Memphis State for a blood drive, and he had his picture taken with Mayor
Tobey. "He would look in the papers," said Guy Lansky, "he was worried
about what they said about him." Ronnie Smith recalled running into
Elvis at WHHM one day, "and he said, 'Come on, Ron, I'll show you my
new Cadillac. ' We got in the elevator and came back down and went
around the parking lot and kept walking until we was in front of the telephone
company. That was where his old Lincoln was parked!" Sometimes
old friends passed him on the street - he didn't know if they were
laughing at him, or if it was because they disapproved, or if they thought
he felt somehow that he was above them now.
In Shreveport it was different. It was as if he were a different person;
he could create a whole new image for himself and never have anyone
bring up the old one. In Shreveport the girls were falling all over themselves
to get to him. When he and Scotty and Bill returned to Shreveport
O C T O B E R-D E C E M B E R 1 9 5 4 '" 1 4 9
the week after Gladys and Vernon came down, they holed up at the AI-Ida
Motel in Bossier City, across the river, and the girls started showing up
almost as soon as they arrived, as if they sensed his presence. For a kid
who had spent scarcely a night away from home in his nineteen years, it
was like being away at summer camp: he had always loved flirting with
the girls, he loved playing with them and teasing them, but now there
was no one around to see that it didn't go too far. And they didn't seem
too concerned about it either. In between shows at the auditorium he
would peek out from behind the curtain, then, when he spotted someone
that he liked, swagger over to the concession stand, place his arm over her
shoulder, and drape his other arm around someone else, acting almost
like he was drunk, even though everyone knew he didn't drink.
"He was a typical teenager," said Scotty. "Kind of wild, but more like
in a mischievous kind of way. He loved pranks and practical jokes. We
had to practically beat him with a stick to get him out of bed. His parents
were very protective. His mama would comer me and say, 'Take care of
my boy. Make sure he eats. Make sure he -' You know, whatever. Typical
mother stuff. But it always came down to me. He didn't seem to mind;
there was nothing phony about it, he truly loved his mother. He was just
a typical coddled son, that's about all you can say, very shy - he was
more comfortable just sitting there with a guitar than trying to talk to
you. Bill and I would usually be the ones to do most of the talking, and yet
he could be very extroverted, too. You know, I'd been all over and he'd
never been outside the city limits. He watched and he learned, I never
said anything to him because we communicated pretty much without
talking anyway - but most of what he didn't know, it was just that nobody
had ever told him. When he got to Shreveport, he was just running
around, I think, sowing his wild oats."
With Merle Kilgore he would hang out at Murrell's Cafe, on Market
Street, opposite the Hayride offices. They would sit for hours sometimes,
eating hamburgers and talking about music and eyeing the girls. "He reminded
me of Hank Williams," said Merle, who as a fourteen-year-old
had met Williams and whose admiration for his idol continued to know
no bounds. "Something in his eyes. He'd ask you a question, and his eyes
would be asking you another question. It was that look. He'd wait for the
answer, but his eyes would be asking the question. I'd only seen that in
Hank and Elvis." Sometimes they would go down to the bus station to
play pinball with Tibby Edwards or stop by Stan's Record Shop to thumb
I S O '" GOOD ROCKIN' TONIGHT
through the rhythm and blues racks. You ate when you wanted, you slept
when you wanted, the girls came running after you - it was a teenager's
dream. Every night he called home and spoke to his mother; frequently
he called Dixie to express his undying love. But then he was free to do
whatever he wanted.
They worked one night at the Lake Cliff Club, where Hoot and Curley
played ordinarily. Elvis was attracted to Hoot's pretty daughter, Mary
Alice, but he was kind of nervous about asking Hoot, the steel player on
Slim Whitman's "Indian Love Call," for permission to take her out. The
gig at the Lake Cliff turned into something of a joke. Hoot and Curley had
been playing there for six years, and they had their following, but unfortunately
their following hadn't been alerted to the fact that they wouldn't
be playing at the Lake Cliff that night, and if they didn't throw things,
they did practically everything but. By the end of the first set the club had
just about emptied out, and it was, in Scotty's assessment, "a complete
bust."
On the basis of Tillman Franks' enthusiasm, and his promise of work,
they settled in at the Al-Ida for what was intended to be a two-week period
in the middle of November, only to discover that Tillman, who had
suddenly become persona non grata at the Hayride, couldn't deliver. Just
how panicked they must have felt can be deduced from Scotty's vivid
memories of being "marooned" in Shreveport, stranded without even the
money to pay their hotel bill or buy enough gas to get back to Memphis.
In fact they were not stranded for long, and they may simply have spent
all their money in expectation of making more. In any case, within days
Pappy Covington had work for them in Gladewater, Texas, some sixty
miles west of Shreveport.
Pappy called Tom Perryman, a young go-getter who had made his
mark in Gladewater at radio station KSIJ, where he had been working
since 1949. In addition to deejaying, he had served as engineer, newsman,
sports announcer, sales manager, program director, and general manager
at various times and also started a local talent show, which he broadcast
first from the studio, then, as it grew, from the local community center
and the three-hundred-seat movie theater in town. Eventually he put the
show on the road, where it played schoolhouses and high school gymnasiums
in towns throughout the outlying area. Perryman also booked Hayride
shows and occasionally put recording artists with his traveling talent
O C T O B E R-D E C E M B E R 1 9 5 4 '" 1 5 1
show as a kind of extra draw, which was how he met Jim Reeves, then a
OJ in Henderson, Texas, whom he later came to manage and partner in
various enterprises. He began to book some of these single artists into
clubs and honky-tonks like the Reo Palm Isle in Longview and in general
was one of the busiest promoters in Northeast Texas, a territory that appeared
to be as music-mad as Memphis or any other region in the country.
He had been playing "Blue Moon of Kentucky" since it first came out,
"because of the unique arrangement. That sound was just something you
never heard." So he was not completely at a loss when Pappy Covington,
with whom he had already booked quite a number of shows, called on a
Monday morning and wondered "if! had a place where I could put an act
right quick.
"He said, 'There are some boys down here that are broke, they don't
have the money to get back to Memphis.' Well, I had a friend that had a
honky-tonk right out on the Tyler Highway. So I said, 'Yeah, I guess so:
and I called this buddy of mine, and he said, 'Yeah, I'm not doing anything,
come on out. Who are they?' I said it was this new act out ofMemphis
called Elvis Presley. So sure enough, I played that record a lot the
next two or three days and come Friday night, here they come. Just Elvis
and Scotty and Bill in a Chevrolet with that big old bass on top of the car.
"The way it would work, I would book the show, the club owner
would take the bar, and I would take the money off the door. My wife,
Billie, would usually work the door. Then we would pay the expenses of
the gig, if you had to pay a sponsor or what little advertising there might
be. Most of the advertising was done on my [radio] show, and we'd do a
live show from the studio, too, promoting that night's performance. Then
I would take fifteen percent of the gross, and what was left would go to
the act. I never will forget: that first night we took in a total of ninety dollars.
That was all we had. Of course I didn't take any of it. I knew those
boys needed the money, so I gave them all of it.
"You know, he was really a natural. When Elvis was performing, everyone
had the same basic reaction. It was almost spontaneous. It reminded
me of the early days, of where I was raised in East Texas and
going to these 'Holy Roller' Brush Arbor meetings: seeing these people
get religion. I said, 'Man, that's something.' You'd see it in the later years
with the big sound systems and the lights, but Elvis could do it if there
wasn't but ten people [in the room]. He never realized what he had till
1 5 2 c,." GOOD ROCKIN' TONIGHT
later years. H e said, 'Man, this sure i s a good crowd in this part of the
country. Are they always that way?' I said, 'No, man. They never seen
anything like you: Nobody had.
"It won't happen again in this generation or the next, I don't believe.
He just came along at the right time with the right thing. Because it was
after the war. People my age grew up with the big band music in the forties.
But those kids, the generation that were children during the war,
they had no music to identify with, they were looking for something they
could identify with, and this new sound was a combination of it all."
On Thursday, November 25, Elvis was booked into Houston for the
first time, at the Houston Hoedown, where he was listed way down on
the bill but made a considerable impression on the MC for the popular
live broadcast, KNUZ's Biff Collie, who also happened to have a parmership
in the club. Collie, a native of San Antonio and a ten-year broadcast
veteran at the age of twenty-eight, was a highly influential figure in radio
and in fact the person who had originally gotten T. Tommy Cutrer his job
in Shreveport. It was through T. Tommy and Tillman Franks, with whom
Biff also went way back, that Biff first heard of Elvis Presley. In fact, he
had stopped off in Memphis with Tillman just the week before to see him
perform, after first picking up Tillman in Shreveport on the way to the
third annual Country Music Disc Jockey convention in Nashville, which
Biff had had a considerable hand in organizing. Tillman's act, Jimmy and
Johnny, was booked into the Eagle's Nest on Wednesday night with this
new Memphis "phenom" that Biffhad been hearing so much about, so he
and Tillman stopped by the club.
Biff was not that impressed. The boy was "different" enough but not
really "sensational"; if anything, Jimmy and Johnny took the show. At the
same time he was intrigued by a combination of elements that he saw
coming together in one package for the first time - the boy seemed like
"a Mississippi gospel singer singing black music, that's about as real as I
could figure." On the basis of that observation, not to mention Tillman's
unflagging enthusiasm and the recommendation of Bob Neal, whom he
saw out at the club that night and with whom he spent time at the convention,
he was happy to book him on the Hoedown for S150, and he
started playing Elvis Presley records as soon as he got back to Houston.
The reaction to Elvis' Hoedown appearance was good, and he was
held over "by popular demand" for two additional nights, but to Biff the
nature of his act was about the same as what he had observed in MemOCTOBER-
DECEMBER 1 9 5 4 '" 1 5 3
phis. The repertoire was extremely limited, and the boy was obviously
just learning the ropes, though by now Biff Collie was beginning to see
the light, even if he wasn't sure exactly why. "I said, 'Don't you do any
slow songs?' He said, 'I don't... I don't... I like to do these things because
they make me feel good, you know.' I said, 'Yeah, they like this stuff
that you are doing pretty good, it seems like, but this rhythm and blues
stuff is not going to stay forever. You really need to sing some slow
songs.' His reaction was, 'I don't like... I don't... I just like to sing...
You know, they make me feel good.'
"That night after we were through we went across the street to
Stuart's Drive Inn restaurant, and we sat down at a booth and ordered
something, and I saw Sonny Stuart come through. His dad was the boss,
and he was learning the business at the time. And I winked at him and
said, 'Just for fun, get the girl upstairs on the PA to page Elvis Presley.' He
said, 'How do you spell that?' And they did it three or four times over a
period of fifteen minutes, and, obviously, nothing happened. Nothing at
all. And I remember telling Elvis that night, 'One of these days you'll have
to have somebody to keep you from getting run over.' And that was -
again, it was not because of what he had done there. I just felt like something
was going to happen."
The next day Elvis sent a telegram home from Houston.
"HI BAB
I E s, " it read. "HERE'S THE MONEY TO PAY THE BILLS. DON'T TELL
NO ONE HOW MUCH I SENT I WILL SEND MORE NEXT WEEK. THERE
IS A CARD IN THE MAIL. LOVE ELVIS.
M
EANWHILE, Bob Neal was looking on his new project with increasing
enthusiasm; the idea of becoming Elvis Presley's fullfledged
manager was beginning to appeal to him more and more. The
few dates that they had done together only confirmed his view of the
boy's potential. So did the reports that kept coming in from Louisiana and
East Texas. And while they had not yet signed any official papers, there
was no question in his mind that this was an experiment that could fail
only if he chose to walk away from it. Here at last was an opportunity to
get in on the ground floor of something instead of just signing on to another
Nashville package promotion; it could be a chance of going all the
way to the top.
Because that was where Bob Neal quickly judged this kid was heading.
1 5 4 n.,. GOOD ROCKIN' TONIGHT
Not much older than Bob's oldest boy, Sonny, and, seemingly, without
the ability to articulate what it was he was really looking for, the kid
seemed to possess as unerring an instinct for how to connect with an audience
- as well as the fierce drive and determination to accomplish it - as
Neal had seen in his dozen years in radio and four or five years of serious
promotion. In the parts of Mississippi and Arkansas where the Hayride
signal came in strongest, he seemed to practically explode, coming out
onstage like a sprinter out of the starting blocks, with an energy and a
crackling enthusiasm that could barely be contained. In places where he
was less well known, on the other hand, "they didn't know exactly how
to take him, they just didn't know what to do. Sometimes they were a
very quiet audience. A lot of them would come out to the shows because
they had been followers of my radio show, and it was a little frustrating to
Elvis sometimes. They would gather around to ask me about my family
and my kids and so forth, and they would more or less ignore Elvis. [But]
the more they sat on their hands, the harder he worked to break them up.
His show developed in that sometimes if he was onstage and just through
some accidental movement there would be a big scream or reaction, he
would automatically remember. On the other hand, if he devised something
and got a dead reaction, he would never worry about it, he would
drop it and go on to something else. It was just as automatic as breathing
to him."
Nearly as important as this natural gift, though, were the two men
who made up the remaining two thirds of the trio. They may not have
been the best musicians in the world, but Elvis felt perfectly at ease with
them, and in those rare instances when his own instincts failed, Bill's always
took over. These were country audiences they were playing for, and
Bill's rough-hewn humor and memory for old Opry routines, in addition
to a thoroughly ingratiating personality, always stood him in good stead.
Sometimes Bill would come out of the audience dressed like a,hobo and
yelling, "Wait a minute, I want to play with y' all. I can play just as good as
you can!" Other times he might brandish an oversize pair of bloomers
that Bobbie and Evelyn had bought for the act or black out his front teeth
or tell one of the old jokes about Rotterdam ("Rotterdam socks off!" was
the punch line), and the audience always went crazy when he rode that
bass, egging Elvis on with both arms uplifted and the bass between his
legs like a Brahma bull. He could save Elvis, too, if the boy got too far out
on a limb or misjudged the audience for its tolerance of his novelty, vulO
C T O B ER-D E C E M B E R 1 9 5 4 "" 1 5 5
garity, o r simply his bad jokes. "On some o f the early shows," said Scotty,
whose unassailable calm and ability to deal with any crisis that came up
were just as integral a part of the whole experience, "if it hadn't been for
Bill, we would have fallen flat on our face. Because Elvis was such an oddity,
if you will, when people first saw him, they were practically in shock.
But Bill's antics loosened them up."
Admission, generally, was $1 for adults, 50 cents for children, with IO
percent retained for expenses and 15 percent taken off the top, after the
local sponsor or Kiwanis Club had been paid. Sometimes there might be
as much as $300 to divide, with $45 going to Bob and the rest split 50-25-25
between Elvis, Scotty, and Bill. Just as often there was less, but one or two
commissions of $25 to $45 a week were a nice supplement to a comfortable
OJ's salary, and if you added up all the litde side benefits that a popular
radio personality was heir to, it didn't make for a bad living.
There were any number of other signs that business was likely to pick
up in the near future. Billboard magazine noted that the records were still
ping-ponging around on the charts (the week of November 17, "Blue
Moon of Kentucky" was number five in Memphis and "Good Rockin' Tonight"
number eight), while in a OJ poll Elvis Presley was named eighth
Most Promising C&W Artist behind Tommy Collins, Justin Tubb, Jimmy
and Johnny, the Browns, and Jimmy Newman, among others. Meanwhile
Bob Neal announced his own third annual listeners' poll, which had Elvis
in tenth position behind such country stalwarts as Webb Pierce, Faron
Young, Ray Price, Hank Snow, and Kitty Wells. The December II issue of
Billboard reported in its "Folk Talent and Tunes" column that "the hottest
piece of merchandise on the... Louisiana Hayride at the moment is
Elvis Presley, the youngster with the hillbilly blues beat," while Marty
Robbins recorded a creditable country version of "That's All Right" for
Columbia on December 7.
What struck Neal most of all, though, was the boy's ambition, something
he might have missed altogether ifit hadn't been for his wife. Sometimes
coming back from the shows, on the drive home to Memphis, Elvis
would ride with Bob and Helen, so that Bob, who had his 5:00 A. M. show
coming up practically as soon as they got into town, could catch some
sleep. Elvis would talk to Helen then in a way that he didn't seem able to
talk to Bob, or even to Scotty and Bill - he would reveal himself in fragments
that Neal would catch in moments between wakefulness and sleep
or as Helen would describe it to him afterward. "He would talk about his
1 5 6 '" GOOD ROCKIN' TONIGHT
aspirations and plans," Neal told Elvis biographer Jerry Hopkins. "Helen
said he talked not in terms of being a moderate success; his ambition was
to be big in movies and so forth. He'd ask her, did she think he could make
it, and her response - well, she was a believer, too - she felt that he could
go as far as he wanted to. From the very first he had great ambitions to be
nothing in the ordinary, but just to go all the way with it."
D
IXIE HOPED, with Christmas coming, that Elvis would be able to
spend a little more time at home. This would be their first Christmas
together, and she really wanted to make it special. When he got back from
Texas, he had brought her something in anticipation of Christmas, a pair of
shorts and a sleeveless blouse in pale pink. He wanted her to try it on right
away, and she was excited, too, because she loved the outfit, but she loved
his enthusiasm about it even more. They had never been much for gift giving
- they just didn't have the money. But she knew that Christmas this
year was going to be different.
Elvis had already given himself a present some months before, a 1942
Martin guitar that he had bought for $175 from the O. K. Houck Company
on Union. He was a little self-conscious about it; it seemed kind of extravagant
to pay so much money, but this was the way he now made his living,
he told himself, and he never hesitated, except when the man threw his old
guitar in the trash. "The man gave me eight dollars on the trade-in," he told
anyone who would listen afterward, still a little openmouthed with disbelief.
"Shucks, it still played good." He had his first name spelled out in black
metallic letters across the blond wood of the D-18, so that it came out
smartly on a diagonal below the fret board, and the guitar looked a lot
more professional than his old one, but, Elvis joked, he frailed away at it
just the same.
They went by Humes for the Christmas show, and all the teachers and
kids flocked around, but some of them acted stuck-up, like they thought
he was going to act stuck-up first, which didn't seem right at all. They
went by Scotty's to rehearse for a session that they managed to get in
not long before Christmas. First they did an old blues number that had
become a western swing standard in different versions by Bob Wills and his
brothers, Billy Jack and Johnnie Lee, over the years. The new version
opened up in a beautiful, slow, lilting blues tempo that almost seemed to
tease the listener, until Elvis announced, with just a trace of amusement
O C T O B ER-D E C E M B E R 1 9 5 4 no.,. 1 5 7
in his voice, "Hold it, fellas, that don't move me. Let's get real, real gone
for a change." And plunged into what became known as "Milkcow Blues
Boogie." The other side was a new song by a Covington, Tennessee, theater
manager named Jack Sallee, whom Sam had met when he came into
the Memphis Recording Service to make some promos for his Fridaynight
hillbilly jamboree. Sam said he was looking for original material for
his new artist, and Sallee went home and wrote a song. "You're a Heartbreaker"
was the first of Elvis' songs on which Sam Phillips owned the
publishing, and it was also the closest that they had come to date to an
explicitly country number.
They played the Hayride on the eighteenth, then Bobbie waited for
Scotty to come home with her Chevrolet. "Scotty was supposed to be
home in time for me to go Christmas shopping. They were using the car,
and I was riding the bus. They were supposed to come home Thursday
night after a show (Christmas was on a Saturday). I said, 'Well, I'll just
wait until you get here and go finish my Christmas shopping.' When they
hadn't gotten home by the middle of the afternoon on Friday, I decided
that they had stayed over, but I still didn't go out. I said, 'I'm not going to
go riding the bus. Scotty just won't get anything for Christmas.' They
came in about five-thirty, and I said, 'Why didn't you come home last
night?' And they said, 'Elvis wanted to stay in Shreveport and do his
Christmas shopping this morning.' I said, 'Okay, Elvis gets what Elvis
wants, and you don't get a Christmas present!' But Scotty wasn't too
much on that anyway."
Elvis and Dixie spent all day Christmas together, first at Dixie's house,
then at the Presleys'. Elvis gave her a suit that he must have bought in
Shreveport - she loved it, everything he got her was something she
liked, but it wasn't like she thought it was going to be, somehow. Here he
had just breezed into town the night before, and now he told her he was
going to have to be off again before she even knew it. He was scheduled
to play in Houston for BiffCollie at the Cook's Hoedown Yuletide Jamboree
on the twenty-eighth, and then at a special New Year's Night broadcast
from Eagle's Hall, which Biffhad also set up.
She waved good-bye as they drove off and then went over to the Presleys',
where she and Gladys alternately shared their pride in the course his
life had taken and consoled each other over what they both had lost.
L O U I S I A N A H A Y R I D E. (L A N G S T O N M C E A C H E R N)
FOR BI D DEN F RUIT
E LVIS SIGNED WITH B O B NEAL formally at the start of the year.
The official picture, which ran in the trades and in the March
issue of Country & Western Jamboree, shows him sitting at a desk
with a fireplace behind him, pen poised, grin crooked, hair perfectly
coiffed. Sam Phillips and Bob Neal stand beside him on either side.
Sam has his hand companionably on Elvis' right shoulder, Bob is wearing a
broad smile and an elaborately bowed western tie, while all three stare
straight into the camera. Because he was still technically a minor, Mr. and
Mrs. Vernon Presley signed the contract as parents and legal guardians,
with every expectation that this would mark a dramatic upturn in their
son's fortunes.
It did, almost from the start. Bob had bookings that would keep Elvis
on the road for much of January, with a hometown debut at Ellis Auditorium
scheduled for February 6, 1955. He was also in the process of making a
solid connection with Colonel Tom Parker, who through his new management
and booking-agency partnership with Hank Snow was in a position
to put Elvis in front of a greatly expanded audience. Although the Colonel
at first appeared somewhat reluctant to get involved, he was now talking
about trying Elvis out on a Hank Snow package tour that started in New
Mexico in mid February. For the present Elvis was booked into West Texas
the week of January 2 on a Hayride package; then, after returning to
Shreveport, he played nearby New Boston, Texas, and on the twelfth he
was scheduled to play Clarksdale, Mississippi, with the brother-sister duo
of Jim Ed and Maxine Brown and "Tater" Bob Neal as MC, going to
Helena, Arkansas, the next night with the same bill. The following week
there was a solid block of bookings in the area around Corinth, Mississippi,
with a side excursion to Sikeston, Missouri, then a return to the Gladewater
area for a five-day tour the week after that.
He didn't always take the show. Jim Ed and Maxine Brow.n were a
highly polished act. They had had a number-eight national hit the previ-
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