saw, too - but their reactions were entirely different.
Sam called Bob Neal right after the Bon Air appearance. Neal, the
WMPS OJ, was putting on a "hillbilly hoedown featur[ing] favorite folk
ballads in a sylvan folk setting" and starring, "in person, the sensational
radio-recording star" Slim Whitman, of the Louisiana Hayride, who
would sing his hits, "Rosemarie," "Secret Love," and, undoubtedly, "Indian
Love Call." The show was at the outdoor amphitheater in Overton
Park, and Sam asked Neal ifhe could add this new Memphis act to the bill.
Bob, the most affable of entrepreneurs, said sure, as long as Sam got the
boy into the musicians' union, which Sam had Marion immediately set
about to do. He didn't say anything about it to Elvis at first, because he
didn't want to get him too worked up - but he thought he would try to
place an ad in the paper with the Poplar Tunes record shop the following
week, assuming that it all worked out.
Dixie came home on Sunday, too late to see Elvis that night. The first
song that the family heard on the radio when they got back into town was
"Blue Moon of Kentucky. " On Monday, Dixie called Elvis at Crown Electric
first thing in the morning, and he told her to meet him at home after
work, he didn't want to have to go home and change and clean up and
drive over to her house before seeing her. "I had on a pale blue fitted skirt
and a red blouse, and his mom and dad and I were sitting on the porch.
They were just so excited they couldn't believe it, they told me about the
studio and the record and the people calling and saying, 'Is this your son?'
Then I saw him walking down Alabama Street, I could see him a block
J U LY-S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 4 '" 1 0 7
away, and I couldn't wait for him to get there, and h e couldn't wait t o get
there. And when he came in we had to go over the whole thing all over
again. And we had to say, Hi, how you doing? Good vacation? Did you
get my telegram? Yeah, I did. And he said something about my outfit, and
we were just very polite for a minute, and then he walked in the door like,
Tm going for a drink or something: And he said, 'Come here just a minute
, Dixie: So I got up and went in the door so we could get our kiss,
because we hadn't seen each other in so long - it had been two weeks! -
but we were so polite about it, because we were right there in front of his
mother and daddy. It was a sweet day, I can still visualize it, I kept thinking
, 'Please don't let him change: but, you know, after that things were
never the same."
They seemed the same for quite some time, though. Dixie rode with
him on his route in the Crown Electric truck. They continued to see each
other almost every night. They stopped by Dewey's radio show once or
twice and sat with Dewey while he screamed and shouted and carried on.
One night Elvis put in a plug for Crown Electric, and the switchboard was
so jammed with calls the next day that the Tiplers took Elvis off his route
and had him answer the phone. The Tiplers were almost as excited about
his success as Mr. and Mrs. Presley. They went out to see him the first
night he played the club, bringing friends and employees, and were only
disappointed that he was not allowed to sing more songs.
Some nights there would be rehearsals over at Scotty's, and Dixie
would sit with the wives, Bobbie and Evelyn, older married women in
their twenties (Dixie was still not quite sixteen), while they rehearsed.
Once they stopped by the Sun studio, but Dixie found Sam a little frightening
, not like Dewey, who put you right at your ease, even if he was a
little vulgar. Sam was kind of off-putting, though - the force of his gaze,
the way it locked in on Elvis, made it seem as ifhe didn't have much use
for, or interest in, Dixie, and as a result she was even quieter than normal
in his presence. On the Saturday night after she got home they played
again out at the Bon Air, but Dixie, of course, couldn't go because they
served alcoholic drinks, so she waited at home for it to be over. When he
finally came by to pick her up, he had forgotten his coat, and she rode out
to the club with him, but "it was like another world. The people recognized
him, and he had to go back onstage and sing again. It was like I was
sitting there, thinking, Tm not really in this, I'm watching it somewhere:
"
1 0 8 c-. " T H A T ' S A L L R I G H T "
The following week, ads for the July 30 Overton Park show started to
appear. One spelled his name "Ellis Presley," one left it out altogether, and
the day of the performance there was an ad with Slim Whitman's picture at
the top that announced "ELVIS PRESLEY, New Memphis Star Who Sings
'Blue Moon of Kentucky' and 'That's All Right, Mama,' " along with a
small Poplar Tunes ad urging patrons to 'buy all of Slim Whitman's Imperial
Records - Elvis Presley's Sun records" at the record store at 305 Poplar.
On Tuesday at lunchtime Marion Keisker took Elvis just down the street to
the Press-Scimitar Building at 495 Union. She had hoped to have her old college
friend Bob Johnson do the story, but Johnson advised her that they had
"a new kid who was handling a lot of that" - Edwin Howard, the editor's
son - and maybe it would be more politic to let him write it up. Marion
arrived with Elvis in tow, Howard recalled. 'TIl never forget.... He
look[ ed] like the wrath of God. Pimples all over his face. Ducktail hair. Had
a funny-looking thin bow tie on.... He was very hard to interview. About
all I could get out of him was yes and no."
The article was headed "In a Spin" and led off with:
Elvis Presley can be forgiven for going round and round in more ways
than one these days. A 19-year-old Humes High graduate, he has just
Signed a recording contract with Sun Record Co. of Memphis, and
already has a disk out that promises to be the biggest hit that Sun has
ever pressed.... "The odd thing about it," says Marion Keisker of the
Sun office, "is that both sides seem to be equally popular on popular,
folk, and race record programs. This boy has something that seems to
appeal to everybody. We've just gotten the sample records out to the
disk jockeys and distributors in other cities, but we got big orders yesterday
from Dallas and Atlanta."
True to Howard's recollection, there is not a single direct quote from the
subject of the article, and the photograph that accompanies it shows an
unsmiling three-quarter view with clip-on bow tie and hair to which grease
has been liberally applied in a vain attempt to make it behave - it is standing
up a little wildly in front, and two strands have escaped, pointing outward
like antennae. He is wearing a western-style shirt-jacket with
white-stitched, button-down breast pockets and wide lapels, he appears to
be wearing eye shadow, and all in all he looks like a combination of something
from outer space and the polite, well-mannered, sober, and sensiJ
U LY-S E P T E M B E R I 9 5 4 n.. I 0 9
tive boy that he really was. He looked, Dixie thought, very handsome,
and was. He looked, Elvis Presley thought, not quite right, but close to
the way he wanted to look.
FR I D A Y, J U L Y 3 0, was hot and sticky. Dixie and Elvis must have spoken
to each other at least half a dozen times during the day. Although
he never liked to talk about it, she knew how nervous he must be, and
driving up Poplar as they approached the park, she noticed that his fingers
drummed an even steadier tattoo than usual on the metal dashboard. Mr.
and Mrs. Presley were there - they came with a bunch of other relatives.
Some of the boys and girls Dixie knew from church, the ones you would
see at the roller rink, and some of their other friends were present, too but
mostly it was an undifferentiated mass who were there to see not
"Ellis Presley" but Slim Whitman, the handsome, mustachioed star, or
Billy Walker, the Tall Texan, who had just had his first big hit with
"Thank You for Calling." These were hillbilly singers, this was a hillbilly
crowd - Dixie was scared to death, not for herself but for how Elvis
would feel if they just sat there and went, 'Huh?' What if they made fun of
him, what if this was the end of his dream?
Sam Phillips was late getting to the show. "I had to park a long ways
away, and when I got there he was standing on the steps at the back of the
shell looking kind of pitiful - well, maybe pitifol is the wrong word, I
knew it was the way he was going to look: unsure. And he just grabbed me
and said, 'Man, I'm so glad to see you, Mr. Phillips. 1-1-1-1 - ' You know,
that was just the way Elvis did. '1-1-1-1 just didn't know what I was going to
do.' Well, you know, it's like when somebody's mother is real sick and
you tell them everything is going to be all right, and yet you know there's
the possibility that his mother might die. I said, 'Look, Elvis, we'll find out
whether they like you or not.' And then I said, 'They're gonna love you. '
Now I didn't know that, and if you want to call me a liar or a fake for saying
something that I didn't know to be the truth -but I believed that
once he started to sing and they saw him, I don't mean the stage act, once
they heard that voice and the beautiful simplicity of what those three
musicians were putting down.... You see, Elvis had confidence in me, he
saw that when I walked up I always had some kind of assured look, and
yet he knew I wasn't going to throw him to the lions either. So I gave him
my best clubhouse pitch, not too many curves, 'cause I knew even if he
1 1 0 '" " T H A T ' S A L L R I G H T "
struck out four times and left three people on base each time, after the
ball game was over that could be overcome, too."
When Elvis went onstage, Scotty said, his knees were knocking so
loud you could almost hear them. Bob Neal made the introduction, and
then the three musicians, none of whom had ever appeared in a setting
even remotely resembling this one, were on their own. The singer fiddled
with the mike, twisting it so hard his knuckles turned white, but when he
struck the opening chord of "That's All Right," Scotty and Bill fell in
loosely behind him, and he raised up on the balls of his feet, leaning forward
into the mike, his lips twisted involuntarily into a kind of sneer, as
his legs began to quiver. "I was scared stiff," he explained afterward. "It
was my first big appearance in front of an audience, and I came out and I
was doing [my first number], and everybody was hollering and I didn't
know what they were hollering at."
"We were all scared to death," said Scotty. "Here we come with two
little funky instruments and a whole park full of people, and Elvis, instead
of just standing flat-footed and tapping his foot, well, he was kind of jiggling.
That was just his way of tapping his foot. Plus I think with those old
loose britches that we wore - they weren't pegged, they had lots of material
and pleated fronts - you shook your leg, and it made it look like all
hell was going on under there. During the instrumental parts he would
back off from the mike and be playing and shaking, and the crowd would
just go wild, but he thought they were actually making fun of him."
He sang his second song, "Blue Moon of Kentucky," which pretty
much exhausted the group's repertoire at this point, and the crowd went
even wilder. Bill clowned and rode his bass, gave ever more confident
whoops in the background, and hit his instrument a double lick. "It was
really a wild sound, like a jungle drum or something," Elvis recalled with
some wonder. "I came offstage, and my manager told me that they was
hollering because I was wiggling my legs. I went back out for an encore,
and I did a little more, and the more I did, the wilder they went."
Sam Phillips and Bob Neal stood watching from the wings. This was
something beyond either of their wildest expectations. As Elvis sang
"Blue Moon of Kentucky" again, for his encore, he showed even greater
confidence and more untrammeled movement. "It was a real eyeopener,"
said Neal, who had had no reason to expect anything whatsoever
of this untried, unproven nineteen-year-old. "He just automatically
did things right." "They still wanted Slim," said Sam, "but they wanted
J U L Y-S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 4 n..> I I I
Elvis, too. When they got done cheering for Elvis, they were cheering for
Slim. And when Slim came out onstage - and this shows you what a
great gentleman Slim Whitman was - he said, 'You know, I can understand
your reaction, 'cause I was standing backstage and I was enjoying it
just as much as you.' How're you going to do better than that?"
Meanwhile, for Dixie there were sharply mixed emotions. She wasn't
shocked by his movements, she had seen him do similar things many
times just singing for their friends at Riverside Park, "it was his natural
way of performing." And it wasn't that different from what Chief did at
the All-Night Singings either - even the reaction and the size of the
crowd were comparable too. Even so, she said, "I don't think he was prepared
for what was about to happen. He knew this was what he wanted
to do and that it was breaking for him, but I don't think he [ever] thought
everybody would just go crazy. I wanted to tell [some of the girls who
were screaming], 'Shut up and leave him alone. What do you think you're
doing here?' And I felt like all of a sudden I was not a part of what he was
doing. He was doing something so totally him that I was not a part of it.
... And he loved it."
IN T H E W E E KS that followed the Overton Park show, Sam Phillips was
on the road almost constantly. Ever since starting up Sun Records
again the previous year, he had traveled between sixty-five thousand and
seventy-five thousand miles, visiting each of his forty-two distributors,
meeting jukebox operators, disc jockeys, record-store owners, buyers and
sellers. For all the pointedness with which Sam eschewed convention
(and conventions), there were very few people in the business that he did
not know and who did not in tum recognize and respect the unswerving
commitment that drove this slim, elegant, intense young man with the
preacher's faith and the piercing gaze. For each of his trips Sam loaded up
the trunk of his car with records and set off on a road that ended in a fitful
few hours of sleep, more often than not at the local YMCA, before he
moved on to meet the next early-morning jock. Meanwhile, Marion kept
things going at home, paying bills, fending off creditors, meeting orders,
ordering up labels, dealing with the pressing plant, and fulfilling all the
other responsibilities that being half of a cash-poor two-person operation
entailed. In the six and a half months before "That's All Right" came out,
Sun Records had released twelve records, none of them as substantial a
1 1 2 '" " T HA T ' S A L L R I G H T "
hit as Rufus Thomas' "Bear Cat," which had occasioned a bitter lawsuit
from Duke Records' Don Robey (he claimed that "Bear Cat" infringed his
copyright on Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog") and the eventual forfeiture
of a considerable amount of money. In the five months following
the release of Sun number 209, the company released only three additional
records, one of them (the only one to come out before November)
the follow-up disc by Elvis Presley. Clearly Sam Phillips' attention was
focused on his new artist, and just as clearly it was not simply because of
the economic opportunities that he foresaw. For Sam Phillips saw a revolution
on the way.
It was not an easy vision to fulfill. When he came around looking for
jocks to play Little Junior Parker or Rufus Thomas, trying to sell distributors
on their sales potential, the task was easy by comparison: he was dealing
with a defined market, and if he happened to believe in the undefined
potential of that market, the crossover potential, that is, more than his listener,
that was merely a matter of degree. Here, though, all the rules
were out the window. "I remember talking to T. Tommy Cutrer [the top
country j ock] at KCIJ in Shreveport, who's one of the greatest guys in the
world - and one thing I never did do is try to overpower somebody with
my convictions of what I had in my little black bag. 'If you can give me
some play on it, I'd appreciate it. If you can't, I understand.' T. Tommy
told me, 'Sam, they'll run me out of town.' " Fats Washington, on the
other hand, was a paraplegic black man with a rhythm and blues show
who had been Crippled in the war. "He played my r&b records, all of
them. But when I wanted him to play 'That's All Right: he played it for
me, but he said on the air, 'I just want to tell all my listeners I got Sam
Phillips in the studio with me here, and he thinks this is gonna be a hit
record, and I'm telling him that this man should not be played after the
sun comes up in the morning, it's so country.' I'll never forget that statement,
but he was honest about it.
"Paul Berlin was the hottest disc jockey in Houston at the time, and I
taught him how to run the board. When he was a little chap on Lowenstein's
Junior Theater on Saturdays on WREC, I put him on the air and
he'd come in after the show and want me to show him the control boards
and everything. Then he became the number-one disc jockey in Houston,
and he was playing Tennessee Ernie Ford and Patti Page, all the big pop
artists of the time, and he told me, 'Sam, your music is just so ragged, I
just can't handle it right now. Maybe later on.'
J U L Y- S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 4 I I 3
"I never forced myself in any door or left where they felt I didn't at
least intend to. I never said, 'Well, you wait and see,' 'cause, hell, I didn't
know myself. I worked with the counter people in the distributorships. I
talked to unbelievable numbers of jukebox operators and retail [merchants].
On Mondays you would usually see your jukebox operators and
give them a whole week to change their program - Wednesday was usually
the last day they could come in and get the newest stuff. Retail was
usually Wednesday and Thursday, Tuesday if they were out in the country.
I'd come in, say, to Atlanta or Dallas, and if there was something the
counter person was on the fence about, they would buy in very limited
quantity just so they wouldn't get stuck. The thing I would never do was
go in and not tell the distributor what reaction I had from other distributors
across the country. I told them the truth. Many times I believed so
much in what I had that I wanted to tell them things that really wasn't
true. But I knew I had to face them again, so I just told them what I felt and
a lot of times I felt real discouraged.
"One night I left Houston going into Dallas on a Sunday night, and I
[ran into] a dust storm sixty miles out of there. I'd already checked out of
the Sam Houston Hotel, and I'd had bad reports in Houston, they just
didn't understand 'That's All Right, Mama.' I turned around and went
back [to Houston] to keep from smothering to death. The next morning I
got up and drove on into Dallas, and when I got there - Alta Hayes was
the counter girl, and she looked at me and said, 'Sam, you look like hell.' I
said, 'Well, thank you, you look nice, too, Alta.' She was a good-looking
woman and a great person, and she had a great ear, too. She said, 'Well,
let's go up to the comer and have a cup of coffee.' We went up there, and
I really didn't want a damn thing, and she sat there and told me, 'Sam,
look, don't worry about this thing, you look worn out. This guy is going
to be a hit, I don't give a damn what they say.' And I said, 'Well, Alta, I
hope you're right.' "
It was a lonely path, and one that Sam trod without regard to personal
gain or popularity ("I could be a mean motherfucker. Now this may
sound like a contradiction, because I needed everybody's help, but I didn't
need myself kissing anyone's ass"). He was a man swept up by a belief, in
a sound and in an idea. And as discouraged as he might sometimes get, as
harsh as the reality of selling this new music might be, he never strayed
from his belief, he never allowed himself to be distracted from his main
goal. Which was to get them to listen.
1 1 4 n.,.
" T H A T ' S A L L R I G H T "
In Tupelo, Elvis' hometown, Ernest Bowen, who had worked with
Vernon Presley for L. P. McCarty and Sons and whose father had employed
Vernon briefly after the war, was now sales manager at WELO.
Bowen had met Sam Phillips while Sam was still working at WREC and
playing the big band music that Bowen loved, and he liked the man - but
he didn't like the new music one bit. As a result WELO was not playing
this new record by a hometown boy, despite countless requests from local
teenagers. "They were just worrying us to death. Sam called and said, 'I
understand you're getting requests for Elvis Presley's music.' I said,
'Yeah.' He said, 'You're not going to play it?' I told him it was a bunch of
crap." Rather than take offense, Sam patiently explained that he could understand
Ernest's feelings but that this was not a question of personal
taste: the world had changed, communications had changed, and while
Sam himself was still a country boy at heart, it was no longer the days of
the horse and buggy and the courthouse square, as great as those days had
been. " 'So you might as well start playing it,' he said. So we did, and from
there on," Bowen concluded, "the music began to change, and changed
rapidly after that. Younger people started listening to radio instead of putting
a nickel in the jukebox. I look back on it, and that was where it began
to tum."
TH E R E W A S N O Q U E S T I O N that the record was a hit in Memphis. As
one of the first national magazine articles announced nearly a year
later: "The current greeting among [Memphis] teenagers is still a rhythmical
line from the song: 'Ta dee da dee dee da.' " On August 7, 1954, Billboard,
which under the editorial direction of Paul Ackerman had long
championed the cause of Sun ("Paul Ackerman had a great dedication,"
said Sam Phillips, "to all the talented people who never had a chance"),
reviewed the new single in its "Spotlight" section under the heading "Talent."
"Presley is a potent new chanter," read the review, "who can sock
over a tune for either the country or the r&b markets.... A strong new
talent." Which was precisely the point Sam was trying to get across.
Meanwhile, there was practically no one in town who hadn't heard the
record and didn't have an opinion about it. Ronny Trout, who had been
Elvis' shop partner at Humes during Elvis' senior year, saw it on a jukebox
at the hamburger stand across from the Dairy Delight where he
worked and stared in disbelief "I thought, Surely, no, that's not, it
J U L Y -S E P T E M B E R 1 9 5 4 '" I I 5
couldn't be. But heck, with a name like that... S o I invested a nickel and
played the first one, 'That's All Right, Mama,' and I said, That's him!
Then I had to play the other."
Red West, the star of the Humes football team, who, along with
Ronny, still had another year of high school to go, heard Dewey play it on
the radio when he was putting in time at bivouac camp at the Memphis
Air Force Base. He was flabbergasted to hear someone that he had considered
a nonentity, really, on the radio - it was like going into a movie theater
and seeing an acquaintance on the screen. "It was bigger than life,"
he said. "That's the way it was to me. I was happy for him, but it was kind
of unbelievable."
Johnny Black was in Texas. "I was in Corpus Christi, and I picked up a
Houston station, and they were playing 'That's All Right, Mama.' " He
recognized the song and the singer right away, he heard Bill's slapping
bass, and he announced to his wife, " 'We're going back to Memphis,
'cause something is happening there, and I want to be a part of it.' "
In the aftermath of the Overton Park show, "That's All Right" was
probably the best-selling record in town. Every OJ in Memphis was on it
now, and it seemed like everybody was jumping on the bandwagon. Ronnie
Smith called up for Eddie Bond to see if Elvis might like to sing with
them now, but Elvis said he had been working hard with Scotty and Bill,
he couldn't just quit, though he appreciated the invitation. For Elvis and
Dixie it was an idyllic time, a momentary lull in the action when everyone
knew that it was all bound to explode but they went about their business
as if it wasn't. For Dixie, looking back, it was easy to say that this was the
point at which it all began to end, this was the point at which she lost him
and the world claimed him, but at the time she was just so proud of him;
all through that summer she rode around feeling that all eyes were on
her, because he was her boyfriend and she was going to be Mrs. Elvis
Presley.
They continued to go to Riverside Park, they continued to drink their
milk shakes in the little park near Dixie's house and go out to Leonard's
for hamburgers and go to the drive-in movies and sit on the front porch
and spoon. Elvis asked Charlie Hazelgrove if he would put the record on
the jukebox at the Blues Shop, and he brought the record out to the Rainbow
skating rink, too, where, the owner, Joe Pieraccini, said, Elvis listened
to it on the jukebox over and over again. Some afternoons they
would rehearse at Scotty's brothers' dry cleaning plant, and Dixie would
I I 6 ", " T H A T ' S A L L R I G H T "
sit there, her mind caught up in other things. The Songfellows, Elvis told
her, were looking for a new singer now that Cecil had replaced R.W. in
the Blackwood Brothers, but he didn't think he would join even ifhe was
asked, he thought he would just see where this new business might lead.
Dixie, who had never imagined any calling higher than quartet singer, just
nodded. Whatever he wanted to do - things were going along so nicely.
One Sunday evening a week or so after the Overton Park show, she
went over to KWEM, in West Memphis, with the band for a brief radio
appearance. Several nights they rehearsed in Scotty's living room, with
Scotty calling the rehearsal and Bobbie serving sandwiches but Elvis indicating
what he wanted to sing. Sometimes he would know no more
than two or three lines from a song, and everyone would be ransacking
their memory for the lyrics. Sometimes, if it was a song that she and Elvis
had listened to at Charlie's, Dixie might help supply the lyrics herself, or
Дата добавления: 2015-09-29; просмотров: 25 | Нарушение авторских прав
| <== предыдущая лекция | | | следующая лекция ==> |