Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  Meanwhile Bob Neal was fielding offers, or at least inquiries, on an almost weekly basis from nearly every major and independent label with whom he had any contact. According to Neal, “Sam had let it be known that he would be interested in talking to them if the money was right,” and while Neal made it clear that he did not represent the record company in any way, that he was only an intermediary, most of the offers came through him. Sam always turned them down or upped the ante in such a way that he could be confident that he would be turned down. One time Columbia head Mitch Miller, who had been hyped by Bill Randle, the Cleveland DJ (Randle had recently handed Miller “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” Columbia’s, and Miller’s, latest hit), reached Neal on the phone in a West Texas motel. “He said, ‘What do you want?’ I said, ‘I’ll find out,’ and I called Sam. As I recall, it was around eighteen thousand dollars that Sam was asking that day, so I called Mitch back, and he said, ‘Oh, forget it, nobody’s worth that much.’ ” Frank Walker, president of MGM, telegrammed Sam on June 8 after having heard from Sam’s brother Jud that Elvis’ contract was available, and Sam turned down Decca when they made an offer that met Jud’s price. Capitol, Mercury, Chess, Atlantic, Randy Wood’s Dot label (currently enjoying great success with Wood’s latest discovery, Pat Boone), and RCA all exhibited active interest—there were rumblings throughout the entire industry.

  And while Sam liked to act as if selling Elvis’ contract were the furthest thing from his mind, as though all this was happening solely at the instigation of strangers, or that Bob Neal was going around without authorization just shooting off his mouth, Bob knew that Sam was strapped for cash, that the little record company was stretched to the limit by its very success, and that Jud was pressing Sam for money (he either wanted some return on his investment or cash to buy out the minority interest he had acquired when he helped Sam buy out Jim Bulleit the previous year). As Marion said, Sam was not a “partner-type person in any form or fashion,” but Bob knew that if Sam wanted to preserve his vaunted independence, if he wanted to keep his label and move forward in the new directions he was eager to explore, he was going to have to make a hard decision soon.

  Bob reported some of the offers to Elvis; others he kept to himself. He didn’t want to overwhelm the boy with possibilities, and after some years in the business himself he knew that most of them would come to nothing. But it was clear that something was going on—you didn’t have so many important people talking about you, looking to jump on the bandwagon, if the bandwagon wasn’t getting ready to move out. He thought they were positioned just about perfectly. The July 16 issue of Billboard showed “Baby, Let’s Play House” at number fifteen on the national country and western charts, and the summer issue of Country Song Roundup, with a picture of Hank Snow on the cover, featured the story “Elvis Presley—Folk Music Fireball,” following national features in Cowboy Songs and Country & Western Jamboree. Bob liked the boy—he couldn’t say anything bad about him, he was almost like another member of the family. They all went waterskiing on McKellar Lake together and picnicked out at Riverside Park; when Bob’s son Sonny ran for student council in the spring, Elvis and Scotty and Bill appeared at the Messick High chapel program in support of his campaign, and Elvis regarded Helen almost like a second mother. Bob couldn’t imagine ever losing him, and when he talked to Colonel Parker about all their far-flung plans, it was never with anything less than a sense of partnership in a glowing future. There were certain unpleasant realities to be faced, to be sure: the financial arrangements with Scotty and Bill were going to have to be changed, and they would have to be satisfied with a salaried status rather than the original agreement, which gave 50 percent to Elvis and 25 percent to each of them. But Elvis understood that, and they would have to understand it, too. The kids were coming out to see Elvis now—it wasn’t the Blue Moon Boys who were drawing the crowds. With a little luck, and with the Colonel’s invaluable assistance, Bob Neal was firmly convinced, from here on in it was going to be nothing but smooth sailing.

  ON JULY 11, Elvis went back into the Sun studio. In about a week he would be out on the road again, and it seemed like he had scarcely been home at all. Everywhere he went around town—on Beale Street, at the movies, at a drive-in for a hamburger, just waiting at a stoplight—it seemed as if he was known, it seemed as if something was expected of him, and he was always prepared to oblige, with a wink, with a wave, with a knowing but deferential nod of his head. Only in the studio were things still the same: Marion in the outer room, with the venetian blinds slanted to fight the heat, Sam in the control room, waiting, watching, always ready for something to happen, Scotty and Bill reassuringly constant—they would never change. For this session Mr. Phillips had brought in another original number and another drummer. The song was, once again, a country composition by Stan Kesler, the steel guitar player who had written “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone,” and the drummer was Johnny Bernero, who played regularly with a number of different country bands and worked at the Memphis Light, Gas and Water Company across the street.

  The song, Sam knew, was not to Elvis’ taste—“he just didn’t dig it at first. Maybe it was a little too country, the chord progression, and it was a slow song, too. But I loved the hook line, and I thought it was something we needed at that point to show a little more diversification. So I called Johnny—he was either in there that day, or I called him, ’cause he had played on some other things for me. And we got it going, and he was doing four-four on the beat, and I said, ‘That don’t help us worth a shit, Johnny.’ I told him, ‘What I want you to do is do your rim shot snare on the offbeat, but keep it four-four until we go into the chorus. Then you go in and go with the bass beat at two-four.’ And by doing that, it sounds like ‘I Forgot to Remember to Forget’ is twice as fast as it really is. And Elvis really loved it then.”

  With the next cut there was no need for any such trickery. They were just fooling around without the drummer when they hit on a lick from “Mystery Train,” the song Sam had originally cut on Little Junior Parker and the Blue Flames just two years before, and they went from there. It was the driving rhythm-based kind of blues that Sam had been feeding Scotty ever since they started recording, and the three of them fell in with the same natural exuberance that they had first applied to “That’s All Right,” but with a degree of knowledge—of themselves as much as of any musical technique—that they had not possessed a year earlier. “There was an extra bar of rhythm thrown in at one point,” said Scotty, “that if I sat down to play it myself right now, I couldn’t, but with him singing it felt natural.” “It was the greatest thing I ever did on Elvis,” said Sam. “It was a feeling song that so many people had experienced—I mean, it was a big thing, to put a loved one on a train: are they leaving you forever? Maybe they’ll never be back. ‘Train I ride, sixteen coaches long’—you can take it from the inside of the coach, or you can take it from the outside, standing looking in. Junior was going to make it fifty coaches, but I said, no, sixteen coaches is a helluva lot, that sounds like it’s coming out of a small town. It was pure rhythm. And at the end, Elvis was laughing, because he didn’t think it was a take, but I’m sorry, it was a fucking masterpiece!”

  The last cut they did was a rhythm and blues number, “Trying to Get to You,” that they had tried without success earlier in the year. This time it was as free and unfettered as anything they had ever done, even with the addition of Johnny Bernero on drums and Elvis chording on piano, and like “Mystery Train” it aspired to a higher kind of—mystery, for want of a better word. There was a floating sense of inner harmony mixed with a ferocious hunger, a desperate striving linked to a pure outpouring of joy, that seemed to just tumble out of the music. It was the very attainment of art and passion, the natural beauty of the instinctive soul that Sam Phillips had been searching for ever since he first started in music, and there was no question that Elvis knew that he had achieved it.

  For the few remaining days of his holiday he cruised a
round town—with Dixie, with Red and his cousin Gene, he stopped in to see Dewey at the radio station. With Dewey he visited the clubs on Beale, where Dewey was still hailed as a conquering hero and this white boy who sang the blues was readily accepted as yet another of Dewey’s crazy ideas. “Elvis had the feel of Beale Street,” said Sam Phillips. “He was probably more at home there than he was on Main. You know, Elvis didn’t walk into Lansky Brothers because someone suggested, ‘Why don’t you buy a chartreuse fucking shirt?’ ” “We had a lot of fun with him,” said WDIA’s Professor Nat D. Williams, the unofficial ambassador of Beale. “Elvis Presley on Beale Street when he first started was a favorite man…. Always he had that certain humanness about him that Negroes like to put in their songs.” That was what he was aiming for, that common human element, and that was what he achieved—there was nowhere he couldn’t go that in one sense or another he didn’t feel at home, but if that was so, why was it that he felt increasingly like a stranger, as if he alone sensed not only the breadth of possibilities but the dangers lurking in the great world that existed outside of his hometown?

  Then he was back on the road, in Texas first, next in a return to Florida that was marked by mounting expectations and increased attention from the press. Few doubted that the Colonel fueled either those expectations or that attention. The show was headlined by philosopher/comic Andy Griffith (“You saw him in U.S. Steel Hour TV production No Time for Sergeants NOW SEE HIM IN PERSON”) and also included Ferlin Huskey with His Hush Puppies, Marty Robbins, Jimmie Rodgers Snow, “newcomers” Tommy Collins and Glenn Reeves, and “EXTRA EXTRA By Popular Demand ELVIS PRESLEY with Scotty & Bill.” At the bottom of each newspaper ad came Oscar Davis’ tag line, “Don’t You Dare Miss It,” and few Florida country music fans did.

  In Jacksonville, the scene of the first riot, in May, there was another near-riot, and “before he could be rescued from his swooning admirers,” Cash Box reported in an account that could have been written by the Colonel himself, “they had relieved him of his tie, handkerchiefs, belt, and the greater part of his coat and shirt. Col. Tom Parker presented him with a new sports coat to replace the one snatched by souvenir collectors.”

  The Florida tour ended in Tampa on July 31, and he immediately began another, a five-day package set up by Bob Neal, this time with Webb Pierce, Wanda Jackson, and new Sun recording artist Johnny Cash. They played Sheffield, Alabama, on August 2, then on the third they were booked into Little Rock, which Mr. and Mrs. Presley, who had yet to assent to the new agreement naming the Colonel “special adviser” to both Elvis and Bob Neal, were scheduled to attend. Vernon seemed pretty much ready to sign, but Gladys continued to balk. She was frightened by the riots in Florida, she said, she didn’t know why there was such a rush to do anything at this point, she was afraid of what might happen to her boy. Well, that was certainly understandable, said the Colonel—he, too, felt like maybe her boy was being overworked. But if the money was right, why, then, Bob wouldn’t have to book him into so many of these little dates, he could even think about taking some time off, maybe going to Florida with Mr. and Mrs. Presley or spending a few days with Colonel and Mrs. Parker over in Madison. The Colonel would never want to see any repetition of what had happened in Jacksonville, and there was certainly no need to sign anything now. Once they got things straightened out, though, he could guarantee Mrs. Presley that nothing like the Jacksonville incident would ever happen again.

  Although he himself had to be in Hollywood to attend to some movie business for Hank Snow, the Colonel arranged for country comedian Whitey Ford, the Duke of Paducah (“I’m goin’ back to the wagon, these shoes are killing me”), to meet the senior Presleys in Little Rock. Ford, a Little Rock native, had worked the original Hank Snow tour in February and was a longtime friend and associate of the Colonel’s as well as a neighbor. He was also known for his work with church and youth groups, and though he was not on the bill, he was playing the White River Carnival in Batesville with Elvis two days later and was glad to help the Colonel make his case. “Mrs. Presley was reluctant,” Ford told writer Vince Staten, “very reluctant at first. She didn’t want Elvis to make any changes, because he was under all these contracts. But I told her these could all be bought up…. I told her I had known the Colonel for years and that he really knew all the angles for producing successful shows.” Elvis’ friend Jimmie Rodgers Snow had done his best to convey pretty much the same message. “They were country people, and Colonel was very slick—I’m sure they picked up on that. I think they were more concerned with sticking with Bob Neal. The idea was to explain to them that they had to progress and go forward. I probably talked more to Mrs. Presley than to Vernon, because she was really the one who made the decisions.”

  For the time being Gladys was still not fully convinced. “He seemed like a smart man,” said Vernon of the Colonel, “but we still didn’t know too much about him, so we didn’t sign.” Elvis was frustrated, angry, and bitterly disappointed with his parents. He felt like they just didn’t understand, but he had no choice other than to accept the Colonel’s assurances that they would come around. There was nothing to worry about, the Colonel intoned without the slightest hint of doubt, they had made a fine beginning. It would all work out in the end.

  He played Camden, Arkansas, the following night and then on August 5 returned to Memphis in a triumphant homecoming concert at the Overton Park Shell, the site of his initial unpremeditated triumph as the misspelled bottom of a bill starring Slim Whitman and Billy Walker. This time he was second headliner (beneath Webb Pierce and the Wondering Boys) of a twenty-two-act bill that marked the finale of “the eighth annual Bob Neal Country jamboree series,” and the story in the Press-Scimitar the next day had images of hometown heroes Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash superimposed on a shirtsleeved crowd of four thousand that jammed the shell while “several hundred had to be turned away.” Marion Keisker attended the show, the first time she had seen Elvis perform since the Opry appearince nearly a year before, and described how she “heard someone screaming, and I’m really a very restrained person publicly, but all of a sudden I realized, ‘It’s me!’ This staid mother of a young son—I’d lost my total stupid mind.” It didn’t altogether surprise her in a way. She adored Elvis, and she was experiencing the most bittersweet feelings of dread, regret, and a measure of anticipation as she watched the drama play itself out.

  For the first time since she had known him, Sam simply didn’t seem to know what to do. It would clearly be to their advantage for Parker to peddle the contract, and it would probably be to Elvis’ advantage at this point, too. Somehow, though, it was as if Sam simply could not commit himself to the bargain he knew he had to make. “Of course I never actually met the Colonel until the [RCA] contract signing, but I felt that Sam had a great deal of contempt for him. I don’t know if I ever heard Sam actually say anything pejorative, but I felt that other than Sam’s self-interest, he didn’t feel it was in Elvis’ best interest to go with Colonel Parker even at that point. I think it was the only thing Elvis ever did against Sam’s advice, though Sam might deny it. He didn’t think it would be a wise thing, but since it seemed inevitable, he didn’t fight it. And Elvis was so innately ingenuous. It’s when you lie and digress that you get into trouble, but I don’t think he ever said a wrong thing into a microphone or camera his whole life.”

  The day after the concert the new single came out, to be greeted with a Billboard “Spotlight” review that declared it “a splendid coupling” and a “Best Buy” write-up three weeks later that said, “With each release Presley has been coming more and more to the forefront. His current record has wasted no time in establishing itself. Already it appears on the Memphis and Houston territorial charts. It is also reported selling well in Richmond, Atlanta, Durham, Nashville and Dallas.”

  Meanwhile, the Colonel pulled out all the stops. In the immediate aftermath of the Little Rock meeting, he bypassed Bob Neal altogether, making direct contact with Vernon and Gladys and c
onveying some of his impatience with what he considered to be Neal’s “inefficient” method of doing business. Knowing the Presleys’ high regard for Hank Snow, he had Snow, too, make a number of telephone calls. “I think Colonel would have used anybody to influence them,” said Jimmie Rodgers Snow, “because they were slow and he was smart enough to realize that he could not directly influence them himself. But I’ll tell you what, I think they probably signed not so much because of Parker and what he’d do, but because they liked my dad.”