Last Train to Memphis Page 16

  Sam had always seen it as his mission to “open up an area of freedom within the artist himself, to help him to express what he believed his message to be,” and here he had found his perfect Trilby. To Sam the person who presented himself had never played anywhere before he entered the Sun studio, “he didn’t play with bands, he didn’t go to this little club and pick and grin. All he did was set with the guitar on the side of his bed at home. I don’t think he even played on the front porch.” This was what Elvis conveyed, without words, and in a way it was true. When Elvis was with Scotty, when Elvis was in the Sun studio, it was as if he were reborn.

  To Sam, as much as to Marion, he was the personification of an ideal, the embodiment of a vision that Sam had carried with him from the farm in Florence—he represented the innocence that had made the country great in combination with “the elements of the soil, the sky, the water, even the wind, the quiet nights, people living on plantations, never out of debt, hoping to eat, lights up the river—that’s what they used to call Memphis. That was where it all came together. And Elvis Presley may not have been able to verbalize all that—but he damn sure wasn’t dumb, and he damn sure was intuitive, and he damn sure had an appreciation for the total spirituality of the human existence, even if he would never have thought of the term. That was what he cared about.”

  That was Elvis’ mark—he conveyed his spirituality without being able, or needing, to express it. And all these adults with their more complicated lives and dreams and passions and hopes looked for themselves in his simplicity.

  ON AUGUST 28 the record entered the Billboard regional charts. It showed up at number three on the C&W Territorial Best Sellers for the week of August 18, behind Hank Snow’s “I Don’t Hurt Anymore” and a Kitty Wells–Red Foley duet, but it was “Blue Moon of Kentucky” that was the hit. On the strength of these credentials, and on the basis of the record’s striking local success, Sam Phillips approached Jim Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, with the idea that the Opry could at least offer the boy a little exposure. After all, Sam adjured Denny, whom he knew from the year he had spent in Nashville, it was no longer the old mule-and-wagon days, wasn’t it time to allow something new to breathe? Sam wasn’t saying the boy was necessarily going to set the world on fire, but give youth a chance, damnit. Jim Denny listened; he was a hard man, Sam knew—he was not about to win any popularity contests—but he was a fair man, too. He had heard the record, he told Sam, it wasn’t really to his taste, but if Sam could give him a little time, well, maybe if the band was in the area at some point he could fit them in. Sam hung up the phone—he was well enough pleased. He could wait as long as he had to. At least Denny hadn’t said no.

  Others were noticing the waves the new record was making. In Nashville, Bill Monroe, far from being offended at the “sacrilege” which had been committed on his song, approached Carter Stanley, another prominent bluegrass musician, after the Opry one Saturday night. “He said, ‘I want you to hear something,’ and he had never said anything like that to me before.” He played Stanley the “new” version of “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” “I laughed a little bit and looked around, and everybody else was laughing except Bill. He said, ‘You better do that record [at Stanley’s scheduled recording session] tomorrow if you want to sell some records.’… He said, ‘I’m going to do it [at his own recording session] next Sunday.’ ” And Monroe helped supervise Stanley’s session on Sunday, August 29, then recut “Blue Moon of Kentucky” himself in 4/4 time, as he had said he would, the following week.

  The major record labels, too, couldn’t help but notice what was going on. Jim Denny, in addition to his duties as general manager of the Opry, was also proprietor of Cedarwood Publishing, which in turn was tied in with Decca Records, and Decca’s Paul Cohen pricked up his ears at this new phenomenon. Sam’s friend Randy Wood, who operated a big one-step and mail-order record business in Gallatin, Tennessee, and had enjoyed a good deal of success with his own Dot Record Company, expressed mild interest as well. Meanwhile, RCA Records in New York had come to be aware of this rising new star, and this upstart new label, not simply because of the write-ups in Billboard and Cash Box but because of the reports they were getting from their own agents in the field. “All of our distributors were aware of Sam Phillips,” said Chick Crumpacker, who had become national country and western promotion manager working under a&r (artist and repertoire) director Steve Sholes in April. “There was all this talk about what this insurgent Sun Records was doing, quite a bit of it pejorative. Also, we would get these reports from the field, from Sam Esgro, who was based in Memphis, and Brad McCuen, who had the RCA field from the middle of Tennessee into Virginia and the Carolinas.”

  McCuen, a thirty-three-year-old transplanted New Yorker, who filed a report to Steve Sholes that summer, vividly recalled his first encounter with Elvis Presley. “My bell-cow area was East Tennessee. If a record made it in the tri-city area of Kingsport, Johnson City, and Bristol on down through to Knoxville, it would go national, so I was just very conscious of that area. One of our best record dealers was Sam Morrison in Knoxville, right on Market Square. He was one of the first southern record dealers that I knew to do the New York City trick of putting a loudspeaker out over his doorsill and playing the music for the market crowd, who had come in to sell their produce. This one particular time Sam grabbed me and said, ‘There’s something very interesting happening here, it’s really weird,’ and he went and got Elvis’ record, which was just out, and put ‘That’s All Right’ on the player. ‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘I can’t get enough of it. I’m selling at least a box a day.’ I was amazed, but I said, ‘It’s just a normal rhythm and blues record, isn’t it?’ He said, ‘No, it isn’t, it’s selling to a country audience.’

  “Well, at just that point an old country man in his fifties came in, I say jokingly he had more hair growing out of his ears and nose than he did on his head, and he said in an easy Tennessee drawl, “By granny, I want that record.’ I couldn’t figure it out, because here was an obvious country fan. Then Sam turned the record over and played ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky,’ and I figured, ‘Well, he probably wants it for that.’ But that wasn’t it—it was really ‘That’s All Right.’ So I bought two copies of the record and sent one to Steve Sholes, and Steve said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ But I told him that Sam Morrison must have gone through about five thousand, and it was selling in Kingsport and the tri-cities area. And Sam Esgro and I kept sending him reports.”

  ON SEPTEMBER 8 the Memphis Press-Scimitar announced “Fun on a Grand Scale” at the opening of the new Lamar-Airways Shopping Center. The festivities over the next few days would include Indian ceremonies, “Scottish, hillbilly and Indian music groups, radio, television and recording personalities,” a twenty-eight-foot “robot” Indian, lavish prizes, and the presence of “a number of celebrities… including Mayor Tobey.” Also included was the “newest Memphis hit in the recording business… Elvis Presley of ‘That’s All Right, Mama’ and ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ fame,” who would be appearing along with Sleepy Eyed John’s Eagle’s Nest band on a flatbed truck in front of Katz Drug Store on opening night, Thursday, between 9:00 and 10:00. “Blue Moon of Kentucky” was number one on the Memphis c&w chart at this point, with “That’s All Right” showing up at number seven.

  The parking lot was jammed when Elvis arrived with Dixie, and George Klein, who was back at Memphis State for the fall semester, was broadcasting from inside the giant wooden Indian. Scotty and Bill were already present, and Sleepy Eye was all set up onstage, but the crowd seemed restive. It was made up almost exclusively of teenagers—there were lots of them, more than could ever have fit into the Eagle’s Nest—and if they didn’t equal the size of the Overton Park audience, this time it was obvious who they were there for.

  George emerged from the Indian to come up and introduce the band, and Elvis lit up to see his old Humes classmate, the president of the senior class and editor of the yearbook, especially whe
n George said he had been playing the record over the air in Osceola all summer. They caught up with each other very briefly—Elvis hadn’t seen George to talk to since graduation, fifteen months before—but it was perfectly evident how their situations had changed. They spoke of friends in common, and then it was time to go onstage. George gave them the big buildup, he mentioned that he had gone to school with this rising young star, he conveyed a sense of significance and respect in his trained announcer’s voice that Sleepy Eye would never have suggested, but there was no preparation for the sound that greeted them, for the whoosh of anticipation, the screams, and the mass intake of breath as Elvis Presley bounded to the microphone. Dixie hadn’t really seen him perform since Overton Park—and here they were not far from the Rainbow skating rink, where she had first met her “secret love.”

  Scotty knew that day. “This was the first we could see what was happening. ’Cause it was a whole parking lot full of kids, and they just went crazy.” They liked Bill’s clowning, and Elvis’ gyrations had advanced way beyond Overton even at this point, but it was the beat that really got to them, and it was the kids’ response that drove the music to another level. It was so out of control it was almost frightening.

  After the show Elvis hung around a little—there were a bunch of people that he knew in the crowd, and they all wanted to talk to him, some of them even wanted his autograph. Looking at him, watching him open up to people in the way she had always known he could, Dixie thought maybe this was as far as he would go, this was success on the highest level that a normal person could ever hope for. George was genuinely excited. He had to go back to making announcements and deejaying inside the Indian, but they really ought to get together sometime, he said. There were some guys in the audience, too, who were muttering under their breath that they didn’t see what the big fuss was all about, this guy was weird in his black pants with the pink stripe, his greasy hair and pimply face—it looked almost like he was wearing makeup. In Florida, Lee Denson heard from his brothers and sisters about the splash that Elvis was making around town, and he couldn’t believe it. Here was a kid barely able to form a chord when Lee tried to teach him in the Courts just a couple of years earlier—of all of them he was the least likely to succeed. Lee was playing a regular gig while also working as a bellhop in Key West. Ernest Hemingway, the writer, had declared him to be his favorite singer one night at Sloppy Joe’s, and here Elvis Presley was stirring up all this fuss. “The difference between me and him,” said Lee, “was I went for it. I drove for it. New York, Hollywood—I went everywhere for it. And he fell into the shithole and came up with the gold watch and chain.”

  GOOD ROCKIN’ TONIGHT

  October–December 1954

  TOP: ELVIS, BILL, SCOTTY, AND SAM PHILLIPS, 1954.

  (COURTESY OF GARY HARDY, SUN STUDIO)

  BOTTOM:WITH BOB NEAL, 1955.

  (COURTESY OF GER RIJFF)

  IT WAS A TWO-HUNDRED-MILE RIDE to Nashville, but the four of them were comfortable enough in Sam Phillips’ four-door black 1951 Cadillac, with Bill’s bass strapped to the roof. It was Saturday, October 2. Elvis, Scotty, and Bill had played their regular Friday-night gig at the Eagle’s Nest; their record “Blue Moon of Kentucky” was near the top of the charts in Memphis and just beginning to break in Nashville and New Orleans; and they had every reason to feel that they had reached the pinnacle of their musical career—because tonight they were going to play the Opry.

  Jim Denny had finally succumbed to Sam’s argument that there was no need to think about putting the boy on as a regular, he didn’t have to think of this as a normal “tryout,” just give the boy a chance. Denny seemed no more convinced than he had been in the first place—perhaps he was just worn down by Sam’s persistence—but he agreed to give the young man a one-time spot on Hank Snow’s segment of the show. He could perform a single song with his band, the country number “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” If it was worth it to Sam and the boys to drive over just for that, well, then, Denny was willing to give them the shot.

  In the meantime Sam had also heard from the Louisiana Hayride, the Opry’s more innovative rival in Shreveport, which, unlike the Opry, actually wanted this new act. The Hayride, which Denny referred to derisively as the Opry’s farm club because so many of its big acts eventually defected to Nashville, had discovered Hank Williams in 1948 and broken such stars as Slim Whitman, Webb Pierce, and, most recently, Jim Reeves and Faron Young. But Sam put them off because, he explained to Hayride booking agent Pappy Covington, he wanted to play the Opry first. As soon as the boys had fulfilled this prior commitment, he told Pappy, stretching the truth a little, Elvis could appear on the Hayride. There was no doubt in his mind, he said, that Elvis could make a hit with the Hayride audience, and they could set it up for just a week or two after the Opry appearance, but he had committed himself to Jim Denny that the boy would appear on the Opry first. He was walking a thin line, he knew. He didn’t for a minute want to lose the Hayride, but he wasn’t going to give up the opportunity to see a new, untried artist get his national debut on the hallowed Grand Ole Opry.

  Ryman Auditorium was like a tattered shrine to the three musicians, none of whom had ever attended, let alone played, a show at the Opry before. They wandered around the dilapidated old building, erected as a tabernacle in 1886 and still retaining the old wooden pews for seats, in something of a daze. They were both overwhelmed at the sense of history contained in the room—the music they had been listening to all their lives emanated from this cramped little stage—and somewhat disillusioned, too, that the Grand Ole Opry was not, well, grander. Backstage the other musicians mingled freely, exchanging small talk and greetings, tuning up, donning makeup and costumes, without any of the formality or protocol that you might have expected from stars but with all of the remoteness, whether real or perceived, of big leaguers sniffing at bushers just up from the minors. Twenty-one-year-old bass player Buddy Killen, who had just started as chief and only song plugger for Tree Music, the publishing house that WSM program director Jack Stapp had set up in 1951, came up to the obviously out-of-place young singer and introduced himself. “[Elvis] said, ‘They’re going to hate me.’ I said, ‘They’re not going to hate you. You’re going to be fine.’ He said, ‘If they’d just let me leave, I’d go right now.’ ” Marty Robbins saw evidence of the same insecurity, but when Elvis spotted Chet Atkins backstage, he introduced himself and then, knowing Scotty’s admiration for Atkins’ playing, pulled Scotty over, too, saying, “My guitar player wants to meet you.” Atkins noted with asperity that the kid appeared to be wearing eye makeup.

  Probably of all the Opry legends the one they were most leery of running into was Bill Monroe. Many in the country field continued to view the Sun version of “Blue Moon of Kentucky” as a desecration, and even Sam had heard that Monroe was going to take their head off for their untrammeled interpretation of his stately lament (“I’d heard he was going to break my jaw!”). But when they met Monroe, conservatively dressed in dark suit and tie and trademark white hat and at forty-three already an elder statesman possessed of a dignity that permitted neither bullshit nor informality, he came right out and complimented them. As a matter of fact, he told them, he had cut a new version of the song for Decca, due out next week, that followed their pattern.

  There were two additional surprises. Marion Keisker, left behind in Memphis to keep the studio doors open, abandoned her post and caught a bus to Nashville, where she thought at first she would just stay out in the audience so as not to spook them but before long found her way backstage and joined the little group. Then Bill peeked out at the audience and, much to his surprise, discovered his wife, Evelyn, and Scotty’s wife, Bobbie, in the front row. “I think he was kind of glad to see us,” said Bobbie, “ ’cause they were wanting to come back to Memphis that night, and Sam was going to stay over in Nashville. You see, they had told Evelyn and me, ‘Y’all can’t go. We’re all going in one car, and there’s no room for you.’ Well, I accepted that
, but then around noon, a couple of hours after they left, Evelyn came over to the house and said, ‘Let’s go to Nashville.’ I said, ‘Oh, I don’t know about that, we might get in trouble,’ but, you know, we really were like Lucy and Ethel, so then I said, ‘What the heck!’ and we drove over. Bill stuck his head out the stage door and saw us, but when Scotty saw me backstage, it was like he’d seen a ghost!”

  At 10:15 Grant Turner announced the Hank Snow segment of the show, sponsored by Royal Crown Cola, and Snow, whose son, Jimmie Rodgers Snow, had just approached Elvis admiringly, got lost in his introduction of a young man from Memphis who has just made a hit record, let’s give him a nice round of applause, to the point that he forgot the young singer’s name. Elvis bounced out the same way that he always did, as if he had just fallen off a fast-moving train, and did his one number. Scotty and Bill were more nervous than he was—to them, it seemed, there was nowhere to go but down from here, and they could sense from the polite, but somewhat tepid, reception that this was exactly where they were going. Afterward they were like a boxing management team trying to rationalize defeat. Everyone was nice to them as they gawked and huddled—they’d gotten a good reception, Bobbie and Evelyn insisted, and Bill introduced himself to everyone, laughing and cracking jokes, while Scotty stood off to one side a little stiffly, waiting to be introduced. Before leaving, Sam conferred briefly with Mr. Denny, who confirmed that Elvis Presley just did not fit the Opry mold, but, he told Sam, “ ‘This boy is not bad.’ He didn’t give me any great accolades, he just grabbed me by my skinny arm and said, ‘This boy is not bad.’ Well, people put down Jim Denny, nobody much liked Jim, he was a damn tough man, but he did me a favor.”