Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  On August 15 they all met once again, in Memphis, and Elvis proudly affixed his signature at the top of a document that named “Col. Thomas A. Parker” as “special adviser to Elvis Presley [‘artist’] and Bob Neal [‘manager’] for the period of one year and two one-year options for the sum of two thousand, five hundred dollars per year, payable in five payments of five hundred dollars each, to negotiate and assist in any way possible the build-up of Elvis Presley as an artist. Col. Parker will be reimbursed for any out-of-pocket expenses for travelling, promotion, advertising as approved by Elvis Presley and his manager.”

  The Colonel retained exclusive rights to one hundred appearances over the course of the next year, for which the artist would be paid $200 each, “including his musicians.” In addition, in the event that “negotiations come to a complete standstill and Elvis Presley and his manager and associates decide to freelance,” the Colonel would be reimbursed for his expenses and, “at the special rate of one hundred seventy five dollars per day for the first appearance and two hundred fifty dollars for the second appearance and three hundred fifty dollars [for the third],” the Colonel retained exclusive territorial rights to “San Antonio, El Paso, Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, Oklahoma City, Denver, Wichita Falls, Wichita, New Orleans, Mobile, Jacksonville, Pensacola, Tampa, Miami, Orlando, Charleston, Greenville, Spartanburg, Asheville, Knoxville, Roanoke, Richmond, Norfolk, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Newark, New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Omaha, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Des Moines, Los Angeles, Amarillo, Houston, Galveston, Corpus Christi, Las Vegas, Reno, Cleveland, Dayton, Akron, and Columbus.

  “Colonel Parker,” the agreement concluded, “is to negotiate all renewals on existing contracts.”

  With that Elvis was back on tour, only now as an official member of Hank Snow’s Jamboree Attractions. On the surface nothing had really changed, unless it was to embolden the trio to add a permanent fourth member. Going back into Texarkana at the end of the month for the fourth or fifth time in less than a year, Bob and Elvis, Scotty, and Bill made a promotional spot in so casual and disarming a manner that it might have been taking place in someone’s living room. “We want to invite everybody out to the show,” said Scotty. “And they’ve all been asking about the drummer who we had up there last time [four months earlier], D. J. Fontana. He’s going to be with us. He’s a regular member of our band now…” “Tell you what,” says Bob, “before we call over some other folks here to talk, Elvis Presley, how you doin’?”

  “Fine, Bobert,” says a relaxed young voice. “How you gettin’ along?”

  “Oh, doin’ grand,” says Bob without so much as a blink. “I know all the folks down at Texarkana been raising such a whoop and a holler for you to come down and whoop and holler at ’em that they got this great big double show scheduled for Friday night at the auditorium down there. What do you think about it?” And they engage in an extended colloquy on the subject before Bob introduces “one of the noisiest guys in all this outfit… Bill Black, who pumps on the bass and occasionally tells a story or two, and just in general messes things up. Bill, come over and say howdy to your fans in Texarkana.”

  For a moment we hear the warm molasses drawl of the man that Scotty said “never met a stranger.” “Bob, I just wanted to say one thing,” he says. “Friday night we’ll be down there, and I’ll have a brand spanking new pose of Elvis for a picture, and they’ll be selling at the same old price of only a quarter. And I’ll have about four or five million of them. If anybody would like to have just one, why, I’ll have plenty of ’em, before the show, during intermission, after the show—the fact is, I may sell them out there all night long. That’s all I got to say.”

  It is all so relaxed and homespun, it’s hard to believe that Elvis Presley is poised on the brink of something—stardom, success, a precipice so steep that it must be at least as fearsome as it is inviting. “I would like to invite everybody out Friday night to see our big show,” he declares, at Bob Neal’s urging, to promote a crowd. “Because I don’t know when we’ll be coming back that way…. It’ll probably be a pretty long while before we can come back to Texarkana,” he concludes, with no way of knowing, and not really caring, when that might be.

  THE PIED PIPERS

  September–November 1955

  COLONEL PARKER, GLADYS, ELVIS, AND VERNON PRESLEY: RCA SIGNING CEREMONY, SUN STUDIO, NOVEMBER 21, 1955.

  (COURTESY OF GARY HARDY, SUN STUDIO)

  THE COLONEL QUICKLY consolidated his position. When Arnold Shaw, the newly named general professional manager of the E. B. Marks publishing company, visited him in Madison in August, the Colonel could talk of nothing but Presley. “What’s your interest, Colonel?” Shaw asked him. With something less than full disclosure of the facts but utter candor nonetheless, the Colonel said, “This kid is now managed by Bob Neal of Memphis. But I’ll have him when Neal’s contract finishes in less than a year.” Even Bob seemed to recognize the inevitability of the conclusion and ceded most of his authority to the Colonel while still terming it “a partnership deal.” He did renegotiate the Hayride contract with Horace Logan, at the beginning of September, so that when the first year came to an end on November 12, 1955, the Hayride would pick up its option at $200 an appearance, a considerable increase from the $18 union scale that Elvis had been getting up till then. The pretext, according to Logan, was for Elvis to be able to carry a drummer on a regular basis, but the reality was that he was “the hottest thing in show business.” The contract stipulated that “artist is given the right to miss 1 Saturday’s performance during each 60 [day] period,” but Logan added a side agreement penalizing him $400 for every additional show that he missed. Unbeknownst to Neal, evidently, the Colonel urged Vernon not to sign the agreement. He wanted the elder Presleys to withhold their signatures as guardians until he had a better idea of where things stood with a new record deal—but Vernon went ahead and signed anyway.

  Neal also had the unpleasant task of telling Scotty and Bill that they were about to go on a fixed salary. What made it even worse was that it was Scotty and Bill who had finally persuaded Elvis to add D.J. on drums by agreeing to share the cost of his $100-a-week salary among them—Elvis wanted a drummer, but he kept saying he couldn’t afford it until the other musicians indicated their willingness to pitch in. According to Neal: “The eventual basic decision [to put the band on salary] went back to Elvis. We talked about it quite a few times, talked about it with his parents, and finally decided that it had to be done. I had to handle that, and I remember that there was quite a bit of unhappiness at that time plus threats that maybe they would quit, but as it worked out they went ahead in that particular situation.” Scotty and Bill were inclined to put it down to the Colonel’s interference, though Bob was certainly prepared to take the heat. He knew that the worst thing in the world would have been for them to blame Elvis, and he did everything he could to insulate the boy, but it turned out he didn’t have to do much. Elvis had a habit of sliding out from under things on his own, and in this case he seemed to do it without any outside help.

  For the first time, though, Bob Neal was beginning to wonder about his own role: what exactly was he supposed to do? Despite the smoothing over of tempers and the affable addition of D.J., there remained an undercurrent of ill feeling and suspiciousness that had never been present before. There was a sense of uncertainty about what was going to happen next—at one point the Colonel had even suggested that Elvis leave Scotty and Bill and D.J. behind and use Hank Snow’s band on an upcoming tour. Bob squelched that before it even got to Elvis, but you could never tell how far that kind of thinking permeated the general atmosphere. Snow’s band knew of the rumor, and if they did, how much further did it have to go to get to Scotty and Bill?

  It was as if the Colonel were trying to throw everyone into some degree of turmoil—and doing a pretty good job of it, too. Even Sam was edgy about just what was going on. He seemed nervous about business in general: his lawsuit with Duke Records owner D
on Robey over Robey’s alleged theft of his artist Little Junior Parker was rapidly coming to a boil; he had a radio station that he was about to open up in the brand-new Holiday Inn downtown (the third in a brand-new chain owned by Sam’s friend Kemmons Wilson); he had a number of new artists in whom he had faith but whom he had not yet been able to break; and he was obviously feeling the pinch of various unnamed financial pressures. But most of all he seemed thrown into uncharacteristic confusion by the Colonel—he clearly wanted what the Colonel had to offer, which was the promise of some sort of financial security, and he just as clearly feared it, too.

  There was a single abortive Sun session that fall to try to get a B side for “Trying to Get to You.” Sam once again had Johnny Bernero on drums, and they worked on the Billy Emerson blues “When It Rains, It Really Pours,” which had been a favorite of Elvis’ since it first came out in January. The mood was edgy, though, the playing tentative, and the session quickly broke up without any of the good feeling or unflagging optimism that had characterized every other recording date. At one point they took a break, Bernero recalled to Sun historian Colin Escott, “when Elvis went up into the control room with Sam. They were up there about thirty minutes. We were just sitting around on the studio floor chewing the fat. Then Elvis came back down and came over to me and said, ‘John, we’re not going to finish this session, but I really appreciate you coming over.’ He gave me fifty dollars. The next thing I knew, Sam had sold his contract.”

  Meanwhile the Colonel systematically went about his business, which seemed for the most part to consist of playing one potential bidder off against another. There was no question of where the Colonel wanted to end up: he had been doing business with RCA, the label of both Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow, for more than ten years now, and he had been working with the same man for most of that time. Steve Sholes had handled artist and repertoire duties for both Arnold and Snow, and Colonel Parker had extensive connections within the company, all the way up to Singles Division Manager Bill Bullock. At the same time he wasn’t going to let RCA take anything for granted, nor was he even sure how committed they were to his artist, or to advancing the kind of money that it was going to take to get the boy out of his Sun Records contract. So he continued to actively encourage the other companies in their interest, up to the point where he and Bob Neal were fielding almost daily offers.

  Other events were conspiring—or being actively solicited as coconspirators—to move things rapidly along. Hill and Range, one of the most prominent of the BMI family of upstart young song publishers who had taken advantage of the boom in “race” and “hillbilly” recording after the war, was well on its way toward bringing out an Elvis Presley song folio, an event which had its genesis at the Jimmie Rodgers Festival in May. That was where Hill and Range representative Grelun Landon, in company with his friend RCA promo man Chick Crumpacker, had seen Elvis perform for the first time. Knocked out by the show, he had contacted his bosses, Jean and Julian Aberbach. The Aberbachs, Viennese refugees with a long history in European music publishing, had set up Hill and Range in 1945 to celebrate “America’s native folk music” (the first part of their title stood for “hillbilly,” the second for “the wide-open range”) and specialized in “partnership publishing” almost from the start. This was a way of drawing in stars like Ernest Tubb, Bob Wills, Bill Monroe, and Hank Snow, by allowing them for the first time to participate on a 50–50 basis in the publishing end of the business (up till now, almost without exception, the writer had been forced to surrender all of his publishing interests, which represented half of the performance royalties earned by a song, to the music publisher who did him the favor of representing his songs). Landon urged the Aberbachs to contact Sam Phillips right away so that they could get in on the ground floor of this remarkable new phenomenon, and by early summer 1955 they had done so, working out a deal with Phillips and Bob Neal.

  Meanwhile, Cleveland DJ Bill Randle, who had had extensive dealings with Hill and Range over the years (everyone stood to gain by this network of informal associations, not excluding the artist, though his songs were likely to come from a source to which his a&r director or an influential DJ like Randle might be tied), approached the Aberbachs on his own. At the same time Freddy Bienstock, the Aberbachs’ young chief lieutenant and cousin, who had already heard about Presley from Randle, got a phone call from Hank Snow touting the twenty-year-old performer. The Colonel was not altogether happy about the contract Bob Neal had agreed to on the folio deal, nor was he unaware of Randle’s belief, fostered by the Aberbachs’ desire to recruit Randle to start a talent management company for Hill and Range, that he would end up as the boy’s manager. But Tom Parker had sufficient confidence in his own business acumen, and in his ability to write his own contract somewhere down the line, that he turned a blind eye toward the Aberbachs’ maneuverings and Randle’s ambitions and simply permitted everyone to think whatever they wanted to think. As he told Arnold Shaw, the first time he had sold an act to a promoter, he had been “taken to the cleaner’s…. So I went home, found the clause that did me in, cut it out, and pasted it on a piece of paper. The next time… I got taken by another clause…. One day I put all those smart-assed clauses together—and that’s the contract you’re holding!”

  Randle, in the meantime, was about to shoot a movie short, a self-promotion called The Pied Piper of Cleveland, in which he was planning to use the boy, and that might come in handy in the marketing of his contract. Or it might not. It didn’t really matter. There was nothing that couldn’t be set right so long as you kept your eye on the ball—everyone else, he knew from experience, was likely to take their eye off it. In the Colonel’s master plan, if he had a master plan, the main thing was to get all the parties working toward the same end without realizing, or even suspecting, that they were not the only ones in the game. In this, in a peculiar way, he and the boy were alike. It did not escape the Colonel’s notice that everyone who met the boy, even for an instant, felt that they were the favored one—almost as a result of the boy’s innocence and lack of guile. It was a rare gift, something which could not be taught, something which the Colonel particularly appreciated and of which he could wholeheartedly approve. It gave them something in common.

  Otherwise it was business as usual: tours, bookings, keeping the publicity machine greased. “[Washington, D.C.–based promoter] Connie B. Gay says that a 19-year-old boy named Elvis Presley will be the next sensation of the country and Western (hillbilly) music field,” it was announced in the “TV and Radio People” column of a Tidewater newspaper on September 4. “Presley has crossed bebop with country music and, according to Gay, ‘is the hottest thing in the hillbilly field.’ ” All the DJ polls and fan magazines showed Elvis Presley rising to the top of “the folk music world—not through picking, yodeling, or balladeering—but by belting out his numbers in a rock ’em sock ’em rhythm style.” And finally, in an October issue of Billboard, under the headline “New Policy Combines Pops-C&W,” it was announced, “Col. Tom Parker of Jamboree Attractions, one of the nation’s major bookers and promoters of country & western talent, instituted a new policy when he presented a combination of popular and country & western music on a recent one-nighter tour. Parker teamed Bill Haley & His Comets with Hank Snow for an extended tour, which opened in Omaha, Oct. 10…. Elvis Presley joined the Snow-Haley tour in Oklahoma City.” Even the poster bore out the separate-but-equal angle. “IN PERSON,” read the top half. “The Nation’s No. 1 Rhythm & Blues Artist Bill Haley and his Comets. Of ‘Rock Around the Clock’ and ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’ fame PLUS Elvis Presley with Scotty and Bill.” While at the bottom Hank Snow, the “Singing Ranger,” with an “All Star Cast,” was showcased with his picture headlining his half of the bill.

  The idea was pretty much as the Billboard article stated. The Colonel had approached Haley’s manager, the almost equally colorful Lord Jim Ferguson, with the pitch that he had this kid: “I can take him over, but I want him to get some experience
.” To which Ferguson, who was managing one of the hottest acts in the country at a time when it was not clear in what direction the country was likely to go next, had readily assented, given the kid’s chart success and the drawing power that Snow could bring to the bill. But for the Colonel the point was something more. RCA was certainly interested—but they weren’t that interested yet. If they were going to put up the money needed to purchase Presley’s contract from Sun, they were going to have to believe not just in the artist but in the movement. This was simply one more way of showing them that there really was something happening out there, that Presley was not just another hillbilly sensation. Once the big-city boys got that point, Colonel Thomas A. Parker was convinced, the rest would be easy.

  Elvis himself was thrilled to be on the bill. Bill Haley, out of Chester, Pennsylvania, had had a string of western-flavored records, some more successful than others, since 1946, when he was twenty-one years old. In 1951 he had recorded a cover of “Rocket 88,” the Sam Phillips production that has frequently been cited as marking the birth of rock ’n’ roll, and since then he had put out a steady stream of releases combining an r&b sensibility with a hillbilly boogie feel and big band, western swing (accordion, steel, and saxophone) instrumentation. It was a mix that defied categorization and made considerable impact on the charts in 1953 and 1954, but it failed to achieve any kind of breakthrough success for Haley until the movie The Blackboard Jungle came out in March 1955. Haley’s 1954 recording, “Rock Around the Clock,” which had sold about seventy-five thousand copies its first time around, was selected to play over the opening credits, and the song went to number one, bestowing upon Haley instant star status (though he would never have another hit that came close to matching it, he continued to work off it profitably until the day he died). His version of Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” long a staple of Elvis’ show, was a credible act of rhythm and blues homage, and he was poised on the edge of a brief movie career (Rock Around the Clock, the lightly fictionalized “Bill Haley Story,” with Alan Freed playing a strong supporting role, came out at the beginning of the following year). His music may have lacked the purity and edge that Elvis had achieved in the studio, and certainly his live performances missed out on the smoldering sexuality of Elvis’ appearances, but Haley at this point was a star, and Elvis was clearly drawn to that stardom, as if it might just rub off on him. Haley for his part was perfectly glad to help a kid who, for all he knew, had never been outside the Memphis city limits before.