What a wonderful morning. I’d just finished reviewing the galleys of my book The Threepenny Hip-Hopera, which compares the sociopolitical roots of Chuck D’s work with those of Kurt Weill’s. It serves as an excellent companion piece to my oft-studied book From Bauhaus to Compton: Sixty Years of Revolution in Western Popular Music.
Then my editor from the Times arts section e-mailed.
“We haven’t interviewed Sam Phillips in nearly two years,” he wrote. “Our readers demand roots-music coverage.”
It was the perfect research opportunity. I needed to seek verification for my still-nascent Pollack biography, to summon my remarkable powers of research, drive into that Delta dawn, and never blink at the truth. I knew that Pollack had spent part of his youth in Memphis, because I possessed this protean gem from the secret diaries he’d kept at age twelve. It was dated July 3, 1953:
I think Rocket 88 is neat/It really makes me tap my feet/They’ll be dancing in the street/When Ike Turner brings the heat.
Brilliant. But I needed more.
My wife was home because her New School seminar, Rapacious Global Corporations: Imperialist Mind Control in the So-Called Third World, didn’t meet on Thursdays.
“Honey,” I said, “I’m gonna get an apartment in Memphis for a few months. It’s for work.”
“OK,” she said.
“Are you gonna miss me, baby sugar?”
“Eh,” Ruth said. “Not really.”
“Oh,” said I.
I’ve often written, at Harper’s folio length, about Sam Phillips, spoken about him on panels, composed tribute songs to him in my mind, but I’d never had the opportunity to meet him in person. While I felt this was the insulting equivalent of Boswell never meeting Johnson, or David McCullough not meeting John Adams, I was still grateful for the assignment and the resulting paycheck.
When I encountered Phillips on a balmy Memphis night a few days later, the father of Sun Records, the grandfather of all records, really, the original benefactor of Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, stood on the front lawn of his Memphis home in his bathrobe, his longish hair and reddish beard appearing just as they had on that recent CBS Sunday Morning feature.
“Who the hell are you?” he said.
“Paul St. Pierre,” I said. “I’m here for the interview.”
He looked confused.
“Someone interviews me every day,” he said. “I can’t keep you damn people straight.”
Every room of the house was full of memorabilia from a life in rock. There were gold records, and platinum ones, and records with no color at all but black, the presence of all musical color. Lyric sheets, both framed and unframed, adorned the walls. A life-size copper statue of Roy Orbison stood in one corner, across from a wax model of Howlin’ Wolf. And everywhere, photos, of men fresh from the cotton fields, hillbillies hitchhiking into town, people recording, picking, playing, laughing, self-promoting, shouting into microphones and sitting on the laps of pretty girls. It was a house to be envied indeed, filled with haunting music from the dawn and twilight of the real America.
Without any prompting from me, Phillips began to talk, in a relaxed, folksy, intelligent drawl, about the birth of rock ’n’ roll. As he spoke, I realized that he’d channeled, in his life, an American ethos about which I’d only dreamed, or occasionally seen in movies made in the 1970s. I realized my rock archivist’s fantasy. Phillips had stood at the center of popular history. Fifty years later, he sat beside me, recounting:
“You see, the motto of my Memphis Recording Service was ‘We Record Anything, Anytime, Anywhere.’ Well, actually, the original motto was ‘Don’t Be Afraid To Record With Me Just Because I’m White,’ but nobody came in off that one, so I changed it. In any case, I opened my shop at 706 Union Avenue in 1949. I wanted to bring together what I saw going on in Memphis at the time, these black and white music scenes that had more in common than even the musicians knew. All along, my mission was to bring out of a person what was in him, to recognize that individual’s unique quality and then to find the key to unlock it. And one person, to me, embodied all the hopes and dreams I’d ever had for American music.”
“Of course,” I said.
“I’m talking,” said Sam Phillips, “about Neal Pollack.”
Pollack had come barging out of the shadows yet again, and my imagination veered into places at once horrible and hopeful.
“Pollack?” I said.
“Oh, yes,” Phillips said. “I knew him from very early on. Why, I remember—”
“Damn Neal Pollack,” I said aloud. “Damn him!”
“Neal Pollack,” Phillips said, “Neal Pollack. Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in many years.”
“But you just mentioned him.”
He slapped his forehead.
“Why, that’s right!” he said. “I did. Well, let me tell you the story about how Neal Pollack and I met.”
My notebook and tape recorder snapped to attention. He began:
“It was early fall, 1951. I’d driven up to Chicago with my dear friend Kemmons Wilson, who was getting ready to open the first Holiday Inn. I’d made the trip to squeeze some money out of Leonard Chess, that parsimonious bastard, and Kemmons was looking for investors in his enterprise. One evening, after retiring our respective alms cups, we met at a bar on Roosevelt, just west of State. It was your typical Chicago bar, tin ceiling, autographed photos of Hack Wilson and Jack Dempsey, bitter anarchists mumbling over their pamphlets at a corner table, fat-fingered city employees ogling the working girls. We sat down. I ordered a draft beer with the density of sausage. Kemmons had sour mash straight.
“Next to us was a thick-shouldered fellow who smelled like beets. I noticed him right away because he was wearing a very nice coat, and I always said you could trust a man in a nice coat. He was with a skinny little boy, maybe ten years old, with a bad haircut. That boy’s eyes radiated a clear intelligence. It’s rare that you notice that kind of perspicacity in a man of fifty, much less a child before puberty. I had to look down into my beer, the kid’s eyes were so bright. Kemmons, always the friendliest sort, started talking to this fellow about this and that and the weather. The man said his name was Vernon Pollackovitz, and the boy was his son, Norbert. The boy just gazed shyly into his ginger ale.
"‘Say, Pollackovitz sure is a funny name!’ Kemmons said.
"‘It’s German.’
"‘Hey! An immigrant! Well, I’ve always said, if an American works hard, an immigrant works twice as hard!’
"‘That is true.’
"‘What line of work are you in, anyway, Vernon?’
"‘I am employed in an executive position at a prominent rug company.’
"‘Rugs! Well, I’ve always said that rugs are a good business, because people will always need rugs. But at the same time, rugs aren’t really growing. I mean, you can’t go wrong with rugs, but they’re not moving forward, if you know what I’m saying. Now the hotel business, on the other hand…’
“At this point, I had to tune out the conversation. I’d heard Kemmons make that pitch a thousand times.
“I talked to the boy instead.
"‘Hello, Norbert,’ I said. ‘My name is Sam Phillips.’
"‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m in the fifth grade.’
"‘Well, I’m in the music business. Do you like music?’
"‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘It’s my favorite thing in the whole world. But my dad won’t let me listen to it. He says it gives people too many ideas, especially jazz.’
"‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s not very enlightened, is it?’
"‘No sir,’ said the boy, ‘especially because if you listen to black music, in my opinion, you can hear, like Walt Whitman kind of said, the real America singing.’
“Well, you could have hit me on the head with a Studebaker when that boy uttered those words. It was the most extraordinary piece of criticism I’d ever heard come out of anyone’s mouth.
"‘Where’d you get an idea like that, boy?’ I said.
"‘I dunno,’ he said, sipping his soda, ‘I just made it up, I guess.’
"‘That’s not the kind of idea a boy just makes up.’
“He looked at me, his eyes confessional.
"‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘after my parents go to sleep, I drink cough syrup and then I write secret stories.’
"‘You do?’
"‘Yes. They’re about musicians. Last night, I wrote a story about how Billie Holliday took me to an ice cream shop.’
"‘Say!’
"‘Then she overdosed on pills, so I got to have all the ice cream I wanted.’
“I sat there, near-stunned, and then I said, ‘Well, son, how’d you like to meet the real Billie Holliday, in person? I think I could make some phone calls…”
"‘Oh my goodness gee!’ said the boy.
“The thrill in his voice reminded me of myself as a cotton-picking boy with imagination.
"‘Let me tell you a story, young fellow,’ I said. ‘It takes place back in northeast Alabama, a long time ago, in the 1930s.’
"‘All the way back then?’ he said.
"‘Yes. Many, many years ago. See, we were poor, very poor, but not too poor that we didn’t have a Negro manservant. We called him Cousin Brutus. Now, Cousin Brutus was blind. He was missing one leg and one arm. Also, he was seventy-five years old, really too old to be much good around the house, but he was fine company, and a fine musician. He would rock on the porch, hold his harmonica with his one hand, tap his one foot, and sing us sad, strange songs that none of us had ever heard before. One day, Cousin Brutus sat me down on his only knee and said, “Sammy, ah’m not gone live a very long time now. I hear the Lord callin’ mah name, and I don’t see fit wah I shouldn’t answer him. But ah’m not afraid of dyin’. ’Cause I know that when I get to heaven, there are gonna be these wonderful trees, and ah’m gonna climb them. But you know what? Instead of leaves and flowers, those trees are gonna have fried eggs, and delicious Virginia ham, and big heaping bowls of biscuits and sausage gravy. And one day, Sammy, you’re gonna meet me there, and we’re gonna climb those breakfast trees together, and it’s gonna be delicious and we’re gonna be happy until the end of time.”
"‘That’s what I’m saying to you, young Norbert. One day, we’re going to climb those breakfast trees, with Cousin Brutus, and the music we love is gonna be there, and we’ll be happy. That’s what life is all about.’
"‘Gee!’ said the boy.
“Vernon turned to me and said, ‘Mr. Phillips, my son is not allowed to talk to black people.’
"‘Well, why the hell not?’
"‘They carry disease.’
"‘No, they don’t!’
"‘Please, Daddy…’ the boy begged.
"‘Son,’ said Vernon. ‘be quiet or I will lock you in the pantry when we get home.’
“I’d never heard such cruelty expressed, and you could just see the tears well up in that poor boy’s eyes. Spotting brilliance was, and always has been, my specialty. Somehow, I thought, I have to give that boy a chance to express himself through popular-music criticism.
"‘Don’t worry, son,’ I said softly. ‘We’ll figure something out. I promise.’
“Meanwhile, Kemmons had finished his pitch to Vernon, and Vernon had bit hard.
"‘Sam,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to meet my new assistant vice-president in charge of something or other.’
“Vernon put his change on the bar.
"‘Come, Norbert,’ he said. ‘We have news for your mother. We are going to move to Memphis, Tennessee.’
“I winked at the boy.
"‘Hasta luego,’ I said. ‘That’s Mexican for see you later…’”
Near 9 P.M. one night in February 1952, the Pollackovitz family first appeared inside the Memphis city limits. Vernon drove a car whose make and model have been lost in the junkyard of time, but accounts indicate that it was large and sensible enough to hold a family of three and all their vital possessions.
Young Norbert was in the backseat, fidgeting.
“I’m bored,” he said.
“Be quiet,” said Vernon.
“Darling,” said Gladys, “why don’t you read your David Copperfield?”
“I finished that before we got to Indianapolis,” he said. “And I read Dombey and Son, too.”
“A smart guy, eh?” Vernon said.
“He is my little genius,” said Gladys.
“Can we listen to the radio?” Norbert asked.
“No,” said Vernon.
“Please?”
“No.”
Norbert started to cry.
Gladys turned on the radio.
“Now, Vernie. It’s been a long drive,” she said. “And he’s been such a good boy. Let him listen to the radio for just a little while.”
“Dee-gaw!” the radio shrieked.
“Ach!” Vernon said.
“Dee-gaw! Broadcasting from right downtown Memphis from the magazine—I mean mezzanine—floor of the Chisca Hotel, this is the Dew with Red Hot and Blue. Dee-gaw-a-roonie! Wuzzat? Wuzzat? I hear a Martian talking into my ear. You better talk louder, Martian, because old Dewey’s gone deaf! Hello, Mr. Dewey Phillips, the people of Mars would like to tell you that this broadcast is being brought to you by Falstaff Beer. If you can’t drink beer, eat it with a fork or put it in your stew. Pour it right through the hole in your neck, just like they do on Mars!”
“What the hell is this?” Vernon said.
In the backseat, Norbert was giggling like he’d never giggled.
“Now here’s one from Coogie Mitchell, for all those people down at Lansky’s Department Store. A little bitty number called ‘Big Pair of Jugs.’ Dee-gaw!”
From the radio came a raw and dirty song. Norbert Pollackovitz listened, gape-mouthed, as the horns, guitar, piano, and call-and-response double entendre chorus swept across his brain like a street-cleaning machine at dawn.
Now, I love my little baby
Love to give her special hugs
But nothin’ says I love you
Like a whopping pair of jugs.
My mama always said to me,
Son you can buy them drugs
But nothing makes a lady scream
Like the special gift of jugs
So if you’re buying poodles
Or if you’re buying pugs
Remember you can trade them in
And give your woman jugs.
It’s a big pair of jugs
It’s a big pair of jugs
It’s a big pair of jugs
It’s a big pair of jugs
Yes, you can buy a picture frame
For framing both your mugs
But your woman’s gonna scream your name
For a big old pair of jugs.
“Oh, dear god!” Vernon said.
He turned off the radio.
“Darn it!” Norbert said.
“Shut your mouth,” Vernon said. “That music is poison.”
Vernon had long ago lost the battle for his son’s soul, but now the music had distracted him as well, and they were lost. The car was moving down Fourth Street. Vernon turned left the first chance he could.
Beale.
“Oh my goodness gee!” said the boy.
He rolled down his window to behold an establishment of sorts. Its sign read: “RESTAURANT—DANCE HALL—CRAP HOUSE—WE NEVER CLOSE.” Next door, another said “DINER—BOARDING HOUSE—BURLESQUE—NOTARY PUBLIC.” For blocks along the sidewalk, in front of many other store-fronts of similar repute, men and women played craps, dealt cards, beat on each other, ate hot dogs, laughed, danced, spat, jumped up and down, and kissed in public.
“Zoot suits!” shouted a tall, bearded black man, who was wearing a zoot suit and holding a sign that read “ZOOT SUITS $25.” “Get your zoot suits here!”
There were all kinds of people. Field hands still covered in the day’s mud abutted the dandiest swells. Gawking teenagers and eye-patched pimps, bookies and sharps and lawyers and aldermen and prostitutes and soda-foundation clerks and secretaries, the wise and the naïve, the penny cowboys and dime-store Indians, everyone was welcome on Beale Street, even German Jewish immigrants in stolid cars. You went down to Beale, and you were part of the show.
Across the street, in W.C. Handy Park, a man in a porkpie hat played a mournful blues that Norbert knew well…
Woke up this morning, with the grease up on my pole
Yeah I woke up this morning, you were greasing up my pole
Baby climb aboard my chassis
We can do the rock and roll…
“Sing it, Clambone!” shouted a woman, nearly falling out of her red velvet blouse.
“You know ah will, you sexy bitch!” said the man.
“Rock and roll,” the boy repeated to himself. His soul awakened. In his short pants, he felt the bulbous stirrings of his first erection.
Vernon was nearly choking with panic.
“Close the damn window! This Memphis is crawling with schvartzers! I can’t believe white people are going anywhere near them!”
“Oh, Vernon,” Gladys said. “Don’t be ignorant.”
Vernon slammed the car into park. He raised his hand, and slapped Gladys hard across the jaw.
“Well,” said Gladys, “that’s a fine welcome to our new home.”
Years later, an adult Neal Pollack wrote, in Crawdaddy, of that day:
Well, hellbroth and damnation, oh, mama, could that really have been the beginning, if my little eleven-year-old rod had the power it would have ripped right through my slacks, because I saw it, the music, and don’t you tell me that Gene Vincent was the leader of any pack because Memphis was it before I saw Elvis or Jerry Lee or Warren Smith, before I met the Prisonaires before I had even heard of acetate, when cough syrup was the only thing I was on, and I grabbed my daddy hard around the neck, and I pulled and tugged and said, “don’t you fucking touch her, you fucking bastard!” and outside the Black Boy played an electric blues and I never needed “Hound Dog” or some “Love Me Tender” shit because I was there at the source. I had no time for adolescent rebellion or that Blackboard Jungle greaser imitative second-tier crap because when you’re live from the phonograph department at W. T. Grant’s in downtown Memphis, when Saturday night is Willie Mitchell and the Four Kings at the Arkansas Plantation Inn, you realize that rock-and-roll is not born, and it does not die. I see the continuum with my own two eyes, suckers, and when my dearest daddy smacked me with a closed fist in that car and my mother scratched at him with her sharp lacquered nails and he bled from the cheek and someone tried to sell him a fifty-cent chicken pie through the window and he said “fuck your nigger food,” and smashed it back in that man’s face, well, then, it wasn’t much of a choice between my family and the blues. It was one and the same. I was in Memphis, boy.
On that day, as his father bled and his mother sobbed in that car on Beale Street, the boy said, “This is the Southern dream of freedom. Where black and white play music together.”
“What are you talking about?” Vernon said.
“I see things in my mind,” said the boy.
“You are an idiot and insane.”
“No, Vernon!” Gladys cried. “Can’t you see how brilliant he is?”
The family moved into a two-story, three-bedroom Victorian on Alabama Street, which Gladys decorated in dark wood, brass and mostly imitation velvet. She needed a comfortable home, because she could not think of a more repulsive place than Memphis, Tennessee; you were sopping wet as soon as you stepped outside. There were no Jews to speak of, no opera, no activities at all for a woman of refinement, particularly one so refined as she. Better to stay inside and not be infected by the vermin and their vulgar mass culture. Vernon, meanwhile, happily drove the South looking for men like him, joiners with the desire to work for a company on the rise. “Imagine staying at a hotel wherever you go,” he’d say, “and every room the same! It is the future!”
They enrolled young Norbert at Henry Clay Junior High. The boy was tan and skinny, quiet, and a mediocre student. Most class hours, he drew cartoons of ghostly men playing the blues, of a breakfast tree in the sky, of a better world that he’d seen in short anecdotal snippets throughout his life. On his way to and from school every day, he’d hear strains of music, from houses or passing cars, and his little heart longed for something different.
I wish I were black, Norbert thought. Then all my troubles would be over.
One afternoon in October 1952, Vernon returned from a business trip to Macon, Georgia. It was already close to dinnertime, and he was hungry. Vernon said, “Norbert, I want you to run over to that butcher at 704 Union Street. Get me some pig’s knuckles. Be a good boy. Don’t stop anywhere else.”
Gladys slipped Norbert an extra quarter.
“Buy yourself something nice,” she said.
Oh boy, Norbert thought. Now he could afford the latest issue of Weird Tales of Batman.
But he never got to the comic store. Because next to the butcher shop, at 706 Union, was the Memphis Recording Service, soon to be the home of Sun Records. In the doorway, Sam Phillips stood.
“Hello, Mr. Phillips,” said Norbert.
Phillips grinned, like in his archival photographs.
“Well, young Norbert,” he said. “Are you ready to hear some music?”
“Oh my goodness gee,” said the boy.
As his parents listened politely, Norbert ran around the living room in circles, frenzied and happy.
“And then he showed me his Presto five-input portable mixer board and its PT 900 companion piece, and then he let me play with his collection of Crestwood tape recorders, and then we used his Presto 6-N lathe to cut acetates, and then he let me help him mount an Ampex recorder in a rack behind his head so he could create a slapback bass echo, and then, and then, oh boy oh boy oh boy!”
He collapsed on the rug, humming to himself.
“Were there any black people there?” Vernon said.
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not. Anyway, they weren’t there very long.”
“How many?”
“Only four.”
Vernon took a puff from his pipe, folded his newspaper in his lap, sipped his tea, crossed and uncrossed his legs, ran a hand through his thinning hair, and performed several other gestures that indicated he was about to speak.
“Norbert,” he said, “Mr. Phillips is a foolish and frivolous man. I forbid you from ever seeing him again.”
Norbert stood up. He was twelve years old and growing, still no match for his father physically. But he did possess a mighty pair of lungs and a gift for language.
“FUCK YOU, MOTHERFUCKER!” he said. “I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU!”
Vernon shot from the chair and smacked his son hard three times in the gut, and once in the small of the back. The boy dropped, gasping. An archipelago of bruises took shape in his midsection.
“Never defy me,” Vernon said.
Gladys jumped on Vernon’s back and clawed at his eyes. A shriek emerged from her prim throat: “Leave him alone! You common monster!”
His parents slapped and scratched and wrestled on the ground. Norbert crawled down the hall, sobbing. It was the same scene every night, with little variation, but he could no longer look upon their battles uncritically. Tonight he realized, for the first time, that his parents didn’t have a good marriage.
As it did every night, the mad, bloody scrum gradually turned passionate. Vernon pinned Gladys by the shoulders and kissed her, full and hard, smearing her mouth into a mush. She slid her knee into his groin, and he began to grind. He tore at her blouse with one hand and plunged his other below her skirt.
Norbert stared sadly. Vernon saw him.
“Do not watch us,” he said.
Norbert went to his room, curled into a fetal position on his bed, and read the latest issue of True Boy Detective Digest.
Minutes later, Vernon and Gladys finished their death tango of love.
As they lay gasping, Vernon said, “That boy will never be involved in the music business. Not as long as I am alive.”
The next afternoon, an awkward, shy teenager appeared at the front door. He slouched with a hangdog sneer. His eyes were cloudy with adolescent confusion and dreams of stardom.
“Flour,” he said.
“I can’t understand you, son,” Gladys said. “Stop mumbling.”
“Um um flour.”
The kid had a look and an attitude that impressed her, even if she didn’t immediately realize how or why. She felt a stirring below, in her private heart, but she later attributed it to the fact that she’d just finished rereading The Sorrows of Young Werther in the original German. Goethe always got her going.
“You want to borrow some flour?” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Momma’s fryin’ up some okra.”
“Do you live next door?” Gladys said, hopefully.
“Um yeah.”
“What’s your name?”
The young man shuffled his feet, shook his greasy head once or twice, and leaned toward Gladys sweetly.
“My name is Elvis, ma’am,” he said with perfect clarity. “Elvis Presley.”
The stirring below became a flood.
“Norbert!” Gladys said.
In his room, Norbert was reading the latest Haunted Soldier comic.
“What?”
“Come here and meet the new neighbor!”
Norbert shuffled to the front room, where he beheld Elvis.
“Hey,” Elvis said.
“Hey,” said Norbert.
Gladys crossed her legs and squirmed.
“Why don’t you go over to Elvis’s house for a while? Momma has some work to do around here.”
“But he’s too old for me to play with,” Norbert said.
“JUST GO!” she said.
“OK,” he said.
“But…” Elvis said.
Gladys looked at Elvis with a longing and lust that he would soon experience hourly, but had not yet seen until that day.
“Take him,” she moaned, “before I do something sinful.”
“Yes ma’am,” Elvis said.
Next door, inside 462 Alabama Street, a large and merry woman was puttering in the kitchen.
“This is my momma, Gladys,” Elvis said. “Momma, this is Norbert.”
“My momma’s also named Gladys,” Norbert said.
“Well, isn’t that something!” Gladys Presley said.
“She’s not as happy as you, though.”
They went upstairs to Elvis’s bedroom. Norbert found it deadly dull. Elvis didn’t have any comic books or baseball cards or posters of Jennifer Jones, all the things that made life worth living.
“You go to Clay?” Elvis asked.
“Yeah.”
“I’m graduating from Humes in two weeks. Then I’m going to work at M. B. Parker’s Machinists’ Shop.”
Norbert was so bored that he contemplated suicide.
“But what I really wanna do is play guitar.”
“Really?” Norbert said.
“Yeah,” said Elvis.
“Are you inspired by the music in the air in Memphis?”
“I dunno,” said Elvis.
“Do you feel the soul of the South traveling up the delta, settling in the place where modernity meets the old, weird America?”
“What?”
“Can you play me a song?”
“Well, sure,” Elvis said.
He got his guitar out of the closet.
“This here’s one I’ve been working on that I heard on Dewey Phillips’s show.”
“Dee-gaw!” said Norbert.
Elvis sat on the end of his bed and sang, You ain’t nothin’ but a Bear Cat/Scratchin’ at my door…
The future Neal Pollack heard something that day, which he later described in his unpublished book of prose poetry, Elvis, Elvis, as “Elvis, pure Elvis.”
“Elvis,” he said, “there’s somewhere I must take you.”
“Huh?” Elvis said.
On a Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1953, Elvis and the future Neal Pollack walked into the Memphis Recording Service. That day, as his many chroniclers have chronicled, Elvis recorded two popular ballads: “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin.” Neither of them was very good. Sam Phillips sat behind the mixer board, filing his nails and drinking a soda.
“Well, this is simply not interesting,” he said.
“I disagree,” said Norbert. “That boy has something inside him, a fullness of spirit that barely begins to reveal his true intentions.”
Phillips sighed.
“Norbert,” he said, “if I could find a black man who criticized music as well as you, I’d make a million dollars.”
“Gee!” said the boy.
Elvis was done.
“That’s the end,” he said.
“Well, we might give you a call sometime,” said Sam Phillips.
What happened next had been lost in time except for an account in the Memphis Commercial Shopper’s Gazette, a small newspaper that the young Neal Pollack published himself but never showed to anyone.
“We got one more song,” Elvis said.
“We?” said Sam Phillips.
“Me and the boy. He wrote these lyrics that I like.”
“Well, I’ve got nothing else to do today except promote about a dozen records,” Phillips said. “Let’s get this over with.”
The boy went into the booth with Elvis. Sam Phillips took a deep, meditative breath, which he always needed during recording sessions so he could channel the true sound of music being born.
“Let’s begin,” he said.
Elvis strummed his guitar, tentatively at first. But as the lyrics took hold, he took control of his material, and then he plunged toward the piano, and played that, too. His dumb gawk became a confident swagger. They sang the first song that Neal Pollack had ever written, an up-tempo number called “Come on Over Tonight”:
Well, a whoppa whoppa woo
I got the boogie in my shoes
Well, a whoppa whoppa wee
I got a shakin’ in my knees
So come on
Come on over tonight!
Come on over tonight
If you have to drive a car,
If you have to take a flight
If you haven’t got a cigarette,
I haven’t got a light,
So come on
Come on over tonight!
The song went on for a couple of verses. When they finished, Sam Phillips said to Elvis, “Son, I think we might be able to work together.”
“What about me?” said Norbert.
Sam Phillips laughed, and so did Elvis.
“You’d better stick to criticism,” Phillips said. “There’s no room in the music business for songwriters who can’t sing.”
Norbert thought that someday he’d meet someone who couldn’t sing. That person would then become famous. He’d prove the founder of Sun Records wrong.
Such a god might walk the earth even now. But where could the boy find this tuneless wonder?
Where?
On June 20, 1954, as he did every morning, Vernon Pollackovitz woke at 6 A.M. did fifteen minutes of vigorous calisthenics, smoked a cigarette, gargled with salt water, took a shower, read a couple pages of Norman Vincent Peale, ate a boiled egg with a slice of country ham and sourdough toast, went to the toilet, where he surreptitiously looked at a Betty Page flipbook, and put on a natty gray suit and a stylish Kangol hat. He wore comfortable shoes, because he walked the five miles to and from work just about every day.
“Cars make people lazy,” he said.
Gladys liked to look out the window because she wanted to know the exact daily moment when she’d be free. On this day, she saw Vernon stroll down the sidewalk, whistling “And the Caissons Go Rolling Along.” She also saw Elvis Presley in his Crown Electric service truck, windows closed, singing along to some unknown boogie-woogie. The truck backed down the driveway and ran Vernon over.
Elvis shouted, “Oh, my god, Mama!”
Gladys Pollackovitz rushed from the house. Her husband’s brains dribbled into the gutter.
Norbert ran out after her.
“He’s dead!” Gladys said.
Oh thank god, Norbert thought.
“I wasn’t looking,” Elvis said. “Oh, mercy!”
Gladys acted with wit and speed.
“Norbert, Elvis, grab his legs,” she said.
“Huh?” Elvis said.
“Drag him into our driveway,” she said.
They were too shocked to do anything else. Gladys ran into the garage, started the car, and drove it down the driveway over her now lifeless husband, taking care not to flatten him with the tires. She got out of the car. With a screwdriver, she punched a hole in the oil pan. Thick black goo gushed over Vernon’s mangled corpse.
“Holy shit,” Norbert said.
Gladys said: “Here’s the story. Vernon was working on an oil leak, the parking brake slipped, and the car ran him over. I’m going to tell the police that I saw the whole thing from the kitchen window, but nobody else did. Elvis is not going to jail. Not for accidentally killing that bastard.”
“God bless you,” said Elvis. “But what do we do about the brains on my curb?”
“Norbert,” said his mother, “go start the hose.”
“Wait,” Elvis said. “Why would he wear a suit to work on the car?”
“And bring me a garbage bag!”
Vernon Pollackovitz’s funeral, held a week later, was attended by his wife, his son, the Presley family, Kemmons Wilson, twenty-seven employees of the Holiday Inn company, and two traveling rug salesmen based in the South. Everyone was late for the service except Gladys and Norbert, neither of whom wore black. The rabbi read the eulogy, which Gladys had written: “He was a prompt man, and in above-average physical shape. His work made him happy, much happier than his family, who he often called ‘his greatest disappointment in life.’ He thought his son was gay, or at least mentally lame, and he could only sexually please his wife if she worked him into a homicidal frenzy. Music was his enemy, everything he ate seemed to be covered with a gelatinous layer of fat, and his farts smelled like death. But he did own several life-insurance policies, and has left his son Norbert with a substantial fortune that the boy could never possibly squander.”
Afterward, as the funeral party enjoyed a delicious dinner at a riverfront seafood house, Gladys Presley said to Gladys Pollackovitz, “How can I possibly repay you for saving my son from jail?”
“I can think of one small favor,” Gladys said.
Norbert got to plan his own Bar Mitzvah party. He invited all of Memphis through separate ads in black-and white-owned newspapers. Gladys set no restrictions on money, so Norbert rented out the Eagle’s Nest. He hired Earl’s Drive-In to do the catering, with an all-ages open bar. Through Sam Phillips, he signed Dewey Phillips to play records between acts. Little Milton did an opening set, and James Cotton stopped by to play “Cotton Crop Blues.” Everyone was drunk within fifteen minutes.
At 10 P.M. on September 10, 1954, Elvis, Scotty, and Bill took the stage. The girls rushed the band, desperate pilgrims seeking baptism. They screamed and cried like harpies on the mount, swaying rapturously, their ponytails loosening in unholy surrender. As they pressed their rippling breasts against the pounding stage, they felt rock ’n’ roll slathering their dawn-thighs, and they were women born. The men felt the empty pit of jealousy down in a primal place, a slow grind of envy that could only emerge in a Cro-Magnon shout toward the musicians who’d upended their cheap and easy scores. Something was happening in America, but no one knew exactly what.
Elvis sang “That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” then he sang them again. At that point in his career, he didn’t know too many songs. Sam Phillips was by the stage, recording everything, nodding sagely, knowingly.
“Ah wanna call the Bar Mitzvah boy onto the stage,” Elvis said. “Where is that Norbert Pollackovitz?”
“Norbert, Norbert!” all of Memphis said.
Norbert went up on stage.
“How you doin’, little man?” said Elvis.
“I’m wasted!” said Norbert.
“Man, we gotta get you a new name.”
“OK. I hate my name anyway.”
“How about Pollack? That’s shorter.”
“OK.”
“Nick Pollack?”
“Too many k’s.”
“Ned Pollack?”
“Naw.”
“Well then,” said Elvis, “I’m just gonna have to call you Neal Pollack.”
Sam Phillips felt a familiar tear on his cheek.
“Neal Pollack,” he said. “What a beautiful, beautiful name.”
That night, Elvis anointed Neal Pollack. His band played a familiar song that became somehow unfamiliar and then familiar again after a while. It was “Hava Nagila.”
The crowd lifted Neal Pollack onto a chair, and Gladys onto another. They bobbed about the room. Gladys was drunk for the first time in her life, and it felt damn good. She whooped and ripped open her blouse. Three men simultaneously kissed her breasts.
“Mein Gott!” she said. “I feel alive!”
Dewey Phillips threw himself onto the stage.
“Neal Pollack!” he said. “Today you are a man!”
Pollack dropped out of high school and got on the bus with Elvis, Scotty, and Bill, riding that Mystery Train over the Blue Moon of Kentucky, on assignment for a little mimeographed magazine called Hillbilly Hot Rag! He followed that Hank Snow package tour through New Mexico and Mississippi, to the Grand Ole Opry, sneaking a peek at Mother Maybelle in the altogether, pinching the Carter Sisters’ collective Carter ass, and then up to Cleveland, where he met Alan Freed, another one just like him. “Let me tell you, Neal,” Freed said. “Jews who love rock ’n’ roll are born to run this country!” They listened to Jimmie Rodgers and Fats Domino all across Texas, Elvis blowing flies off his lips, Scotty and Bill becoming progressively less famous, Neal chugging the cough syrup, staring bug-eyed out the window, singing “Baby, Let’s Play House” as they steamed into New Orleans and Jacksonville and all roads leading to stardom.
On stage one night in Texarkana, late summer 1955, a girl appeared in a ruffled blue dress, guitar slung across her chest, her mouth wider than the American highway, her skin perfect, her eyes full of hellfire. Neal Pollack watched her move her hips and he fell in love. She saw him from the stage.
“There’s a boy I can use,” she said to herself.
Soon, Neal Pollack found himself mending Wanda Jackson’s dresses on the bus while Wanda played for hundreds. She was a pitcher of delicious sugary cream. She was his bad, bad girl, and he was her good little boy.
“I love you, Wanda,” he said one night as they lay beneath the stars because they couldn’t afford a hotel.
“I know you do, baby,” she said. “Could you pass me the bourbon?”
He did, and she slugged it. Then she kissed his little face, which he was shaving nearly every day now. Her tongue wandered to unforeseen places. Neal Pollack tasted the sour mash that to him would always mean love.
“God have mercy, Wanda Jackson!” he said. “You are my forever!”
One morning in early December 1956, Neal came home. Wanda had gone to visit her uncle in New York City, leaving him with a bunch of her clothes to take to the cleaners.
“You have an uncle in New York City?” Pollack had said.
“Honey,” she’d said, “I have an uncle in every city.”
Neal opened the front door and beheld ruin. His mother’s velvet curtains were torn and stained. Stuffing billowed from the couches. The kitchen teemed with dirty dishes and piles of festering rat turds. Paint peeled off the walls in long lacquered sheets. A great, horrific, if somewhat metaphorical beast lurked in the dark hallways, breathing hateful fire from its blazing nostrils. The house stank of death and sex.
In the foyer, Gladys lay naked, surrounded by candles. A sandy-haired drunk was fucking her wild, pounding her against the floor.
“Yeeeeeeeee-hooooooooo!” he said.
“Mom,” Pollack said, “what the hell are you doing?”
“Hello, honey,” said Gladys, between moans. “Meet your new daddy, Jerry Lee Lewis.”
“Jesus Christ!” Pollack said.
Jerry Lee dismounted. He extended a hand.
“Hello, kid,” he said.
“Fuck you,” said Pollack.
Jerry Lee pounded him on the jaw.
“Don’t talk to your daddy that way,” he said.
Pollack pounded him back.
“I’m not your son,” he said.
“Like hell you ain’t,” he said. “I married your mother one month ago today!”
Pollack looked at Gladys, who shrugged through a daze of pills.
“I was lonely,” she said.
Jerry Lee hitched up his pants.
“I like your spirit, son,” he said to Neal. “Have some whiskey.”
“Nah,” said Pollack. “Too early.”
To Gladys, Jerry Lee said, “Your men are hungry. Put on some damn clothes and make us some eggs!”
She jumped on his back and bit his ear.
“Arrrrrrgh!” he said.
“Make your own eggs!” she said.
“I’ll take some of that whiskey now,” Pollack said.
Later that day, after Gladys had passed out, the Killer and Pollack drove over to Sun, where Jerry Lee was booked to play piano for a Carl Perkins session. On the way, they hit a pedestrian, and didn’t stop.
“He could be hurt,” Pollack said.
“Who cares?” said Jerry Lee.
“I’ve gotta take Wanda’s clothes to the cleaners.”
“Kid,” said Jerry Lee, “that woman is making a woman of you.”
“But I love her!”
Jerry Lee busted Pollack in the chops with a full bottle of gin.
“Ow!” Pollack said.
“Love is for weaklings!” Jerry Lee said. “And you’re the weakest of them all!”
Neal next returned home a year later. He found his mother wallowing in a pile of shredded British tabloids. She was drinking gin and weeping.
“Jerry Lee married his thirteen-year-old cousin,” she said.
“When?”
“Four months ago.”
“Wanda left me for a preacher,” Neal said.
“When?”
“Today.”
They had long misunderstood the region in which they lived.
“Fucking Tennessee!” they said together.
The fall of 1958 found Neal and Gladys heartbroken, rich, and bored. Neither of them felt much like doing anything. They cleaned the house, and had a contractor come repair the damage from the Jerry Lee years. Gladys put her hair back up and started dressing like she had before the wild times, went back to reading Goethe and staring out the window, listening to Bach records, cooking schnitzel and cholent for dinner. Neal started working on a novel that he called Long River of Tomorrow. Its protagonist was a young man with a guitar, misunderstood by a cruel world, who sold his soul to the devil so he could appear on American Bandstand. He’d written about seventy-five pages and was very pleased with himself. His mom seemed to like it, too, and they talked about where they’d go eat in New York when it was published.
Dewey Phillips called one night. He wasn’t on the radio much anymore because he’d gotten all hopped up on pills.
“Come pick me up,” he said. “Elvis just called. He wants us to visit him at Graceland. Bring some friends.”
That was exciting. Elvis had stopped taking visitors months before. Neal put on a shirt and told Gladys he was going out. She just stared out the window onto Alabama Street, her eyes empty.
“Go, son,” she said. “Go into the world and be young.”
Neal loved his mama. She was all he lived for, with Wanda gone. When no one else believed in his writing, which was most of the time, she told him to keep going, because he was her little genius superstar.
He kissed her cheek.
“You’ll be all right,” she said.
Neal picked up some friends and drove to Dewey’s house. Dewey was definitely on pills, because his pupils were like bowling balls, and he’d been drinking, too. They could smell it on his breath. He said “Dee-Gaw” to them, but very quietly, not like the Dewey Phillips Neal remembered from his first day in Memphis.
“Thanks for setting this up, Dewey,” Neal said.
“It’s nothing, boys,” he said. “Say, why don’t we stop by the Manhattan Club first and catch some of the house band?”
“Aw, I dunno.”
“Drinks are on me,” he said. “As long as you don’t have more than one apiece.”
So they went to the Manhattan Club. Willie Mitchell and the Four Kings were playing, and people were dancing, and it kind of felt like the old Memphis again. Dewey bought a round and Neal bought two more. Soon Neal was grinding up against a big black girl and he felt alive.
“Elvis is sending a Cadillac for us,” Dewey said.
“Sure he is.”
“No, really. The Cadillac is gonna pick us up right out in front. Let’s go wait in the car.”
Two hours passed, then three. No Cadillac came. Dewey really began to fume.
“Where’s that goddamn Cadillac? Fucking Elvis Presley has a few hit records and he thinks he’s too big for the Dewster, huh? Well, I’m gonna show him! Boys, drive me all the way to Graceland!”
“I don’t think so, Dewey,” Neal said.
“Do it!”
They drove the four miles to Graceland. The security guard stopped them at the gates. It was about 2 A.M.
“Tell Mr. Presley that Dewey Phillips is here to see him.”
“Elvis is not taking any visitors.”
“Well, he’ll see me.”
“No, he won’t.”
Dewey got out of the car.
“You tell Elvis Presley that I made him, goddamn it, and he had better see me because there are some boys here who love his music and they know that he would never sell them out!”
“No, sir.”
“Neal Pollack is in the car!”
The guard picked up his house phone.
“Is it really Neal Pollack?” he said.
“Yes, goddamn it!”
“Because Elvis said that he wasn’t taking any visitors except Colonel Parker or Neal Pollack.”
A few minutes later, a sad, lonely Elvis Presley loped down the drive. Neal had heard that his mother’s death had beaten the King down, but wasn’t prepared for the grief that overwhelmed Elvis’s face. He looked wise, but also lost.
“I only want to talk to Neal,” he said.
“Aw!” Dewey said. “Aw shit.”
“Go,” said the King.
Neal’s friends drove a few yards down the road and left him to talk to Elvis alone. They spoke through the gate. An eerie whistling wind blew through the Graceland elms. Some distant owl hooted twice. The night was cool with fear.
“I’m going into the army,” Elvis said.
“I know,” Neal said. “I read about it in Life.”
“I don’t wanna go, but they say I have to.”
“Yeah.”
“My momma died.”
“I know.”
“It’s no fun being famous.”
“Yeah.”
“Not what I expected. So. How’s your momma?”
“She’s OK.”
“Be good to your momma, Neal. No one understands a boy like his momma.”
“OK, Elvis,” Neal said. “I will.”
“And keep the spirit of rock ’n’ roll alive. I won’t be able to from here on out.”
“Aw, you’ll get back to the old music,” Neal said.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Do me a favor.”
“What?”
“Tell people what it was really like. Let them know the truth.”
“I intend to, Elvis.”
“Now I have to go. The photographers lurk in the woods. They can smell me.”
“OK.”
“Remember your momma,” said the King.
He faded back toward his mansion, America drifting into its endless tomorrow.
They dropped Neal off at his house around 3 A.M. There was a lot of blood in the bathtub. Neal found a note attached to a fresh meat loaf in the kitchen:
“My darling boy,” it read. “This is lunch for the next week. Put it on toasted bread with mustard. I also cleaned your room. Make me proud. Someday you’ll understand why I had to do this. I love you. Mama.”
A darkness enveloped Neal Pollack’s heart then, and he knew it would never completely lift. He was no longer a boy. He was alone in the world.
On February 3, 1959, Neal Pollack drove his Chevy to the levee. It was dry, but that didn’t matter to him. All his affairs were in order, the house sold, half his money in a blind trust for blind people who wanted to be musicians, the other half in his pockets or his knapsack. He looked upon the city of his boyhood and felt no sadness. Then he realized that a true American hobo didn’t drive a brand-new car.
He left the Chevy, still running, for someone who might need it more. It was about a ten-mile walk to Sun Studios, but he had all day and he was capable. He got there around sundown.
“I’m skipping town, Sam,” he said.
Sam Phillips got teary.
“They always leave,” he said. “It’s my fate as a man.”
“Memphis is finished,” Pollack said. “American music is dead.”
“Oh no, son,” Sam said. “You’re wrong. It will rise again. And you’ll come back to me. They all will, whether they’re in a Cadillac limousine or on the bus or crawling on their hands and knees. They’ll all come back to old Sam Phillips, and then, like Cousin Brutus said, we’ll be climbing those breakfast trees and eating country ham in heaven.”
Neal Pollack, mature well beyond age eighteen, looked at his mentor sadly.
“Sam,” he said, “I hate to tell you. There ain’t no breakfast in heaven. And there ain’t no trees.”
Sam Phillips sighed for the ideals Neal had lost.
“Where are you going to go, Neal?” he said.
“I don’t know,” said Pollack. “Wherever the road takes me, into the real America, where real people sing real songs.”
“Well, then, son, I wish you all the luck. Remember that you have a gift and that someday there will be publications devoted solely to music criticism. Don’t miss that particular boat when it docks.”
“Sure, Sam,” Pollack said. “Sure.”
With that, Neal Pollack wandered off with nothing more than a change of clothes, some trail mix, $500,000, and dog-eared copies of On the Road, Journey to the End of the Night, and Butterfield 8. The last one he wasn’t going to show to anyone else, but he couldn’t help it. He had a secret thing for John O’Hara.
Soon he’d write about his experiences, hundreds and hundreds of pages, probably without punctuation, pouring out all his grief and joy and frustration, as well as his hatred and love for those elusive things called America and rock ’n’ roll, all the while thinking, knowing, understanding, telling himself the sad singular truths he had learned during all his hard years in Memphis and now beyond.
There ain’t no breakfast.
And there ain’t no trees.