Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  The show that night went fine. Elvis remained largely unheralded in Cleveland (his records were little more than “turntable hits” there, since Sun’s distribution did not extend effectively that far), but if Bob Neal had been apprehensive about a northern audience’s receptivity to this new music, his fears were quickly put to rest. Elvis went over the same as he had throughout the South: the young people went wild, and the older folks covered their mouths. Bill’s souvenir photo sales were brisk, as he mixed easily with the fans and made change from his money belt, and Tommy Edwards sold a fair number of their records (which they had carried up from Memphis in the trunk of Bob’s car) in the lobby. After the show Edwards said there was someone he wanted Neal to meet. In fact it was the very person who had put on the Billy Ward–Bill Haley show, just returned from his four-hour Saturday-afternoon shift on WCBS in New York. Maybe Elvis could do another interview, even though they had already done an on-the-air promotion for the Jamboree on Edwards’ show that afternoon. They went down to the station, and there they met Bill Randle.

  Bill Randle was a legend in radio at that time. Tall, scholarly-looking with black horn-rimmed glasses, he had just been written up in Time two weeks before in a story that announced, “For the past year the top U.S. deejay has been Cleveland’s Bill Randle, 31, a confident, prepossessing fellow who spins his tunes six afternoons a week (from 2 to 7 P.M. on station WERE).” According to the article, Randle had predicted all but one of the top five best-sellers of 1954, discovered Johnnie Ray, changed the name of the Crew-Cuts (from the Canadaires) as well as finding them their first hit, drove a Jaguar, and made $100,000 a year, with his Saturday-afternoon CBS network show in New York the latest in his series of unprecedented accomplishments. “Randle’s explanation of his success: ‘I’m constantly getting a mass of records. I weed out those that are obviously bad and play the rest on my program to get listener reaction. Then I feed the results into a machine. I’m the machine. I’m a Univac [computer]. It’s so accurate that I can tell my listeners, “This tune will be No. 1 in four weeks.” ‘” When asked if he liked the music that he played, Randle, whose personal taste ran to jazz and classical music and who had been fired from a Detroit radio station several years earlier for refusing to play pop (“It was a tremendous emotional problem switching to popular music…. It was almost a physical thing bringing myself to play the records”), Randle declared, cheerfully, in Time’s estimation: “I’m a complete schizophrenic about this. I’m in the business of giving the public what it wants. This stuff is simply merchandise, and I understand it.”

  It was through Tommy Edwards that Randle had first heard Elvis Presley’s music, but while Edwards played “Blue Moon of Kentucky” for his country audience, Randle heard something in the blues. It wasn’t until he started going to New York in January, though, that he actually started playing Presley, and then he aired “Good Rockin’ Tonight” on his CBS show, which according to Randle made him persona non grata at the station for a while.

  They did the interview down at the WERE studio that night, as Randle played all three of Presley’s Sun records and was altogether won over. “He was extremely shy, talked about Pat Boone and Bill Haley as idols, and called me Mr. Randle. Very gentlemanly, very interesting, he knew a lot about the music and the people and the personalities in Memphis, and it was very exciting.” He was almost equally impressed with Bob Neal. “Bob Neal to my mind was a really interesting person. He was very bright. He was a country disc jockey, but he was also a businessman-entrepreneur-hustler—but with a lot of class.” Randle invited Neal to stay over at his place, and they stayed up much of the night talking. By the end of the evening Randle was convinced that Neal “had a big artist on his way,” and he gave Neal the name of a contact in song publishing who he thought could help get Presley a tryout on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. When they parted in the morning, Randle wished Neal luck with his boy and said he hoped he’d get a chance to see him perform when they returned to Cleveland and the Circle Theater the following month. Then Randle had his Sunday-afternoon radio show to do, and Neal and the boys had a long drive back to Memphis.

  Memphis seemed almost tame upon their return. It had been more than three weeks since Elvis had last seen Dixie, their longest separation, and he felt like he had all kinds of things to tell her, but when it came down to it, it seemed like he didn’t have all that much to tell. They went to the monthly All-Night Singing at Ellis, where James Blackwood left Elvis’ name at the door, then announced that he was in the audience and invited him backstage after the show. They went to the movies—The Blackboard Jungle opened that month, with Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” blasting out over the opening credits. For the first time they didn’t have to worry about money, they could buy all the new records they wanted at Charlie’s and Poplar Tunes and Reuben Cherry’s Home of the Blues, where Elvis bought every red and black Atlantic and silver and blue Chess record that he could find. They dropped in to see Dewey Phillips, and Dewey always made a big fuss, announcing in his superexcited pitchman’s voice that Elvis was in the studio, firing a few questions at him that Elvis answered with surprising ease on the air. He played football down at the Triangle a few times, but he felt increasingly uncomfortable with the old gang. They stopped by the new office on Union, whose recurrent motif was pink and black: fan club membership cards, stationery, and envelopes all matched Elvis’ preferred personal decor, and Bob’s wife, Helen, said they had several hundred fan club members enrolled already. On March 15, Elvis signed an amended one-year agreement with Neal, giving Neal a 15 percent commission and subject to renewal in March 1956, when, if necessary, it could be revised again.

  Meanwhile, the group had its second recording session in little more than a month. They had gone into the studio at the beginning of February, just before the start of the Jamboree tour, with the idea of recording their next single, but like every other session, this one had come hard. They tried Ray Charles’ current hit, “I Got a Woman,” already a staple of their live act, as well as “Trying to Get to You,” an unusual gospel-based ballad by an obscure rhythm and blues group from Washington, D.C., called the Eagles, but neither one worked out. The one number they did come up with, though, was probably the best they had gotten in the studio to date. Taken from a fairly pallid original by Arthur Gunter that hit the rhythm and blues charts at the end of January, “Baby, Let’s Play House” virtually exploded with energy and high spirits and the sheer bubbling irrepressibility that Sam Phillips had first sensed in Elvis’ voice. “Whoa, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby,” Elvis opened in an ascending, hiccoughing stutter that knocked everybody out with its utterly unpredictable, uninhibited, and gloriously playful ridiculousness, and when he changed Gunter’s original lyric from “You may have religion” to “You may drive a pink Cadillac” (“But don’t you be nobody’s fool”), he defined something of his own, not to mention his generation’s, aspirations. This looked like it could become their biggest record yet, everyone agreed. All they needed was a B side.

  While they were out on tour, Stan Kesler wrote it. Kesler, the steel guitarist in Clyde Leoppard’s Snearly Ranch Boys, had been hanging around the studio since the fall, when he had been drawn in by the strange new sounds he had heard on the radio (“I never heard anything like it before”). The Snearly Ranch Boys were looking to make a record, which they eventually did, but Sam Phillips picked out Kesler, along with Muscle Shoals–area musicians Quinton Claunch (guitar) and Bill Cantrell (fiddle), to form a kind of rhythm section for a bunch of little country demo sessions he put together in the fall and winter of 1954–55 on artists as diverse as fourteen-year-old Maggie Sue Wimberley, the Miller Sisters, Charlie Feathers, and a new rocking hillbilly artist out of Jackson, Tennessee, a kind of hopped-up Hank Williams named Carl Perkins. He put out limited-release singles on each of these, mostly on a nonunion subsidiary label he formed just for that purpose, called Flip, but with almost all of Sam’s energies still focused on Elvis none of the records
did anything much.

  It was clear, though, that Sam was thinking of the future and seeking ways to expand upon Sun’s newfound success. Times were still tough, money remained tight, and Sam was still feeling the pinch from buying out his partner, Jim Bulleit, the year before, but there was no question of his settling for being known as a one-artist producer. Sam Phillips’ ambitions were much grander than that: he had great hopes for this new boy Perkins, “one of the great plowhands in the world,” as he later described him, and he was “so impressed with the pain and feeling in his country singing” that he felt this might be “someone who could revolutionize the country end of the business.” He was equally impressed with yet another young man who had shown up on the Sun doorstep in the wake of Presley’s success and continued to hang around until Sam gave him an audition. There was something about the quality of this young appliance salesman’s voice—it was in a way akin to Ernest Tubb’s in its homespun honesty (he kept telling the boy not to try to sound like anyone else, not to worry if his sound and his style were untutored, not even to rehearse too much, “because I was interested in spontaneity, too”). He didn’t release a record on Johnny Cash until the following summer, but he was working with him and Perkins and Charlie Feathers and a host of others all through the winter and spring.

  That was why Stan Kesler kept hanging around. He sensed that something new was about to happen, and he wanted to be a part of it when it did. When he heard that Sam was looking for material for the next Presley session, he immediately went home and wrote a number called “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone” with fellow band member Bill Taylor (trumpet player with the Snearly Ranch Boys) based on the melody of the Campbell’s Soup commercial. He borrowed Clyde Leoppard’s tape recorder, had Taylor demo the song, and sat around the studio chatting with Marion until Sam came in and listened to it. As it turned out, Sam liked the song, and Elvis must have a little bit, too, because it was the one number that they concentrated on at the session the following week.

  What was different about this session was that for the first time they used a drummer. Sam had always said that he wanted to take the trio format as far as he could—and in fact they started out this session as a trio—but Sam felt like there was something missing, and he called up a young musician who had come in with his high school band the previous year to make an acetate of a couple of big band jazz numbers. Jimmie Lott was a junior in high school at the time but unfazed by the action. “I had bronchitis, but I loaded up my drums into my mom’s car. Elvis was standing in the doorway of the studio. He had long greasy ducktails, which was not too cool with my [crowd].” They jumped into a Jimmie Rodgers Snow number that Elvis wanted to cut, “How Do You Think I Feel,” to which Lott contributed a Latin beat, but they couldn’t get it right and soon went back to the Kesler-Taylor composition that Elvis, Scotty, and Bill had been fooling around with all evening. They had run up more than a dozen takes already, trying to transform a simple country tune into a wrenchingly slow blues number patterned on the Delmore Brothers’ “Blues Stay Away from Me.” Elvis was uncomfortable with the idea of doing a straight-out country tune, and Sam could understand that, but even as they came closer to what they were aiming for, Sam knew they were just getting further apart: hell, they all knew it in some part of their souls. The Campbell’s Soup melody just wasn’t altogether suited to a blues treatment.

  Once the drums were added, providing a solid, jangling background, there wasn’t so much weight on Elvis’ vocals, and he got the pretty, almost delicate tone that Sam had envisioned for the tune all along, breaking his voice in a manner halfway between traditional country style and his newly patented hiccough, with Scotty supplying his smoothest Chet Atkins licks on top of the blues variations that still lingered from earlier versions. It didn’t really match some of the other stuff they’d gotten, but it was just the kind of thing Sam felt they needed (“We didn’t need that Nashville country, but I wanted the simplicity of the melody line—you know, we had to do a little bit of crawling around just to see where we were before we got into the race”). At the end of the session, as Jimmie Lott was packing up his drums, Sam asked him if he would be interested in working some more with the group, but Jimmie, who would later play in Warren Smith’s band and record again in the Sun studio, demurred without much hesitation. “I told him I had another year of school and couldn’t.”

  Some two weeks later, on March 23, they went up to New York with Bob Neal. They flew because their booking schedule was so tight that they didn’t have time to drive or take the train (Billboard of April 2 reported that the group was “set solid through April”). It was the first time that Elvis or Bill had flown, and the first time any of the boys had visited New York. They gawked at the skyscrapers and took a subway ride. Bob, who had been to the city before, pointed out the sights to them while Bill kidded around, crossed his eyes, and acted like a cheerful hick. When they got to the studio, though, the response was decidedly cool, the lady conducting the audition conveyed a “don’t call us we’ll call you” kind of attitude, and they never even got to see Arthur Godfrey. It was very disappointing to them all, not least to Bob Neal, who had been building this up as an opportunity to break into the big time—television was a national market, and Arthur Godfrey was the vehicle by which the Blackwood Brothers had become nationally known. They had been saving up for months for this trip, and now they might just as well have flushed the money down the toilet. Bill Randle’s friend Max Kendrick reported back to Randle somewhat indignantly that this new kid just wasn’t ready for the big time—he showed up for the audition badly dressed and seemed nervous and ill prepared—and Randle felt that Kendrick was a little distant as a result for some months thereafter.

  Elvis and Scotty and Bill had no time for reflection, however. They hit the road again almost immediately. They were driving a 1954 pink-and-white Cadillac by now. Elvis had gotten a 1951 Cosmopolitan Lincoln with only ten thousand miles on it at the beginning of the year, the first “new” car he had ever owned. He had had a rack put on top for the bass, painted “Elvis Presley—Sun Records” on the side, and was so proud of it that he wouldn’t allow anyone even to smoke inside the car. Bill had wrecked it in March, driving it under a hay truck late one night in Arkansas, but Elvis had been able to assuage his disappointment, with Bob Neal’s help, by purchasing the Cadillac.

  They were constantly on the go. Sometimes it seemed as if they didn’t even have time to sleep. Houston, Dallas, Lubbock and all through West Texas. Hayride shows in Galveston, Waco, and Baton Rouge. Hawkins, Gilmer, and Tyler, Texas, all within calling distance of Tom Perryman’s Gladewater radio signal. All the little towns scattered throughout the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta. Back to Cleveland for another date at the Circle Theater. El Dorado. Texarkana. The Hayride. “It was always exciting,” in Elvis’ view. “We slept in the back of the car, and we’d do a show and get offstage and get in the car and drive to the next town and sometimes just get there in time to wash up [and] do the show.” Scotty and Bill were chasing the girls, and the girls were chasing Elvis—and frequently catching up with him. Everywhere he went he created a sensation. “He’s the new rage,” said a Louisiana radio executive in an interview with the British musical press. “Sings hillbilly in r&b time. Can you figure that out. He wears pink pants and a black coat… [and] he’s going terrific. If he doesn’t suffer too much popularity, he’ll be all right.”

  “This cat came out,” said future country singer Bob Luman, still an eighteen-year-old high school student in Kilgore, Texas, “in red pants and a green coat and a pink shirt and socks, and he had this sneer on his face and he stood behind the mike for five minutes, I’ll bet, before he made a move. Then he hit his guitar a lick, and he broke two strings. Hell, I’d been playing ten years, and I hadn’t broken a total of two strings. So there he was, these two strings dangling, and he hadn’t done anything except break the strings yet, and these high school girls were screaming and fainting and running up to the
stage, and then he started to move his hips real slow like he had a thing for his guitar…. For the next nine days he played one-nighters around Kilgore, and after school every day me and my girl would get in the car and go wherever he was playing that night. That’s the last time I tried to sing like Webb Pierce or Lefty Frizzell.”

  Not surprisingly, he was not entirely unaffected by all this adulation. While everyone agreed that he continued to maintain a remarkably polite and deferential manner and never failed to show his elders an uncommon degree of respect, those meeting him for the first time encountered a somewhat different figure than they would have met six months, or even three months, before—more confident perhaps, understandably more suspicious, but overall simply more himself. Sometimes this could lead to sudden displays of temper, as at the Hayride, when in a famous local incident he punched the doorkeeper, a teenager named Shorty, in the nose, because Shorty either opened or closed the door on his fans. Everyone was surprised by the incident, no one more so than Elvis himself, who immediately apologized profusely and offered to pay all of the doctor’s bills. The Miller Sisters, the performing duo that Sam had been working with, who met Elvis at a show in Saltillo, Mississippi, just down the road from where he was born, found him stuck-up and conceited. “He was really cocky,” said one. “I remember Elvis asked me to hold his guitar, and I said, ‘Hold it yourself. I’m not your flunky!’ ” But, of course, that may have just been his way with one woman.

  “Elvis Presley continues to gather speed over the South,” wrote Cecil Holifield, operator of the Record Shops in Midland and Odessa, Texas, in the June 4 edition of Billboard.

  West Texas is his hottest territory to date, and he is the teenagers’ favorite wherever he appears. His original appearance in the area was in January with Billy Walker… to more than 1600 paid admissions. In February, with Hank Snow at Odessa… paid attendance hit over 4000. On April 1 we booked only Elvis and his boys, Bill and Scotty, plus Floyd Cramer on piano and a local boy on drums for a rockin’ and rollin’ dance for teenagers, and pulled 850 paid admissions…. Incidentally, our sales of Presley’s four records have beat any individual artist in our eight years in the record business.