Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  Elvis Presley, one of the most sought-after warblers this year, signed two big-time contracts as a recording artist, writer and publisher. RCA Victor beat out the diskery competition and signed the 19-year-old to a three years–plus options contract. Besides which, Hill & Range inked him to a long-time exclusive writing pact and at the same time set up a separate publishing firm, Elvis Presley Music, Inc., which will operate within the H&R fold…. Altho Sun has sold Presley primarily as a c.&w. artist, Victor plans to push his platters in all three fields—pop, r.&b., and c.&w. However, RCA Victor’s specialty singles chief, Steve Sholes (who will record Presley), plans to cut the warbler with the same backing—electric guitar, bass fiddle, drums and Presley himself on rhythm guitar—featured on his previous Sun waxings.

  STAGE SHOW

  December 1955–February 1956

  THE DORSEY SHOW, MARCH 17, 1956.

  (ALFRED WERTHEIMER)

  No matter what people say about you, son, you know who you are and that’s all that matters.

  —Gladys Presley to her son as quoted by Harold Loyd in Elvis Presley’s Graceland Gates

  The last admonishment I had to Elvis was, “Look, you know how to do it now, you go over there and don’t let anybody tell you—they believe enough in you that they’ve laid some cold cash down, so you let them know what you feel and what you want to do.”

  —Sam Phillips on his advice to Elvis Presley, late fall 1955

  ON TUESDAY, JANUARY 10, 1956, two days after his twenty-first birthday, Elvis Presley entered the RCA studio in Nashville for the first time. Just before Christmas Steve Sholes had sent him a brief note proposing ten titles for his consideration, along with acetate demos and lead sheets for each of the songs. The selection included ballads, novelty numbers, country weepers, blues, and “beat” songs, which Sholes urged him to learn and then let the RCA a&r man know which of them he liked best. About a week before the session, at the Variety Club in Memphis, an after-hours “members only” club for entertainment people and businessmen, Elvis sat down at the beat-up old upright and picked out “Heartbreak Hotel” for Dewey, announcing he was going to cut it in Nashville the following week.

  Sholes meanwhile got in touch with Chet Atkins, his Nashville coordinator and one of Scotty’s principal inspirations on guitar, about booking the studio and putting together a band for the session. The band was no problem—they would use Elvis’ regular group with Chet on rhythm. In addition, Atkins contacted Floyd Cramer, who had just moved to Nashville and had played piano behind Elvis on the Hayride and on tour over the past year, as well as Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires, the popular quartet who had toured with Eddy Arnold and were singing background on an increasing number of Nashville sessions. He would not be able to employ the full group, Atkins explained to Stoker; RCA had just signed the renowned Speer Family gospel quartet, and he wanted to use Ben and Brock Speer to augment the sound on any ballads they might cut at the session.

  Steve Sholes was becoming increasingly nervous. At the DJ convention the previous November, wrote Billboard editor Paul Ackerman, the prevailing attitude was, “Anyone who buys [Elvis Presley] will get stuck,” and the prevailing attitude at the New York home office was no more comforting. Sholes, ordinarily the most cautious of men, was not unaware that with this signing he had put his neck on the line. He had little doubt that there was enough corporate jealousy to bury him, and it didn’t help his state of mind any when Sam Phillips put out his latest release, an upbeat, rambunctious rocker called “Blue Suede Shoes” by twenty-three-year-old Carl Perkins, just before the new year. “Steve was afraid he’d bought the wrong one,” Chet Atkins observed, and there is little question that many at RCA would have been exceedingly quick to agree.

  In the weeks following the signing, however, RCA as a corporate entity did everything they could to capitalize on their investment. On December 2 they put out their own version of Elvis’ last Sun single, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget,” still riding high on the country charts after eleven weeks and destined now to reach number one and stay on the charts for another twenty-eight. In addition they rereleased each of the four other Sun singles on December 20, while, in related developments, Hill and Range finally came out with the Elvis Presley songbook and the Colonel announced on December 17 that his boy had been contracted for four appearances on CBS’ Stage Show, hosted by Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, which comedian Jackie Gleason produced as a lead-in to his own highly successful Saturday-night show. NBC had also been in the running, the Colonel declared, with fellow RCA artist Perry Como, whose show ran opposite Gleason’s, making an unsuccessful bid for Mr. Presley’s services. “The most talked-about new personality in the last 10 years of recorded music,” declared RCA’s full-page ad in Billboard on December 3, featuring a dynamic picture of Elvis Presley, legs astraddle, eyes closed, shouting out his blues, and a small italicized notice below: “Bob Neal, manager/under direction of Hank Snow Jamboree Attractions/Col. Tom Parker, general manager.”

  RCA HAD ITS STUDIO in a building that it shared with the Methodist TV, Radio and Film Commission. The room was big, high-ceilinged, with an arched roof that created a tendency, according to Atkins, for bass notes to “roll around for a long time.” The first session was booked for 2:00 in the afternoon, an unlikely hour, but neither Sholes nor Chet was much for night sessions. D. J. Fontana sat attentively behind his drums; it was his first recording date with the group, and he knew that there must be lots of equally good drummers in Nashville. Floyd Cramer, with a young wife to support, was wondering if he had made the right decision leaving Shreveport and whether there would be a living for him in studio work, while Steve Sholes, sitting behind the control room glass with his lead sheets and his song lists and little insight into how the boy was going to react to the new studio and the new situation, couldn’t help but feel that this was not a very auspicious beginning from any point of view. To be working with such a ragtag group, especially under such trying circumstances; to feel himself under the jealous scrutiny not just of his own record company but of an entire industry; to be seeking to duplicate the “slapback” sound that was so integral a part of the singer’s appeal while his own engineers professed ignorance as to just how Sam Phillips had achieved it—this was not a position he was happy to find himself in. Bill kept chewing gum and cracking jokes, but it was evident that even he felt the tension in the air, and it didn’t make Scotty feel any better when, after making small talk with Atkins about the unique qualities of their Echosonic amps, a custom-made item which Scotty had gotten six months earlier after hearing Chet employ it to particular effect on “Mister Sandman,” he asked Chet what he wanted them to do. “Just go on doing what you been doing” was his musical idol’s characteristically phlegmatic reply. “He was just old Cool Hand Luke himself,” said Scotty. “He wasn’t there to disturb or anything. [The whole thing] was a drastic change for us at first—at first I think it seemed a little cold. The engineer called take numbers instead of, ‘Hey, do it again.’ My feeling was not necessarily we’re in the big time, just now we had a little more professional atmosphere…. We were fresh meat!”

  Elvis alone failed to show any sign of strain. He was wearing pink pants with a blue stripe and was clearly excited about the occasion. He flung himself into the first number, Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman,” which had been a staple of their stage act for nearly a year, and sang it again and again, zeroing in on the half-time, bluesy finish that had always been a climax of the live performance. There appeared to be no doubt or hesitation. It didn’t seem to bother him that for the first time they were hearing the echo effect in the studio (Sam Phillips’ slapback was in essence an electronic adjustment after the fact; the only way to get a similar effect in the McGavock Street studio—and then it was only a crude approximation—was by placing a mike and an amp at opposite ends of the long hallway at the front of the building and feeding that back into the main room). He was just biding his time, as he had learned to do from Sam Phillips, until they
got it right. A couple of times Steve Sholes might have called it a master take, but the boy was insistent, in a nice way, that he could do better, that it wasn’t there yet. Atkins, ordinarily unemotional and undemonstrative, was so struck by the performance that he called his wife and told her to come down to the studio right away. “I told her she’d never see anything like this again, it was just so damn exciting.”

  The next song was “Heartbreak Hotel,” the number Mae Axton had brought to the convention, which he had told Dewey he was going to record. It was an odd, almost morbid composition, which Axton had written with Tommy Durden after Tommy showed her a Miami newspaper story about a man who had committed suicide and left a note saying, “I walk a lonely street.” “It stunned me,” said Mae. “I said to Tommy, ‘Everybody in the world has somebody who cares. Let’s put a Heartbreak Hotel at the end of this lonely street.’ And he said, ‘Let’s do.’ So we wrote it.” Mae promised the song to Buddy Killen at Tree Publishing, and she gave a third of the writer’s credit to Elvis. “I don’t know why,” said Buddy, “she said she wanted to buy him a car.” Hill and Range tried to get the publishing, but Mae held firm, which must have frustrated Steve Sholes even more.

  It was a strange choice by any kind of conventional wisdom: gloomy, world-weary, definitely at odds with the irrepressibly vibrant image that Elvis had projected from the start, both in performance and on all his records to date. In theory it may not have been an altogether comfortable fit, and Sam Phillips pronounced the finished product a “morbid mess,” but Elvis clearly believed in it and put everything he had into it, and whatever Sholes’ or Chet’s personal reservations, the heavy overlay of echo and D.J.’s rim shots created a powerful, emotion-laden atmosphere of upbeat despair.

  The entire three-hour evening session was spent putting down “Money Honey,” yet another r&b staple of the live act, and the single session that was held the following afternoon was consumed recording the two ballads that Steve Sholes had brought in, with the makeshift three-man vocal group providing only adequate background harmonies. Gordon Stoker in particular was dissatisfied. Stoker, who had met the boy on the Eddy Arnold bill that played Memphis fourteen months before, was upset that his own group had not been used and felt that the sound was unprofessional, with a “quartet” made up of a low bass and two natural tenors. The songs came out all right (“I Was the One” was always Elvis’ favorite from the session), but Stoker was not very impressed with Presley’s ballad-singing abilities and left the session angry at both Chet and Steve Sholes for showing him so little consideration.

  All in all it was a somewhat desultory beginning, and Steve Sholes could not have been happy going back to New York with two r&b covers, a singularly odd original on which Hill and Range didn’t even own the publishing, and two ballads unlike anything Elvis Presley had ever recorded before. He couldn’t have felt any better when, upon his return, his superiors were so put off by what they heard, Sholes said, that they wanted him to turn around and head straight back to Nashville. “They all told me it didn’t sound like anything, it didn’t sound like his other record[s], and I’d better not release it, better go back and record it again.” Sholes argued that it had taken him two days to get this, if he went back it would just be throwing good money after bad; besides, they had an opportunity for another session in New York at the end of the month and they needed to put something out right away.

  Elvis meanwhile remained unfazed by anyone else’s doubts. Back in Memphis he appeared on a father’s night show at Humes, just as he had appeared the previous month in a Christmas show produced by Miss Scrivener to raise money to help out needy students. He bought a brand-new 1956 Plymouth station wagon for his parents, too, and he stopped by the Chisca to fill in Dewey’s radio audience on what he’d been up to lately, talking with Dewey off-air as the records played and Dewey got more and more excited about the world he was entering and the future that stretched out before him.

  At the Memphis Recording Service at 706, all attention was focused on the two new Sun releases, Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” and Johnny Cash’s stark “Folsom Prison Blues.” Elvis told Marion and Mr. Phillips all about the Nashville session and the upcoming Dorsey broadcasts; Sam was a big swing band fan and had always pointed to Tommy Dorsey’s “Boogie Woogie” as the start of it all. Sam didn’t really press him much about the session—he considered Steve Sholes a man of integrity and didn’t want to get in the middle of anything. They sat for a few minutes in the little outer office, not really saying much, but secure in the knowledge that things were moving along pretty much according to plan. Elvis felt comfortable with Sam and Marion, he felt at home in the little studio—“there was no place he’d rather be,” said Sam, “that’s just a fact. If you ever befriended him, he never forgot it. He had difficulty building true friendships, and I had that difficulty, too. I have a lot of friends, but I am just not a person who builds relationships easily. Elvis was the same way. He was just, innately, a loner.”

  He heard from Steve Sholes again around January 20, just a week before his scheduled departure for New York. Sholes suggested six songs this time, including “Pins and Needles in My Heart,” a 1945 Roy Acuff number that Sholes thought he might be able to “get with.” A carbon copy of the letter, of course, went to the Colonel, who was busy making plans based on a future that nobody else could see.

  The Colonel’s vision of the future centered on mass exposure, something he had tried with Eddy Arnold with a good deal of success. With Elvis, though, it was different. “I think there was a big difference in the time…. The Eddy Arnold era and the Elvis era were entirely different,” said country comedian Minnie Pearl, who worked with the Colonel in both eras. They were different because, according to Pearl, as big a star as Arnold became, Elvis was the Colonel’s dream, the perfect vehicle for all the Colonel’s elaborately worked out and ingenious promotional schemes. Elvis was the purest of postwar products, the commodity that had been missing from the shelves in an expanding marketplace of leisure time and disposable cash. The Colonel “slept, ate, and breathed Elvis,” just as he had Eddy Arnold—but the times had changed, and the personalities of the performers were dissimilar as well: Elvis was fresh-faced and eager to please, pure plasticity in an informational age that required a protean hero.

  Television was the key to the deal. The Colonel realized it—hell, Bob Neal had realized it, that was what he had been aiming for when he took Elvis to New York to try out for Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. How many people could you reach with one national appearance as opposed to all the one-night stands, the endless promotions and exploitations, that you did before picking up stakes and moving on to the next town? There was no comparison, even for an old carnival hand like Tom Parker. The trick was in controlling the game. You had a boy who could be ruined by any number of variables: sex, scandal, familiarity, loss of self-belief. The idea was to remove him from those variables. The trick was to expose him, but expose him only so much, to define, and control, the level of acceptable danger. The Colonel had a number of powerful allies, a carefully assembled team that included Abe Lastfogel, head of the William Morris Agency, and his second in command, Harry Kalcheim, who had set up the Dorsey contact; Jean and Julian Aberbach of Hill and Range, who along with Lastfogel went back to the days of Eddy Arnold; he had all of his contacts from all of the years with RCA, and he had peripheral players like Bill Randle, with his vast radio audience, working for the Colonel’s interests without necessarily even knowing it. All he had to do was to get them working for themselves without working against each other, the key was to put together a team where all the players functioned smoothly but only the team manager knew everyone’s function and position. It was a neat trick, but one that he was sure he could pull off—if only the boy came through. And he had little doubt that he would.

  THE WEEK BEFORE the first Dorsey appearance Elvis was off on yet another Texas tour. On Saturday night he told the Hayride performers about his upcoming televis
ion appearances, and they all wished him luck—he was off for a month now on a Jamboree Attractions tour of the Southeast that was booked around the four consecutive Saturday-night television appearances. According to Maylon Humphries, a Shreveport buddy and occasional performer who was on college break, “He was sitting around in Hoot and Curley’s dressing room, and Curley says, ‘Elvis, you’re going to make a fortune off this,’ and he looked down and took a deep breath and says, ‘Not really.’ And he named what he was getting. ‘But, you know, Curley,’ he said, ‘Mr. Parker says more people will be seeing me on these four shows’—and he didn’t say Colonel, he said Mr. Parker—‘than I would be exposed to for the rest of my life on the Hayride.’ ” Which left everyone with something to think about.

  He flew into New York on Wednesday, January 25, with the Colonel and on Thursday met with various top RCA executives. Steve Sholes took him in to see Larry Kanaga, the head of the record division, and Sholes almost sank through the floor when Elvis buzzed Kanaga with the electric buzzer concealed in his hand. Then Sholes took him over to the publicity department, where he met Anne Fulchino, the attractive young Bostonian who had modernized pop and c&w publicity practices at RCA but had been pleading with Sholes to bring her the right new artist to work with so that she could really break pop in a big way. “Steve brought Elvis in and introduced him to me. He shook my hand, and he had that electric buzzer. I said, ‘Honey, that may be big in Memphis, but it’s never going to work in New York.’ Fortunately, he had a sense of humor, so we just laughed about it, but he never used that stupid buzzer again.