over: He gave me fifty dollars. The next thing I knew, Sam had sold his
contract."
Meanwhile the Colonel systematically went about his business, which
seemed for the most part to consist of playing one potential bidder off
against another. There was no question of where the Colonel wanted to
end up: he had been doing business with RCA, the label of both Eddy Arnold
and Hank Snow, for more than ten years now, and he had been
working with the same man for most of that time. Steve Sholes had handled
artist and repertoire duties for both Arnold and Snow, and Colonel
Parker had extensive connections within the company, all the way up to
Singles Division Manager Bill Bullock. At the same time he wasn't going
to let RCA take anything for granted, nor was he even sure how committed
they were to his artist, or to advancing the kind of money that it was
going to take to get the boy out of his Sun Records contract. So he continued
to actively encourage the other companies in their interest, up to
the point where he and Bob Neal were fielding almost daily offers.
Other events were conspiring - or being actively solicited as coconspirators
- to move things rapidly along. Hill and Range, one of the most
prominent of the BMI family of upstart young song publishers who had
taken advantage of the boom in "race" and "hillbilly" recording after the
war, was well on its way toward bringing out an Elvis Presley song folio,
an event which had its genesis at the Jimmie Rodgers Festival in May.
That was where Hill and Range representative Grelun Landon, in company
with his friend RCA promo man Chick Crumpacker, had seen Elvis
perform for the first time. Knocked out by the show, he had contacted his
bosses, Jean and Julian Aberbach. The Aberbachs, Viennese refugees with
a long history in European music publishing, had set up Hill and Range in
1945 to celebrate "America's native folk music" (the first part of their title
2 1 6 c-.. T H E P I E D P I P E RS
stood for "hillbilly," the second for "the wide-open range") and specialized
in "partnership publishing" almost from the start. This was a way of
drawing in stars like Ernest Tubb, Bob Wills, Bill Monroe, and Hank
Snow, by allowing them for the first time to participate on a 5<>--50 basis in
the publishing end of the business (up till now, almost without exception,
the writer had been forced to surrender all of his publishing interests,
which represented half of the performance royalties earned by a song, to
the music publisher who did him the favor of representing his songs).
Landon urged the Aberbachs to contact Sam Phillips right away so that
they could get in on the ground floor of this remarkable new phenomenon,
and by early summer 1955 they had done so, working out a deal with
Phillips and Bob Neal.
Meanwhile, Cleveland DJ Bill Randle, who had had extensive dealings
with Hill and Range over the years (everyone stood to gain by this network
of informal associations, not excluding the artist, though his songs
were likely to come from a source to which his a&r director or an influential
DJ like Randle might be tied), approached the Aberbachs on his own.
At the same time Freddy Bienstock, the Aberbachs' young chief lieutenant
and cousin, who had already heard about Presley from Randle, got a
phone call from Hank Snow touting the twenty-year-old performer. The
Colonel was not altogether happy about the contract Bob Neal had
agreed to on the folio deal, nor was he unaware of Randle's belief, fostered
by the Aberbachs' desire to recruit Randle to start a talent management
company for Hill and Range, that he would end up as the boy's
manager. But Tom Parker had sufficient confidence in his own business
acumen, and in his ability to write his own contract somewhere down the
line, that he turned a blind eye toward the Aberbachs' maneuverings and
Randle's ambitions and simply permitted everyone to think whatever
they wanted to think. As he told Arnold Shaw, the first time he had sold
an act to a promoter, he had been "taken to the cleaner's.... So I went
home, found the clause that did me in, cut it out, and pasted it on a piece
of paper. The next time... I got taken by another clause.... One day I
put all those smart-assed clauses together - and that's the contract you're
holding!"
Randle, in the meantime, was about to shoot a movie short, a selfpromotion
called The Pied Piper of Cleveland, in which he was planning to
use the boy, and that might come in handy in the marketing of his contract.
Or it might not. It didn't really matter. There was nothing that
S E P T E M B E R-N O V E M B E R 1 9 5 5 '" 2 1 7
couldn't b e set right s o long as you kept your eye on the ball - everyone
else, he knew from experience, was likely to take their eye off it. In the
Colonel's master plan, ifhe had a master plan, the main thing was to get
all the parties working toward the same end without realizing, or even
suspecting, that they were not the only ones in the game. In this, in a peculiar
way, he and the boy were alike. It did not escape the Colonel's notice
that everyone who met the boy, even for an instant, felt that they
were the favored one - almost as a result of the boy's innocence and lack
of guile. It was a rare gift, something which could not be taught, something
which the Colonel particularly appreciated and of which he could
wholeheartedly approve. It gave them something in common.
Otherwise it was business as usual: tours, bookings, keeping the publicity
machine greased. "[Washington, D.C.-based promoter] Connie B. Gay
says that a 19-year-old boy named Elvis Presley will be the next sensation of
the country and Western (hillbilly) music field," it was announced in the
"TV and Radio People" column of a Tidewater newspaper on September
4. "Presley has crossed bebop with country music and, according to Gay,
'is the hottest thing in the hillbilly field: " All the OJ polls and fan magazines
showed Elvis Presley rising to the top of "the folk music world - not
through picking, yodeling, or balladeering - but by belting out his numbers
in a rock 'em sock 'em rhythm style." And finally, in an October issue
of Billboard, under the headline "New Policy Combines Pops-C&W," it
was announced, "Col. Tom Parker of Jamboree Attractions, one of the
nation's major bookers and promoters of country & western talent, instituted
a new policy when he presented a combination of popular and
country & western music on a recent one-nighter tour. Parker teamed Bill
Haley & His Comets with Hank Snow for an extended tour, which opened
in Omaha, Oct. 10.... Elvis Presley j oined the Snow-Haley tour in Oklahoma
City." Even the poster bore out the separate-but-equal angle. " I N
P E R S O N, " read the top half. "The Nation's No. I Rhythm & Blues Artist
Bill Haley and his Comets. Of 'Rock Around the Clock' and 'Shake, Rattle
and Roll' fame P L U S Elvis Presley with Scotty and Bill." While at the bottom
Hank Snow, the "Singing Ranger," with an "All Star Cast," was showcased
with his picture headlining his half of the bill.
The idea was pretty much as the Billboard article stated. The Colonel
had approached Haley's manager, the almost equally colorful Lord Jim
Ferguson, with the pitch that he had this kid: "I can take him over, but I
want him to get some experience." To which Ferguson, who was manag2
1 8 c-., T H E P I E D P I P E R S
ing one of the hottest acts in the country at a time when it was not clear in
what direction the country was likely to go next, had readily assented,
given the kid's chart success and the drawing power that Snow could
bring to the bill. But for the Colonel the point was something more. RCA
was certainly interested - but they weren't that interested yet. If they
were going to put up the money needed to purchase Presley's contract
from Sun, they were going to have to believe not just in the artist but in
the movement. This was simply one more way of shoWing them that
there really was something happening out there, that Presley was not just
another hillbilly sensation. Once the big-city boys got that point, Colonel
Thomas A. Parker was convinced, the rest would be easy.
Elvis himself was thrilled to be on the bill. Bill Haley, out of Chester,
Pennsylvania, had had a string of western-flavored records, some more
successful than others, since 1946, when he was twenty-one years old. In
1951 he had recorded a cover of "Rocket 88," the Sam Phillips production
that has frequently been cited as marking the birth of rock 'n' roll, and
since then he had put out a steady stream of releases combining an r&b
sensibility with a hillbilly boogie feel and big band, western swing (accordion,
steel, and saxophone) instrumentation. It was a mix that defied categorization
and made considerable impact on the charts in 1953 and 1954,
but it failed to achieve any kind of breakthrough success for Haley until
the movie The Blackboard Jungle came out in March 1955. Haley's 1954 recording,
"Rock Around the Clock," which had sold about seventy-five
thousand copies its first time around, was selected to play over the opening
credits, and the song went to number one, bestowing upon Haley instant
star status (though he would never have another hit that came close
to matching it, he continued to work off it profitably until the day he
died). His version of Big Joe Turner's "Shake, Rattle and Roll," long a staple
of Elvis' show, was a credible act of rhythm and blues homage, and he
was poised on the edge of a brief movie career (Rock Around the Clock, the
lightly fictionalized "Bill Haley Story," with Alan Freed playing a strong
supporting role, came out at the beginning of the following year). His
music may have lacked the purity and edge that Elvis had achieved in the
studio, and certainly his live performances missed out on the smoldering
sexuality of Elvis' appearances, but Haley at this point was a star, and
Elvis was clearly drawn to that stardom, as if it might just rub off on him.
Haley for his part was perfectly glad to help a kid who, for all he knew,
had never been outside the Memphis city limits before.
S E P T E M B E R- N OVE M B E R 1 9 5 5 '" 2 1 9
"Now this was a long time before he was a big hit, you know," Haley
recalled to interviewer Ken Terry. "He was a big tall young kid. He didn't
have too much personality at that time.... The first time I remember talking
to Elvis was in, I think, Oklahoma City. He was standing backstage, and
we were getting ready to go on. And he came over and told me he was a fan
of mine and we talked - an awful nice kid.... He wanted to learn, which
was the important thing. I remember one night he went out and did a show
and asked me what I thought. I had watched the show, and I told him,
'Elvis, you're leaning too much on ballads and what have you. You've got a
natural rhythm feeling, so do your rhythm tunes.'... He had the attitude
which most young kids do that he was really going to go out there and stop
the show and knock Bill Haley off the stage, which at that time was an
impossibility because we were number one. And he went out and he was
facing Bill Haley fans.... When I came back after doing my show he was
kind of half crying in the dressing room, very downhearted, and I sat down
with him and I told him, 'Look, you got a lot of talent: and I explained to
him a lot of things. He and I buddied together for about a week and a half
after that."
In other respects life on the road was just the usual form of insanity:
shows increasingly marked by sheer, unrestrained pandemonium; crazy
girls who would do anything just about anywhere and, not infrequently,
the complications of jealous boyfriends; desperate drives to make the next
show after staying up all night in the town where they had played their last
one; two or three calls a day home, no matter what else was going on, or
who else was around; firecrackers. "Elvis was one of those guys that had a
lot of nervous energy," said D. J. Fontana, the newest member of the band.
"A superhyper guy - superhyper. Always jumping around or doing something.
He never got tired, but when he did, he'd just crash eleven or twelve
hours straight in those days. He was always doing something. We'd be driving
down the road, we'd never get to a show date on time, because we'd
stop every thirty miles to buy firecrackers. He'd make us stop at every
other stand, that sucker would. I'd say, 'We've got a bagful.' And he'd say,
'Well, you know, man, we might need some more.' We'd stop and buy
some more firecrackers just for something to do."
He was headlining his own show now almost everywhere. In West Texas
it was the Elvis Presley Jamboree, with a supporting cast of up to a dozen
that included Johnny Cash, Porter Wagoner, and Wanda Jackson. In Lubbock
the young singer Buddy Holly, now actively looking for a recording
2 2 0 '" T H E P I E D P I P ER S
contract of his own, opened the bill for him once again and sought his
advice. In Houston he went to see Bob Wills with Tillman Franks on an
off night and was amused when Wills told the promoter, Biff Collie,
"Bring the young punk. back."
He was finally getting used to it, up to a point. He no longer believed
it was all just going to go away - even though in interviews he was still
inclined, with becoming modesty, to say that he did. Part of him still
didn't believe that it was all really happening: the records, the shows, the
success, the Colonel, the sex. But part of him - most of him - did. It was
all over with Dixie, he realized. He didn't want it to be, but that was the
way it had to be. They had talked it over - over and over again. He never
really told her that he had been unfaithful, but he knew that she knew.
And he knew that she forgave him. It wasn't a life for a decent Christian
girl - sometimes when things got quiet or he was alone for a moment
and had time to contemplate, he wasn't so sure it was a life for a decent
Christian of any sort - but, he thought, he could handle it. And if he
couldn't, if it got too much for him, he could always go back, couldn't he?
Dixie had told Gladys that it was over, and the two women had cried
about it together, but they had agreed they would always be friends because
they both loved him so. When she told her own mother, her
mother was almost equally upset. "It was hard for my family to accept.
They loved him dearly, too. Mother would say, 'Well, what are you going
to do if you meet somebody else and get married, and after you get married,
Elvis comes back and says, 'Hey, I made a mistake, and I want you to
come and be my wife'? And I said, 'Well, I'll just divorce whoever I'm
married to and go live with him.' It was so simple in my mind. I thought:
'That's what I'll do.' "
The Presleys, meanwhile, had moved again, just around the comer
this time, to 1414 Getwell, which got them off a busy thoroughfare, and
they were angry at their former landlord anyway for trying to hold them
up, Vernon felt, when they had expressed an interest in purchasing the
Lamar Avenue house. Once again they were forced to move in Elvis' absence,
and once again Gladys wished that he could simply stop right now,
buy a little business with the money he had made, marry Dixie, have
three children. But she knew it wasn't to be. And she clung to his telephone
calls, they spoke to each other in a language all their own, as she
proudly kept track of his growing fame. She kept up her scrapbook religiously.
Just as she once saved all of his baby pictures and school reports
I
S E PT E M B ER- N O V E M B E R 1 9 5 5 c..., 2 2 1
and memorabilia, now she saved every story she came across that was
written about him; she and Vernon looked at them again and again.
"When Elvis was a youngster down in Tupelo, Mississippi, folks used to
stop him on the street and say, 'Sing for us, Elvis,' " read the latest, in
Country Song Roundup. "And he would... standing on the street comers,
in the hot Mississippi sun... or in church... or at school... anywhere
someone wanted to hear him, he'd sing." And in the Saturday, October
22, 1955, edition of the Cleveland Press, in Bill Randle's column, next to
Amy Vanderbilt's and just above a review of a spoken-word recording of
T. S. Eliot's Old Possum 's Book of Practical Cats, was an item called "Turntable
Topics," which read: "Turning my life into a frenzy this week was a
shooting company from Universal International Pictures. I'm not a Gable
at acting, so I'm fortunate to be supported in this film short by Pat Boone,
the Four Lads, Bill Haley and his Comets, and the phenomenal Elvis Presley.
Called 'Top Jock,' the film will run about 15 minutes when it hits your
movie house."
EL V I S P L A Y E D Cleveland's Circle Theater once again, on Wednesday
night, October 19, in an all-star country music jamboree headlined by
Roy Acuff and Kitty Wells. The next day Randle's film was scheduled to
be shot at 1:00 in the afternoon at the Brooklyn High School auditorium
in front of the school's three thousand students, and then at 8:00 that
night at St. Michael's Hall, at East looth and Union. Randle had filmed a
number of shorts before - with Peggy Lee and Benny Goodman and
Stan Kenton - and in fact the idea was for this one to end up in New
York with performances by Patti Page, Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, and
other "legitimate" pop stars. But Cleveland was the jumping-off point
and proved hospitable enough until Universal director Arthur Cohen
balked at the idea of putting on Presley, after watching his Circle Theater
performance and going through initial run-throughs at the high school
auditorium the next day. According to Randle: "He thought he was 'pitiful,'
completely unacceptable, not worth the time and effort to set up the
numbers. I told him about the phenomenal response Presley was getting
... but Cohen was adamant and proceeded to film the established stars as
they went on." Randle then consulted with cameraman Jack Barnett, who
agreed to film Presley if Randle would pay for the overtime shooting himself.
This proved to be an effective solution, and the show went on.
2 2 2 c-.. T H E P I E D P I P E R S
Pat Boone never forgot the occasion o f his first meeting with Elvis
Presley. Boone, just twenty-one years old and a student at North Texas
State Teachers College (he would transfer to Columbia University the following
year), had grown up in Nashville and was married to Red Foley's
daughter, Shirley. He had already won Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour,
made frequent appearances on the Arthur Godfrey show, and had enjoyed
success on two Nashville labels, achieving a national hit on Dot
with a cover of the Channs' "Two Hearts" earlier in the year. At the moment
his new single, the EI Oorados' "At My Front Door (Crazy Little
Mama)," was just beginning to climb the pop charts. Randle picked him
up at the airport, "and on the way into town he told me about a kid on
the show who was going to be a big star, I asked him who it was, and he
said, 'Elvis Presley, from Memphis, Tennessee.' I said, 'Oh yeah?' I had
lived in Texas, and I had seen his name on some country jukeboxes, and I
wondered how in the world a hillbilly could be the next big thing, especially
with a name like Elvis Presley. So I was curious, and sure enough, at
the high school auditorium where we did this thing, he came backstage,
and already he had a little entourage [probably Red and his cousin Gene].
Now, nobody in Cleveland had ever heard of him, so the fact that he had
an entourage struck me as funny. I went over dressed in my button-down
collar and thin tie and white buck shoes and introduced myself. He mumbled
something I couldn't understand, leaned back against the wall with
his head down, and never looked me in the eye. So, I said, 'Boy, Bill Randle
thinks you're really going to be big,' and he said, "Mmm...
mrrrbbllee...,' sort of a country twang mumble. I just couldn't tell what
he was saying. He had his shirt collar turned up, and his hair was real
greasy, and it was, well, he was always looking down, you know, like he
couldn't look up. I thought to myself, what's the matter with this guy? I
thought his perfonnance would be a catastrophe, that he'd pass out onstage
or something."
Elvis was glad to see Bill Haley, whom he had left in Texas just the
previous week. OJ Tommy Edwards wanted to take a picture of the two
of them together, and while they were backstage in the dressing room,
Elvis remarked that he hoped these Yankees liked his music, giving Haley
no indication that he had ever played Cleveland before. Randle introduced
him to Mike Stewart, a big bear of a man who had been very successful
in managing the Four Lads and would one day take over the
United Artists label. Stewart was so impressed by both the boy's talent
S E P T E M B E R-N O V E M B E R 1 9 5 5 223
and charm that he called Mitch Miller at Columbia Records the following
day, only adding to the chorus of praise that Randle had started and that
Miller clearly wished would go away.
The show itself was a great success. Each act did four or five numbers,
with Elvis, Scotty, and Bill (DJ. doesn't seem to have made the trip) performing
"That's All Right," "Blue Moon of Kentucky," "Good Rockin'
Tonight, " and his latest coupling, "Mystery Train" and "I Forgot to Remember
to Forget," which had entered the national country charts the
month before. Pat Boone's fears were not realized. When Elvis hit the
stage in his tweedy brown jacket, red socks, white bucks, and white
pleated shirt with boldly embroidered front, he looked to Boone "like he
had just gotten off a motorcycle. He had his shirt open, and he looked like
he was laughing at something, like he had some private joke, you know?
He didn't say anything, just went into some rockabilly type song, and the
kids loved it. I was really surprised. Then he opened his mouth and said
something, and it was so hillbilly that he lost the crowd. Then he sang
another song and won them over again. As long as he didn't talk, he was
okay. It took me a long time to win that crowd."
It went pretty much the same at St. Michael's, only with greater intensity.
Unlike the scene at the high school, where the kids were restrained
by the looming presence of their teachers (the athletic director, Mr. Joy,
held the doors to keep the students away from Pat Boone), here the girls
screamed without restraint and fought to get to Elvis and Boone as they
performed. When Presley broke the strings on his guitar, Randle said, and
then smashed the guitar on the floor, "it was mass hysteria. We needed
police to get him out of the hall, clothes torn, a sleeve ripped from his
jacket. Boone also got the same response. He said after the show that he
had never believed what had happened could have happened to him. He
said for the first time he felt he was going to make it all the way - like Pat
Boone."
There was no question that Bill Randle had spotted a winner, and for
the entire length of time that he was in negotiations for an executive position
with Hill and Range (which ended in November, when he turned
down the song publisher's deal and decided to go with a more lucrative
stock-option arrangement with the Cleveland radio station WERE), he
had no doubt that he was still in the picture. The Aberbach brothers were
clearly anxious for him to stay involved with Presley (or was that a ploy to
get Randle to sign with them?), the film was just waiting on the New York
224 '" T H E P I E D P I P E RS
shoot, and if they could successfully negotiate union problems there, it would
emerge as the first movie short devoted to the new music, with the focus on
what its subtitle suggested: A Day in the Life of a Famous Disc Jockey. Randle
maintained good television and Las Vegas connections, which was where he
thought the boy's career should be headed. But reality now came jarringly
face-to-face with Bill Randle. For Colonel Parker at almost exactly this time
took fate into his own hands, went to New York and ensconced himself at the
Warwick Hotel, where, armed with an impressively sweeping document from
Vernon and Gladys Presley authorizing him to represent their boy (he had dictated
its legalistic language to them in an October 20 telegram of his own), he
for the first time formally entertained offers for an artist whose contract he did
not, strictly speaking, formally possess. Four days later, on October 24, he contacted
Sam Phillips, informing him of his new managerial status and demanding
that he name his "best flat price for complete dissolution free and clear of
the talent and recording services of Elvis Presley"
This was, finally, too much for Phillips. Up till then it had all been something
of a dance whose consummation, if preordained, had not yet had to
be squarely faced. Now with a hit record on his hands and new expenses
cropping up seemingly every day on every front, Phillips felt as if not only
his relationship with Elvis but the credibility of his record company was
being undermined by this continuing atmosphere of uncertainty that he
had himself allowed to be set in motion. "I was pissed off. 1 got so goddam
mad, 1 called up Bob Neal and 1 said, 'Bob, you know what the hell you
doing to mer He said, 'Aw, Sam, 1 ain't doing nothing,' and 1 said, 'Goddammit,
you're associated with Tom Parker and he's putting out this bullshit,
after all of what I've been through to get this guy going, he's putting
the word out to my distributors that I'm gonna sell Elvis' contract.' 1 said,
'Man, this is killing me, you're not just messing with an artist contract here,
you messing with my life, man. You just don't deal with these people [the
distributors] unfairly They're in this damn thing, too.' 1 had worked my ass
off - driven sixty-five to seventy-five thousand miles a year to gain their
confidence, not only on Elvis but going back to the first damn releases on
Sun. 1 said, 'This could cost me the company.' 1 said, 'This has got to stop.'
"So 1 called Tom Parker at the Warwick Hotel in New York, and he said,
'Sa-a-am, how you doin'r And 1 said, 'Well, 1 ain't doing worth a damn.' 1
said, 'Look, Tom, this has been going on now basically for three or four
months, but 1 thought nothing of it, 'cause 1 couldn't get confirmation from
Bob Neal that you good friends of mine would be trying to do me in advertently
or inadvertently' He said, 'Oh, noooo, Sam, no, 1 don't underS
E P T E M B ER-N OVE M B E R I 9 55 '" 225
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