CHAPTER 6
On October 2, 1954, Elvis made his first and only appearance on “The Grand Ole Opry,” the revered country radio program out of Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, where a talent manager named Colonel Tom Parker often did his booking from the free phones in the hallway. The facts of that historic performance have clouded into myth. But according to most of the witnesses, the truth is as follows: Elvis was booked on the program by Jim Denny, the “Opry” manager, after a conversation with Sam Phillips. They agreed that Elvis should perform on the 10:15 to 10:30 segment of the “Prince Albert Show,” hosted by Hank Snow.
Denny, who was almost as famous for his terrible toupee as he was for his position with the “Opry,” met with Elvis before the show. Someone—probably Denny—made the decision that Elvis’s single, “That’s All Right (Mama),” wasn’t country enough for the “Opry” audience, so Elvis offered to sing the B side, “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” even though he worried that Bill Monroe, one of the “Opry”’s Old Guard, would take offense at Elvis’s revved-up rendition of his bluegrass classic. At the time, Monroe seemed less than pleased. Later, Elvis was thrilled to learn that the stern-jawed patriarch liked it after all.
The “Opry” audience, however, was not that enthusiastic. Elvis inspired a complimentary round of applause, but there was no encore. Just what conversation Elvis had with Denny after his appearance has been the source of much debate. Legend has it that Denny, disgusted by Elvis’s wild movements and hepcat beat, told the young singer to “go back to Memphis and drive a truck.” Other witnesses, including Chet Atkins, say that Denny spoke politely with Elvis, using the deep, slow voice he’d manufactured to disguise his lifelong stutter, but didn’t make any reference to future appearances. Elvis was so heartsick, and so afraid the failure signaled the end of his career, that he cried all the way home, leaving his stage costume in a gas station bathroom when he stopped to change clothes.
MARTY LACKER: Even before the disastrous “Grand Ole Opry” audition, Sam Phillips had set up Elvis’s first “Louisiana Hayride” appearance with Pappy Covington, who was the “Hayride”’s talent booker. They agreed on a date two weeks after the “Opry” [October 16, 1954], and Sam sent Elvis’s record to Pappy, and wrote him a letter to make sure everybody understood Elvis was white. The “Hayride” was over KWKH, out of Shreveport, Louisiana, and it reached pretty much all over the South—they had 190 stations on CBS. It was sort of a junior “Grand Ole Opry,” second in prestige and broadcast coverage. But Hank Williams had started there, so it wasn’t anything to turn your nose up at. Elvis’s appearance led to all kinds of things, including becoming a regular—he was headlining after a month—and bookings on the road. When he started on the radio show, Elvis got $18 and Scotty and Bill $12 each. The tours paid better, of course, or Elvis couldn’t have quit his job at Crown Electric and Scotty and Bill couldn’t have quit their band, the Starlite Wranglers.
BILLY SMITH: When Elvis went on the road, Gene and Red went with him. That was the start of the entourage. Aunt Gladys was glad Elvis had ’em because he had those nightmares and walked in his sleep sometimes. When you say Elvis had a strong link with his mother, it’s true, boy. She had ESP about him. When he was on the road with Scotty and Bill, he had an old Cadillac, and it had a bad wheel bearing and caught fire. And Gladys sensed that. She was asleep and bolted upright. She didn’t know exactly what was wrong, but she was tuned in.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis probably took his first pills in those very early days to stay awake when he was traveling long distances. Gladys always had this obsession about her weight. So the doctor gave her diet pills—uppers. And Elvis would see those and hear about them, and he would try them.
BILLY SMITH: Elvis took No Doz back when he was traveling for “The Louisiana Hayride.” And yeah, I think he got some of his pills from Aunt Gladys. But there’s a theory that Dewey Phillips give Elvis some of his first amphetamines, or at least Benzedrine. I don’t know it for a fact, but it might have been. Dewey, at times, was real wild. On the radio, he had this country way of talking, and he’d go on this tear, sort of squawking, even while the record was playing. He’d say crazy things, like, “Get yasself a wheelbarrow load of mad hogs, run ’em through the front door, and tell ’em Phillips sentcha!” And he’d talk a mile a minute. Somebody said he was on drugs because of some old war injury. I do know he went to the VA hospital a lot to get straightened out. That Colin Escott book, Good Rockin’ Tonight, says that on the air he was “wired from his usual combination of uppers and corn liquor.” He sure sounded like it. I remember him coming around in ’57 and ’58, and even in ’56, over on Audubon Drive.
Elvis liked Dewey. He went to his funeral in ’68—one of the few funerals he went to. Marty says he stood up against the wall back where the family was and cracked jokes with one of the other guys. I can see Elvis doing that. Death made him uncomfortable.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis and Scotty and Bill were basically playing in school auditoriums and gymnasiums. Lots of country acts did that until well into the sixties. But Elvis started getting too big. Scotty couldn’t handle the music and the management and booking, too.
BILLY SMITH: They decided they needed a real manager and booking agent. And Sam Phillips got in touch with Bob Neal. Scotty let Elvis out of his contract on January 1, 1955, and Bob came on board.
LAMAR FIKE: Bob Neal was a disc jockey on WMPS, which was the biggest radio station in Memphis and one of the first Top 40 radio stations in the country. Sam knew Bob because he always wanted him to plug his records. Bob also did some promoting, and on July 30, ’54, he’d put Elvis on a country show with Slim Whitman and Billy Walker at the Overton Park Shell. And Elvis walked away with it, with “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” standing out there shaking his leg.
Later, Bob became the booking agent for the Sun Records group. He was booking everybody from Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins to Jerry Lee Lewis, after Jerry Lee came up from Louisiana in ’56. At one point in ’55, Elvis played a high school in Lubbock, Texas, and he shared the bill with Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and local boy Buddy Holly, who hadn’t put together the Crickets yet.
MARTY LACKER: I think Elvis always thought that Cash and Perkins resented him for making it as big as he did. One night in 1969 or ’70, we were sitting in the den at Graceland and Johnny Cash’s television show came on. Carl Perkins was the guest. And when Johnny introduced Carl, he said, “Here’s the guy who really should get the credit for ‘Blue Suede Shoes.’” [Perkins wrote it and also had his own record of the song out.] And Elvis really got upset. He said, “Well, that no-good, jealous son of a bitch.” And he got up and walked out.
It’s funny how Elvis’s and Johnny Cash’s lives were connected. But also not connected. In early ’55, Elvis played some dates with the Carter Family. You know how country people are. After the last one, June Carter—now June Carter Cash, Johnny’s wife—told Elvis if he was ever in Nashville to come by and see her.
So not too long after that, Elvis and Red went to Nashville for a lark. Red says they were totally broke, so sure enough, they went to June’s house. Except June wasn’t home. She was out on tour. So they just broke a window, went in, fixed themselves something to eat, and then went to sleep in the big double bed in the master bedroom.
June was married to country singer Carl Smith at the time. The next morning, Smith came home and saw the broken window and the mess in the kitchen, and headed for the bedroom. Elvis heard him coming, and when Carl opened the door, Elvis just kind of sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes and said, “Hi, Carl.” Then Red woke up and realized that he was just a lump under the covers and that Carl might think Elvis had his wife in bed and go get a shotgun. Red said he slowly peeled back the covers and stuck his face out and said, “How you doin’, Carl?” And Carl broke out in a big laugh.
Red said when they got up, Carl showed them all around the house. And when June came home that night, they all had a big supper and sat around and sang together ’til morning.
You’ve got to give Carl Smith credit for being a good sport. But then he probably knew that June wouldn’t cheat on him. And, of course, Anita Carter was the one Elvis was really interested in. Poor Elvis. Anita couldn’t have cared less about him. Not that way
LAMAR FIKE: Bob signed Elvis about the same time Elvis got signed to the “Hayride.” He’d made a couple calls to try to get Elvis on the show himself. But they’d already heard of Elvis through Slim Whitman and [talent manager] Tillman Franks. Bob set up Elvis Presley Enterprises in the Sterick Building at Madison and Third. Everything was pink and black then, from Elvis’s stage costumes to the song folios and the stationery Bob used in the office.
A couple of weeks later, Oscar Davis came out to see Elvis at the Eagle’s Nest, a little club out at Rainbow Park. Oscar was an independent promoter. He’d been Hank Williams’s manager, and he later managed Jerry Lee [Lewis]. He was no rube. He’d come out of vaudeville, and he’d worked with a lot of big stars, like Ernest Tubb and Roy Acuff. And he’d worked with Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow, largely through Tom Parker. He did “advance” work for Colonel sometimes, even though Oscar was a bigger promoter than Colonel at the time. He was top-drawer. Nicknamed “The Baron.” Oscar was the one who first mentioned this new singing sensation to Parker. Bob Neal arranged it. He wanted to get Elvis on those big package shows.
BILLY SMITH: Bob Neal was a real nice man. He just didn’t know exactly what to do. He got Elvis some good exposure, and he made him some pretty good money—like $1,500 or $2,000 a night—before he ever got famous outside of Memphis. I sometimes wonder how different things might have been if Bob had stayed Elvis’s manager. But after Elvis got going real good, Bob realized he was getting too big for him to handle. He said, “He’s growing faster than I am.” Bob always said the first time Colonel actually became involved with Elvis was in February ’55, when he helped Bob book Elvis into Carlsbad, New Mexico. But now Hank Snow says Colonel is the one who had Hank put Elvis on his segment of “The Grand Ole Opry.” So maybe Colonel was way ahead of everybody else, and they just didn’t know it.
LAMAR FIKE: Colonel was essentially a one-star manager. He didn’t have a group of stars because he didn’t think he could give them enough individual attention. He’d managed Eddy Arnold in the late forties up ’til ’51, and now he managed Hank Snow. In addition, he was an equal partner with Snow in Hank Snow Enterprises–Jamboree Attractions, which packaged tours. And now he needed somebody to open the Hank Snow Jamboree tour of ’55. So he put Elvis on. Hank was supposed to be the headliner, but it didn’t turn out that way. Elvis was the second or third act on the show. But the girls screamed so loud, Elvis had to come back onstage. Hank couldn’t even do his show. About ten dates into the tour, Hank said, “Either take Elvis off the damn show, or put him on before intermission.” Bill Black did Elvis’s merchandising, by the way. He was out there selling pictures up a storm.
MARTY LACKER: Elvis used to tell me about playing Jacksonville, Florida, in May of ’55. It was the Gator Bowl, a stadium, and he said they had 14,000 people in front of the stage. They were held back by a big chain-link fence, but the crowd got so wild that they rushed that fence and down it came. They started toward the stage, and the police tried to erect some kind of barricade, but they just kept coming. The band was getting shook. Scotty yelled, “Come on, Elvis, let’s go!” But Elvis kept right on singing. Finally, they had to grab him and pull him off the stage. They followed him into the dressing area and tore most of his clothes off. He asked for it, though. Because at the end of his act, he said, “Girls, I’ll see you all backstage.” A similar thing happened in Vancouver, in ’57. But Jacksonville was his first real riot. When he went to get in his car, it was covered with names and phone numbers. Girls had scrawled ’em with lipstick or scratched ’em in the paint with safety pins.
LAMAR FIKE: Colonel started doing business with Bob Neal, and when he saw what those contracts were bringing in, he started sabotaging Bob’s relationship with Elvis. Elvis was paying Bob Neal 15 percent and Colonel was hoping to get 25 percent. So every night, Colonel would come back and peel off, say, $100 to $250 extra.
Elvis said, “Why didn’t I get this from Bob?” And Colonel said, “Look, I’m giving this to you. This is what you should be making, and with me, you will make that.”
On August 15, 1955, Elvis signed a contract with Colonel Parker that named Colonel as “special adviser” to Elvis and Bob Neal. But when you read it, you see Colonel’s clear intent is to wrestle Elvis away from Bob, under the guise of negotiating and assisting “in any way possible the build-up of Elvis Presley as an artist.”
You know the little exchange Elvis and Colonel supposedly had when they signed one of their contracts, don’t you? Elvis, always respectful to his elders, said, “Sir, you put a lump in my throat.” And Colonel shot back, “Elvis, you put a lump in my wallet.”
BILLY SMITH: When Elvis died, Bob gave some interviews where he said he wasn’t bitter about losing Elvis. He basically just let Elvis go, partly because he was tired of the traveling. He’d been in it more for the fun than the money, and he’d just spread himself too thin. See, Bob told Elvis at the beginning, “I’ll do what I can.” Out of all of them, he’s the guy who really put himself out.
LAMAR FIKE: When Elvis came home after one of those tours with Colonel, he talked to Sam Phillips. They were riding around in Sam’s ’54 Fleetwood Cadillac, and Elvis was trying to figure out what to do. Sam said, “There are two people in this business I would trust to manage you. One of them is my brother, Jud, and the other one is Tom Parker.” Jud did a little of everything. He’d been an army chaplain, a gospel promoter, and a production assistant for Jimmy Durante. He’d worked as a front guy for Roy Acuff when he had his tent show, and he’d supposedly worked for Colonel for a spell. Jud did promotion for Sun for a while, and then Sam and Jud had a falling-out because Jud could match anybody drink for drink. In a way, Sam was telling Elvis, “I don’t know a lot about Tom Parker, and I’m not sure if I like him that well. But he could do a hell of a job for you.”
MARTY LACKER: Colonel could have just conned Bob Neal out of Elvis’s contract, but he decided to take a different tack. He saw that Elvis’s family was poor country people and easy marks. And he put on this act of being God-fearing and all, but he thought he might need more. Gladys didn’t like him at all. Colonel was a carny type, but the Presleys saw him as Big City, and they weren’t used to Big City people. Gladys asked him what church he went to, and he had to dance around that one, boy! I never knew him to go to church, and I never heard him mention God or religion, period. I don’t think he put a lot of stock in it.
Anyway, he knew that Vernon and Gladys, like most rural people, were big country music fans. So he figured he’d send Hank Snow, this big country star, down there to spend a couple of hours with them and impress them.
BILLY SMITH: Aunt Gladys was a hard person to win over. She saw what Colonel was doing by bringing Hank Snow down here. Colonel hooked Vernon so quick it was unreal. He told him he was going to get Elvis out of his “Louisiana Hayride” contract because it wasn’t enough money, even though Elvis was now getting $200 a night. And Colonel did get him out of it, but it cost ’em $10,000. Vernon saw dollar signs tumbling one after the other, and he said, “Hey! Hey! Hey! Let’s get this thing going!”
MARTY LACKER: All Vernon was looking at was the money, because he still didn’t want to work. So that’s how Colonel got Elvis’s management contract. It was a case of convincing Vernon and Gladys that “I’m going to do everything for your boy and I love him.” I don’t think Gladys ever bought it, but Vernon and Elvis overruled her.
LAMAR FIKE: The second thing Colonel did was go to Jean and Julian Aberbach. They were music publishers—smart Viennese Jews. Jean had worked in music publishing in Paris and Berlin during the days of cabaret. He came over here about 1940. He worked for Chappell Music when he first got here, and then in ’45 he and his brother Julian founded Hill and Range Music. They built it up into a major independent publisher. Had offices in sixteen countries.
Hill and Range was another way of saying country and western, although they published all styles of music, including “Frosty the Snowman” and “Arrivederci, Roma.” Through the years they had some great writers, too. Like Burt Bacharach, Hal David, and a list of guys who figure real heavy in the Elvis saga—Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Ben Weisman, and Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. In the forties and fifties, when New York publishers didn’t give a shit about country music, they handled Ernest Tubb. And they also had a joint publishing venture with Eddy Arnold and Hank Snow through Colonel Parker.
Colonel always liked Jean and Julian. And he figured with their help, he could easily get Elvis’s record contract away from Sam Phillips and Sun Records. Sam couldn’t get his distributors to pay him on time, and he owed a lot of money to Chess Records on another deal and also to his brother, Jud, as part of a buyout agreement. He just couldn’t make anything, and he owed Elvis, and probably other artists, back royalties.
In January of ’55, Sun’s liabilities were three times their assets. Sam was doing everything he could to keep out of bankruptcy. He’d already tried to sell Elvis’s contract to Paul Cohen, at Decca Records in New York, through Webb Pierce and Jim Denny. He wanted $20,000 for it, although some people say he asked considerably less. Then other folks say Decca offered $8,000 and got turned down. Either way, it didn’t fly. And it didn’t fly at Columbia or MGM or Dot, either. And Columbia supposedly offered $40,000.
When Colonel came into the picture, he went back to Decca, this time to Owen Bradley in the Nashville office. Actually, he ran into him at the dog track at Daytona Beach. Bradley coordinated Decca’s Nashville recording sessions, as assistant to Paul Cohen. He’d been a staff pianist and bandleader at WSM, and he opened the first recording studio in Nashville. He was already becoming famous, although he’d become a lot more famous producing Patsy Cline and Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn in the sixties and seventies. Owen was a country music producer, and he didn’t much like rockabilly or rock ’n’ roll. But he was interested in Elvis, because he heard he was stopping the show wherever he played. So he tried to get Decca to take him. But Decca was very conservative. Part of that was probably because Colonel wanted too much money. The price had gone up since the last offer. Colonel thought Elvis’s contract was worth $50,000. Some people say he got it.
BILLY SMITH: That’s when Colonel set up the deal with RCA. He already knew Steve Sholes [head of RCA Victor’s Nashville operations]. RCA was Hank Snow’s and Eddy Arnold’s label. Mr. Sholes had seen Elvis perform either at the Disc Jockey Convention in Nashville, or on another showcase, and he told people he hadn’t seen anything that weird in a long time. Colonel told Bob Neal there was a good chance that he was going to get a lot of money from RCA, and when he pulled it off, he’d give him a commission. That’s probably another reason Bob gave up without a fight.
MARTY LACKER: Atlantic Records had just started up as a black label with Ray Charles, Big Joe Turner, and the Drifters. And [founders] Ahmet Ertegun and his partner Jerry Wexler wanted to buy Elvis. Ertegun was passionate about black music—R & B and blues and jazz. He had an honest love for it, and he was trying to get black artists and the black sound into mainstream America.
So he had a special interest in Elvis. He thought that Elvis, unlike Bill Haley, who’d covered Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” understood what the music was all about. And that Elvis conveyed the same feeling the black artists did, that they came from the same roots. I think he saw what Sam Phillips did—that Elvis had the same insecurity as black people, that he identified with their oppression, and that it came out in his music. So he went after Elvis’s contract.
But RCA won out. Because Atlantic stopped at $25,000. They just didn’t have any more money. Then Colonel went to Jean and Julian Aberbach and said, “I need money to get Elvis on RCA.” So Elvis’s Sun contract was bought by both RCA and Hill and Range. You sometimes hear there was $50,000 in this deal altogether, but I think it was really $40,000, at least some of it against royalties. RCA gave Sam Phillips $20,000 and gave Elvis a $5,000 bonus to cover the future royalties he would have gotten from Sun. And Hill and Range came up with $15,000 for a copublishing deal on Sam Phillips’s Hi-Lo Music publishing company. And there was one important stipulation—the Aberbachs insisted on having the publishing rights to one side of every Presley single. In other words, when Elvis went to record, he had to pick from songs that they gave him. For the rest of his life.
This is where you see how shrewd Parker is. He worked a deal with Hill and Range to set up several publishing companies for Elvis under the Hill and Range umbrella. He named them “Elvis Presley Music” and “Gladys Music.” The Aberbachs would get to administer the publishing companies for the money that they put in.
The ownership of Elvis Presley Music was split up with Jean owning 25 percent, Julian owning 25 percent, and Elvis owning 50 percent. But later there were other companies—Mr. Songman Music, Aaron Music, Elvis Music, Inc., and Whitehaven Music. Colonel structured some of those for his own benefit, so there was more for him than Elvis. Colonel owned 40 percent of Mr. Songman Music, for instance, while Elvis owned only 15 percent. Then Freddy Bienstock, who worked for the Aberbachs, owned 15 percent, George Parkhill at RCA owned 15 percent, and Tom Diskin, Colonel’s right-hand man, also owned 15 percent. And that was the same for Aaron Music. So Colonel was getting money that had nothing to do with Elvis’s split and nothing to do with his merchandising and managing Elvis. The publishing royalties should not have been part of it.
In other words, he was double dipping. In fact, in some of these arrangements, everybody got at least as much or more than Elvis did. And these were people like Parkhill and Diskin, who were part of it for no reason other than Colonel wanted to reward them for being in his camp.
LAMAR FIKE: When Elvis signed with Colonel, and they put that deal together with RCA, son, it broke wide open. Steve Sholes had to personally guarantee that the advance would be made back during that first year, and boy, it was. RCA sold 12.5 million singles and 2.75 million albums during Elvis’s first year with the label. What happened was, in pop music, except for Pat Boone and Bill Haley, the business had been controlled by older singers—Tony Martin, Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Tony Bennett. Elvis kicked the door open, and for the first time, young people had their own music. Elvis was the musical counterpart to James Dean—he gave that generation a voice. Then Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee [Lewis], who had been regional acts, broke loose nationally, and the Everly Brothers, and Ricky Nelson, and Bobby Darin followed. Rock ’n’ roll was in full swing. Later, all the imitators started, the teen idols like Fabian and Bobby Rydell.
This was great for just about everybody but the folks in Nashville. Because in two years, Elvis single-handedly wiped country music off the face of the earth! The country artists couldn’t get booked. And yet Elvis was raised on it. It took country music five years to recuperate, with that countrypolitan “Nashville Sound” that Chet Atkins and Boots [Randolph] and Floyd [Cramer] came up with. Elvis separated the pop music charts and then put them all together again. He combined all these different types of music. Of course, what Elvis did to country music then, country’s doing to rock now.
MARTY LACKER: Sam always says he’s not resentful about selling Elvis’s contract. It got him out of a jam, although he finally had to sell the whole Sun label later on. The interesting thing is what happened to his relationship with Elvis. In 1969, Elvis invited him to his opening in Vegas, but that’s about the only time he saw him. I was shocked he invited him then, because of the things Elvis had been saying about Sam. He still called him “Mr. Phillips,” you know. But he really didn’t want to go back and relive that time.
In the late fifties, when people like Rockin’ Ray Smith and Jerry Lee Lewis were still at Sun, Elvis used to go over there for late-night jam sessions. Him and Jerry Lee on the piano. But once Elvis came home from the army, he never went back to see Sam again. In fact, on a couple of occasions, he said, “I don’t want to see him.”
One time, one of the music organizations put on a dinner to honor Sam. And Sam’s son, Knox, asked me if I would talk to Elvis to get him to come. Elvis was out in L.A., and I was in Memphis. I called him, and he said, “Hell, no, I don’t want to do that.” And I said, “Well, let me make a suggestion. Send a telegram saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m in Vegas doing a show.’” So he told me, have one of the guys send it from Las Vegas so it would have the Vegas postmark.
The night of the dinner, Knox asked me to read the telegram to everybody. Sam was sitting right next to the speaker’s platform, and as I got up to read the telegram, he looked at me and said sarcastically, “Why the hell isn’t Elvis here?” But Elvis certainly didn’t feel any allegiance.
LAMAR FIKE: I don’t think there’s a particular reason. Probably it’s because Sam was a drinker. Elvis didn’t like people who drank. Sam was part of Elvis’s past, and he wanted to blow it off.
MARTY LACKER: One time in the seventies, after Elvis’s Memphis Sessions, when he began to cut bad songs again after that brief blaze of glory, I was over at Sam’s recording studio. Sam said, “Where in the hell is Elvis getting these shitty songs? Why doesn’t somebody do something?” That was the only other time Sam brought up Elvis’s name to me.
LAMAR FIKE: Sam lost big with Elvis in the long run. But there were other losers, too. Oscar Davis and Hank Snow, for instance. Oscar should have had part of the action for alerting Colonel to Elvis. And Colonel absolutely screwed Hank out of his percentage because they owned Hank Snow Enterprises–Jamboree Attractions together. Colonel’s first contract with Elvis identifies the “Party of the Second Part” as “Col. Thomas A. Parker and/or Hank Snow Attractions.” Hank probably knew Colonel was a con man, but he had no idea what a sham artist he actually was. No one did, really.