One spelled his name “Ellis Presley,” one left it out altogether, and the day of the performance there was an ad with Slim Whitman’s picture at the top that announced “ELVIS PRESLEY, New Memphis Star Who Sings ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ and ‘That’s All Right, Mama,’ ” along with a small Poplar Tunes ad urging patrons to “buy all of Slim Whitman’s Imperial Records—Elvis Presley’s Sun records” at the record store at 305 Poplar. On Tuesday at lunchtime Marion Keisker took Elvis just down the street to the Press-Scimitar Building at 495 Union. She had hoped to have her old college friend Bob Johnson do the story, but Johnson advised her that they had “a new kid who was handling a lot of that”—Edwin Howard, the editor’s son—and maybe it would be more politic to let him write it up. Marion arrived with Elvis in tow, Howard recalled. “I’ll never forget…. He look[ed] like the wrath of God. Pimples all over his face. Ducktail hair. Had a funny-looking thin bow tie on…. He was very hard to interview. About all I could get out of him was yes and no.”

  The article was headed “In a Spin” and led off with:

  Elvis Presley can be forgiven for going round and round in more ways than one these days. A 19-year-old Humes High graduate, he has just signed a recording contract with Sun Record Co. of Memphis, and already has a disk out that promises to be the biggest hit that Sun has ever pressed….“The odd thing about it,” says Marion Keisker of the Sun office, “is that both sides seem to be equally popular on popular, folk, and race record programs. This boy has something that seems to appeal to everybody. We’ve just gotten the sample records out to the disk jockeys and distributors in other cities, but we got big orders yesterday from Dallas and Atlanta.”

  True to Howard’s recollection, there is not a single direct quote from the subject of the article, and the photograph that accompanies it shows an unsmiling three-quarter view with clip-on bow tie and hair to which grease has been liberally applied in a vain attempt to make it behave—it is standing up a little wildly in front, and two strands have escaped, pointing outward like antennae. He is wearing a western-style shirt-jacket with white-stitched, button-down breast pockets and wide lapels, he appears to be wearing eye shadow, and all in all he looks like a combination of something from outer space and the polite, well-mannered, sober, and sensitive boy that he really was. He looked, Dixie thought, very handsome, and was. He looked, Elvis Presley thought, not quite right, but close to the way he wanted to look.

  FRIDAY, JULY 30, was hot and sticky. Dixie and Elvis must have spoken to each other at least half a dozen times during the day. Although he never liked to talk about it, she knew how nervous he must be, and driving up Poplar as they approached the park, she noticed that his fingers drummed an even steadier tattoo than usual on the metal dashboard. Mr. and Mrs. Presley were there—they came with a bunch of other relatives. Some of the boys and girls Dixie knew from church, the ones you would see at the roller rink, and some of their other friends were present, too—but mostly it was an undifferentiated mass who were there to see not “Ellis Presley” but Slim Whitman, the handsome, mustachioed star, or Billy Walker, the Tall Texan, who had just had his first big hit with “Thank You for Calling.” These were hillbilly singers, this was a hillbilly crowd—Dixie was scared to d
eath, not for herself but for how Elvis would feel if they just sat there and went, ‘Huh?’ What if they made fun of him, what if this was the end of his dream?

  Sam Phillips was late getting to the show. “I had to park a long ways away, and when I got there he was standing on the steps at the back of the shell looking kind of pitiful—well, maybe pitiful is the wrong word, I knew it was the way he was going to look: unsure. And he just grabbed me and said, ‘Man, I’m so glad to see you, Mr. Phillips. I-I-I-I—’ You know, that was just the way Elvis did. ‘I-I-I-I just didn’t know what I was going to do.’ Well, you know, it’s like when somebody’s mother is real sick and you tell them everything is going to be all right, and yet you know there’s the possibility that his mother might die. I said, ‘Look, Elvis, we’ll find out whether they like you or not.’ And then I said, ‘They’re gonna love you.’ Now I didn’t know that, and if you want to call me a liar or a fake for saying something that I didn’t know to be the truth—but I believed that once he started to sing and they saw him, I don’t mean the stage act, once they heard that voice and the beautiful simplicity of what those three musicians were putting down…. You see, Elvis had confidence in me, he saw that when I walked up I always had some kind of assured look, and yet he knew I wasn’t going to throw him to the lions either. So I gave him my best clubhouse pitch, not too many curves, ’cause I knew even if he struck out four times and left three people on base each time, after the ball game was over that could be overcome, too.”

  When Elvis went onstage, Scotty said, his knees were knocking so loud you could almost hear them. Bob Neal made the introduction, and then the three musicians, none of whom had ever appeared in a setting even remotely resembling this one, were on their own. The singer fiddled with the mike, twisting it so hard his knuckles turned white, but when he struck the opening chord of “That’s All Right,” Scotty and Bill fell in loosely behind him, and he raised up on the balls of his feet, leaning forward into the mike, his lips twisted involuntarily into a kind of sneer, as his legs began to quiver. “I was scared stiff,” he explained afterward. “It was my first big appearance in front of an audience, and I came out and I was doing [my first number], and everybody was hollering and I didn’t know what they were hollering at.”

  “We were all scared to death,” said Scotty. “Here we come with two little funky instruments and a whole park full of people, and Elvis, instead of just standing flat-footed and tapping his foot, well, he was kind of jiggling. That was just his way of tapping his foot. Plus I think with those old loose britches that we wore—they weren’t pegged, they had lots of material and pleated fronts—you shook your leg, and it made it look like all hell was going on under there. During the instrumental parts he would back off from the mike and be playing and shaking, and the crowd would just go wild, but he thought they were actually making fun of him.”

  He sang his second song, “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” which pretty much exhausted the group’s repertoire at this point, and the crowd went even wilder. Bill clowned and rode his bass, gave ever more confident whoops in the background, and hit his instrument a double lick. “It was really a wild sound, like a jungle drum or something,” Elvis recalled with some wonder. “I came offstage, and my manager told me that they was hollering because I was wiggling my legs. I went back out for an encore, and I did a little more, and the more I did, the wilder they went.”

  Sam Phillips and Bob Neal stood watching from the wings. This was something beyond either of their wildest expectations. As Elvis sang “Blue Moon of Kentucky” again, for his encore, he showed even greater confidence and more untrammeled movement. “It was a real eye-opener,” said Neal, who had had no reason to expect anything whatsoever of this untried, unproven nineteen-year-old. “He just automatically did things right.” “They still wanted Slim,” said Sam, “but they wanted Elvis, too. When they got done cheering for Elvis, they were cheering for Slim. And when Slim came out onstage—and this shows you what a great gentleman Slim Whitman was—he said, ‘You know, I can understand your reaction, ’cause I was standing backstage and I was enjoying it just as much as you.’ How’re you going to do better than that?”

  Meanwhile, for Dixie there were sharply mixed emotions. She wasn’t shocked by his movements, she had seen him do similar things many times just singing for their friends at Riverside Park, “it was his natural way of performing.” And it wasn’t that different from what Chief did at the All-Night Singings either—even the reaction and the size of the crowd were comparable too. Even so, she said, “I don’t think he was prepared for what was about to happen. He knew this was what he wanted to do and that it was breaking for him, but I don’t think he [ever] thought everybody would just go crazy. I wanted to tell [some of the girls who were screaming], ‘Shut up and leave him alone. What do you think you’re doing here?’ And I felt like all of a sudden I was not a part of what he was doing. He was doing something so totally him that I was not a part of it…. And he loved it.”

  IN THE WEEKS that followed the Overton Park show, Sam Phillips was on the road almost constantly. Ever since starting up Sun Records again the previous year, he had traveled between sixty-five thousand and seventy-five thousand miles, visiting each of his forty-two distributors, meeting jukebox operators, disc jockeys, record-store owners, buyers and sellers. For all the pointedness with which Sam eschewed convention (and conventions), there were very few people in the business that he did not know and who did not in turn recognize and respect the unswerving commitment that drove this slim, elegant, intense young man with the preacher’s faith and the piercing gaze. For each of his trips Sam loaded up the trunk of his car with records and set off on a road that ended in a fitful few hours of sleep, more often than not at the local YMCA, before he moved on to meet the next early-morning jock. Meanwhile, Marion kept things going at home, paying bills, fending off creditors, meeting orders, ordering up labels, dealing with the pressing plant, and fulfilling all the other responsibilities that being half of a cash-poor two-person operation entailed. In the six and a half months before “That’s All Right” came out, Sun Records had released twelve records, none of them as substantial a hit as Rufus Thomas’ “Bear Cat,” which had occasioned a bitter lawsuit from Duke Records’ Don Robey (he claimed that “Bear Cat” infringed his copyright on Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog”) and the eventual forfeiture of a considerable amount of money. In the five months following the release of Sun number 209, the company released only three additional records, one of them (the only one to come out before November) the follow-up disc by Elvis Presley. Clearly Sam Phillips’ attention was focused on his new artist, and just as clearly it was not simply because of the economic opportunities that he foresaw. For Sam Phillips saw a revolution on the way.

  It was not an easy vision to fulfill. When he came around looking for jocks to play Little Junior Parker or Rufus Thomas, trying to sell distributors on their sales potential, the task was easy by comparison: he was dealing with a defined market, and if he happened to believe in the undefined potential of that market, the crossover potential, that is, more than his listener, that was merely a matter of degree. Here, though, all the rules were out the window. “I remember talking to T. Tommy Cutrer [the top country jock] at KCIJ in Shreveport, who’s one of the greatest guys in the world—and one thing I never did do is try to overpower somebody with my convictions of what I had in my little black bag. ‘If you can give me some play on it, I’d appreciate it. If you can’t, I understand.’ T. Tommy told me, ‘Sam, they’ll run me out of town.’ ” Fats Washington, on the other hand, was a paraplegic black man with a rhythm and blues show who had been crippled in the war. “He played my r&b records, all of them. But when I wanted him to play ‘That’s All Right,’ he played it for me, but he said on the air, ‘I just want to tell all my listeners I got Sam Phillips in the studio with me here, and he thinks this is gonna be a hit record, and I’m telling him that this man should not be played after the sun comes up in the morning, it’
s so country.’ I’ll never forget that statement, but he was honest about it.

  “Paul Berlin was the hottest disc jockey in Houston at the time, and I taught him how to run the board. When he was a little chap on Lowenstein’s Junior Theater on Saturdays on WREC, I put him on the air and he’d come in after the show and want me to show him the control boards and everything. Then he became the number-one disc jockey in Houston, and he was playing Tennessee Ernie Ford and Patti Page, all the big pop artists of the time, and he told me, ‘Sam, your music is just so ragged, I just can’t handle it right now. Maybe later on.’

  “I never forced myself in any door or left where they felt I didn’t at least intend to. I never said, ‘Well, you wait and see,’ ’cause, hell, I didn’t know myself. I worked with the counter people in the distributorships. I talked to unbelievable numbers of jukebox operators and retail [merchants]. On Mondays you would usually see your jukebox operators and give them a whole week to change their program—Wednesday was usually the last day they could come in and get the newest stuff. Retail was usually Wednesday and Thursday, Tuesday if they were out in the country. I’d come in, say, to Atlanta or Dallas, and if there was something the counter person was on the fence about, they would buy in very limited quantity just so they wouldn’t get stuck. The thing I would never do was go in and not tell the distributor what reaction I had from other distributors across the country. I told them the truth. Many times I believed so much in what I had that I wanted to tell them things that really wasn’t true. But I knew I had to face them again, so I just told them what I felt—and a lot of times I felt real discouraged.