Last Train to Memphis Read online

  He kept nearly everyone, even his closest associates, at arm’s length. “You have one fault,” he told his brother-in-law, Bitsy Mott. “You make too many friends.” His cold eyes belied his occasional warmheartedness; his absolute honesty in business affairs conflicted with the opportunism that always drove him to come out on top not just in formal dealings but in day-to-day affairs as well (he would spend a hundred dollars, it was said, to beat you out of a dollar). “He got a helluva kick,” Chet Atkins declared, “out of getting someone to pick up the check. Or out of just beating you in a deal—any kind of a deal.” He was capable of real generosity, but more than anything else he loved the game. As Gabe Tucker observed, he lived in a world of mirrors—he never really left the carnival world, in which “they speak a different language. All of them is just like the Colonel; they’ll cut your throat just to watch you bleed. But they’ve got their own laws, it’s a game with them, to outsmart you, you’re always the pigeon to them.” In Gabe’s view, and in Oscar Davis’, too, everyone else in the Colonel’s estimation was a little bit of a fool.

  IT WAS LITTLE WONDER, then, that Sam Phillips should take so instant, and visceral, a dislike to the man sitting opposite him in the little restaurant on Poplar. On the other hand, Tom Parker was one of the few people in the business able to provide a match for Sam. These were two very strong, independent men with two very different visions of life. Sam’s embraced the sweep of history; it very consciously conjured up the agrarian hero as the focus of the democratic dream. The Colonel’s vision, on the other hand, denied history; it centered on the here and now, focusing on survival by wit and instinct in a universe that was indifferent at best. There was room enough for sentiment in the Colonel’s view but little for philosophy; Sam was perhaps less inclined to the sentimental gesture but more to the humanitarian impulse. They didn’t like each other, clearly, but their needs suited each other, at least for the time being.

  And Sam’s need for Parker and Jamboree Attractions was, if anything, greater than Parker’s need for any untested twenty-year-old. Parker was right in terms of the blunt challenge he had thrown out: Elvis Presley could get only so far with Sun Records. Sun Records could get only so far without a considerable infusion of cash to cover the signing and promotion of new talent, increased pressing costs, expanded distribution, and the wherewithal to provide some kind of breathing space. Bob Neal had 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 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 ten-day 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 protégé 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.

  THE TOUR—WITH HANK SNOW HEADLINING, 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 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. I’d never seen anyone quite like him—even as a kid he had that something about him, he just had it. I had never heard of Elvis Presley when I went out there, I 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 I first saw that David Lynch film [Blue Velvet]. I 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 he 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,” “I’m 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 personally answered every last item of fan correspondence—it 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 clean-cut-looking 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…. 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.

  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.”

  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 future, 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.

  THAT SATURDAY, 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 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.