Last Train to Memphis

by Peter Guralnick

  NOT DUE AT THE PARAMOUNT STUDIO until the beginning of the week, Elvis reported to Radio Recorders at noon on Saturday, January 12, the day after his Hollywood arrival, for his first RCA session since September. He might more easily have recorded in Nashville during his time off in November and December, but he was adamantly opposed to working anymore under such uninspired conditions, unless he absolutely had to. With the second album out and nothing of any substance left in the can, Steve Sholes had been begging the Colonel for more studio time, and Parker had at last grudgingly conceded it to him on the two weekends that framed the start of the picture—unless Paramount should happen to change its plans. The principal purpose of the session was to record an extended-play “inspirational” album of four or five titles, something Elvis had publicly stated to be his ambition since his start in show business, along with a follow-up single to “Too Much,” which was currently number two on the charts. In addition, it appeared that he would cut studio versions of several of the songs intended for the motion picture, so as to avoid the problem they had run into with Love Me Tender and be able to offer recording-quality sound on at least some of his RCA movie soundtrack releases.

  Steve Sholes would be present, of course, but with Freddy Bienstock serving as de facto a&r man, he had been virtually relegated to a timekeeper’s role, and he was fed up with being the constant butt of the Colonel’s jokes. On principle he refused to address Parker by any other title than his Christian name. Still, he was a good company man, and that was the limit of his personal rebellion, until, on the second or third day of his visit, he told the Colonel that he wouldn’t be able to join him and Bienstock and Tom Diskin for their daily breakfast meeting, due to an unavoidable early meeting at RCA. “That sonofabitch just doesn’t want to have breakfast with us,” declared the Colonel indignantly to Freddy Bienstock. The next morning Colonel had everyone there an hour and a half early, and they caught Sholes sneaking into the dining room. “Must have been a short meeting, Steve,” remarked the Colonel caustically. “And, of course, Steve had to sit down at the table,” recalled Bienstock, “and he hated all of it. He felt perhaps that he was too important an executive to play along with Colonel Parker. You know, the Colonel knew a lot of practical jokes and so forth, and he was a difficult man and had, always, all kinds of demands and requests, and Steve was just too impatient a man to put up with all of this.”

  The sessions themselves went smoothly enough. In addition to the religious and movie titles, Elvis recorded “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,” the Ink Spots number which he had spoken of at the “Million-Dollar Quartet” session in December, as well as Otis Blackwell’s latest, “All Shook Up,” which Elvis thought was a good phrase for a refrain. For this he received a co-writing credit, his last (after the one third Mae Axton had given him for “Heartbreak Hotel” and the songwriter’s share Hill and Range had insisted on for “Don’t Be Cruel” and the Love Me Tender soundtrack) for a long while.

  Hill and Range had its own deal in place by now, which got around the question of credit by simply getting a one-third cut-in from every songwriter who wanted to have his song recorded by Elvis Presley. What this meant was that the songwriter signed a document surrendering one third of his songwriter’s royalties, which were paid by the record company to the song publisher. Once the publisher received them, they were split, under ordinary circumstances, 50–50 with the writer(s), but in this case one third was to be reserved out, to be “paid to Elvis Presley personally.” As a result the writer, or writers, ended up getting 33 percent, instead of 50 percent, of these “mechanical royalties.” The performance royalties, on the other hand (which were calculated on the basis of live performance and jukebox and air play) were not affected. They were collected by the performing-rights societies ASCAP and BMI and paid directly to songwriter and publisher alike. The understanding was that this agreement would apply only to songs first recorded by Elvis Presley and only in their original version. This got around Elvis’ embarrassment at taking credit for something he didn’t do (“I’ve never written a song in my life,” Elvis insisted vociferously on a number of public occasions, going on to declare in one interview, “It’s all a big hoax… I get one third of the credit for recording it. It makes me look smarter than I am”) while at the same time neatly sidestepping his contractual agreement with RCA to give the record company a reduced publishing rate on all songs authored, or coauthored, by him.

  It would be virtually impossible at this point for a non–Hill and Range song to find its way to a session—unless, of course, Elvis introduced it, and then Hill and Range was bound to secure a substantial piece of the publishing before RCA might see fit to clear it for release. Still, the publishing house liked to cover all bets, and on the second day of the session, after Elvis had recorded “Peace in the Valley” and “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”—two staples of the Hill and Range religious catalogue by Thomas A. Dorsey, the father of modern black gospel music—there was a suggestion from Jean Aberbach, the younger of the two brothers who had founded the firm. Since Elvis was recording religious music anyway, offered the debonair forty-five-year-old Aberbach, why not try a holiday release like “Here Comes Peter Cottontail,” with which the firm had had great success? Freddy, somewhat more attuned to the likes and dislikes of their successful young partner-client, was horrified, but Jean, for the first and only time in what would turn out to be a very long association, persisted. “I mean, you had to be mad to think Elvis is going to record ‘Peter Cottontail,’ ” recalled Freddy, “and I told him that, but Jean had no sense for songs and he insisted. So he brought a lead sheet down to Radio Recorders, and he put it on Elvis’ stand while Elvis was having something to eat, and Elvis comes back and looks at it and said, ‘Who brought that Bre’r Rabbit shit in here?’ ” Whereupon Jean conceded defeat (“Jean could laugh at himself, and when he saw Elvis’ reaction, he died laughing—he just disappeared”), but he got the last laugh anyway when he snuck an instrumental version of the song onto the motion picture soundtrack.

  On Monday Elvis reported to the studio for makeup and wardrobe tests. This would be his first Technicolor film, and he’d always thought that actors with dark hair, like Tony Curtis, lasted the longest and looked the best. The makeup man said that with his eyes he should photograph well with black hair, so they dyed it and Mr. Wallis liked the way it looked, and they went with the darker coloring. From the start he felt more comfortable on the Paramount lot than he had ever felt at Fox. Mr. Wallis treated him with affectionate respect, and it was clear he was not being seen as just the latest freak, to be trotted out and eyed suspiciously by the rest of the cast and crew until he had proved himself. Hal Kanter greeted him with the fond familiarity that only shared experience can bring, and he immediately took to the music director, an easygoing guy with a pencil-thin mustache named Charlie O’Curran, who was married to Patti Page (he had previously been married to Betty Hutton) and who rolled up his sleeves and went to work with Scotty, D.J., and Bill.

  They spent the week first rehearsing, and then recording, the film soundtrack on the Paramount soundstage. It quickly became evident that Elvis was uncomfortable in the big open space, with people wandering in and out, but whether because Radio Recorders was all booked up or because Hal Wallis truly believed that he had the best facilities for motion picture recording, with a two-track 35-millimeter sound system that allowed you easily to bring up the vocal, tone down the instrumentation, and introduce ambient sound, they persisted at Paramount throughout the week. There were moments of exasperation when, for example, sultry Lizabeth Scott, the thirty-four-year-old smoky-voiced heroine of countless films noirs, strolled in during a take, perhaps to get a closer look at her costar. Songwriter Ben Weisman, too, showed up unannounced at a session. Weisman, a protégé of Jean Aberbach’s who had gotten his first Elvis cut a few months earlier with “First in Line” and had then written “Got a Lot O’ Livin’ to Do” for the film, was tipped off to the recording session by Aberba
ch and flew in from New York with his songwriting partner, Aaron Schroeder—at their own expense—to make sure that the song got cut. On the afternoon that Weisman and Schroeder arrived, Elvis was struggling with the movie’s title cut, and it didn’t seem like he would ever get to their song. He had already recorded a version of it at Radio Recorders, but Weisman was getting increasingly worried that the number wouldn’t make it into the movie.

  “So I do things sometimes that are very unorthodox, I’ve learned sometimes you’ve got to do things that are a little off-the-wall. Aaron and I were sitting in the control booth waiting for our song to be recorded, and I told Aaron during an intermission that I was going out there to meet him. Aaron says, ‘Don’t go. You don’t belong out there.’ But I went anyway, and it happened that Elvis was sitting in the corner of this big studio with nobody around him, playing guitar, and there was a piano right next to him. So I sat down at the piano—he was playing the blues—and I jammed with him. He didn’t look up. After a chorus or two, he looks up and says, ‘Who are you?’ I said, ‘My name is Ben Weisman.’ He said, ‘Ben Weisman. Didn’t you write…’ He said, ‘Wow.’ He was so impressed. He liked the way I was jamming with him. He got up, and he yelled out, ‘Guys, get out here,’ and on the spot they all got together again, and I was there watching, and I went back in the control room, and they did the tune.”

  Because Wallis had so little faith in Elvis’ musicians (“I need them like I need a hole in the head,” Wallis told Elvis, who insisted that he needed his boys behind him), he made sure to have a couple of experienced studio musicians for the session. Hilmer J. “Tiny” Timbrell, an affable native of British Columbia in his mid thirties, played rhythm guitar, while Dudley Brooks, forty-three-year-old assistant music director at Paramount and an alumnus of the Lionel Hampton band, played piano and served as de facto arranger of the sessions. “Dudley was a little, short, heavyset guy, black as the ace of spades,” said Radio Recorders engineer Thorne Nogar, who met him at the recording studio just a few days later. “For some reason Elvis took a liking to him, and he would sit there at the piano, and Dudley would say, ‘Well, El, you play it this way—no, use that finger.’ He kind of taught Elvis.”

  The band gelled, but the sessions didn’t, and even Wallis was forced to admit that the studio soundstage was not the ideal setting for an Elvis Presley recording. They went back to Radio Recorders the following week to fix up the soundtrack (in the end they wound up using a judicious mix of studio and soundstage recordings), but Wallis was hooked by now and even attended some of the sessions. “I was fascinated by the way Elvis recorded,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Never bothering with arrangements, he and his boys noodled around, improvised, ad-libbed, and worked out numbers for hours. Finally, he would rehearse a number straight through. Night after long night I watched and listened, fascinated.” What he did not put into his autobiography was the almost daily pressure to which the Colonel was subjecting him to bring Elvis’ pay up to a more suitable level. In the end Wallis reluctantly came up with a bonus of $50,000 on top of the agreed-upon $15,000, which did not quite equal Elvis’ Twentieth Century Fox salary but certainly bore out the Colonel’s belief that everything was negotiable.

  By then production had started up, and some of Wallis’ genuine faith and fascination with his star carried over into the actual filming. Hal Kanter had adapted what might have been a conventional Hollywood musical (“Hey, kids, let’s put on a show”) into a witty treatment of fame and disaffection. Here the wily manager was transformed from a cigar-chewing carny into a beautiful, if inaccessible, woman (Lizabeth Scott); the faithful musicians, who might have been left behind but in the end were warmly reembraced, became, in this version, Wendell Corey alone; and Elvis’ character was rendered with faithful perplexity as a pained innocent in a Technicolor world. The music was incorporated into the script in a way that celebrated its wholesome joyousness, the very “spirituality” that Sam Phillips had spoken of from the start, without confronting any of its troublesome social, or generational, implications. Ben Weisman and Aaron Schroeder’s “Got a Lot O’ Livin’ to Do” ran like a trouble-free theme throughout the film, and there was lots of snappy repartee playing off its audience’s, or its author’s, knowledge of the real-life drama. The Trouble in Jacksonville, for example, is put up on the screen in the form of a campaign to ban Deke Rivers’ music, while The Gas-Station Fight in Memphis—or perhaps it is The Hotel Fight in Toledo—here is transformed into a café fight in which Elvis is goaded into performing a wonderful version of “Mean Woman Blues,” then knocks his tormentor into the jukebox which has, miraculously, provided his musical accompaniment.

  Elvis was seemingly attuned throughout, in character in a way that he had been able only fitfully to achieve in his debut film, and his musical performances were marvelous representations of his stage act, not the real thing exactly but close enough to leave no one in the audience in any doubt as to what the fuss was all about. What was most striking, however, was not his energy, which was considerable, nor his very convincing representation of emotion (mostly inner turmoil and wounded pride, in the manner of James Dean) but the occasional indication of a stillness at the center, those rare moments of true ease which gave promise of the kind of long-term career that a Spencer Tracy, or even a Bing Crosby, could enjoy and that Hal Wallis could well envision for his latest discovery.

  He felt at ease with his fellow actors as well. He liked Wendell Corey, whose acting tips he appreciated (and for whom he later named a cat), and he felt perfectly comfortable with Dolores Hart, who was younger and did not have even his experience in the movies. His romance with Dottie seemed to be cooling, helped along by the Colonel’s obvious skepticism of her motives (“The Colonel never wanted anyone to get close,” Dottie felt, though she continued to remain in touch with Elvis’ mother), and the Colonel stepped in on one or two other occasions, too, when he felt that one of Elvis’ Hollywood acquaintances might be “unsuitable.” But for all that, there was no question he felt more at home in Hollywood, dating starlets like Rita Moreno, with whom he went to see Dean Martin at a Hollywood nightclub, and Yvonne Lime, a Paramount player who had a small part in the picture and who was more like a hometown date, “a lot of fun to be with,” Elvis told Press-Scimitar reporter Bob Johnson. “Mostly we’d go to movies or just ride around looking at things. Sometimes we would play records.”

  Less idyllic was the situation that seemed to be developing with Scotty and Bill, and with D.J. to a lesser extent. They didn’t like Hollywood, they were bored just sitting around waiting to be called, and they couldn’t help but feel the slights, real or imagined, that they saw continually coming their way. To relieve the boredom on the set they would jam with Elvis between takes. An electrician would plug them in, and they always drew a crowd, up to the point that Kanter had to beg, “Will you please stop? We’re trying to do some work here!” Off the set they hung around with Charlie O’Curran, a man who enjoyed his liquor and could ask them out to his house in Santa Monica without even calling his wife, Patti. For the most part, though, they were on their own, seeing little of Elvis even though they were only two or three floors below him at the Hollywood Knickerbocker and, in Scotty and Bill’s case in particular, hurt and resentful at the separation. Aspiring rockabilly singer Glen Glenn (né Troutman), who had first met Elvis in San Diego in April 1956 and had subsequently become good friends with the band, came by often to see Scotty and Bill, and Bill would frequently bring him up to see Elvis, who was his main inspiration.

  “Lots of times Bill would go up with us, knock on the door, and then he would go back down. It wasn’t that easy to get in, but he always made sure. There were always a lot of girls sitting around on the couch and stuff, talking. One night I remember Elvis had all the acetates for the soundtrack from Loving You, and he had that old Smiley Lewis song, ‘One Night,’ too—that wasn’t in the movie, but he cut it at Radio Recorders at the same time—and he was bragging on it ’cause he playe
d guitar on that. We sat there listening to every one of those songs, and the girls were setting around and Black had already left—he kept playing ‘One Night’ over and over. ‘That’s a good fuckin’ record,’ he said.

  “Bill got real mad one time, ’cause they wouldn’t let us in upstairs—I think it was mainly the Colonel didn’t want Elvis to see anybody that night, but Bill said, ‘I ought to go up there and just hit him right in the nose.’ He knew I loved Elvis, and it meant a lot to Bill that he could actually take me up there to meet him. He was very bitter, because he thought that Elvis could have put his foot down and done more. Scotty never would say much, but Bill felt like him and Scotty was the band, they should be with Elvis, these other guys were just along for the ride.”

  That was the only real cloud on the horizon, though. Cliff and Gene (“Cuz”) were getting to feel more at home in Hollywood, too, so much so that Elvis was embarrassed at times and felt compelled to restrain their more unencumbered speech and behavior, his cousin’s in particular. His father had shipped out his new white Cadillac so that he could cruise around town in style. All in all, despite “a little homesick[ness],” he felt like he was fitting in just fine.