Last Train to Memphis Read online

  “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 corner 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.

  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 turn.”

  THERE WAS NO QUESTION 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 couldn’t be. But heck, with a name like that… So 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 DJ 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 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 if he 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 Elvis would just ad-lib something and they would move on to the next number. Scotty and Bill took an active role in Elvis’ education. “They taught him how to stand,” said Bill’s wife, Evelyn. “They coached him on how to hold his guitar and to do all this stuff in front of the mike. He had to learn all that.” “It was kind of like we adopted him,” said Bobbie Moore. “We had to make sure that he got to the dates, we had to make sure that he got home, we had to make sure that he didn’t get into trouble. He was just a kid—he was nice, but he could be kind of a brat, too!”

  With Elvis everything always had to be funny, Bobbie said, he was always acting up, whereas Scotty, who enjoyed a good joke, too, believed there was a time and a place for everything. One time Scotty and Bill were loading up after their second or third Saturday at the Bon Air while Elvis and Bobbie stood by the car. “Scotty came out, and he put his amplifier in the trunk, and Elvis said, ‘I’m trying to get a
date with your wife.’ Scotty didn’t say a word, but I thought, ‘Oh-oh, you shouldn’t have said that’—because he wasn’t, really. Scotty didn’t say a word. He went ahead and got in the driver’s seat. I said, ‘We better get in the car before he leaves.’ I knew he didn’t take that as a joke.”

  One night Elvis stayed over after the show. Bobbie wasn’t expecting him to, “but then Scotty said, ‘You got some linen for the couch?’ so I made up a bed. Elvis was never tired, he could stay up all night after a show, and he was always pacing. He wasn’t shy! He wouldn’t think anything of walking around, poking his head in the bedroom, every time he’d come over he’d look in the refrigerator, walk around, go look out the door. He just couldn’t be still. The time he stayed over, the next morning Scotty says, ‘Elvis likes his eggs cooked hard as a rock.’ So I fried his eggs as hard as I could, ’cause I like mine done, too. He sat there, and he said, ‘Can you cook it a little more?’ Well, I cooked it until you couldn’t get that egg any harder, and he ate a bunch of toast and bacon but only a couple of bites of that egg. That was the first time I ever remember him spending the night away from home. His mother always waited up for him—she said she couldn’t go to sleep until Elvis got home—so maybe he called her to tell her he was spending the night.”

  Scotty took his duties as manager seriously. He and Sam agreed that it made no sense to put Elvis into some of the rough joints that Scotty and Bill had been playing, so he went looking for schoolhouses to book and local Elks Club and Lions Club events within a seventy-five-mile radius of Memphis that might be looking for a singer. He tried his hometown of Gadsden and got turned down by his old principal, who didn’t think they’d make enough money to pay the light bill, but he got some dates over in Mississippi and Arkansas starting in September. In the meantime they played out at the Kennedy Veterans Hospital one Saturday afternoon and in the basement rec room of St. Mary’s, across from the Courts, where they gained additional exposure if not pay. At Kennedy they played for the paraplegic and quadriplegic ward under the auspices of the B’nai B’rith, and even there they made quite an impact, according to Monte Weiner, a classmate of Elvis’ at Humes, whose mother booked the shows. “My mother brought a group out once a month, and she knew of Elvis through me, though I didn’t really know him in school. He did it for several months in a row, the first time was right after the record came out, and they’d bring people on stretchers and wheelchairs down to the little room where he was going to perform. I remember they rolled the beds out into the middle of the floor, and I watched their faces while he and his group were performing, doing something completely different from anything I had ever heard before. The patients couldn’t move at all, but their facial expressions—it was like they were trying to clap by their facial expressions. It was a really remarkable thing, that’s all I can tell you.”

  JUST ONE WEEK after Overton Park they started playing as the intermission act out at the Eagle’s Nest on their own—without the Starlite Wranglers, who had not taken the success of Scotty’s new discovery very well at all. In fact the Overton Park appearance seems to have marked the end of the group, although they did not formally break up for another couple of months. Dixie sometimes baby-sat for Evelyn so that she could go out to the show, and the five of them—the Blacks, the Moores, and Elvis—would go out to eat afterward at Earl’s Drive-in downtown. Elvis never had any money in his pocket, Bobbie said; since they had joined the union, they no longer got paid on the job but had to go down to the union hall on Monday to collect, so the “girls” generally ended up paying. “Elvis would ask Scotty, ‘Can I have another hamburger or a milk shake?’ And Scotty would say, ‘You’ll have to ask her,’ ” said Bobbie. “ ‘She’s got the money.’ ” “I found out he didn’t like ketchup,” said Evelyn. “ ’Cause if I put ketchup on my french fries, he wouldn’t eat them. It got to where I put ketchup on them every time—otherwise he’d eat every one!”

  It wasn’t too long before the intermission shows at the Eagle’s Nest became a kind of underground sensation. It was Sleepy Eyed John who booked the club, and Sleepy Eyed John whose band continued to play the main dance sets, but from the start Elvis was clearly an attraction. “Elvis Presley Tonight,” the little newspaper squib announced. “See and hear Elvis singing ‘That’s All Right’ and ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky,’ Admission $1.20 (Including Tax).” Sometimes it was “Ladies’ Nite, Too (Ladies .50),” and many of the ads cheerfully admonished, “Don’t Wear a Tie Unless Your Wife Makes You,” but as the momentum built over the course of the month, with perhaps half a dozen different appearances, in addition to one or two at other clubs around town, you didn’t need any gimmicks to build attendance. At first Vernon had wanted to take a sock at Sleepy Eyed John because of some of the sarcastic things Sleepy Eye had said about his son’s record on the air. He was going to go up to the station, he told Sam Phillips, and take care of him. “I said, ‘Now wait a minute, Mr. Presley, that’s not the way it works. The worst thing you can do is go over there. All he wants to do is to create some noise. Let’s kill the sonofabitch with kindness.’ ” Vernon was dubious, but he allowed himself to be dissuaded, and when he and Gladys went out to the club, he was glad that he had. Other members of the family came out on occasion: Gladys’ sister Lillian and her husband, who remained pessimistic about the boy’s prospects; Vernon’s brother, Vester, and his wife, Clettes, another of Gladys’ sisters, who took a couple of snapshots of a very young, very blond, and somewhat uncomfortable-looking Elvis Presley standing in front of the Eagle’s Nest sign.

  James and Gladys Tipler came out to the Eagle’s Nest, too. They continued to feel great pride in their employee and even brought some of their big construction clients. “He wanted us to come out and see him so he would feel he had some friends in the audience,” Mrs. Tipler said. “He had quite a bit of trouble with stage fright.” Sometimes he wore his bolero jacket, sometimes he wore a striped sports jacket with a velvet collar that he had recently bought at Lansky’s, occasionally he favored western clothes. His favorite colors were pink and black. “I remember the first check he gave me,” said Guy Lansky, who had known him from the time he first pressed his face to the Beale Street clothing store window. “It was hard to take. I think it was five hundred dollars from Sam Phillips, and he asked me to cash it for him, and he bought some clothes and some jewelry—I had a little jewelry store on the side. And I was still skeptical of him because of his appearance, I remember running to the bank to see if it was good. Years later, after he got Graceland, I used to take my kids out there, and I remember he showed me that sports coat that he had bought years before—boy, he loved that coat, it was still in his closet.”

  He seemed to gain more and more of a sense of himself, greater and greater self-assurance onstage and off. “His movement was a natural thing,” said Scotty, “but he was also very conscious of what got a reaction. He’d do something one time and then he would expand on it real quick.” According to Reggie Young, who was seventeen at the time and would join Eddie Bond’s band, the Stompers, the following year, all the teenagers who were out at the swimming pool that gave the Clearpool complex its name (the Eagle’s Nest was over the changing room) would rush in as soon as they heard Elvis, Scotty, and Bill start to play. Then all the kids went back outside when Sleepy Eyed John’s band took the stage again, fifteen minutes later. “Sleepy Eyed John was all into Ray Price’s big western swing band at that time,” said his sometime lead vocalist and MC, Jack Clement, who went on to become Sam Phillips’ right-hand man at Sun and one of the most brilliantly idiosyncratic producers and confabulators that Nashville ever produced. “Eight or nine pieces, three fiddles, all that kind of stuff—that’s where Sleepy Eye thought music was going. Of course nobody agreed with him, and Elvis would come on and do the floor show, just the three of them. He seemed to be handling it all very well, you know, in a young-gentleman fashion, he was kind of reserved but not really shy—that was his demeanor. I was going with my fiancée, Doris, we got m
arried in December, and Doris would come to the dance and sit at a table and when I was up there singing Elvis would be over there trying to get Doris to go out with him. Doris was a very pretty girl—I didn’t mind if he flirted with Doris, I liked him. I would get up there and do my set, and then I’d bring him on and he would really cut up.”

  Marion Keisker saw Elvis frequently all through August. He would stop by the studio from time to time to find out how his record was doing or just to hang around and chat. He remained grateful to Marion, as he would be all his life, for helping him “get his first break,” and she in turn saw in him an almost magical quality that both protected him and in turn brought out the best in others. “My total image of Elvis was as a child. His attitude towards people was the equivalent of tipping your hat as you walk down the street—‘Good evening, ma’am, good evening, sir’—but not showing off. He never said a wrong thing from the very first night he appeared on the Dewey Phillips show—he was like a mirror in a way: whatever you were looking for, you were going to find in him. It was not in him to lie or say anything malicious. He had all the intricacy of the very simple.”

  As for Sam, increasingly he saw in the boy something to mirror his own self-image, the kind of person whose “insecurity drove him, and yet he was an extremely patient person for achieving a kind of success [that his contemporaries could only dream of], he was absolutely, unequivocally going to sing. He was not an eloquent person, but many times without a direct statement he was eloquent in starting something that told you exactly what he was thinking.” A person still subject to mood swings (“Sam was a driven man,” said Marion) yet one who always maintained the appearance of calm and self-assurance, Sam saw in Elvis the very person that he was but rarely showed. Where Elvis appeared unsure, tongue-tied, incapable of expressing himself, Sam saw in him the same sort of burning ambition, he was only lacking the ability to verbalize it.