‘It’s now or never, my love won’t wait’
Elvis Presley hit, 1960
A highly controversial study by the American taxonomist Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, was published in 1948. He and his researchers had spoken to thousands of males about their sex lives. The participants, all volunteers, had been frank and intimate. Faced with this evidence, nearly every rational reader would have reached the same conclusion: namely, men were sexually driven, lustful creatures who seized opportunities as they arose, though possibly constrained by moral or religious principles, or even the possible consequences.
Kinsey’s technique was questioned: he had only used volunteers, so how representative was this of the whole? The real picture could be different. This was true but it was doubtful if it would be substantially different. The criticisms were made by critics who wanted to invalidate his research.
The prudish American public, as a whole, did not like the conclusions and the picture it painted of society. Life magazine said it was an ‘assault on the family as a basic unit of society, a negation of moral law, and a celebration of licentiousness’. This was arguably true. Kinsey was placing no moral criticisms of his subjects and he was treating both homosexuality (then illegal) and extra-marital affairs as normal behaviour.
Maybe Kinsey didn’t need all that research. The evidence was in the popular songs of the day. People bought songs about sexual relationships which were often franker you might expect. Here are a few examples: there are many more.
Cole Porter’s ‘Let’s Do It’ (1928) compared human lovemaking to animals mating and ‘Love for Sale’ (1931) can only be about prostitution. The prospect of sex after a long time away excited Ella Fitzgerald in ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’ (a 1956 record but written in 1940): the words were written by Lorenz Hart, a repressed, depressed homosexual. Noël Coward as good as told the world he was gay in ‘Mad about the Boy’ (1932), although he passed it to a girl singer. In the 1930s George Formby was making a living out of double entendres with ‘With My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock’ and ‘With My Little Ukulele in My Hand’.
All kind of shenanigans were described in the black blues and R&B market. Leadbelly accused his friend of ‘Diggin’ My Potatoes’ (1946); Wynonie Harris had a ‘Lovin’ Machine’ (1952); and Billy Ward and his Dominoes paraded their sexual prowess in ‘Sixty Minute Man’ (1951). Clyde McPhatter fronted the Drifters on ‘Such a Night’, which became a major pop hit for Johnnie Ray in 1954. The BBC banned the record but that didn’t prevent Johnnie Ray from reaching the top.
Undeterred, Kinsey continued his research and published Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female in 1953. This was even more problematical as he pointed out the double standards in society and that women were as sexually motivated as men. The TV evangelist Billy Graham accused Kinsey of promoting immorality and one minister said that he was leading us ‘out in the fields to mingle with the cattle and become one with the beasts of the jungle.’ Wasn’t this what Cole Porter was saying with his song, ‘Let’s Do It’?
The criticism hit Kinsey where it hurt, as much of his funding was withdrawn. He died in 1956 and he has to be congratulated for bringing certain things to the fore: namely, that everybody has a sex life (no matter how repressed), that adolescents were becoming sexually aware at younger ages, that women should be more comfortable with their sexuality, and that there needed to be a greater understanding of homosexuality.
In a way, Kinsey was starting the sexual revolution, which was advanced by Gregory Pincus who pioneered the contraceptive pill which, in the early 60s, made it possible for couples to have sex without fear of pregnancy. As one deeply religious wit put it, this was The Pill’s Grim Progress. There was also Hugh Hefner with his magazine, Playboy, with its first centrefold in 1952 going to Marilyn Monroe. Its success encouraged further magazines like Penthouse and several manuals on sexuality.
In the UK, the zoologist Desmond Morris published The Naked Ape (1967) and Intimate Behaviour (1971), which confirmed much of what Kinsey was saying.
Although Elvis Presley never admitted it, his gestures, particularly his pelvic thrusts, were designed to excite teenage girls. Right from the start, it amused him and on his TV appearances in 1956, he was often close to laughter. Other performers didn’t get it quite right because they didn’t have his looks (Gene Vincent, Carl Perkins), they overdid it (Little Richard’s screams) or they looked silly (Chuck Berry’s duck walk). The best practitioners, outside of Presley, were Eddie Cochran (US) and Billy Fury (UK).
Presley was all about sexuality but the press rarely wrote about his girlfriends, so much so that the NME’s Alley Cat column made several stinging comments, all implying that he wouldn’t get married because he was gay. He was friendly with the actor Nick Adams who had worked with James Dean and it was thought that they might have been more than friends. His life was so well – shielded that the Alley Cat (usually Maurice Kinn) was even making such comments in 1965. Nobody knew about Priscilla.
When somebody has the keys to the sweet shop, they will gorge on its contents, and that is the story of Elvis Presley. Here are some of the girlfriends I know about.
In February 1954 he met 15-year-old Dixie Locke at the Rainbow Rollerdrome in Memphis. She became his steady and discussed marriage with him. She broke it off because she didn’t see him enough but she became the President of the first Elvis Presley fan club.
In what seems like a genuine interview, Elvis told David Williamson of the NME that he had only been in love once and it was with Dixie. He gave her his school ring: ‘In Tennessee a girl has to be pretty special for that.’ While Elvis was on tour, she was dating other boys and she returned his ring. This interview, dating from April 1959, does not mention Anita Wood.
1955 was a musical year. As well as the receptionist June Juanico, he dated three country singers: Anita Carter (from the second generation Carter family), Wanda Jackson and Barbara Pittman (who was on Sun).
In 1956 he dated at least three Vegas showgirls, Marilyn Evans, Kathy Gabriel and Sandy Preston, and the singer Kitty Dolan, whom he met in Vegas. Other dates included Kate Wheeler and Sharon Whiley.
When he got to Hollywood, he had no success in dating Debra Paget and in a rare public moment of self-doubt, he said, ‘I sent her flowers, I was nuts about her, but she wouldn’t even give me the time of day.’ Possibly he couldn’t believe that someone would turn him down.
Then he dated Natalie Wood, who had been in Rebel without a Cause. They became serious and Elvis took her home to meet his parents. They planned to elope to Las Vegas but Colonel Parker and Gladys Presley talked him out of it.
In 1957 it was Arlene Bradley, who claimed to have dated him for the next six years, and a Hollywood actress, Joan Bradshaw. Once again he had the hots for a Las Vegas dancer, this time Dorothy Harmony, and he tried to get her a role in the film, Hot Rod Rumble. He dated Barbara Hearn who can be seen in an audience scene in Loving You.
He dated the dancer Rita Moreno and Dolores Hart, who was in Loving You and King Creole. He called Dolores ‘whistle britches’. It is speculated that she became a nun because of her unrequited love for Elvis.
Elvis had the mother of a weekend with the famed stripper, Tempest Storm. She then beguiled Herb Jeffries (the ‘bronze buckaroo’ who recorded ‘The Devil is a Woman’), becoming his second wife in May 1959. Jeffries came with her to London in 1961 where she stripped at Paul Raymond’s Revuebar, albeit billed as ‘Elvis Presley’s girlfriend’. I wonder if Colonel Parker knew about that. I was only 16 and living in Liverpool, but if I’d been a little older, I’d have been tempted to see her out of curiosity. She was the first person to cash in on her closeness to Elvis Presley: well, maybe not if you are taking your kit off in a Soho dive. But not for long.
Paul Raymond expected his girls to go from fully clothed to completely naked in 60 seconds, but Tempest Storm had a slow act, only removing her gloves in the first minute. Raymond told her to speed up as this was not the London way. In 1967 Herb Jeffries wrote and produced the film, Mundo Depravados, for Storm, which has become a cult film.
Elvis enjoyed this world but he also felt comfortable with young girls and he liked the company of three Memphis teenagers, Gloria Mowel, Heidi Heissen and Frances Forbes, who were all 14. There was nothing sexual about this, and possibly he liked to meet young fans to see how he could appeal to that age-group.
In 1957 Elvis met the first girl he wanted to marry, 19-year-old Anita Wood, a glamorous blonde who could act and sing. Her first record was ‘Crying in the Chapel’ and there is a bootleg tape of Elvis and Anita fooling with ‘Who’s Sorry Now’. Apparently, Colonel Parker vetoed their marriage as it could harm his fan base. She married the football player, Johnny Brewer, of the Cleveland Browns.
Other girlfriends before the army included June Wilbank, Yvonne Lime, Jana Lund and Venetia Stevenson, who was to marry Don Everly.
Once he was in Germany with the army, he found time for night manoeuvres with the Russian actress Vera Tschechowa, the dancer Anjelika Zehetbauer and 16-year-old Margit Buergin, whom he called ‘Little puppy’.
There’s more to come, but we’ll stop it there for the moment as I’m sure you’ve got the picture. Elvis was a highly charged, highly experienced sexual animal, and his whole stage act was based around sex – warm, romantic ballads (‘Love Me Tender’, ‘Loving You’), lewd songs about carnality (‘One Night’) and wild, gyrating performances.
There is no doubt that Elvis enjoyed intimate relationships with glamorous females and he appears to have enjoyed foreplay more than the act itself. It was all good fun with consenting adults and there is no evidence that Elvis forced himself upon anyone.
And then Elvis met Priscilla, and here we hit the problem. She was only 14 at the time they met.
The Russian-American novelist, Vladimir Nobokov, published his most famous novel, Lolita, in 1955. It told of a professor’s passion for a 12-year-old girl and it led to the term ‘Lolita Syndrome’. Nabokov wrote the screenplay for the 1962 film directed by Stanley Kubrick, which was a tour de force for James Mason with his remarkably creepy voice. His quarry, Sue Lyon, is a 16-year-old girl, which radically and deliberately changes the nature of the story.
It is probable that the producers feared the original book was such a sensitive subject that nobody would want to see it. A cinemagoer might feel uncomfortable as he watched or if he saw someone he recognised in the audience. Even with a 16-year-old in the title role, it would be difficult for the film to find an audience.
Although there have been several high profile, historical child abuse cases in recent times, some situations were tolerated then, although it would seem unacceptable today.
The attitudes of pop stars to their fans was different. It would be a remarkable star who asked a groupie for her birth certificate. So maybe what I am recounting is symptomatic of the times and things are different today.
And not just in Britain and America. Jacques Brel wrote ‘Jackie’, a fantasy about his younger self wanting to be famous and become ‘the procurer of young girls’. Serge Gainsbourg had many suspect projects including ‘Lemon Incest’ with his daughter, Charlotte, and an album about under-age sex, Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971), with Jane Birkin.
Records often indicate the climate of the times, notably ‘Jail Bait’ by Andre Williams (1957). The lyric includes such choice lines as ‘15, 16, 17, that’s jail bait’ and ‘You’ll get one to three.’ There is a definite feeling in the song that the girl is encouraging the boy. In 1974 the lead singer of the Drifters, Johnny Moore was singing ‘Every night, I pick you up from school, ’Cause you’re my steady date’ but you can argue that Johnny Moore in his forties was playing the part of a 15-year-old boy. In 1976 the Sutherland Brothers and Quiver were extolling ‘The Arms of Mary’: ‘She took the things of boyhood, and turned them into feel good.’ And how about ‘My Sharona from the Knack in 1979? ‘Never gonna stop, give it up, such a dirty mind, I always get it up, for the touch of the younger kind.’
The most infamous example of the Lolita syndrome in the rock’n’roll era is with Jerry Lee Lewis. Jerry Lee’s career was doing fine with Sun Records as he had international hits with ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ and ‘Great Balls of Fire’, again two songs that were sexually charged.
Jerry Lee had married a preacher’s daughter, Dorothy Barton, in 1952 when he was only 16 but he left her for the club life. That same year he got Jane Mitcham pregnant and her brothers forced him to get married. It was a shotgun wedding but he was still married to Dorothy. Somehow he was able to get a divorce and before the year is out, Jane had given birth to Jerry Lee Lewis Jr.
Jerry Lee and Jane fell out over his womanising, which became excessive once he had chart hits. In 1957 he became infatuated with his second cousin, Myra Brown, the daughter of his bass player, Jay Brown. On 12 December 1957, with ‘Great Balls of Fire’ shooting up the charts, Jerry Lee married Myra in Hernando, Mississippi. It was not reported as a news story in the States.
Jay wanted to kill Jerry when he first heard about his activities but then he realised he could see the world through his talented son-in-law. He gave Myra a beating instead.
Around this time, the southern states had been amending their marriage laws to fall in with the rest of the civilised world. The age of consent was rapidly being accepted as 16 years. Mississippi was the last of the southern states to amend its law and so many couples were making their way across the state line to get married. In 1957, the legislature in Mississippi raised the minimum age for women from 12 to 15 and for men from 14 to 17 and it looks as though Jerry Lee Lewis and Myra Brown were married just before the age limit was raised.
But once again, Jerry Lee was already married – or was he? Did that second marriage count because it was bigamous? Did this new marriage count? As sure as hell, the supremely arrogant Jerry Lee Lewis couldn’t care less.
Jerry Lee came to the UK for a 37-date tour, with two shows a night for Lew and Leslie Grade with the Treniers in May 1958. This had the makings of being a great rock’n’roll tour. It was quite the family outing as Jerry Lee and Myra came with her father Jay as bass player, Jay’s wife Lois and Myra’s sister, Rusty. There was an ominous warning when the plane carrying them had to make an emergency landing in Ireland because the engine had caught fire.
A replacement plane took them to London and Jerry Lee held a press conference. Someone asked him how old Myra was. Sensing a problem, he said 15 but even that was a cause for concern. The Daily Mail then revealed the truth.
‘Age doesn’t matter back home,’ said Myra, ‘You can marry at 10 if you can find a husband.’ The story became front page news, although no one had researched the full story of that rather dodgy second marriage. Early marriage ran in the family: Jerry Lee’s sister, Frankie Jean, had been married at 12 and was now pregnant at 15.
The police came to the Westbury Hotel and examined Myra’s passport in the presence of her parents. Myra admitted she was waiting to hear from Mississippi about the legality of their marriage. Somewhat undeterred, Lois said, ‘The first my husband and I knew about this marriage was when we found the certificate in a drawer at home. If I find it is not valid, they will get married again quickly. I will insist on that.’ Probably not, as the law had changed.
Clearly not taking any advice from publicists, Jerry Lee told the media, ‘I was a bigamist at 16. My marriage to Jane was invalid. I married Dorothy when I was 14. I was just a brat and didn’t know what I was doing. She was a good girl but I left her because I was too young to get married. Then I met Jane who was as wild as the wind. I met her before my divorce from Dorothy so I married her bigamously.’
The reactions to all this could have gone either way. British mums and dads were horrified by the story and the teenage fans could have defiantly supported Jerry Lee but not a bit of it: the entire country was outraged. The Teddy Boys who had loved his records barracked his shows, shouting ‘Baby-snatcher’ when he appeared on stage, and somebody rolled a pram on stage. After three days, Jerry Lee returned home and the tour limped on for a short while with British replacements. Jerry Lee had lost an estimated £35,000.
This was an opportunity for the adults’ hatred of rock’n’roll to come to the fore. What were these Americans doing over here anyway? Questions were asked in the House of Commons, leading to this splendid exchange:
Sir Frank Medlicotte: ‘Is my Right Hon. Friend aware that great offence was caused to many people by the arrival of this man with his 13-year old bride, especially bearing in mind the difficulty that others have in obtaining permission to work here? Will he remember also that we have more than enough rock’n’roll entertainers of our own without importing them from overseas?’
Minister of Labour (Iain Macleod): ‘This was, of course, a thoroughly unpleasant case, which was ended by the cancellation of the contract and the disappearance of the man. But, at the time the matter was before my officers, it was purely a question of a permit for employment, and his case was treated under the ordinary arrangements which apply to anybody.’
Commenting on the Jerry Lee Lewis controversy in the Daily Mail and widening her criticism, Eve Perrick complained about ‘semi-literate latter day wandering minstrels, roaming the country to entertain hordes of other semi-literate minors’.
What is the solution? Perrick says that the Chancellor should impose ‘such a heavy tax on gramophone records made by unknown, under-age and untalented rock’n’rollers that their price will be too high even for the teenage market.’
What a lunatic idea. Looking at the records released around that time, you might have to pay an extra two shillings for Marty Wilde’s ‘Endless Sleep’ or the Kalin Twins’ ‘When’, but how about a discount if you bought Kathie Kay’s ‘Hillside In Scotland’? Elvis Presley was very definitely not unknown, but I would think that Eva Perrick would want to impose a super supertax on ‘Hard Headed Woman’.
She had a close ally in Leslie MacDonnell, a director for the Moss Empires circuit. He said, ‘We will ban those singers who have to make about 30 attempts of one song before the technicians have enough good material to make a single record.’ How exactly will he find how many takes Tommy Steele made of ‘Singing the Blues’ or Cliff Richard of ‘Move It’? In any event, the country’s most insecure singer was Michael Holliday, whose style was based around Bing Crosby.
The Jerry Lee scandal travelled back to the States and his career, for the moment, was over. Jack Clement, Barbara Pittman and George Klein, with a wry sense of humour, issued a cut-in single in the style of Buchanan and Goodman called ‘The Return of Jerry Lee’. There was no intention to issue it but Sam Phillips loved it and put it out. At one point, Klein asks Jerry Lee how he proposed to Myra, and Jerry Lee answers, ‘Open up a-honey, it’s your lover boy me that’s knocking.’
With irony piling upon irony, Jerry Lee had cut the title song from a teen film, High School Confidential. It was a terrific rock’n’roll record with some madcap piano playing and it was still issued as a single. It made No.21 in the US and No.12 in the UK, so some fans were still buying his records.
For a couple of years, Jerry Lee could only play small clubs dates in the southern states for reduced fees, but then he returned to the charts with a revival of Ray Charles’ ‘What’d I Say’. By then Myra was 16 and as they were portrayed as a loving couple, all was forgiven.
In 1962 Jerry Lee returned to the UK for a tour for Don Arden but a few days before the tour, Jerry and Myra’s son, Steve Allen (named after the TV host), drowned in their pool. His arrival in the UK was delayed because of the inquest and the funeral. Astonishingly, Jerry Lee did not want to cancel the tour: he had something to prove. He came to the UK and Myra followed a week later. Don Arden’s publicist, Ken Pitt, had an idea: ‘Jerry told me that she was a very religious little girl. She read the Bible every day and it was her bedtime reading. I suggested that she should be carrying that when she stepped off the plane as she would get a better reception, and of course she did.’
But Ken Pitt found that working with Jerry Lee was difficult. ‘He was just uninterested. He didn’t want to talk to anybody and he wasn’t interested in anybody else. When he sat at the piano, he would play in his own inimitable style and that was marvellous but whenever he came off the stage, he might say, ‘Hiya, how y’doing?’ to me but I don’t think he really know who I was or what my function was.’ Still, his wild, rocking performances drew huge acclaim and Jerry Lee Lewis was back.
In the mid-60s the obstinate and arrogant Jerry Lee Lewis moved over to country music and has been a successful touring attraction ever since, but the length and the quality of his performances depend very much on his mood. He has now been married seven times and has had to cope with the death of close family members. He once went to Graceland to shoot Elvis Presley and there were many violent incidents in his career, but then he does call himself ‘The Killer’.
Then there is Chuck Berry whose misdemeanours caught up with him in December 1959. He was arrested for taking a 14-year-old Native American, Janice Escalante, across the state line for immoral purposes. The girl was going to be a hooker at his club.
Chuck Berry was fined $5,000 and given a five-year sentence. It was determined subsequently that the judge had been racially biased and the sentence was reduced to three years. Chuck was able to record some songs while his appeal was being heard and one of them, wisely not released at the time, was a song about a young girl growing up, ‘Adulteen’.
From February 1962 to October 1963, he was incarcerated. Significantly, and unlike today, it never occurred to him that the public might take against him because he spent his time learning accountancy (so he could manage his own business) and writing new songs. When he asked the prison guard for an atlas, the staff thought he was planning his escape. Not so – he was writing ‘The Promised Land’, a song that Elvis would record.
The key point is that Chuck Berry was 100% correct, even more than 100% in fact. When he came out of prison, he found that he had an increased following. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other British groups were singing his songs and soon he was back recording new ones, making the charts and successfully touring the UK. If any journalist asked him about prison, he would simply say that he had never been inside.
Chuck became so skilful at his accountancy that he was able to work the system. In 1979 he went to a party at the White House just before he served four months for tax evasion.
It could be perilous to be in the spotlight. Rockabilly singer Ben Hewitt: ‘A guy in North Florida did some record hops as me and because most people didn’t know what I looked like, he got away with it. One night he drove a 14-year-old girl home. They hugged and kissed, she said no, he said yes, and he raped her. She told her parents who told the cops, and they picked up the guy and threw him in jail. This guy rang up Irving Green of Mercury Records in Chicago, saying he was me and demanding money. Irving stormed into Clyde Otis’ office and asked what kind of fool Clyde had hired. He shouted, ‘Who is this clown, Ben Hewitt?’ Clyde said, ‘You’d better ask him, he’s sitting right across the table from me.’ Had I not been in the office at that moment, I could have been named in the papers as a rapist.’
In the previous chapter, I described how Elvis and Priscilla met when she was only 14. She desperately wanted to meet him and encouraged an airman to introduce her. We don’t know what happened between them, but she continued to see him because she wanted to meet Elvis.
There seems to be an attraction to younger girls amongst the rock stars. Roy Orbison opened ‘Goodnight’ with the phrase, ‘My lovely woman child’ and recorded a song called ‘Child-woman, Woman-child’. Gary Puckett and the Union Gap performed ‘Young girl, get out of my life’ and both Steve Lawrence and Mark Wynter sang ‘Go Away Little Girl’. Neil Diamond and Cliff Richard sang ‘Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon’. There is nothing to connect them to any untoward practices but they were appealing to young audiences who loved to fantasise and hear messages like this.
Consider too the songs with 16 in them – ‘Sixteen Candles’ (Crests, 1958) and ‘Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen’ (Neil Sedaka, 1961). A British vicar wanted the Sedaka record banned, as he realised why Sedaka wanted her to be 16.
P.J. Proby, a Southern rocker based in the UK since the mid-60s, knew Presley and recorded songwriter demos for his approval. He thought there was nothing unusual about Elvis and Priscilla’s relationship and indeed, the tabloids had a field day with P.J’s young girlfriend.
Priscilla’s mother and stepfather appear to have encouraged the liaison. Even if they didn’t know of his many affairs, surely a vulnerable young girl should not be seeing a 24-year-old man who was seen as a sex god without a chaperone, and allowed to stay out until midnight.
We know that he gave her drugs and certainly had serious sex with her even if he did not go the whole way. We know from his behaviour that he knew that, at the very least, his actions could be misconstrued.
We don’t have the lowdown on most of his relationships but a couple of the girls have said that they did not have full sex with Presley. Maybe he was worried about future paternity suits, but these were the days before DNA tests, so it was easy for somebody, whether or not she had had sex with him, to make a claim if it would ensure a better life for her child.
Nobody else but Priscilla knows what happened in the bedroom but she should never have been there. We can be fairly sure that Priscilla in her autobiography, Elvis and Me (Century Hutchinson, 1985), is showing Elvis in the best possible light, but even in doing that, she is giving enough grounds for Elvis to have been arrested. She did after all write: ‘Our relationship remained chaste, though we came awfully close to consummation.’
Elvis was back and there was much speculation as to what would happen next. He was seen as a model patriot and being 25 it was never on the cards that he would continue as a rebellious, headline-grabbing rock’n’roller.
By 1960, for one reason or another, all the leading rock’n’rollers, with the exception of Fats Domino, were out of action. Although there were excellent, second-generation rock’n’rollers (Freddy Cannon, Brenda Lee, Jack Scott, Larry Williams), the fashion was for good-looking, clean-cut boys singing drippy beat-ballads. They got their breaks on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, a daily TV show broadcast live from Philadelphia. It was a mimed show with live dancers, who became celebrities in their own right. Brian Hyland recalls, ‘American Bandstand was a very important show for breaking records. The kids would get home from school at four o’clock and turn it on.’
British TV producer Jack Good: ‘We all thought that the show must be great – you know, Chuck Berry refers to it in ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’. I went to the States in 1959 and I have to tell you that American Bandstand was the most boring show I have ever seen. Terrible, terrible, terrible, and I hated Dick Clark ’cause he looked so slick and so smooth and he was selling commercials for spotty girls. I don’t think he contributed anything to rock’n’roll, but he understood a cash register.’
Many new idols came from the Tri-State area and several were of Italian extraction, owing as much to Al Martino as to Elvis Presley. Compared to 1956, it was dullsville but then New Elvis was like New Labour: the radical originality had been sanitised. After being demobbed, Elvis never shook his pelvis again, except in jest, and even recorded twist songs – the brain-dead but enjoyable dance which, for a time, upstaged rock’n’roll.
The crossover artist is Ricky Nelson: was he the last of the old rockers or the first of the new breed? Lead guitarist James Burton: ‘Ricky Nelson was at Imperial Records and he heard the bass player James Kirkland and me working with Bob Luman. The next day he sent a telegram to our house in the valley inviting us to meet his parents. He wanted us to play with him on his family TV show and we liked that as he had a real smooth voice and he let us play as we felt. That solo in ‘Hello Mary Lou’ is just what came into my mind at the time.’
In 1958 Ricky Nelson topped the US charts with ‘Poor Little Fool’, supposedly written by Sharon Sheeley but is the writing credit correct? P J Proby: ‘There was a boy of 16 who claimed that he had written ‘Poor Little Fool’ and was going to take Sharon to court, so we invited him over with his mother to dinner and there was Ricky Nelson, with Johnny and Dorsey Burnette. The boy came in and he was gob-smacked as there was his idol, Ricky Nelson, and they had a great meal. Sharon played the perfect hostess and the boy went away and dropped the lawsuit. It could have turned nasty as the Burnette brothers were heavy dudes so maybe he sensed that something might happen to him.’
Jerry Lee Lewis scathingly called 1958 to 1963 ‘the era of the Bobbys’, regarding Bobby Darin, Bobby Vinton, Bobby Vee and Bobby Rydell as interchangeable. Bobby Vee: ‘Yeah, and don’t forget Bobby Goldsboro. There was a ton of us. It’s the American name. There are more Robs or Bobs in America than anything else.’
The Bobby-sox heroes, who made their US chart debuts or consolidated their careers while the Cat was away, were white male solo singers – in other words, the opposition, what Elvis was returning to in March 1960. It was as though Pat Boone had won.
Bobby Darin, whose talents were as awesome as Elvis’ own, was the most talented of the Bobby-soxers, whether or not called Bobby. Neil Sedaka: ‘You can’t really touch Bobby Darin, he was in a class by himself. He was my idol and he had a very polished supper club act. I wanted to do that kind of cabaret act myself, and when I did the Copacabana, it went very well.’
Paul Evans: ‘I knew Bobby Darin and even before ‘Splish Splash’, I knew that he had something. Conversations would stop when he walked in a room and heads would turn in his direction. I would have bet on him becoming a big star. He thought had it all but so what, he did have it all. He was never rude and he was never so cocky that you didn’t like him.’
Mort Shuman had started writing with Doc Pomus: ‘The first song that got things rolling for us was ‘Plain Jane’, which we wrote for Bobby Darin on the newly-formed Atco label. Bobby was very much into rock’n’roll at the time but he had a lovely ballad voice and did some of our demos.’
Roger McGuinn, who later founded the Byrds: ‘Bobby Darin hired me as a backup singer to play 12-string guitar and sing harmony when he was doing some folk music. He also opened up a publishing company in the Brill Building and hired me as a songwriter. He was very driven and he was an amazing artist. He could play the drums, vibraphone, piano and guitar, and he could tap dance and do impressions too. He was always very professional, always on time with a pressed suit and shoes shined and just ready to go. In that respect, he was old school like the vaudeville artists from the 20s. I never heard him say that if he was good now, what would he be like when he was Sinatra’s age, but he was cocky, no doubt about that.’
Frankie Avalon, in reality Francis Avallone from Philadelphia, had his first hit in 1958 with ‘Dede Dinah’ and topped the US charts with ‘Venus’ in 1959. Bobby Vinton: ‘I heard ‘Venus’ on the radio and I loved it as it was such a new sound. It had a good echo and I loved the way that they used an acoustic guitar. It was a great song with a nice gimmick and I used to sing it with my band.’
Mort Shuman: ‘Pete De Angelis and Bob Marcucci from Philadelphia were going great guns with Frankie Avalon, and they came rolling into New York. They told us, ‘We’ve got this new kid called Fabian, and we would like to make him a peppermint-flavoured Elvis Presley.’ They wanted to create an anti-septic scene with a pussycat Elvis. Fabian was, and still is, a lovely guy but he was not the greatest rock’n’roll singer that ever came out. We wrote ‘I’m a Man’ and he did the best he could and it went into the Top 40. I can’t criticise it as I recorded it myself in London and I can’t believe how bad I was. Joe Brown saved it with his guitar solo.’
Doc Pomus: ‘Fabian was getting a lot of attention at record hops, but his first records hadn’t sold anything. The problem was to make records for a feller who didn’t have, in the legitimate sense, a voice. In other words, he had to practically talk the lyrics. We took a couple of songs that we had written for Presley – ‘I’m A Man’ and ‘Turn Me Loose’ – and watered them down. Presley hadn’t rejected the songs – we never even gave them to him – and Fabian got lucky with them.’ (The Presley lyrics have been recorded by Adam Faith, who, until I told him, hadn’t realised he was singing anything different from Fabian.)
Mort Shuman: ‘Turn Me Loose’ was originally written for Presley with a much stronger, harder lyric. Pete De Angelis had asked me for a song for the kid and our publisher said, ‘You’ve got this great song. I don’t think Elvis is going to do it. Why don’t you tone down the lyrics a bit, make it more teen-oriented and we’ll get Fabian to do it?’ It became a different thing for Fabian, but that’s showbiz. We went into the studio and I played piano on the session. Fabian did his best and it was enough to get by.’
Fabian was the classic pretty face and a pompadour. Lou Christie: ‘Fabe is a nice person, a very nice person, and he did appeal to a lot of people. He did have a magical quality about him. Bob Marcucci was impressed by the way he looked and it was the beginning of merchandising people.’
Bobby Vee: ‘We would all agree that Fabian was not a great singer. He typifies the American teenage idol and to a great degree, he was manufactured. Forty years on and he is a very good host of rock’n’roll shows: he knows how to talk to people and he’s a nice warm performer.’
Duane Eddy: ‘I had put my guitar down to sign autographs and I had my back turned. Some guy picked it up and carried it out of the door. Fabian saw that he had my guitar and called for the tour manager. Fabian tried to catch him but he couldn’t. The guy knew the back of the hall too well. Fabian lost him but he saved my guitar.’ So Fabian did something positive for rock’n’roll? ‘Oh, that’s unkind! ‘I’m a Man’ and ‘Tiger’ are good fun rock’n’roll records.’
Tommy Sands starred opposite Fabian (and Bing Crosby) in the 1960 film, High Time: ‘They wanted the Fabian character to be the dark lover-boy type and since I also had dark hair, they thought I would be too much competition and they dyed my hair blond. I didn’t like that at all. I had to get to make-up every morning at 4am for them to touch up my roots. They would grow out overnight and you could see the black around the edges.’
Mort Shuman: ‘‘Turn Me Loose’ was in the Top 10 around the same time as ‘A Teenager In Love’ by Dion and the Belmonts, and so Doc and I became the flavour of the month. We had been writing together for about a year and Laurie Records told us that they had this group of little Bronx hoods – old-time punks if you like. They were kids who’d steal hub-caps, just normal healthy pursuits for teenagers in the Bronx, and they were called Dion and the Belmonts. We said we would write for them and I started going ‘doowah, doowah’ and ‘A Teenager in Love’ was born. Dion and the Belmonts recorded it, which was great for us.’
Dion: ‘The teachers in my school thought I didn’t know what I wanted to do but music opened my whole world. Rock’n’roll at its best was an expression of individual freedom. There was no such thing as teenagers back then, let alone teenage music. From 13 to 19, you weren’t supposed to talk and then you became an adult and could listen to adult music. Rock music gave us our own culture.’
Doc Pomus: ‘Dion was a great, great singer and he is the most underrated singer of all-time. So many people emulate him without realising that they are copying him. The street bends in his voice are part of the hierarchy of rock’n’roll to me.’
A difference between the first rock’n’roll songs and the teen ballads is that the singer was often prepared to play the gallant loser. Ruth Batchelor who wrote for Elvis said that his management would not even consider songs where Elvis had lost to another guy. Elvis would never have sung ‘Run to Him’, a 1961 hit for Bobby Vee. Bobby appreciates the social changes: ‘That was the great American value system at the time. It wasn’t a deliberate image but it was a pulse that was going on in pop music at the time. When you look at 1950s rock’n’roll, you have the rough edges of Eddie Cochran and Ronnie Hawkins, the songs that made people say it was going to corrupt our youth and was never going to last. By the early 60s, the major studios had gotten hold of rock’n’roll and tamed it, and that was when I got involved. The songs were more socially acceptable and spoke of values that are still alive today. I don’t mind that. I liked the songs that I sang.’
So this was the brave new world for Elvis Presley. Bobby Darin was a new explosive talent and Dion had a wonderful voice, but the music of the day was blander, with teen idols with limited talent and no real commitment to what they were doing.
On Sunday 20 March 1960, Elvis went to Nashville for his first post-army session, with Steve Sholes and Chet Atkins co-producing, although the session tapes show that Elvis knew what he wanted.
Elvis was switching off from army time and tuning into Elvis time. His first session started at 8pm and went through to 5.30am. By then they had completed six songs, all of which would be released. Scotty Moore was back with him as well as Hank Garland. Bob Moore was bass, D J Fontana and Buddy Harman on drums and Floyd Cramer on piano, a Nashville A team if there ever was one.
The first song was a new Otis Blackwell song. ‘Make Me Know It’, very much in the same vein as Don’t Be Cruel’, and with an identical theme. At the time I thought Elvis was singing ‘with your head and shoulders’ in the chorus but I now know it is ‘go ahead and show it’ so the song never made sense to me.
Then he did a song that had often been on his mind – ‘Soldier Boy’, which had been recorded by the Four Fellows in 1955 and related to Korea. This was an excellent doo-wop song with a beautifully plaintive lyric from Elvis. The outtakes include Elvis whistling the tune: what a pity he didn’t complete this for a bonus track.
Then there was John Leslie McFarland’s ‘Stuck on You’, which to a degree is ‘All Shook Up, Part 2’. Uh huh. Some critics have thought it half-hearted but that is the nature of the song and it has grown on me with the years. I would say that this is the best doo-wop performance ever by an act who is not a bona fide doo-wop performer.
In 1964 Mort Shuman wrote ‘Little Children’ with John Leslie McFarland, a hit for Billy J Kramer with the Dakotas: ‘John Leslie McFarland is one of the great unknown talents. He was more than eccentric, he was mad, totally round the bend. He was a light-skinned black guy from Chicago who had no idea of right and wrong. He stole a mummy from a museum and took it on a bus. He stole a horse from a mounted policeman and took it into a cinema. He stole a plane and flew it even though he’d never flown before. How can you expect a man like that to write normal songs? We wrote ‘Little Children’ together and he wrote ‘Stuck on You’ with Aaron Schroeder, which was based on the shuffle Otis Blackwell did for ‘All shook Up’. Aaron Schroeder looked like the head of an insurance company, a really dapper businessman and is hard to imagine him writing with this totally spaced-out lunatic. He wrote one song about weeds growing in the garden of love, but how can you interest Elvis Presley in a song called ‘Weeds’?’
Fred Wise and Ben Weisman had written the bluesy ‘It Feels So Right’ and a ballad, ‘Fame and Fortune’, very much in the vein of ‘Playing for Keeps’ or ‘I’m Counting on You’.
The greatest performance and one of the best of his career was ‘A Mess of Blues’, the first song he had recorded by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. Mort Shuman: ‘‘A Mess of Blues’ was a Doc Pomus expression. Doc sometimes doesn’t give me as much credit as he should, but that’s okay and I still give him credit. ‘A Mess of Blues’ was totally Doc’s idea, you know, a mess of blues. Doc loved the word ‘mess’ and he loved the blues, so ‘Since you’ve gone, I got a mess of blues’ is a great line. It could be a mess of trouble, anything, and it’s just a great Doc Pomus expression. It was a very driving, bluesy thing and it was a return to roots for Elvis.’
Like everyone else, Doc and Mort had to surrender some of their royalties to Elvis and Doc, with great humour, used to refer to it as ‘the Elvis tax’, but Elvis was actually taking money from a disabled man as Doc was in a wheelchair.
It was a great start to his first comeback and he topped it with his first degree black belt in karate. He and his entourage took an overnight train to the Fontainebleau Hotel in Memphis for rehearsals for his appearance on Frank Sinatra’s next special for Timex, subtitled Welcome Home, Elvis.
The most obvious way for Elvis to push his new single would have been on The Ed Sullivan Show. However, Frank Sinatra’s TV ratings needed a boost and his sponsor Timex suggested that he should swallow his pride and make an offer to Colonel Parker. Presley knew that Sinatra hadn’t changed his views but both could see that such a combination made great commercial sense.
The stars had their own spots and they swapped songs with Frank singing ‘Love Me Tender’ and Elvis ‘Witchcraft’, both looking uncomfortable. Elvis contributed a line, just one line, to an ensemble piece, ‘It’s Nice to Go Travelling’.
Frank told Elvis what he has missed while he had been away, which turned out to be his Only the Lonely LP and Sammy Davis in Porgy and Bess. Peter Lawford, Joey Bishop and Nancy Sinatra contributed to the show with Nelson Riddle conducting, but the show didn’t sparkle. Someone should have filmed the backstage moment when Joey Bishop asked Elvis for his autograph and Colonel Parker demanded a dollar. Still, when the show was eventually shown on 12 May (a pointless delay), the show grabbed 40% of the audience, Frank’s highest ever rating.
During the show, Frank said, ‘Glad to see the Army hasn’t changed you, Elvis’, when it must have been obvious to everybody else that it had. When Elvis eyed 19-yearold Nancy, Frank said, ‘She’s spoken for.’ Well, I wouldn’t be too sure about that.
On 23 March, the new single was released, ‘Stuck on You’ on the A-side and ‘Fame and Fortune’ on the back. It was the first Elvis single in stereo. It sold its first million copies in a couple of days, knocked ‘Theme from A Summer Place’ from the top and stayed for four weeks, when it was replaced by an even greater record, the Everly Brothers’ ‘Cathy’s Clown’, both featuring Buddy Harman on drums.’ Fame and Fortune’ made No.17 in its own right.
RCA was so pleased with the sales of ‘Stuck on You’ that they wanted a new album. They had booked him on a late night session on 3 April and the intention was to master the tracks immediately and have a new album released as quickly as possible. It would be called Elvis is Back! They already had ‘Make Me Know It’, ‘Soldier Boy’ and ‘It Feels So Right’ and they were saving ‘A Mess of Blues’ for a single.
The same musicians were booked along with the saxophonist, Boots Randolph, best known for his ‘Yakety Sax’ instrumental, which was used on The Benny Hill Show. His contribution was especially notable on ‘Such a Night’, ‘Like a Baby’ and ‘Reconsider Baby’. The drummers, D.J. Fontana and Buddy Harman were together for ‘Such a Night’ and at the end, you can hear Elvis give a quiet but appreciative ‘Wooo!’.
Elvis added Charlie Hodge for ‘I Will Be Home Again’, written by Bennie Benjamin, the composer of ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’.
There was only guitar, bass and drums for a sensual ‘Fever’, which followed the Peggy Lee arrangement rather than Little Willie John’s original. Elvis started by saying, ‘I can’t get my bearings right but we’ve got plenty of tape.’
Elvis did two blues songs, ‘Like a Baby’ (written by Jesse Stone) and Lowell Fulson’s ‘Reconsider Baby’. There was a fierce rocker by Leiber and Stoller, ‘Dirty Dirty Feeling’ but it was emotionless, just going through the motions. Going back to the Sun writers, there was Stan Kesler’s gospel-slanted ‘Thrill of Your Love’ (with Ray Walker on bass), somewhat similar to ‘Peace in the Valley’. The one song that sounded like a novelty was ‘The Girl Next Door Went A’ Walkin’’, co-written by Thomas Wayne, a Nashville performer who had his own hit with ‘Tragedy’ in 1959: he was the brother of Luther Perkins from Johnny Cash’s band. The song had been pitched by Scotty Moore, who was working for Fernwood Studios.
‘The Girl of My Best Friend’ came from two Brill Building writers Beverly Ross and Sam Bobrick, although the UK writer Bunny Lewis claimed, I think without substance, that he had written it. It was put onto Elvis is Back! but an 18-year-old Presley soundalike, Ral Donner, covered it and took it into the US Top 20. Ral then had a million-seller with ‘You Don’t Know What You Got’ and he made numerous records in which he sounded like Elvis. He was the best of the soundalikes and he did a narration as Elvis Presley for the film, This is Elvis (1981).
That in itself showed it was a remarkable session but that wasn’t all. It also embraced ‘It’s Now or Never’, ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’ and a light rocker, ‘I Gotta Know’. What is intriguing is the versatility of it – Elvis showed that he was at his best when given a variety of styles and moods. The outtakes show that doing so many songs didn’t faze him and he was in good humour throughout.
Elvis Is Back! was a big-selling album, but it couldn’t dislodge the Kingston Trio from the top with Sold Out.
The title Elvis Is Back! was about right. He was making up for lost time with his Memphis girlfriends. Anita Wood realised that marrying Elvis was out of the question, although he gave her a diamond necklace. She recorded the plaintive singles, ‘I’ll Wait Forever’ (on Sun, released after he had left the army) and ‘Memories of You’. She spent a lot of time at Graceland and although she knew Elvis had other girlfriends, she was baffled at the love letters from 15-year-old Priscilla. ‘She’s just a girl,’ said Elvis, dismissing the whole thing.
In 1931 the director Norman Taurog won an Oscar for Skippy, based on a comic strip and starring his nephew Jackie Cooper, aged eight. To ensure that Jackie would cry on camera, he told him that he was about to kill his dog. The young boy finished the picture and although he continued to work for him, he harboured a grudge and never wanted to see him socially.
Taurog didn’t repeat his Oscar success but he made commercial films with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, Mario Lanza, and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. He was a safe pair of hands and, now in his sixties, he was hired to make a service comedy, G.I.Blues, with Elvis Presley. During the 1960s he made eight more films with Elvis and when he wasn’t working with Elvis, there was always Pat Boone and Frankie Avalon. You get the picture? This man was the leader of the bland.
G.I. Blues was a light-hearted, fictitious account of Elvis’s army life. It made out that Elvis, or Tulsa McLean as he was called, did little army work and spent most of his time partying. The truth was somewhat different. Elvis spent nearly all his time partying. I love the credits – ‘Technical Advisor, Col. Tom Parker: Military Technical Advisor, Capt. David S. Parkhurst’. Why was Capt. Parkhurst needed? Couldn’t Elvis (or Parker) have told them what was wrong? The answer is the endorsement that this film was made ‘with the full cooperation of the US Army’.
Around the same time, Ricky Nelson was starring in another demoralising picture, The Wackiest Ship in the Army, but at least that had Jack Lemmon in the main role.
Rock’n’roll came to Broadway with Bye Bye Birdie, a musical about how an egotistical rock’n’roll sensation, Conrad Birdie (Dick Gautier) is drafted, much to the annoyance of his agent (Dick Van Dyke) who cannot afford to marry his girlfriend (Chita Rivera). Dick plans to write a major hit for Birdie (‘One Last Kiss’) so that he can live off the royalties, but the big songs from the show are ‘A Lot of Livin’ to Do’ and ‘Put on a Happy Face’.
This 1960 musical was the first Broadway production to acknowledge that rock’n’roll even existed, although naturally the parents win the day. The West End production starring Marty Wilde did reasonable business, but was too American for many theatregoers.
When it was filmed in 1963, there were negotiations with Colonel Parker as the producers wanted Elvis to perform a couple of songs. Parker said the cost would be $100,000. The producers tried to talk him down. ‘Tell you what,’ said Parker, ‘We’ll flip a coin. If I lose, Elvis will do it for free and if I win, you will pay $200,000.’ The producers walked away.
The film was made with Dick Van Dyke and Janet Leigh, with Jesse Pearson playing Elvis for laughs via the narcissistic Conrad Birdie. He had one reasonable ballad, ‘One Last Kiss’ and Ann-Margret and Bobby Rydell didn’t fare much better. Ed Sullivan’s role was ominous as by the time the film was released, the Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show was only weeks away which truly said bye-bye to Birdie. Not to worry as Charles Strauss went on to write Annie.
G.I. Blues starts with Elvis showing us what he did in the tank regiment. He plays a happy-go-lucky soldier, who is transferred to Frankfurt. He is bet $300 that he can’t stay the night with the iceberg dancer at Club Europa, played by Juliet Prowse. His army buddies spy on him as they go from club to club and it’s embarrassing to watch today. Personally, I would have told the dancer that there would be $150 for both of us if she let me through the door.
Juliet Prowse was a leggy singer and dancer who had been in Can-Can. She denied an affair with Elvis, but you would, wouldn’t you, if Frank Sinatra was your fiancé? Almost certainly, this only encouraged Elvis. He enjoyed Prowse’s company as she had a supple body and favoured athletic sex, so we’re back to that contortionist.
What was happening off-screen was more exciting than what was filmed. This was the first Elvis film where the script, the score, the location and the direction were cynical and done to order. Elvis didn’t film a single frame in Germany: there were location shots and Elvis was on the Paramount lot.
Ray Walker of the Jordanaires, who all perform ‘Frankfurt Special’ in a train carriage with Elvis: ‘We saw the whole of Germany without leaving the studio. We were in a three-sided Pullman car. They had a rear projection screen behind the windows and two guys had a 20-foot pole on a rack and were shaking it to make it look as though the train was moving. Things are more sophisticated today.’
The fall in standards in Presley’s films started here and not with Blue Hawaii, which was also directed by Taurog. The title song, built around an army march, is so mundane and demoralising as it implies everything the soldiers do is pointless: ‘We’d like to be heroes but all that we do here is march.’
The score is poor, although the songs come from experienced writers – Sid Tepper and Roy Bennett, Aaron Schroeder, Fred Wise and Ben Weisman, and even Sherman Edwards, who wrote ‘Broken-Hearted Melody’ for Sarah Vaughan in 1959. Couldn’t he have given Elvis something as good as that? Certainly he could have done better than the lullaby, ‘Big Boots’, but I suppose it works – it sends you to sleep. His ‘Didja Ever’, another kids’ song, is tedious, revived once by Michael Barrymore and a children’s chorus for a Royal Variety Performance.
You get the impression that Freddie Bienstock assembled the writers one morning and said, ‘Okay, here’s the plot. Write the songs and we’ll meet for lunch. This thing’s set in Germany so take some operatic thing and add new words, making sure it’s out of copyright.’
Sid Wayne and Abnie Silver took ‘Barcarolle’ from Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffman, but they slipped up. It was still in copyright in Europe. Not to worry – they took their lyric, ‘Tonight Is So Right for Love’ and changed it to ‘Tonight’s All Right for Love’ with a new melody, this time taken from Strauss’ Tales from the Vienna Woods. Elvis sort of filmed a new version but it looks like a paste-and-scissors job to me.
Songwriter Mort Shuman: ‘There were about 25 writers under contract to Elvis’ publishing companies which went through Hill and Range. He had Elvis Presley Music for BMI and Gladys Music, which was his mother’s name, for ASCAP. The minute Elvis had a film, all these writers were put on call and started working like crazy. About a block and a half away from the Brill Building, there was Associated Recording where they made Tin Pan Alley demos. It was operating 24 hours a day and people were sending demos to artists all over America. There were usually three or four studio musicians around and if a writer could sing passably, as was my case, then he could do the vocals. Otherwise, you might use a session singer, perhaps a has-been R&B performer or someone up-andcoming. Loads of demos would be made for Elvis and then Freddy Bienstock would sort through them and take them to Elvis.’
The film had a ‘Wooden Heart’ as well as a wooden head, but that song was a No.1. Elvis’ version, partly sung in German, topped the UK charts for six weeks. It was not issued as a single in the US and Joe Dowell took his cover version to the top.
‘Wooden Heart’ was based on ‘Muss I Denn Zum Staedtele Hinaus? (Do I Really Have To Miss This Little Town?)’ and after the German bandleader Bert Kaempfert considered it right for G.I.Blues, it was given an English lyric by three American writers. Admittedly, Elvis performs the song delightfully at a puppet show with tuba and accordion accompaniment. It demonstrates that he would have been the perfect guest for The Muppet Show.
Bert Kaempfert is the only person who worked with the three greats of popular music – he produced the first records by the Beatles (‘My Bonnie’), he adapted a German folk song for Elvis Presley and wrote ‘Strangers in the Night’ for Frank Sinatra.
For a jukebox scene, Elvis recorded a new version of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, this time more akin to Carl Perkins’ arrangement, but it only leads to a fight, effectively over the old Elvis versus the new one. The actor who fights Elvis is Ken Becker who also fought him in Loving You.
His new rock song, ‘Shoppin’ Around’, written by Tepper and Bennett, never caught fire. Before recording a take, Presley said, ‘I’m gonna play rhythm on this son of a bitch.’ Perhaps the best moment in the film is when Elvis sings ‘What’s She Really Like’ without accompaniment, in the shower. He also sings ‘Pocketful of Rainbows’ to Juliet Prowse in a chair lift. He had trouble recording this track as, at the time, it was a rare excursion into falsetto.
The best song from G.I. Blues is the much neglected ‘Doin’ the Best I Can’, a poignant Pomus and Shuman ballad that could have been a single for Presley and revived by any number of singers. It is the most overlooked song in the Presley catalogue. Mort Shuman: ‘Doc and I were much into Don Robertson who was a great country writer. His output was not very large but most of his songs were spot-on, great classics like ‘I Really Don’t Want to Know’. We were in that mood when we wrote ‘Doin’ the Best I Can’ and I love Elvis’ recording. I feel that he was very much influenced by the Ink Spots when he did it. He is sounding like their lead singer.’
The reviews for G.I. Blues were reasonable and the film was a full-out international success. The New York Times commented, ‘Gone is the wiggle, the lecherous leer, the swagger, the unruly hair, the droopy eyelids and the hillbilly manner of speech.’ And that was praise, not criticism.
The Guardian said, ‘He is still apt to dredge his low notes from the bottom of the barrel. But so did the artist he is faintly beginning to represent – the young Bing.’ Really?
Monthly Film Bulletin said that ‘Juliet Prowse deserves a better role and a more mature leading man; certainly one with more genuine fire than Elvis Presley.’
If Elvis had been cruising while he made G.I. Blues, he was still serious about his musical career.
The Italian aria, ‘O Sole Mio’, which means ‘My Sunshine’ was written in 1898 and was famously recorded by Enrico Caruso in 1916. In 1949, Tony Martin recorded an English version with the title, ‘There’s No Tomorrow’. Elvis Presley was very fond of ‘O Sole Mio’, but when his publishers, Hill and Range, couldn’t reach a deal over ‘There’s No Tomorrow’, they asked four Brill Building writing teams for new lyrics. The best was by Aaron Schroeder and Wally Gold and Elvis brought Mario Lanza’s version of ‘O Sole Mio’ to the session so he knew what he had to match. For the record, Presley hits a G sharp at the end as opposed to Lanza’s high B.
Ray Walker of the Jordanaires: ‘‘It’s Now Or Never’ was Elvis’ favourite secular song and he wanted to hit those notes like Caruso or Lanza. He was proud of that.’ Neal Matthews adds, ‘‘Surrender’ was real good too as they showed off the range and the power of his voice. They were different arrangements for us too.’
‘It’s Now or Never’ was a US No.1 for five weeks, but a difference in the copyright laws between the US and UK meant that its release was delayed while a resolution was reached. The US B-side, the glorious ‘A Mess of Blues’ became a UK A-side, reaching No.2 and was coupled with ‘The Girl of My Best Friend’.
Copyright resolved, this was followed by ‘It’s Now or Never’, which was No.1 for eight weeks and became Elvis’ biggest-selling UK single. It, more than anything, marked Elvis’ change from rock’n’roll singer to adult entertainer. The UK B-side was ‘Make Me Know It’.
It was now or never for Vernon Presley and Dee Stanley too as they married in Huntsville, Alabama. Elvis was nowhere to be seen but they returned to Graceland. David Stanley: ‘I was four years old when Elvis became my stepbrother. Gladys had only been gone for a year and a half. It would be hard for anyone to accept that. But in my mother’s defence, she never tried to be Elvis’ mother, she never said I am the Queen of Graceland. Actually, my mother and Elvis had a good friendship and laughed a lot. Elvis was kind to Billy, Ricky and myself because he knew that we didn’t have a choice, and my mother was very fond of Elvis.’ However, Elvis wasn’t to approve of Dee’s plans to redecorate Graceland and she and Vernon were soon to move out but live nearby.
Of his own relationship with Elvis, David Stanley said, ‘Elvis picked me up, a four-year-old kid, and welcomed me into his family. We had holidays together and I spent summers on the backlots of movies. He taught me how to play drums and how to play football. I did get a lot of attention going to school in a pink Cadillac. I would get Elvis to sign 20 pieces of paper and I would sell them at school.’
Elvis’ new love was water-skiing and he had a new boat called Karate. His agility on water-skis was incorporated into the script for Clambake (1967).
Sam Cooke had been signed to RCA from the Keen label and like Elvis, his singles are wonderfully varied. In September 1960 he climbed to No.2 with ‘Chain Gang’, his ‘Jailhouse Rock’ as it were.
The follow-up to ‘It’s Now or Never’ in both countries was ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’. It was written in 1926 by two Tin Pan Alley songwriters, who included a narration based on Jacques’ speech from As You Like It. Several artists recorded it, notably Henry Burr, Vaughn Deleath (a female despite the name) and Al Jolson. In 1950, the song was revived by the bandleader Blue Barron with his vocalist Bobby Beers but a disc jockey, John McCormick, performed the narration.
Outside of publishing deals, ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ is the only song which Colonel Parker asked Elvis Presley to record, a request emanating from Parker’s wife. Elvis copied Jolson note for note and almost word for word. He recorded it late at night during a marathon session and put the lights out in order to increase his emotional feelings. Chet Atkins found Elvis’ working hours interfered with his day job at RCA and so he stopped producing him after this.
Despite being a transatlantic number one in 1960 (6 weeks US, 4 weeks UK), ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ was one of Elvis’s most controversial recordings as rock’n’roll fans felt he was selling out. This was nonsense as the B-side of ‘All Shook Up’, for example, was another lost love song with a narration, ‘That’s When Your Heartaches Begin’.
Dodie Stevens recorded an answer version, ‘Yes, I’m Lonesome Tonight’, but the best adjustments to the lyric came from Elvis himself who sang such variations as ‘Do you gaze at your bald head and wish you had hair?’ in concert.
Elvis’s laughing version, caught in concert in 1969, is taken by some as evidence that he was perpetually high and by others that he had a wonderful sense of humour. Elvis had simply forgotten the words, but the song title summarised Elvis’s later life and became the title of a West End play by Alan Bleasdale featuring Martin Shaw as the broken King.
The B-side was written by Paul Evans, ‘I Gotta Know’, featuring close harmony vocals with Elvis in the middle. Paul Evans: ‘To get a song to Elvis, you either had to be in New York City or Nashville. Here in New York, you would have to go to Hill and Range, a big company which controlled the music that Elvis would record. I knew the people and I played ‘I Gotta Know’ for them. I was very excited when I heard that Elvis had cut the song and I was dying for it to come out, then I got a call to go over and see them. Even though Elvis had cut the song, they didn’t know if he would release it, and so they wanted to cut it with this new kid, Fabian. I got angry and said, ‘Absolutely not’ as I didn’t want anything in the way of Elvis. I was surprised that they had asked my permission as normally, publishers would just do it. It worked out okay as the Presley record did very well for me.’
Paul had done his demo specifically for Elvis. ‘When you do demos for specific artists, you want to sound like the artist. I did try and get that kind of mumbling, closed mouth sound that Elvis had. I learnt a lot that way. Someone gave me a song for Perry Como so I had to croon the song. You didn’t know what you were going to be asked to do when you were called to do a demo.’
In the summer of 1960, Elvis Presley starred in a new western, Flaming Star. It was to be Black Star and Elvis recorded the same song but with amended lyrics as ‘Flaming Star’. As the lead song on an EP, ‘Flaming Star’ made the US Top 20. The title was an American Indian concept that once you saw the black star or the flaming star, your number was up: a bit like getting the black spot in Treasure Island. The concept also appealed to David Bowie, hence the title of his final record, ‘Black Star’ (2016).
Two songs were dropped from the film, a cheerful song about a girl in trousers, ‘Britches’ and a sweet-voiced ballad, ‘Summer Kisses, Winter Tears’, but included on the Flaming Star EP. If ‘Summer Kisses, Winter Tears’ sounds familiar, just start singing Tommy Roe’s 1963 hit, ‘The Folk Singer’.
‘Flaming Star’ would be the title song and the only other song in the final version would be the hoe-down ‘A Cane and a High-Starched Collar’, which is placed in the first five minutes to get it out of the way, as it were. After that, Elvis doesn’t sing a note – he’s too busy killing people: indeed, he kills as many people as a Clint Eastwood character. Nevertheless, my DVD copy says ‘contains mild violence’.
The film was directed by Don Siegel, who made several films with Eastwood, so possibly he was warming up. The scene where Elvis and his brother ride into town and encounter the hostile townsfolk is similar to later encounters in Italian westerns. Siegel’s previous film had been Hound-Dog Man, a coming of age film for Fabian.
Flaming Star is a western about a half-breed torn between family loyalties. It was based on a book Flaming Lance (1958) by Clair Huffaker, a male writer who dressed all day everyday as a cowboy, which was unusual even by Hollywood standards. At first the script was written by Nunnally Johnson (The Grapes of Wrath) for Marlon Brando. Brando turned it down and the producer, David Weisbart, thought it would suit Presley. He asked Siegel to rework the script with Huffaker.
Elvis refused to wear brown contact lenses so he remained a blue-eyed half-breed. He played the son of John McIntire and Dolores Del Rio, who was Mexican. The chief Indian was played by Rodolfo Acosta, another Mexican, so ethnically this film is confusing. Elvis was called Pacer which sounds like a name from Watership Down.
A British actress, Barbara Steele, was going to play Elvis’ girlfriend but she was miscast and, more to the point, towered over him. She was replaced after a couple of weeks by Barbara Eden. Eden dressed far too smartly for the film, but at least she was smaller than Elvis.
Siegel practised karate with Elvis and knew he would have no problems in fight scenes. He was however unsure about a dramatic scene where Elvis had to threaten the town’s doctor. He told Don Siegel that he could have the use of his Rolls-Royce until he felt prepared. A week or later, Elvis said, ‘I’m ready for that scene.’
Elvis convinced no one that he was half-Indian and the film was tiresome, mostly consisting of horsemen passing on messages to each other. Elvis played an unlikeable character: he fought dirty and it was inevitable that he was going to meet his own flaming star. The film impressed Andy Warhol and became the image for one of his most-famous Pop Art silkscreens, Double Elvis (1963).
The film was banned in South Africa because Elvis had an American-Indian mother in the film. The film raised valid issues about race relations but not well. The Indians were said to be savages but clearly they had a more developed sense of belonging.
Don Siegel said in 1968, ‘Presley is a very fine actor, but he’s given very little chance of being a fine actor. It’s not a question of talent. He’s in absolutely banal, stupid pictures.’ This wasn’t one of them but it’s not too far above them.
Johnny Bragg was allowed out of prison to perform with his new group, the Marigolds at a civic event in Memphis honouring Elvis Presley. The warden, no doubt thinking it funny, had them perform an a cappella ‘Jailhouse Rock’. Elvis loved it and wanted to record with them but Colonel Parker did not consider it a good career move.
While Bragg was released, he was soon back doing time again for allegedly attacking a white female over $3. He was given 10 years and his record company, Decca, dropped him for not delivering further singles. Elvis visited him and offered help, but Bragg shrugged his shoulders and said he would form another prison band. When one of The Prisonaires returned for a burglary sentence, he was delighted as he could work with him again.
Johnny Cash had left Sun Records: he felt that Sam Phillips had not given him enough attention and would not let him record a gospel album. He moved to Columbia, who let him record Hymns by Johnny Cash. It wasn’t a big seller but he had done what he wanted. Elvis felt the same way. He had made the Peace in the Valley EP and now he wanted to make a gospel LP.
In a way, his most unexpected accomplishment in 1960 went unnoticed. He released a gospel album, His Hand in Mine, and it made the US Top 20 albums, eventually selling over a million copies.
Elvis said in an interview, ‘I know practically every religious song that’s ever been written.’ As if to bear that out, the whole album was made over two days with his usual musicians, the majority of the songs being recorded in five takes or less. The most problematic was ‘He Knows Just What I Need’ with 10, so this was fast work for Elvis, presumably because he knew the songs well. At many times, he sounds like a fifth member of the Jordanaires who had released their own gospel album, Heavenly Spirit, in 1958. Some songs were familiar to British ears (‘Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho’ and ‘Swing Down Sweet Chariot’) but most had not travelled to the UK.
Elvis sang both black and white gospel songs. ‘Milky White Way’ was a hit record by the black gospel group the Trumpeters from Baltimore in 1947. The Blackwood Brothers were known for ‘Mansion Over the Hilltop’ and ‘In My Father’s House’, here recorded with a tremendously deep vocal from Ray Walker – how Elvis loved such voices.
Stuart Hamblen’s ballad, ‘Known Only to Him’, was associated with George Beverly Shea, who sang at Billy Graham’s crusades. Elvis’ vocal is magnificent and the arrangement follows the recording by the Statesmen Quartet. This is one of Elvis Presley’s best records and if RCA had wanted a religious follow-up for the surprise hit, ‘Crying in the Chapel’ in 1965, they could have gone with this.
Elvis took ‘I Believe in the Man in the Sky’ from the Statesmen’s repertoire, and their arranger and bass singer, Mosie Lister, wrote ‘His Hand in Mine’. Elvis once played Johnny Rivers their original version of ‘I Believe in the Man in the Sky’ and said, ‘Now you know where I got my style.’
‘Crying in the Chapel’ was not used on the album – perhaps it was out of keeping with the rest of the songs It had been written in 1953 by Artie Glenn from Knoxville and it was recorded by his son, Darrell. That record did well and it was covered by Rex Allen (country), June Valli (pop) and the Orioles (R&B).
In the midst of the gospel songs, Elvis recorded a new single, ‘Surrender’, which would be released in 1961. Doc Pomus: ‘‘Surrender’ was an assignment from Elvis Presley. It was the only time that he gave us an exact assignment. Following ‘It’s Now Or Never’, which was based on ‘O Sole Mio’, he wanted something based on ‘Come Back To Sorrento’. I thought ‘Sorrento’ sounded like ‘Surrender’ so it worked out very well.’
Mort Shuman: ‘My greatest kick was in writing the songs and making the demos and I didn’t care what happened to them after that. There is a point in my demo for ‘Surrender’ where it breaks and we change key with me singing, ‘Won’t you please surrender to me?’ Elvis did that exactly the way that I did it, which made me feel good. It was nice to feel that he was really listening to what we were doing.’
Ray Walker of the Jordanaires: ‘Elvis didn’t think he could make that final note on ‘tonight’. I told him to pretend to vomit and to put an ‘h’ in front of ‘tonight’ – and it worked!’
The success of the album, His Hand in Mine took Colonel Parker by surprise. Elvis was more bound for Hollywood than bound for glory, but he was back in the big-time, making successful films and having hit singles.
Had the army hurt his career? Emphatically not.
Had the army changed his career? Emphatically yes.
But this was the nature of the man himself – Elvis had a wide breadth of interests. He didn’t just want to record rock’n’roll. He wanted to work in country, pop, R&B and gospel – he had a fondness for Italian arias. By the end of 1960, he must have felt that he could do anything and go anywhere – New York, Nashville, Nazareth and Naples: he had so much to offer.
Elvis was thinking more and more about Priscilla. He wanted her in Graceland and he rang Captain Beaulieu to see if it were possible. He asked Vernon and Dee to contact the captain to say that they would let her stay at their nearby Hermitage apartment.
Priscilla came to Memphis for the Christmas holidays and Elvis collected her from the airport and showed her around Graceland. Her two-week stay was extended to a month and then in January she returned to school in Germany.
Elvis could not afford to be complacent, but he was. Unknown to Elvis, as he left Germany, the Beatles came. On 17 August 1960 they played their first show in Hamburg. The new setting transformed their music and popular music would never be the same again. They were to sing a number of Elvis’ songs – Paul sang ‘Wooden Heart’ in Germany and in German, Stuart Sutcliffe ‘Love Me Tender’, and Pete Best ‘Wild in the Country’. Their roadie, Mal Evans, always had a copy of Elvis Monthly in his pocket.
Elvis had worked hard to get back on top. As we shall see, by 1964, with mediocre films and records, he was no match for the Beatles. Shagged out would be the best way to describe it, I suppose.