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,
D E C E M B E R 1 95 5 - F E B R U ARY 1 9 5 6 ", 237
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."
n C A H A D I T S S T U D I O in a building that it shared with the MethodRist
TV, Radio and Film Commission. The room was big, highceilinged,
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
238 c-., S T A G E S H O W
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,
D E C E M B E R 1 95 5 - F E B R U A R Y 1 9 5 6 239
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
OJ'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 balladsinging
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 brandnew
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
240 '" S T A G E S H OW
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 dissiInilar as well: Elvis was fresh-faced and
D E C E M B E R 1 95 5 - F E B R U A R Y 1 9 5 6 n.,. 2 4 1
eager to please, pure plasticity i n a n 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.
TH E W E E K B E F O RE the first Dorsey appearance Elvis was off on yet
another Texas tour. On Saturday night he told the Hayride performers
about his upcoming television 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
242 '" S T A G E S H OW
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.
"He was a very quick study, a cornball kid who was a quick snidy. 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
pyramids 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
D E C E M B E R 1 9 5 5 - F E B RUARY 1 95 6 ", 243
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 OJ.,
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
244 c-.. S T A G E S H O W
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.
TH E S H O W T H A T N I G H T, 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
D E C E M B E R 1 95 5 - F E B R UARY 1 9 5 6 ", 245
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 ifhe 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 nextdoor
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 story: "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
246 c-.. S T A G B S H O W
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.
S T B V B S H O L B S 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 boogiewoogie
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
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