been just the thing, Sam was convinced, but in the short time he had been
working with Elvis he had taken the boy about as far as he could go on his
1 7 0 '" F O R B I D D E N F R U I T
own - he had brought Elvis to his audience, booked him all through Mississippi
and Arkansas, and tied in with other local promoters like Tom Perryman,
Biff Collie, and Jim LeFan, so that Elvis Presley was now an
authentic regional sensation. The new record had been well reviewed just
the previous week in Billboard ("Presley continues to impress with each release
as one of the slickest talents to come up in the country field in a long,
long time"), records were selling like crazy in Memphis, New Orleans, Dallas,
Little Rock, Houston, and all over West Texas, and after only three
months Elvis Presley was becoming an attraction the likes of which the
Louisiana Hayride had never seen. But he needed a national stage.
Elvis excused himself to go back to the auditorium with Scotty, and
the five men sat around for a little while longer. They talked about details
of the tour: money and bookings, the towns and auditoriums (some of
them already familiar) that Elvis would be playing during this brief tenday
tour. It was just a start, but if it worked... Neal dreamt about television
and movies. He didn't say anything, but they were saving out money
from their appearances, building up a little fund for a trip to New York to
audition for Arthur Godfrey - he hadn't even mentioned it to Sam. They
were working almost every night now, he told the Colonel, busting out
everywhere they played, creating some kind of sensation or another, just
like Colonel Parker had heard about in New Boston. The Colonel
grunted. As far as the Colonel was concerned, if this music was going to
be made popular it might as well be made popular by Tommy Sands, a
young protege of his in Shreveport - and that was just what he thought
he would write to Steve Sholes after his encounter with Phillips today.
Wait'll you see the evening show, Bob Neal persisted. Simply on the basis
of his own experience, there was little doubt in Neal's mind that Tom
Parker was the best in the business. In his heart of hearts he envisioned a
kind of partnership of interests. He couldn't wait to begin. Once this tour
was over, Neal knew there would be more - more tours, more appearances,
with or without the Colonel. He couldn't wait to break out of the
mid-South territory.
TH E T O U R - W I T H HA N K SN O W H E A D L I N I N G, the Carter Sisters
and Mother Maybelle, and celebrated comedian Whitey Ford (better
known as the Duke of Paducah) - opened in Roswell, New Mexico, eight
days later. Elvis was booked into Lubbock, Texas, the night before, where
J A N U ARY-MAY 1 9 5 5 1 7 1
he played the Fair Park auditorium for the second time in little more than
a month. Also on the bill was Jimmie Rodgers Snow, Hank's son, who
was scheduled to join the tour the next night as well. Just a few months
younger than Elvis, Snow was bowled over by his first exposure to this
kid in "a chartreuse jacket and black pants with a white stripe down the
side, and the kids were just going wild. r d never seen anyone quite like
him - even as a kid he had that something about him, he just had it. 1 had
never heard of Elvis Presley when 1 went out there, 1 had no idea who he
was, the Colonel just called me in - him and Tom Diskin - and said, 'I
got you booked with this guy, Elvis Presley, out in Lubbock, Texas.' But
we talked that night, we ran around that night, as a matter of fact Buddy
Holly was hanging around the show [actually Holly opened the show with
his friend Bob Montgomery]. And we just became friends immediately."
They joined up with the others in Roswell and two nights later played
Odessa, where Elvis was already something of a local legend from his one
previous area appearance, in early January. Typical was the enthusiasm of
a nineteen-year-old Odessa musician named Roy Orbison, who had had
Elvis on his local TV show the first time he had come to town after seeing
him on Dallas' Big "D" Jamboree. Orbison later said of that first encounter:
"His energy was incredible, his instinct was just amazing.... Actually
it affected me exactly the same way as when 1 first saw that David Lynch
film [Blue Velvet]. 1 just didn't know what to make of it. There was just no
reference point in the culture to compare it. "
Hank Snow might well have agreed, though h e would have been
looking at the subject from a slightly different point of view. Snow, a
proud, aloof Canadian of diminutive stature and iron will, kept his distance
from the "young punk," with little evident recollection of the fact
that he had introduced him on the Opry just four months earlier and little
apparent affinity for the figure he was cutting. Elvis for his part made it
clear to Jimmy that he idolized his dad - he knew every one of Hank
Snow's songs and persisted in singing snatches of even the most obscure
of them ("Brand on My Heart," "Just a Faded Petal from a Beautiful Bouquet,"
'Tm Gonna Bid My Blues Goodbye"), as if to prove that somehow
he belonged.
To Jimmie Rodgers Snow, named for the "Father of Country Music"
and with a firsthand view of the cost of success - from sudden uprootings
in the middle of the school year to broken promises, bitter disappointment,
and the sound of his father's typewriter pecking away as he
1 7 2 '" F O R B I D D E N F R U I T
personally answered every last item o f fan correspondence -i t was almost
as if a vision had entered his world, a vision of peculiar purity and
innocence that seemed free of all the frustrating struggle and harsh ugliness
of the performer's reality. "He didn't drink, he'd carry a cigarette
around in his mouth, one of those filter types, never light it because he
didn't smoke, but he'd play with it. I remember how cool he was in my
mind. I wanted to sing like him. I wanted to dress like him and do things
that I never cared about till I met him. He was the change that was coming
to America. With Jimmy Dean and all that. I don't think anybody saw
it. Dad had no idea what Elvis Presley would become. Colonel probably
saw it more than anybody, but I don't think he saw Elvis Presley for more
than an entertainer at that time. I used to ride in the car with him and
Scotty and Bill- oh, he was the worst guy in the world to ride with,
, cause he was talking to you the whole time, speeding up and his feet
moving all the time, he'd work the stations on the radio dial like crazy,
listen to different things, country, spirituals, he loved gospel music. I was
just fascinated with him. Watching him comb his hair of a morning using
three different hair oils, butch wax for the front like you'd use for a crew
cut, one kind of hair oil for the top, another for the back. I asked him why
he used that butch wax, and he said that was so when he performed his
hair would fall down a certain way. He thought that was cool. I also remember
that when he would wear a pair of socks, rather than get them
washed he'd roll them up and throw them in the suitcase, and if you
opened it up it would knock you down. He'd have that thing full of dirty
stuff, and a lot of times he would just throw it away and you'd wonder
how this dean-cut-Iooking kid could be so disorganized, but he always
took care of his hair. He would take his socks off sometimes and you
could be on the bed next to him, and he'd smell up the whole room, but
the women could care less. He was Elvis. "
That was the way the crowd reacted, too. Almost immediately the
Hank Snow show had a problem. "Dad was in his heyday, he was drawing
the crowds, and in many of the places that we performed at the beginning
they didn't know Elvis, but it didn't matter if they knew him or
not - nobody followed Elvis." It was the oddest thing. This nice, polite,
well-mannered boy became transformed onstage in a manner that
seemed to contradict everything that you might discern about his private
personality. "He was this punk kid," Roy Orbison recalled from his original
vantage point in the audience. "Just a real raw cat singing like a bird.
J A N U ARY-MAY 1 9 55 '" 1 73
... First thing, he came out and spat on the stage. In fact he spat out a
piece of gum.... Plus he told some real bad, crude jokes - you know,
this dumb off-color humor - which weren't funny. And his diction was
real coarse, like a truck driver's.... I can't overemphasize how shocking
he looked and seemed to me that night."
His energy was fierce; his sense of competitive fire seemed to overwhelm
the shy, deferential kid within; every minute he was onstage was
like an incendiary explosion. "There never was a country act that could
follow him," said Bob Neal. "With this type of show he would have a big
crowd, and then when he appeared, he just tore them up completely."
The trouble was, according to Neal, his competitive spirit got the best of
him. He didn't want anyone to dislike him, he especially didn't want any
of the other performers to think that he had the big head, " but he was up
against the tops and he always tried to outdo them."
You have only to listen to the few live recordings from that period
that have survived. The repertoire is distinctly limited, and Scotty occasionally
gets lost in his solos, but Elvis and the boys just tear into each
song, whether it's "That's All Right" or "Tweedle Dee" or Ray Charles'
brand-new hit, "I Got a Woman." The intensity that you get in each performance
bears no relation even to the classic recordings on Sun, and
while it may not surpass them, in nearly every case it leaves them sounding
dry. If Hank Snow felt angry and humiliated in front of his own audience,
though, he knew a commercial trend when he spotted one. Jimmie
Rodgers Snow was entranced. Before he left the tour in Bastrop, Louisiana,
he invited Elvis to come motorcycle riding with him in Nashville
sometime soon. Even the Colonel, who still professed profound disinterest,
showed a different side to Elvis than Jimmy had ever seen him
show before. "He wouldn't go out of his way for nobody. He was always
jumping on my case about being on time, carrying a little bit more, giving
me this advice, that advice. " He was "a hard-nosed man," said Jimmy,
much like his own father, and yet even Parker seemed to have fallen
under the spell of this irrepressible youth, he seemed as taken as everyone
else by the unfeigned enthusiasm, the undisguised eagerness for experience
- only the boyfriends of some of his more uninhibited female fans
seemed to take exception. Jimmy had no idea where it was going to end,
he was more and more confused about the muddle that his own life was
falling into under the growing influence of alcohol and pills, but he knew
that Elvis Presley had a future in the business.
1 7 4 F O R B I D D E N F R U I T
Elvis himself was increasingly coming to believe it, although he continued
to discount the idea to family and friends. Every night he called
Dixie as well as his mother from each stop on the tour. He told them how
it had gone, he told them with almost wide-eyed wonder how the audience
had reacted, he told them who he had met and what they had said.
"He was always excited about what happened," said Dixie. "He'd say,
'Guess who I saw.' Or: 'Hank Snow was there.' " It was almost as if he
were suspended between two worlds. He studied each performer - he
watched carefully from backstage with much the same appreciation as the
audience, but with a keen sense of what they were doing, what really
knocked the fans out, and how each performer achieved it. Between
shows he would seek out opportunities to sing with other members of the
troupe, and they were all captivated, much as the audience was, by the
young man's ingenuous charm.
He could read every audience; it was, evidently, an innate skill. "I see
people all different ages and things," he said years later, trying to explain
it. "If I do something good, they let me know it. If I don't, they let me
know that, too. It's a give-and-take proposition in that they give me back
the inspiration. I work absolutely to them.... They bring it out of me: the
inspiration. The ham." Even if they didn't respond at first he could always
get to them. "He would study a crowd," said Tillman Franks of the Hayride
tours. "He would look at them, see that he'd gotten through to them,
then give them a little bit more. He had electricity between him and that
audience, same as Hank Williams did. Hank just give everything he
had - he didn't worry about it, he just did it. But Elvis masterminded the
situation. He was a genius at it."
"He knew, of course, that his main thrust was to the women," said
Jimmie Rodgers Snow. "I saw grandmas dancing in the aisles. I saw a
mother and daughter actually bidding for his attention and jealous of each
other. It was uncanny: they would just get totally captivated by this guy."
"He was always unhappy about the reaction from the boys," said Bob
Neal, "because he very much wanted to be one of the boys and a favorite
of theirs, but the boys reacted very violently in many areas because, I suppose,
of the way the girls acted. It hurt him. You know, we'd talk about it
sometimes for hours at a time, driving; he really couldn't understand it.
But there was just no way, apparently, that a lot of these young teenaged
fellows would change their minds. They just resented him because of the
way the girls reacted to him."
J A N U ARY-MAY 1 9 5 5 n.. 1 75
But if that was a cloud on the horizon, it was only the casing for the
silver lining. There was no aspect of Elvis' new life with which he was not
entranced. When the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle joined the tour,
he and Scotty both were a little taken with Anita, the youngest sister, and
they considered it a great triumph when they could get her to ride with
them, away from the watchful eye of Mother Maybelle. On one of the last
dates of the tour, near Hope, Arkansas, they got stuck on a back road
looking for a shortcut to town, and Scotty tried to make time with Anita
in the backseat while the others did what they could to persuade a farmer
to help pull them out of the mud. "All of us were in the back of this
pickup truck," recalled Jimmy Snow, "just laughing - on our way to
Hope to do a show."
Two days later the tour ended in Bastrop. Hank Snow was long since
departed (his last show had been in Monroe, Louisiana, the previous Friday),
and there was no definite commitment from Jamboree for the fu-
,
ture, but there was a sure sense that they had accomplished what they set
out to do: they had expanded their audience and had a good time doing it.
TH A T S A T U R D A Y, February 26, they made their first trip north, to
Cleveland, to play the Circle Theater Jamboree. Bob Neal accompanied
the boys in hopes that this might lead to even further exposure, that
through the contacts he made at radio stations along the way, or just by
being on the scene, something might happen. Other than that, he had no
firm expectations - they didn't even have a definite place to stay.
Tommy Edwards, "the City Slicker Turned Country Boy" and host of the
Hillbilly Jamboree, had been playing Elvis' records on WERE since the
previous fall and was an unqualified fan; there was a big market for this
music in Cleveland, he assured Neal. With all of the southerners who had
flocked to town looking for work after the war, in addition to the large
black population that occupied the Hough district and a diverse ethnic
population, Cleveland was a real music town. Every Friday night there
was a rhythm and blues show at the Circle, and the Jamboree had
unearthed so many hillbillies that Edwards had invited them to educate
him as to what they wanted to hear.
But probably the biggest indicator of the change that was coming in
music was the startling success of Alan Freed, who, both on the air and as
a concert promoter, had discovered the same young white audience for
1 7 6 '" F O R B I D D E N F R U I T
rhythm and blues that Dewey Phillips had found in Memphis. Freed, as
flamboyant as Dewey and as opportunistic in business as Dewey was lacking
in business sense, had left Cleveland just months earlier for the even
more lucrative New York market, where he continued to crusade for the
same kind of music, introduced the all-star rhythm and blues revue (the
Drifters, the Clovers, Fats Domino, Big Joe Turner, and half a dozen
more premier acts all on the same bill), and claimed to have coined, and
even copyrighted, the term "rock & roll." And how about Bill Haley, who
was very popular here in town; had Bob Neal ever seen him perform? He
had done a rhythm and blues show with his western-style band, the Comets,
some eighteen months earlier with Billy Ward and His Dominoes and
former heavyweight champion Joe Louis and his orchestra. It seemed like
right here in Cleveland all the dividing lines and musical barriers were
coming down.
The show that night went fine. Elvis remained largely unheralded in
Cleveland (his records were little more than "turntable hits" there, since
Sun's distribution did not extend effectively that far), but if Bob Neal had
been apprehensive about a northern audience's receptivity to this new
music, his fears were quickly put to rest. Elvis went over the same as he
had throughout the South: the young people went wild, and the older
folks covered their mouths. Bill's souvenir photo sales were brisk, as he
mixed easily with the fans and made change from his money belt, and
Tommy Edwards sold a fair number of their records (which they had carried
up from Memphis in the trunk of Bob's car) in the lobby. After the
show Edwards said there was someone he wanted Neal to meet. In fact it
was the very person who had put on the Billy Ward-Bill Haley show, just
returned from his four-hour Saturday-afternoon shift on WCBS in New
York. Maybe Elvis could do another interview, even though they had already
done an on-the-air promotion for the Jamboree on Edwards' show
that afternoon. They went down to the station, and there they met Bill
Randle.
Bill Randle was a legend in radio at that time. Tall, scholarly-looking
with black hom-rimmed glasses, he had just been written up in Time two
weeks before in a story that announced, "For the past year the top U.S.
deejay has been Cleveland's Bill Randle, 31, a confident, prepossessing fellow
who spins his tunes six afternoons a week (from 2 to 7 P. M. on station
WERE)." According to the article, Randle had predicted all but one of the
top five best-sellers Of I954, discovered Johnnie Ray, changed the name of
J A N U ARY-MAY 1 9 5 5 '" 1 7 7
the Crew-Cuts (from the Canadaires) as well as finding them their first hit,
drove a Jaguar, and made SIOO,OOO a year, with his Saturday-afternoon
CBS network show in New York the latest in his series of unprecedented
accomplishments. "Randle's explanation of his success: Tm constantly
getting a mass of records. I weed out those that are obviously bad and
play the rest on my program to get listener reaction. Then I feed the results
into a machine. I'm the machine. I'm a Univac [computer]. It's so
accurate that I can tell my listeners, "This tune will be No. I in four
weeks.", " When asked if he liked the music that he played, Randle,
whose personal taste ran to jazz and classical music and who had been
fired from a Detroit radio station several years earlier for refusing to play
pop CIt was a tremendous emotional problem switching to popular
music.... It was almost a physical thing bringing myself to play the records"),
Randle declared, cheerfully, in Time's estimation: 'Tm a complete
schizophrenic about this. I'm in the business of giving the public what it
wants. This stuff is simply merchandise, and I understand it."
It was through Tommy Edwards that Randle had first heard Elvis
Presley's music, but while Edwards played "Blue Moon of Kentucky" for
his country audience, Randle heard something in the blues. It wasn't until
he started going to New York in January, though, that he actually started
playing Presley, and then he aired "Good Rockin' Tonight" on his CBS
show, which according to Randle made him persona non grata at the station
for a while.
They did the interview down at the WERE studio that night, as Randle
played all three of Presley's Sun records and was altogether won over.
"He was extremely shy, talked about Pat Boone and Bill Haley as idols,
and called me Mr. Randle. Very gentlemanly, very interesting, he knew a
lot about the music and the people and the personalities in Memphis, and
it was very exciting." He was almost equally impressed with Bob Neal.
"Bob Neal to my mind was a really interesting person. He was very
bright. He was a country disc jockey, but he was also a businessmanentrepreneur-
hustler - but with a lot of class." Randle invited Neal to
stay over at his place, and they stayed up much of the night talking. By the
end of the evening Randle was convinced that Neal "had a big artist on his
way," and he gave Neal the name of a contact in song publishing who he
thought could help get Presley a tryout on Arthur Godfrey'S Talent Scouts.
When they parted in the morning, Randle wished Neal luck with his boy
and said he hoped he'd get a chance to see him perform when they re1
7 8 ", F O R B I D D E N F R U I T
turned to Cleveland and the Circle Theater the following month. Then
Randle had his Sunday-afternoon radio show to do, and Neal and the boys
had a long drive back to Memphis.
Memphis seemed almost tame upon their return. It had been more
than three weeks since Elvis had last seen Dixie, their longest separation,
and he felt like he had all kinds of things to tell her, but when it came
down to it, it seemed like he didn't have all that much to tell. They went
to the monthly All-Night Singing at Ellis, where James Blackwood left
Elvis' name at the door, then announced that he was in the audience and
invited him backstage after the show. They went to the movies - The
Blackboard Jungle opened that month, with Bill Haley's "Rock Around the
Clock" blasting out over the opening credits. For the first time they didn't
have to worry about money, they could buy all the new records they
wanted at Charlie's and Poplar Tunes and Reuben Cherry's Home of the
Blues, where Elvis bought every red and black Atlantic and silver and blue
Chess record that he could find. They dropped in to see Dewey Phillips,
and Dewey always made a big fuss, announcing in his superexcited pitchman's
voice that Elvis was in the studio, firing a few questions at him that
Elvis answered with surprising ease on the air. He played football down at
the Triangle a few times, but he felt increasingly uncomfortable with the
old gang. They stopped by the new office on Union, whose recurrent
motif was pink and black: fan club membership cards, stationery, and envelopes
all matched Elvis' preferred personal decor, and Bob's wife,
Helen, said they had several hundred fan club members enrolled already.
On March 15, Elvis signed an amended one-year agreement with Neal,
giving Neal a 15 percent commission and subject to renewal in March
1956, when, if necessary, it could be revised again.
Meanwhile, the group had its second recording session in little more
than a month. They had gone into the studio at the beginning of February,
just before the start of the Jamboree tour, with the idea of recording
their next single, but like every other session, this one had come hard.
They tried Ray Charles' current hit, "I Got a Woman," already a staple of
their live act, as well as "Trying to Get to You," an unusual gospel-based
ballad by an obscure rhythm and blues group from Washington, D.C.,
called the Eagles, but neither one worked out. The one number they did
come up with, though, was probably the best they had gotten in the studio
to date. Taken from a fairly pallid original by Arthur Gunter that hit
the rhythm and blues charts at the end of January, "Baby, Let's Play
J A N U A RY-MAY 1 9 5 5 '" 1 7 9
House" virtually exploded with energy and high spirits and the sheer bubbling
irrepressibility that Sam Phillips had first sensed in Elvis' voice.
"Whoa, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby," Elvis opened in an ascending, hiccoughing
stutter that knocked everybody out with its utterly unpredictable,
uninhibited, and gloriously playful ridiculousness, and when he
changed Gunter's original lyric from "you may have religion" to "You
may drive a pink Cadillac" ("But don't you be nobody's fool"), he defined
something of his own, not to mention his generation's, aspirations. This
looked like it could become their biggest record yet, everyone agreed. All
they needed was a B side.
While they were out on tour, Stan Kesler wrote it. Kesler, the steel
guitarist in Clyde Leoppard's Snearly Ranch Boys, had been hanging
around the studio since the fall, when he had been drawn in by the
strange new sounds he had heard on the radio ("I never heard anything
like it before"). The Snearly Ranch Boys were looking to make a record,
which they eventually did, but Sam Phillips picked out Kesler, along with
Muscle Shoals-area musicians Quinton Claunch (guitar) and Bill Cantrell
(fiddle), to form a kind of rhythm section for a bunch of little country
demo sessions he put together in the fall and winter of 1954-55 on artists as
diverse as fourteen-year-old Maggie Sue Wimberley, the Miller Sisters,
Charlie Feathers, and a new rocking hillbilly artist out ofJackson, Tennessee,
a kind of hopped-up Hank Williams named Carl Perkins. He put out
limited-release singles on each of these, mostly on a nonunion subsidiary
label he formed just for that purpose, called Flip, but with almost all of
Sam's energies still focused on Elvis none of the records did anything
much.
It was clear, though, that Sam was thinking of the future and seeking
ways to expand upon Sun's newfound success. Times were still tough,
money remained tight, and Sam was still feeling the pinch from buying
out his partner, Jim Bulleit, the year before, but there was no question of
his settling for being known as a one-artist producer. Sam Phillips' ambitions
were much grander than that: he had great hopes for this new boy
Perkins, "one of the great plowhands in the world," as he later described
him, and he was "so impressed with the pain and feeling in his country
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