January 28, 1956. I was twelve years old, which meant to my parents that they no longer needed to shell out a few bucks for a baby-sitter. They could leave me alone, perhaps even pay me to watch my brother, who was four…and was in bed asleep that week when the variety program with Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey—Stage Show—appeared on our television set.
Elvis Presley had very recently celebrated his twenty-first birthday and signed a contract with RCA Records. A disc jockey from the South, someone who looked like Buddy Holly’s even-nerdier older cousin was invited to the stage. He told the audience that we were about to experience something very special. A new singer. A fabulous talent.
Shift the camera to the first national appearance by Elvis Presley. There he stood with that guitar that made a muted sound, wearing a speckly sports coat, light tie, dark shirt and slacks. I could feel something extraordinary happening in the audience, something that I’d never felt before anywhere. Playing with him, of course, were Scotty Moore on guitar, Bill Black on bass, D.J. Fontana on drums and an off-camera pianist—the foundation of the Elvis Presley sound. They ripped into “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” a song written two years earlier by Jesse Stone (under the pen name, Charles E. Calhoun) and recorded with some success by Big Joe Turner and Bill Haley and the Comets, who released it after their hit version of “Rock Around the Clock” had all but redefined country music.
Something big was happening here. I watched this Elvis, with the guitar he used mostly as a prop and the odd, improvised body movements. I knew there was something subversive about everything he did. I was also intensely aware that he was driving girls my age and older crazy with lust. “You’re wearing those dresses,/ Sun comes shining through.” Yow! Very sexy stuff for 1956.
“Flip, Flop and Fly” followed, and then “I Got a Woman,” Ray Charles’s first hit single, inspired by a gospel barn-burner titled, “It Must Be Jesus.”
I was like a one-eyed cat, peeping in a seafood store—a raunchy sexual reference that would have meant absolutely nothing to me at age 12. But there it was. I’d seen the cookie jar for the first time, and felt the first stirrings of desire and the interior sting of libido’s unpredictable whips.
When the show ended, I turned off the TV set and pulled out my copy of “Rock Around the Clock,” a big, breakable 78 rpm slab of vinyl. I started to sing, trying out Elvis’s electric moves. A few hours later, having made no progress toward superstardom, I was asleep on the downstairs couch.
Dad woke me up. “What the hell you doin’, son?” he asked. “Why aren’t you in bed?”
I looked up, bleary-eyed, and immediately wanted to tell my father that Elvis had been in our TV room and that he was amazing, but instead, I said, “I fell asleep, Dad.” And I gathered my things and went to my own bed.
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The next day, as Dad and I drove to pick up the Sunday burgers for our family lunch, I told him about Elvis. Lo and behold, a disc jockey on LA’s KFWB announced, “Here’s a song by a guy who’s gathering fans very quickly.” And he played the first single recorded for RCA, “Heartbreak Hotel.”
Dad liked it. He loved the stand-up bass, the kind of slinky, jazzy feel to the arrangement and he even said Elvis sang rather well. This was unexpected, but it seemed to validate my discovery.
A week later, Elvis again appeared on Stage Show and, because of my enthusiasm, the whole family had gathered around the television set. “Baby Let’s Play House,” he sang. “Eeuuw!” Mom exclaimed.
“Huh?” I responded.
“Greasy hair,” she exclaimed. “Yucky! He looks like one of those motorcycle guys.”
I wasn’t all that interested in motorcycles—though the subversive hairdo held some appeal. The bottom line, though, was that Mom found Elvis intolerable. And that sealed the deal.
Elvis was the man. The one with the future riding on his back. And somehow or other, that future was mine as well as his.
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When Elvis’s first album was released, I climbed aboard my bicycle and rode about eight miles to the nearest record store, Stratton’s. I picked it up and hustled to the counter.
“Don’t buy that,” Strat advised.
“Why not?”
“Get something good,” he said. “Sinatra maybe. Crosby.”
“But this is what I want, Strat,” I countered.
“Really? Really?” He sighed as if his concerns about the future of mankind had all been thrown into a bag and lowered to his back, where they threatened to overwhelm him. “But don’t tell me I didn’t warn you,” he warned, ringing up the sale. “$2.98,” he said. “Like candy from a baby.”
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June 8, 1956. Elvis performed in Los Angeles at the Shrine Auditorium. By then, I was the Elvis-watching investigative reporter for classmates and friends. My friend Kim Headley and I, sitting at the Headley dinner table, begged to go to the concert and Kim’s father kindly offered to take us.
So there we were, the three of us, sitting through an unnervingly lengthy vaudeville show at the Shrine—with jugglers, acrobats, comedians, and a set of gospel songs by Elvis’s backup singers, the Jordanaires—and, finally, Elvis, Scotty, Bill and DJ took to the stage.
Everyone stood up. The theater erupted in screams. Elvis stepped out, jittery as a prize fighter, talking that polite drawl of his, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.” One of the girls to my right interrupted her screaming long enough to observe the following to her friend in multi-decibel shrieks, “He scratched his nose!!!”
Yes, something amazing was happening here. Like a medieval festival where, for a brief period of time, all the rules are off. You can reach out and grab a maiden’s body parts, scream out terrible obscenities, pretend you are the bishop or the pope. A complete release from the humdrum of daily life, this was the experience of a lifetime.
Elvis had come to town and the town would never be the same. Most likely Colonel Tom, the shady character who guided Elvis’s career, was somewhere in the building selling posters and programs to young nubile fans, doing everything possible to make sure that, when the girls went to bed tonight, Elvis would be the last thing on their minds.
When it was over—when Elvis had given us about 35 minutes of gyrating hips and sneering lips and, face it, brilliant country/rock/blues singing—and the last verses of “Hound Dog” hung in the dusty air like a not-quite fulfilled promise, the audience filed out of the old auditorium, itself a brazen hussy of a venue, many of them weeping uncontrollably.
I looked at Kim. Kim looked at Dr. Headley. We stood there in our stupid astonishment. “Let’s go see if we can get his autograph,” Dr. Headley suggested.
“Yeah!” we roared, and we soon stood in the nearly-empty streets that surrounded the Shrine.
“I dunno,” Kim said.
“Me neither,” I concurred.
“Look,” said Dr. Headley, pointing down the street. There, parked with its tire just over the curb, was a pink Cadillac.
“Wow,” I said.
“You don’t suppose….” Dr. Headley began.
“No, I don’t,” said his son. But we stood there anyway, for nearly a half hour, on the off chance that it was Elvis’s car and that he would soon sneak out to drive off in it.
He didn’t. So we drove home, still bubbling over with excitement. The world had changed. Life was a great deal edgier, somehow, and full of exotic and erotic possibilities. And I felt that I was well-positioned, somehow, at the cutting edge.
Kim and I liked what we were discovering. We felt as if we had a hand in the creation of a new sort of life, full of wild creativity and girls and dancing and excitement.
But we never quite made it all the way home again. A part of us remained in the cold and empty streets surrounding the Shrine, waiting for something big to happen.
And when Elvis’s second album hit the stores, Strat sighed like an exhausted steam engine. “Sure you want this?”
“Yep,” I responded enthusiastically. “That’s uh what I want.”
