Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  The next morning they had breakfast with the Colonel and Hank Snow. Then to Chick’s surprise: “In walks the young star. And the first impression I had is the one that will always stick: that he was so unassuming, he seemed somewhat withdrawn at first, looked nervously around the room, but he had this quality—he was very, very smart behind it all, and he knew how to flatter people. We talked about the show, exchanged views about the crowd, the turnout, the other artists—he was very affable, he would say to Brad and me how much he enjoyed being with us; ‘I like you, Chick,’ he said. And while this may well have been a ploy, it worked. We liked him, immensely, from the start.”

  Chick finished up his trip in Louisville, but not before purchasing all four of Elvis’ Sun records, two copies of each, one to present to RCA’s country and western division head, Steve Sholes. “Throughout that spring and the early part of that summer I did a lot of wishful thinking with Sholes—maybe we could sign this guy. But as far as I know, there were no rumors at this point that his contract was for sale. There was no question that the Colonel had his eye on him, though, the Colonel was definitely taking a proprietary attitude, even if nothing was explicitly said or voiced.”

  MYSTERY TRAIN

  June–August 1955

  TAMPA, JULY 1955.

  (POPSIE. COURTESY OF GER RIJFF)

  BOB NEAL, manager of Elvis Presley,” declared the July 9 issue of Billboard, “reports that his charge this week begins a fortnight’s vacation before embarking on a busy summer and fall schedule being arranged by Col. Tom Parker, Jamboree Attractions, Madison, Tenn.”

  He had been working steadily, virtually every night, since the show at Ellis Auditorium on February 6, and in that short time he had come further than either he or his manager had ever dared hope. He had opened up new territory, more than held his own with some of the biggest Opry stars, and attracted the favor of a man who had it in his power, Neal insisted, to do even more for him than he had already done.

  On balance Bob Neal was well satisfied: he had seen bookings pick up, watched his own and Elvis’ material situations dramatically improve, and redrafted their agreement to last until March 1956, with an option to renew. He had also witnessed the kind of growth he would never have taken on faith, an almost exponential progression that had taken place in the boy himself, not just in his stage manner (which would alone have been remarkable enough) but in an appetite for change and self-improvement that seemed to know no experiential bounds. Not that the boy would ever be mistaken for an intellectual—and he was far too jittery to be called introspective. But he soaked up influences like litmus paper; he was open to new people and new ideas and new experiences in a way that defied social stereotype. He was serious about his work. Whenever Neal went by the house, he found him with a stack of records—Ray Charles and Big Joe Turner and Big Mama Thornton and Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup—that he studied with all the avidity that other kids focused on their college exams. He listened over and over, seeming to hear something that no one else could hear, while able to carry on a perfectly coherent conversation at the same time on the subject of bookings or the upcoming Florida tour (what were they going to do in Jacksonville for an encore?) or something that Helen needed to know for the fan club, with Dixie all the while sitting by his side.

  Vernon was around most of the time—he didn’t seem terribly ambitious about going out and looking for a job. Bob was a little worried about that; you could never tell what went on inside a family, and Bob wondered if there might not be “a little rift” between father and son over the father’s disinclination to work. “But Gladys kept the family together, she was very down-to-earth, always concerned about his health and well-being, and was always concerned about those of us around him. He was very aware of the fact that she did everything she possibly could to help give him a chance, and he wanted so much to do big things and nice things particularly for his mother. I remember coming back from a show one night, he was commenting to Helen, ‘Oh, I just want to be big, because I want to do something for my folks.’ He said, ‘They’re getting old.’ I looked at Elvis, and I said, ‘Elvis, how old do you think I am?’ And he said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’… I was, I think, a year or two older than Vernon.”

  Elvis was glad to be home while at the same time anxious to be on to the next step. It had all started to get to him a little toward the end of the tour. Just one month before, on June 5, on the road between Hope and Texarkana a wheel bearing caught fire, and he had watched his pretty pink Cadillac burn up. He had had it for little more than two months, and he was as proud of it as anything he had ever owned. For a moment, as Scotty and Bill gave him a hard time and the instruments and clothing sat forlornly by the side of the road, it was like watching all his dreams go up in flames—but then there was business to be taken care of, they had to charter a plane to get to the next show, call Bob, get someone to drive the Crown Victoria down to meet them in Dallas, move on. Then on July 4 he found himself playing a picnic with the Blackwood Brothers and the Statesmen Quartet at gospel promoter W. B. Nowlin’s All-Day Singing and dinner on the ground in De Leon, Texas. He showed up in his pink suit, according to James Blackwood, but whether or not he knew anything in advance about Nowlin’s annual picnic event (it had started seven years earlier with Eddy Arnold and the Stamps Quartet; in 1950 Hank Williams had been booked with the Blackwoods), there was something about the scene that brought him up short: all those families gathered with their kids, eating fried chicken in the afternoon sunlight under the pecan trees in Hodges Park.

  “I ain’t gonna sing nothing but gospel music today,” he told James in the Blackwood Brothers’ new bus as they swapped stories and songs, and nothing that James could say would dissuade him. Onstage it was almost as if he were spellbound; he didn’t respond when people called out for his songs, “he fell flat on his face,” said J. D. Sumner, the bass singer with the group. The spell—if that was what it was—was broken later that afternoon when he played a second show with the whole troupe at an indoor jamboree in nearby Stephenville that also featured Slim Willett (“Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes”) and then a third in Brownwood that evening. “It was mighty warm in our rec. hall,” reported Stephenville DJ/promoter Bill Bentley, “but next year it will be cool, as we have decided to air condition it.”

  Even coming home was not like coming home exactly. For one thing, he was coming home to a new house, the first single-family structure the Presleys had lived in since moving to Memphis, and even though he had slept there before, it was never for more than a night or two, he had been on the road so steadily since they had moved in some two months before. It was a modest two-bedroom brick bungalow at 2414 Lamar, partway between Katz Drug Store, where Elvis and Scotty and Bill had created such a sensation not ten months previously, and the Rainbow skating rink, where Elvis and Dixie had first met. If you continued east on Lamar, it took you past the Eagle’s Nest and, as Highway 78, all the way to Tupelo. It was the road on which the Presleys had first arrived in Memphis, and he didn’t know how many times he had traveled it, going in and out of town as a small child and as a young man, but somehow it seemed different now, he felt almost like a stranger. For the first couple of days after he got home he mostly slept.

  The next-door neighbors, the Bakers, with three teenagers in the family, two boys and a girl, waited eagerly for their first real glimpse of the young scion of the house. The Presleys didn’t have a phone of their own for quite some time—it was difficult to get a new phone installed in those days—so Mr. and Mrs. Presley were frequent visitors to the Bakers’ house to make calls, and Mrs. Baker had had a memorable encounter with Mrs. Presley on the night they had moved in. Mr. Presley must still have been moving things from their old house, because he wasn’t there when one of her cousins burst in on the Bakers and announced that Mrs. Presley had passed out on the bed. The cousin didn’t know if the Presleys had a regular doctor of their own, so Mrs. Baker called her own doctor, who came out and pronounced Mrs. Presle
y a sick woman—Mrs. Baker understood it was diabetes or a bad heart, something along those lines. Which was a shame in such a young woman. Since then, while they never became exactly friends, Mrs. Baker had felt sorry for Mrs. Presley, the nicest-mannered person but a “nervous creature” who seemed to carry such a burden of sadness that she couldn’t stand to even be in the house alone.

  The night that Elvis’ Cadillac burned up, as the Bakers remembered it, they got the call, but Mrs. Presley seemed to know what was the matter even before she picked up the phone. After that she could scarcely bear to even contemplate the dangers that her son faced out on the road. As much as she wanted success for him, it was almost as if any satisfaction she might take in it was gone. One time she invited Mrs. Baker and her daughter, Sarah, over to the house. “Come here, come here,” she said, and showed them his closet, full of clothes in black and pink. She was so proud of all his shoes and the suits hanging up, and she talked about her son in a manner that she talked about nothing else. She convinced Mrs. Baker that he didn’t deserve all the criticism that was being directed at him, that he wasn’t vulgar in his movements, that he didn’t mean anything by it, he just put his whole self into what he did.

  Mr. Presley was another story altogether. He was what you might call a very “dry” man, never offering much in the way of amenities or even response. Mr. Baker had even started latching the screen door for a while, because Mr. Presley would walk in without so much as a knock, to use the phone or borrow something, day or night—he didn’t mean anything by it, he just didn’t know any better, they supposed, but Mr. Baker didn’t like it so he put a hook on the door. They watched Vernon in the yard, working with a brother or brother-in-law occasionally, installing air conditioners in new cars whenever, it seemed, he felt like it, and they felt even sorrier for poor Mrs. Presley, but they knew the family was very dedicated to one another—they were even talking about buying the little house someday and adding on a room for Mr. Presley’s mother, who stayed with them much of the time.

  When he finally got used to being home, Elvis started popping in on the Bakers to make some calls, and to take some, too, showing a graciousness and a natural ease that they could never forget. The first time the two younger kids, Jack and Sarah, saw him, he was on the phone, and he turned to them and introduced himself, as if they would have no idea who he was. It was as if, fourteen-year-old Sarah thought, “he was looking up to you, whoever you were, he certainly didn’t want any of us to treat him like he was more important than any of us were.”

  “We’ll have to double-date sometime,” he said to eighteen-year-old Don Baker, and though they never did, no one in the family suspected him of hypocrisy; it was all just part of the “mannerliness” that announced in a contradictory way (because it denoted such self-assurance) “I am really someone.” When they saw him on the phone, they imagined that he was speaking to Hollywood, to far-off, distant lands, even though he was probably just talking to Scotty, his guitarist, or Colonel Parker in Nashville, who called more and more frequently, it seemed, with details of his upcoming tour. As the days passed they could hear him playing his records, the rhythm and blues music that Dewey Phillips played on the air, through the open windows of the little house on the busy city street on a still, hot summer’s day.

  THERE WAS SO MUCH TO DO in the little time that he had left. Now that he had a real place of his own, Scotty and Bill came by a few times to rehearse. They played out on the little screened-in porch, and the kids next door and their friends sat out on the grass and listened. “What do you want to hear?” Bill said to them, clowning around, and Elvis favored them with his dazzling smile, asking if they liked the music. With Bob Neal’s help once again (the title and financing were still in Bob’s name) he purchased another Cadillac, brand-new this time, and at Helen Neal’s suggestion had it painted in his customized colors of pink and black. When he drove it down to Lansky’s, he showed it off proudly to everyone on Beale and then walked up to Guy Lansky in the store dangling the keys. “He told me to drive it around the block. He said, ‘Mr. Lansky, I want you to tell me what you think of it.’ He loved it, and this was the biggest mistake I ever made: here I am heavily in debt with all this merchandise, and I think, ‘If I drive it around the block, if I wreck this automobile, it’s gonna cost me a ton of money.’ So I refused him. And he was really disappointed. He felt bad that I wouldn’t drive it: he couldn’t get over it. He loved that automobile, and here I dropped him. I’ve felt bad about it ever since.” He got a new Martin D-28 guitar, too, bigger than the D-18, with a hand-tooled leather case that muffled the sound a little but looked almost as sharp as the pink-and-black Cadillac.

  Dixie came by the house just as often as she ever had. Young Jack Baker and his sister spied on them sometimes holding hands in the backyard, playing with the little white dog that Sarah took care of when the Presleys were away. Elvis had just taken Dixie to her junior prom, borrowing Bob Neal’s brand-new Lincoln for the occasion and double-dating with Dixie’s best friend, Bessie Wolverton, and his cousin Gene. He looked handsome in his white tuxedo jacket; she was really proud of him and proud to be able to show him off to all her friends. She tried to make friends with some of his new acquaintances, but she found it harder and harder to fit into his life. She knew Red West, of course—Red had been with him off and on all winter and spring, and since school had gotten out he had started accompanying Elvis regularly on tour. When he went off to college in the fall, she knew, Elvis wanted to get him a car. Red was nice enough, he was always courteous to her, anyway, but some of the new guys who had started hanging around just weren’t the kind of people that she and Elvis had ever been drawn to. “They used horrible language, they all smoked, everybody had a drink—it was a group of people I was totally uncomfortable with.” More and more, it seemed, he wanted to be with the crowd, they rarely were alone together even in the brief time that they had; “a lot of times he had to go with the guys and party around, that sort of thing.” She could understand when he went off to play football with Red at Guthrie Park or down at the Triangle with his old friends, but sometimes it seemed as if he had been swept up in the turmoil himself—he came alive only when other people were around and seemed to crave their attention in a way that neither of them had imagined he ever would.

  They had broken up more than once already. Usually the argument was about what she was doing while he was away, though really, she suspected, the shoe should have been on the other foot. He couldn’t stand for her to have any kind of independent existence, even as he was escaping the very world they had constructed for themselves. What was she doing? Who was she seeing? Where had she been when he called? She wasn’t going to lie about it. “Of course I had other friends, the same circle of girlfriends I had always had. I wasn’t dating anybody, but we would go out to a canteen called the Busy Betty on Lamar. They had a jukebox, and we’d dance. It got to the point where, Look, you’re gone three weeks, and I’m supposed to just sit here every weekend and watch TV? That was the basis of every argument we ever had. He was very possessive and very jealous. I think he knew that what he was asking was unreasonable, but there was nothing he could do about it. It was very dramatic. Several times I gave him back his class ring, or he took it back. And that would last maybe a day, maybe just that night, sometimes before I would get in the house he would drive around the block and come back and say, ‘Wait,’ and we would sit out on the porch and cry about it. Sometimes my mother would come to the door two or three times and peck on the glass and say, ‘Come in,’ and I’d say, ‘Just a minute.’ I thought, you know, ‘I can’t leave,’ because we were both so upset and we were going to break up and we didn’t want to break up, because we were still friends. You know, I probably spent more time with his mom and dad than he did with them. When he was out of town, I would go over and stay with them, I spent the night lots of times and slept in his bed while he was gone. Mrs. Presley and I cooked together and ate, and we’d walk. We’d come uptown and just brows
e around. We’d just kind of console each other.”

  HIS MIND WAS INCREASINGLY on things that hadn’t happened yet—things that Bob Neal and Mr. Phillips had told him would come about, things that Colonel Parker had promised would come to pass before too long in ways that he couldn’t altogether imagine. He told Dixie about the Colonel, though she wasn’t sure she understood; he talked with Bob about all the ways in which the Colonel would be able to help them out; he talked to his parents all the time about this Colonel Parker, who had done such a great job promoting the last Florida tour. He kept telling them about Colonel Parker, said Vernon, “talking about [what] a great man he had met, how smart he was and all of that…. Gladys and I warned him that we really didn’t know anything about this man, and anyway, he had an agreement with Bob Neal.” Bob would be a part of any arrangement that was made, Elvis assured them. This was something that Bob couldn’t really handle on his own. Bob knew that as well as anyone. Bob didn’t have the connections that Colonel Parker had. The Colonel had friends in high places. The Colonel had been to Hollywood.

  He wanted it as badly as anything he had ever wanted in his life, and he went about getting it in exactly the same single-minded way, even though—it was kind of funny—he could no more name what it was than he could have predicted what was going to happen when he first walked in the door of the Sun studio. Gladys didn’t want to hear any more about what the Colonel could do for them; she was simply fearful for her son, while Vernon reacted after a fashion of his own. He was proud of his boy, to the casual acquaintance he showed all the slow-witted pride of a man who’d won the lottery, but to those who knew this handsome, soft-spoken man, withdrawn at times almost to the point of sullenness, he seemed increasingly unsure of himself, increasingly adrift. To Dixie both parents were equally affected. “I think a lot of it had to do with Mr. and Mrs. Presley’s resistance to the lifestyle that he was getting into—they had no control over him anymore. It was a very frustrating feeling.” And yet the father knew what the boy was saying probably made sense. He liked Bob, he was comfortable with Bob, you could talk to Bob—and like he told the boy, he didn’t know a thing about this Colonel Parker. But he supposed he was going to have to learn, because the man never stopped calling and sending telegrams; he obviously didn’t worry about his long-distance bills. And he was beginning to see that what this Colonel fellow was saying to Elvis was probably true: Memphis wasn’t big enough, Sun Records didn’t have the kind of national distribution or pay the kind of money that the big companies did, he could see that. Marion Keisker detected what she felt was a very noticeable change in manner toward Sam. “I got the feeling that Mr. Presley felt that Sun Records depended on Elvis Presley rather than vice versa. One day he said within my earshot, ‘Well, you know, the studio wouldn’t be nothing without my boy.’ I don’t think Sam was even there, but I thought, ‘Well, that does it.’ The whole picture was changing.”