Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  When they got to the theater, Elvis checked out the stage, “feeling its size like a builder inspecting a piece of land.” Girls screamed through an open window as Elvis and the Jordanaires tried to rehearse. The Colonel’s assistant Tom Diskin was handling the box office while the Colonel was “hunched over [in the lobby] in the middle of the crowd, breaking open bundles of souvenir programs and glossy photos suitable for framing. He gave a handful to a kid.

  “ ‘Got enough change on ya, son? Make sure you count your change.’ ”

  The lobby, Wertheimer noted, was papered with glossies. “Nowhere did I see pictures of any other performers. It was wall-to-wall Elvis.”

  Backstage there was the usual complement of opening acts milling around: Phil Maraquin, the magician; the dancing team of Doris and Lee Strom; a local square-dancing troupe; and the Fliam Brothers, musical comedians. This was the show with which the Colonel had replaced the more traditional country and western caravan of just two months before. A lackluster brass band was rehearsing onstage, and Wertheimer decided it was a safe time to go to the bathroom, but when he heard what he took to be the sound of the show starting, he raced down the staircase to the stage area. There on the landing he discovered Elvis and the blonde from the coffee shop engaged in a ritual dance of courtship, with Elvis “slow, natural, insistent. He slid his arms around her waist. She pressed her arms against his shoulders, pinning the purse between them. He inched forward, she retreated.” The photographer snapped picture after picture until at last, in an image destined to become as memorable as Doisneau’s classic “The Kiss,” “she stuck her tongue out at him and he playfully returned the gesture. The tips of their tongues touched.” At this point Wertheimer discreetly withdrew, and not long afterward Elvis faced his loyal fans.

  At the end of the second show Elvis left while the band was still playing, and the photographer rode to the train station with the other musicians in a police paddy wagon. There they caught the 10:50 sleeper back to New York; Elvis was already on the train, in an upper berth, “his hand on his forehead, his eyes on the ceiling, watching his own movie.”

  THEY ARRIVED back in New York early Sunday morning and promptly took a taxi to the Hudson Theater, on Forty-fourth Street, for a full day of rehearsals for the live broadcast that night. They did a quick run-through in which Elvis sang his latest hit, “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You,” on a Greek-columned set (it was all part of Allen’s comedic concept of presenting low culture in a high-culture setting). “He sang without… passion,” Wertheimer noted. “He didn’t move, he didn’t touch the microphone, he stood square, both feet spread and stuck to the ground. After he had finished… Steve patted him on the back and told him it was great. Elvis smiled and in a slow, modest voice, he said, ‘Thank you, Mr. Allen.’ ”

  Then he met the dog, a female basset hound dressed in collar, bow tie, and top hat. In further keeping with the theme of the show he was going to sing “Hound Dog” to—who else? During the first run-through the dog ignored him. Allen “suggested that they get to know each other.” Elvis petted her, sang to her, and in the end prevailed, to the applause of the assembled stagehands and professionals. They then went into the rehearsal of the sketch. At the dress rehearsal, as Elvis stood uncomfortably in his dress shirt and tails waiting to go on, Milton Berle, who was making a cameo appearance on the show, walked by. “Good luck, kid,” he said, straightening Elvis’ bow tie. “Thank you, Mr. Berle,” said Elvis gratefully.

  “Well, you know, a couple of weeks ago on The Milton Berle Show, our next guest, Elvis Presley, received a great deal of attention, which some people seem to interpret one way and some viewers interpret it another. Naturally, it’s our intention to do nothing but a good show.” There is a yelping sound from backstage. “Somebody is barking back there. We want to do a show the whole family can watch and enjoy, and we always do, and tonight we’re presenting Elvis Presley in his, heh heh, what you might call his first comeback…”—Allen laughs again self-consciously, prompting scattered laughter from the audience—“… and at this time it gives me extreme pleasure to introduce the new Elvis Presley. Here he is.”

  If Allen was experiencing extreme pleasure, it was clear that Elvis was experiencing the opposite. He sidled out to the accompaniment of dreamy music, holding the guitar by the neck out from his body, almost as if he were dragging it. He bowed stiffly from the waist, then wiped his nose on his top hat, hiding his face as he handed it to Steve. “Elvis, I must say you look absolutely wonderful,” said Allen with a straight face while Elvis tugged at his white gloves, shifted nervously, and looked away. “You really do. And I think your millions of fans are really going to get kind of a kick seeing a different side of your personality tonight.”

  “Well, uh,” said Elvis almost somnambulistically, “thank you, Mr. Allen, uh…”

  “Can I hold your guitar here?”

  “It’s not often that I get to wear the, uh, suit and tails…”

  “Uh-huh,” said Allen encouragingly, perhaps wondering if they were ever going to get through this sketch.

  “… and all this stuff. But, uh, I think I have something tonight that’s not quite correct for evening wear.”

  “Not quite formal? What’s that, Elvis?”

  “Blue suede shoes.”

  “Ooh yes,” said Steve with a double take. The audience laughed and applauded encouragingly.

  With his opening number, “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You,” for the first time he appeared if not comfortable, at least involved, even in tails. He sang the song with sincerity and feeling, hunching his shoulders, loosening his tie, but for the moment lost in the private reverie which his music provided. The Jordanaires dooh-wahed behind him, out of the picture, as were the musicians, save in silhouette. Even as the last notes were still ringing, Steve Allen bustled out onstage again, this time wheeling the basset, and announced that Elvis was now going to sing “Hound Dog,” his next big hit, which he would record the next day. The dog started to look away, Elvis cupped its chin, and there was sympathetic laughter as Elvis glanced balefully, as if sharing a joke with a friend, at the audience. The camera was on the dog as Elvis pointed at her and declared the obvious with a playful snarl. When the dog started to tremble, he held her affectionately and in the course of the song even kissed her once or twice. Apart from nervous titters, there was little response from the audience, but Elvis was a good sport about it all (“He always did the best he could with whatever situation he was given,” said Jordanaire Gordon Stoker of the appearance, “and he never, ever insulted anybody”), walking the mike around into the basset’s line of vision whenever its attention wandered, sharing his discomfiture openly and amiably. There was a sense of almost palpable relief on the part of all concerned when the song ended and he could finally march offstage after a long, lonely moment in the spotlight.

  The embarrassment was only heightened when, after a commercial break, the “Range Roundup” skit (with “Big Steve and the Gang”) opened to the strains of “Turkey in the Straw.” “Big Steve” was carrying a toy guitar, Andy Griffith had a fiddle and was wearing furry chaps, Imogene Coca was dressed up in a Dale Evans cowgirl skirt, and “Tumbleweed” Presley, looking extremely abashed, was shadowed, like everyone else, by his cowboy hat. At first he literally lurked in the background, throwing in his shouts of agreement in unison with the others with some diffidence and having a good deal of difficulty getting his own lines out (even “You tell ’em, Big Steve” came out in a garbled Memphis accent). But gradually he warmed to the task, and by the time they sang their little western ditty at the end, with each actor taking a verse and all joining in the chorus, he seemed to have entered into the spirit of fun, beating out a rhythm easily on the body of his guitar, throwing a couple of patented, self-referential moves into his cowboy sashay, and singing out his lines with good humor if not abandon. “Well, I got a horse, and I got a gun / And I’m gonna go out and have some fun / I’m a-warning you, galoots / Don’t step on
my blue suede boots.” “Yeah!” said Steve, with the cast ending on a chorus of “Yippy-i-oh, yippy-i-yay, yippy-i-oh-i-yay.”

  “On his way to the dressing room,” reported Wertheimer, “Elvis was intercepted by the William Morris agent with the wire-rimmed glasses whom I had seen Friday morning at the first rehearsal. Shaking Elvis’ hand, he said, ‘I think the show was terrific. You did a marvelous job. We really ought to get a good reaction to this one.’ Tom Diskin, the Colonel’s lieutenant, stood by with a wide smile.”

  Back at his room at the Warwick, Elvis was still not done with his official duties. It had been arranged for him to do an interview on Herald-Tribune columnist Hy Gardner’s program, “Hy Gardner Calling!,” which broadcast locally on WRCA-TV, channel 4. The peculiar conceit of the program was that both parties were filmed “at home,” and the show was broadcast “live” at 11:30 P.M. as a split-screen telephone conversation. This particular conversation must have been even more awkward than most. Gardner came across as the ultimate square, while Elvis, perhaps as a result of his experience that evening, suggested more of the James Dean aspect than ever, looking weary and, at times, genuinely lost. Frequently a fluttering hand would drift up to a furrowed brow, his eyes were heavily made up, and overall he presented a perplexing mix of rebellious image and conventional values, resentful truculence and hurt misunderstanding.

  Was he getting enough sleep? Gardner wondered. No, not really, “but I’m used to it, and I can’t sleep any longer.” What would go through his mind to keep him awake? Some of the songs he was going to do, “or some of your plans, or what?” “Well, everything has happened to me so fast during the last year and a half—I’m all mixed up, you know? I can’t keep up with everything that’s happened.” Slightly nonplussed, Gardner asks him about some of the criticism that has been directed at him. Does he feel any animosity toward his critics? “Well, not really, those people have a job to do, and they do it.”

  But has he learned anything from them?

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “You haven’t, huh?”

  “Because I don’t feel like I’m doing anything wrong.”

  It was not the words so much as the affect—the generational stance not so much that he doesn’t understand as that he isn’t understood. Over and over again he rejects the rebel label (“I don’t see how any type of music would have any bad influence on people when it’s only music…. I mean, how would rock ’n’ roll music make anyone rebel against their parents?”) while adopting the stance. Gardner was clearly taken with him and concluded the interview with fatherly advice, suggesting that even the bad publicity may have helped him; it’s “made it possible for you to do the kind of things for your folks that you always wanted to. So I sort of think I’d look at it that way, Elvis.” “Well, sir, I tell you,” said Elvis, repeating words he has said many times but which part of him clearly believes, “you got to accept the bad along with the good. I’ve been getting some very good publicity, the press has been real wonderful to me, and I’ve been getting some bad publicity—but you got to expect that. I know that I’m doing the best that I can, and I have never turned a reporter down, and I’ve never turned a disc jockey down, because they’re the people that help make you in this business…. As long as I know that I’m doing the best I can.” “Well, you can’t be expected to do any more,” says Gardner reassuringly. “I want to tell you it’s been just swell talking to you, and you make a lot of sense.” With that the interview concluded, and Elvis was able to set aside the ambivalent feelings and experiences of the last two days and, perhaps, finally, get some sleep.

  THE NEXT DAY he seemed hardly the worse for wear. He arrived at the RCA building to find fans carrying picket signs that declared “We Want the Real Elvis” and “We Want the GYRATIN’ Elvis”; held yet another press conference, in which he announced that “Barbara Hearn of Memphis and June Juanico of Biloxi, Miss…. are the two girls he dates. Miss Hearn has the added distinction of being a good ‘motorcycle date’ ”; and recounted the story of his life once again in painstaking, and painstakingly accurate, detail. Then he entered the studio, shortly before 2:00, and settled down to work.

  The studio, according to Al Wertheimer,

  looked like a set from a 1930’s science fiction movie. It was a large rectangular space of acoustical tile walls ribbed with monolithic half cylinders. These ran vertically on the long sides of the rectangle and horizontally on the short sides. The high ceiling was rippled with more parallel cylinders and two pipes of fluorescent light. The floor was a series of short strips of wood scaled in a sawtooth pattern of right angles. In the center of the room lay a patch of carpet on which the musicians had placed their instruments.

  This was a different kind of session. For one thing, “Hound Dog,” the one song they knew they were going into the studio to get, was a number that Elvis and the band had been polishing in live performance for two months now. For another, it was the first session to be attended by Freddy Bienstock, the twenty-eight-year-old Viennese-born “double first cousin” and protégé of the Aberbach brothers, in his capacity as Hill and Range’s representative. It was also, of course, the first time that a full complement of Jordanaires was present in the studio. More significant than anything else, though, for the first time the twenty-one-year-old singer was clearly in charge.

  They started with “Hound Dog,” but perhaps not surprisingly it proved more difficult to capture on record than anyone had anticipated from its easy onstage success. Engineer Ernie Ulrich, as cynical about rock ’n’ roll as anyone else in the building, got a good sound mix early on, but then there were seventeen takes without a satisfactory master. The drums, always the driving force in the live show, weren’t working right, Scotty was groping toward his guitar solo, the Jordanaires were having some difficulty finding their place, and Shorty Long, the boogie-woogie piano player who had filled in on the last New York session, was just looking for his cues. Steve Sholes was getting visibly discouraged—he was desperate to get material for the second album, and here they were wasting all their time on a single song—but Elvis, who exhibited few points of stillness in any other aspect of his life, maintained absolute concentration. “In his own reserved manner,” wrote Wertheimer, “he kept control, he made himself responsible. When somebody else made a mistake, he sang off-key. The offender picked up the cue. He never criticized anyone, never got mad at anybody but himself. He’d just say, ‘Okay, fellas, I goofed.’ ”

  On the eighteenth take they finally got something. By now the beat had changed considerably from the way they did it in live performance, and the phrasing of the lyrics had changed even more. It had veered still further from Big Mama Thornton’s original Latin-flavored “rhumba-boogie” feel (preserved mainly in the repetition of the final words, hound dog, at the end of the opening lines) and become a hard-driving number powered by D.J.’s tommy-gun attack and a solo that Scotty later labeled “ancient psychedelia.” With the twenty-sixth take Sholes thought they had it, but Elvis wanted to keep going. After the thirty-first take Sholes announced over the PA, “Okay, Elvis, I think we got it.”

  Elvis rubbed his face, swept back his hair and resigned. “I hope so, Mr. Sholes.”…

  The recording had taken over two hours and without the air conditioner turned on (the mikes would have picked up the noise), the air in the room hung low and close. The double doors were opened, admitting cool air, the noise of vending machines and visitors with glowing compliments. Elvis combed his hair, drank the Coke offered by Junior and shrugged in reply to comments about how good the music was. Steve trod lightly. “Elvis, you ready to hear a playback?” As if bad news never had good timing, he said, “Now’s as good a time as any.”

  Elvis sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the speaker. The engineer announced the take over the PA and let the tape roll. Elvis winced, chewed his fingernails and looked at the floor. At the end of the first playback, he looked like he didn’t know whether it was a good take or not. Steve
called for take eighteen. Elvis pulled up a folding chair, draped his arms across its back and stared blankly at the floor…. The engineer racked take twenty-eight.* Elvis left his chair and crouched on the floor, as if listening in a different position was like looking at a subject from a different angle. Again he went into deep concentration, absorbed and motionless. At the end of the song he slowly rose from his crouch and turned to us with a wide grin, and said, “This is the one.”

  They ate a late lunch, with Junior taking orders for sandwiches and drinks, and then they began to look for something else to record. Freddy Bienstock had brought in a stack of acetate demos with lead sheets from Hill and Range, and Elvis sorted through them, picking out several by title alone, then listening to them on the studio speaker as Steve broadcast them out from the control room. When he heard the second one, he instantly brightened. “Let me hear that again,” he said. “Something I like about that one.”

  The song was “Don’t Be Cruel,” a number that Bienstock had acquired through Goldy Goldfarb, a song plugger at booking agent Moe Gale’s Shalimar publishing company. It was written by rhythm and blues singer Otis Blackwell, who had enjoyed some success as an artist but was just beginning to enjoy far greater prominence as a writer (his “Fever” had just reached the top of the r&b charts in Little Willie John’s classic version). Bienstock, whose principal administrative background had come in running Hill and Range’s rhythm and blues division, St. Louis Music, for the past couple of years, was immediately taken with the song. However, he let Goldfarb know in no uncertain terms that if he wanted to get a song recorded by the hottest new act in the business, he would have to give up half the publishing (to Hill and Range) and half the writer’s share (to Elvis). As Otis Blackwell later said, “I was told that I would have to make a deal”—but there was little question that it was worth it.