Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  “He was a very quick study, a cornball kid who was a quick study. We took him to lunch that day, and he didn’t know which end of the fork to use, but, you know, he never made the same mistake twice. This was a kid who knew where he wanted to go, and he was very single-minded about it. We had a little discussion that day about what he wanted to do, what the long-range goals were and what the steps would be in the publicity campaign. I explained to him that this should be done very methodically, this should be a long-range plan, I had to know what he wanted to do, and we both had to agree that he was capable of getting there. I was drawing little pyraminds in my notebook to show him, and we discussed things like concert tours, I knew there was an acting possibility from the very beginning. He understood all this. He wanted it, and he had the talent. After lunch I asked him to wait in my office, and I went to see Steve. I said to Steve, ‘We got him!’ The guy that we’d been looking for.”

  There was a rehearsal late Saturday morning at the Nola Studios, on Broadway between Fifty-first and Fifty-second, just a couple of blocks from the Warwick Hotel, where the Colonel and Elvis and the band were all staying. The Colonel and a William Morris agent introduced Elvis to the Dorseys and their mother, “and Elvis exhibited a kind of deference and courtesy,” observed Arnold Shaw, who had brought Presley to Bill Randle’s attention early on, “that patently puzzled” the Dorseys, not normally known for either their deference or courtesy. Scotty, who was interested in sound engineering, checked out the control booth, while D.J., who had never been to New York before (“We didn’t know what to expect. We didn’t know what kind of people they were—we figured they’d just gobble us up”), met his boyhood idol, drummer Louie Bellson; Bellson invited him out for coffee and turned out to be a really “nice guy.” Elvis hung around at the back of the hall, playing with Hill and Range representative Grelun Landon’s five-year-old son and talking to Grelun and Chick Crumpacker, among others, about the time that his car had burned up on the highway. He had seen his whole career “going up in smoke,” he said. They had clambered up on a hillside to watch the car burn when all of a sudden the horn went off and died in a crescendo, he told them, like a dying cow. He talked about some of his favorite performers, Bill Kenny and the Ink Spots in particular, and named his favorite movie actor as James Dean, whose “Rebel Without a Pebble,” he said, was his favorite film. He was absolutely charming, said Chick Crumpacker, winning in a way that didn’t fail to take into account the reaction of his audience.

  It was a gloomy day—rain had been pouring down in the aftermath of a storm that had blanketed the East Coast—but when the rehearsal was over Elvis was not averse to doing some sightseeing with Grelun Landon and his son. They bought a ball to toss around in a sporting goods store near Madison Square Garden, stopped off at a coffee shop and ordered milk shakes, and happily soaked up the hustle and bustle of the city. Back at the hotel Scotty and Bill reminisced about some of the early tours, and Bill talked about all the things they had done when they first started out to bolster Elvis and support the act. Scotty was characteristically reserved, while Bill was full of beans in describing some of the scrapes they had gotten themselves into, but with Elvis, said Landon, you simply couldn’t tell how relaxed he really was or to what extent he was simply brazening it out. “He knew,” said Landon, a sophisticated observer of human nature and, at thirty-three, a music-industry veteran, “what he was doing at all times. I really believe he was like a novelist—he studied and watched what was going on, it was really just second nature with him.” There was some talk about “Heartbreak Hotel,” which had been released with considerable misgivings by the RCA brass the day before. “I Forgot to Remember to Forget,” in its new RCA pressing, was still riding high on the charts, and probably there was no one at RCA, including Steve Sholes, who wouldn’t have picked its clear, crisp, snappy sound over the murky mix and message of the new song. But RCA needed fresh product, they needed to demonstrate their commitment to their new artist, they needed to prove that they had not made a mistake of monumental proportions; they were not about to become the laughingstock of the industry. Just before it was time to go over to the theater Elvis Presley took a nap.

  THE SHOW THAT NIGHT, wrote Chick Crumpacker, was not marked by any foreshadowings or harbingers of great success. It was broadcast from CBS’ Studio 50, between Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth, and “few had braved the storm. The theater was sparsely filled with shivering servicemen and Saturday nighters, mostly eager for the refuge from the weather. Outside, groups of teenagers rushed past the marquee to a roller-skating rink nearby. Just before showtime, a weary promoter [Crumpacker himself] returned to the box office with dozens of tickets, unable even to give them away on the streets of Times Square.”

  The series itself was on rather shaky ground; ratings were poor, and in many quarters it was seen simply as the indulgence of one of television’s biggest stars, who happened to love the sweet sound of swing. Stage Show had started out the previous fall as a half-hour lead-in to Jackie Gleason’s Honeymooners, which had previously occupied the full hour as The Jackie Gleason Show. It proved so weak a lead-in that by March the order would be switched, and the show itself dropped after a single season. Other guests on the night of Elvis Presley’s television debut included Sarah Vaughan, whose manager-husband George Treadwell refused to let her follow some untalented “hillbilly” singer, and comic-banjoist Gene Sheldon. In the paper the previous morning it had been announced in Nick Kenny’s New York Daily Mirror column that “Bill Randle, one of the country’s ace disc jockeys, makes a guest appearance on the CBS-TV ‘Stage Show’ tomorrow night at 8. Bill will present his new pop singing discovery Elvis Presley.” It was not Elvis Presley, then, whom Tommy Dorsey introduced but “special guest” Bill Randle, who had been plugging the television appearance on his Saturday-afternoon New York radio network show. “We’d like at this time,” said Randle, “to introduce to you a young fellow who, like many performers—Johnnie Ray among them—came out of nowhere to be an overnight big star. This young fellow we saw for the first time while making a movie short. We think tonight that he’s going to make television history for you. We’d like you to meet him now—Elvis Presley.”

  Then Elvis came out looking as if he’d been shot out of a cannon. Wearing a black shirt, white tie, dress pants with a shiny stripe, and a tweed jacket so loud that it almost sparkled, he launched into the first song with no more than a toss of his head to Scotty and Bill, but much to Randle’s surprise the song that he launched into was not his new RCA single but Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” When it came to the instrumental break, he drew back into the protective shelter of the band, got up on the balls of his feet, spread his legs wide, and let loose.

  The reaction of the audience, as Chick Crumpacker recalled it, was something between shock and interest, “a kind of amusement. People tended to laugh as much as applaud at key moments.” His hands never stop moving, it looks as if he might be chewing gum, there is a twitchiness to his whole aspect—and yet there is a boundless confidence, too, and his mascaraed visage appears to scan the audience as he seeks… connection. In the middle of the song he segues into “Flip, Flop and Fly,” another Big Joe Turner number, and you’re not sure if it’s planned or unplanned, but there is the feeling of something fierce and uncontrolled. Scotty concentrates intently on his guitar playing; Bill—who is chewing gum—shouts encouragement: “Go, go, go.” And Elvis is gone. At the end of the performance he almost staggers back from the mike, takes a deep bow, and waves, all in one instant. What you take away from it, no matter how many times you watch or how much you are aware of the fluttery movement of the hands, is the sheer enjoyment of the moment. Elvis Presley is on top of the world.

  “Daddy just sat there,” said Jackson Baker, Elvis’ fifteen-year-old next-door neighbor of the previous summer, “and he said, ‘Elvis is going to be a big star.’ We all watched, and it was just so obvious that he was.” Bob Johnson wrote in his notes for a future st
ory: “Presley puts intensity into his songs. Over-emotional? Yes. But he projects. He ‘sells.’ Elvis has arrived…. But you can’t throw that much into something without it telling. It’ll wear him out. It will exhaust him emotionally and physically. He’s 20 now [actually he was twenty-one]. If he’s wise, he’ll slow down a little and live another 20 years.”

  Probably there were few in Memphis who did not watch—Bob Neal, the mayor, the Lansky brothers, Dixie and her family, Elvis’ boyhood friends, all were rooting for him, no doubt. And yet the stars didn’t fall from the sky, the ratings didn’t even go up appreciably, there was certainly no great press notice of Elvis Presley’s television debut, and on Monday morning he was back in the studio recording.

  STEVE SHOLES once again had a session in mind that was not going to take place anywhere but in his mind. He had lined up a good boogie-woogie piano player named Shorty Long, currently featured on Broadway in the musical The Most Happy Fella, to fill out the band, and he had done his best once again to prep Elvis for the session, but he sensed that something was missing. For while he never got any back talk from the boy, and he could sincerely offer nothing but praise to Colonel Parker with respect to the attitude and deportment of his young charge, he suspected that some connection was not being made, that the boy’s politeness masked a distance or another point of view that he could not, or would not, articulate.

  At Sholes’ instigation, in what amounted to standard record company procedure, they started off with “Blue Suede Shoes,” the new Sun release that was climbing the charts and provoking such galling afterthoughts at RCA. Recording conditions here in New York were far more satisfactory than in Nashville, the studio on the ground floor of the RCA building on East Twenty-fourth that had once housed the old police academy stables was a comfortable one for Sholes to work in, and the musicians were certainly familiar with the material. After thirteen takes, though, they still hadn’t come up with a version to rival the authority of the original, and Sholes could scarcely have been reassured when the boy declared that it was no use doing any more, they couldn’t do better than Carl’s anyway. Next, at Presley’s urging, they launched into a song with which Sholes was surely familiar because it came from an artist with whom he had worked extensively in Victor’s “race” series, blues singer Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. Crudup had written “That’s All Right,” Presley’s first song, and now they did a masterful version of his “My Baby Left Me,” in which for the first time the band really started to sound like a unit. D.J.’s drums and Bill’s descending bass introed the song. In contrast to the rushed rhythms of the Perkins number or the murky echo of “Heartbreak Hotel,” this sounded deliberate, thought out, a vibrant companion piece to the Sun recordings. And yet it can hardly have been of much consolation to Sholes, to whose way of thinking an Arthur Crudup blues was not what they were looking for, no matter how good it might be. This was not the potential new pop artist that RCA had signed, this was not the revolutionary new sound that RCA was looking for.

  The afternoon session brought more of the same, another wonderful Crudup number, “So Glad You’re Mine,” plus one of the six songs that Sholes had suggested, a honky-tonker called “One Sided Love Affair” that was particularly suited to Shorty Long’s barrelhouse style. If he could get three or four more, Sholes figured, along with the five unissued Sun titles that he had acquired, he would have just enough for an album.

  At some point in the process he called Sam Phillips in Memphis and, under the pretext of informing him that they had cut “Blue Suede Shoes” (which he assured Sam he would not put out as a single), sought advice and reassurance concerning the course he was following. He even put out feelers, according to Phillips, for Sam to produce Elvis for RCA on a freelance basis. “I told him he hadn’t bought the wrong person. And I told him what I told him when he bought the contract in the first place, just don’t try to make Elvis what he’s not instinctively. The worst mistake you can make is to try to shape him into some damn country artist, or anything else, if it just doesn’t naturally flow that way. I told him to keep it as simple as possible, and I happen to be the greatest admirer of Steve Sholes—he was a person of the utmost integrity and how he could be that way when he was with a major label, quote unquote, I really don’t understand—but he was not a producer. Steve was just at every session, and he kept his fucking mouth shut.”

  On the second day of recording a young wire reporter named Fred Danzig showed up for an interview, the first fruits of Anne Fulchino’s publicity campaign. “I wrote a thing called ‘On the Record’ for the radio wire, and I did another version for the newspapers for what was called the United Press Red Letter. I would interview singers and composers and record producers and just give them stuff like that. At some point in 1955 Marion Keisker started writing me from Memphis about this kid, Elvis Presley, who was doing such marvelous things down there, and then he placed ninth in our third annual Disc Jockey Poll. So I knew about him when Annie called me up and told me that he was going to be in New York to do the Dorsey show.”

  Danzig watched the show on TV and showed up at Fulchino’s office at 11:00 A.M. the following Tuesday. She took him down to the recording studio where he found, he later wrote, “a tall, lean young man standing in the hallway waiting for us.” He was wearing “a shirt the likes of which I had never seen before. It was a ribbon shirt, light lavender in color. Elvis said it cost $70. I also noted that his blue alligator loafers were scuffed and worn-down at the heels. He had on a gray sports jacket and dark gray slacks. His fingernails were chewed down to where there was no biting room left.” His presence was compelling, Danzig said, “just for that face alone. If you saw him on the street, you’d say, ‘Wow, look at that guy.’ ”

  They went into the control room to do the interview. In response to a question about his music, the boy started naming blues singers with whom Danzig was somewhat familiar but who “obviously meant a lot to him. I was very surprised to hear him talk about the black performers down there and about how he tried to carry on their music. He talked about how he wanted to buy his parents a house and make life easier for them. I asked him about the shaking and the wiggling, and he told me they hadn’t wanted him to jump around so much on TV but that he had told them it was the way he had to perform, it was just the way he did it. He showed me his leather-covered guitar and explained that there was only one other leather guitar case like it. Hank Snow had given him the idea, he said. ‘It keeps the guitar from getting splintered when I swing it around and it hits my belt buckle.’ ” They talked about the movies and how he “wanted to go out to Hollywood and become the next James Dean. And I thought, ‘Yeah, well, come on, kid…’ But that was obviously his goal.

  “We talked for about twenty or twenty-five minutes—he wasn’t the most articulate kid in the world, but he answered all the questions—when Steve Sholes came in and said they were ready to begin.” Elvis invited Danzig to stick around and watch him work, and the first number they tried was “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Cry (Over You),” a 1954 r&b number for Roy Hamilton (it was the B side of Hamilton’s smash inspirational hit, “You’ll Never Walk Alone”). “Gee, those sideburns bother me,” Sholes remarked to Danzig wryly. “I wonder if I should get him to the barbershop.” But, he added with a mirthful chuckle, “I guess you don’t tamper with success. I guess we’ll leave them on the kid.”

  THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS were taken up with sightseeing and a scattering of promotional activities, mostly organized by Anne Fulchino and Chick Crumpacker, with Hill and Range representative Grelun Landon along for the ride. The Colonel by now had gone home to Tennessee, presumably to oversee, in his meticulous fashion, the multiplicity of details surrounding the start-up of the upcoming tour. With his “keepers,” Elvis drove out to Trenton to do an interview on perhaps the only station in the New York metropolitan area to air country music. They got lost looking for the station, and Elvis slept all the way out and back. The William Morris people threw a party for him; so did
Julian Aberbach, the president of Hill and Range, who had a dinner in Elvis’ honor at his home. Julian’s wife, Anne Marie, served lamb cooked rare, and Elvis almost gagged on it, explaining that he was not used to “bloody” meat; his taste ran more to hamburgers, well done. “He was extremely polite,” said Freddy Bienstock, Julian’s cousin, who was also present, “but he was completely lost.”

  Chick, in what he later came to see as a case of enthusiasm overrunning judgment, scheduled a reception at the Hickory House, on Fifty-second Street above Times Square, but made the mistake of failing to secure a private room. “It might as well have been Grand Central Station the way people were milling in and out, but the savior of the situation was Elvis, who looked around, took stock of things, and then took charge with such aplomb and such charm that he made everybody feel like they were alone with him in the room.” He was wearing a hand-painted tie that he had gotten for a dollar in Times Square and the same lavender ribbon shirt that Fred Danzig had remarked upon. What was his reaction to success? he was asked. “It’s all happening so fast,” he said, “there’s so much happening to me… that some nights I just can’t fall asleep. It scares me, you know… it just scares me.”

  THE SECOND DORSEY SHOW went fine. He sang “Tutti Frutti” and “Baby, Let’s Play House,” once again failing to plug his new single, which according to Billboard was “a strong blues item wrapped up in his usual powerful style and a great beat…. Presley is riding high right now with network TV appearances, and this disk should benefit from all the special plugging.” Evidently something was bothering Elvis about the show, though, because when Sholes wrote to Parker three days later he said: “I thought Elvis did even better Saturday night than he did on the previous week’s show. I understand he was not so pleased but I think he had every right to be happy. You should be very proud of the boy,” Sholes went on,