Week Three: Elvis Aron Presley 1935-1977

December 19, 1955: A thousand miles from Harlem, a world away from the street corners of Sugar Hill, a different kind of rock and roll, rooted in country idioms rather than rhythm and blues, had slowly been taking shape. The place was Memphis, the key player Elvis Presley— not that many people outside the mid-South noticed. Throughout most of 1955, Presley remained a largely regional phenomenon, his influence a matter of the impression he made in his live appearances, his commercial impact limited to the field of country music. Alan Freed in these months refused to play Presley's records, explaining that he "really sings hillbilly, or country and western style."

There were multiple ironies at play. Elvis Presley, after all, was no hillbilly. Before Sam Phillips had begun to work with him at Sun Records, Presley scarcely showed any interest at all in country music. Still, because he was white and because he was performing with gui­tar and bass accompaniment, the most obvious way to market him was as a country singer. That is why Presley ended up playing a country music show at Overton Park on July 30, 1954. And that is why Presley's first professional manager, Bob Neal, was a country music veteran, familiar with country music venues.

Outside Memphis, Presley was a hard sell. A lot of country disc jockeys thought his records sounded too "black." As Sam Phillips discovered, a lot of rhythm and blues disc jockeys, un­like his friend Dewey Phillips, thought that his records sounded too "white." (The mystery of what, exactly, gives a piece of music a par­ticular racial hue has yet to be rationally explained.)

On October 2, 1954, Presley had gotten his first shot at the big time when Sam Phillips succeeded in booking him as a guest on the Grand Ole Opry radio show, beamed to half the country from WSM, a clear-channel radio station in Nashville. He chose to sing his souped-up version of Bill Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky." Though Presley was mortified at the prospect of offending Monroe, a longtime Opry regular, the great mandolin player was supportive: Monroe, after all, had launched his own career on the Grand Ole Opry with a souped-up version of Jimmie Rodgers' classic (and jazz-tinged) "Mule Skinner Blues."

Jim Denny, the Opry's manager, proved less tolerant. After hearing Presley, Denny chose not to exercise the Opry's option for a return visit: in his view, Presley wasn't really a country singer at all.

Several weeks later, after another stream of phone calls stressing, again, the indisputable fact that Elvis was a "white boy," Sam Phillips managed to get the singer booked on yet another country music showcase, The Louisiana Hayride, the Opry's only real rival.

On October 16, 1954, the night Presley made his debut on the Hayride, the following exchange, surprising only because it so bluntly sums up the musical facts of the matter, occurred between Presley and the Hayride's emcee, Frank Page:

"I'd like to know how you came up with that rhythm and blues style," asked Page. "Because that's all it is."

Presley: "Well, sir, to be honest, we just stumbled upon it."

Page: "You're mighty lucky, you know. They've been looking for something new in the folk music field for a long time now. I think you've got it."

So did a growing number of fans and musicians. Slowly but surely, Presley's unusual brand of music began to influence up-and-coming local acts, none more powerfully than Carl Perkins—one of the first country pickers directly influenced by Presley, and the first man to write a song successfully emulating his style.

In 1954, when Perkins, then twenty-two, first heard "That's All Right" and "Blue Moon of Kentucky," he was working at the Colo­nial Bakery in Jackson, Tennessee, with a part-time job on the side, playing country music with his brothers Jay and Clayton—they billed themselves as the Perkins Brothers Band. Carl played electric guitar and sang most of the leads, in a style modeled after his first musical hero, Hank Williams; Clayton played stand-up bass, and Jay played acoustic rhythm guitar as well as handling some vocals in the gruff style of Ernest Tubb.

The Perkins Brothers were representative of the main trend of postwar country music. Throughout the 1930s, most country songs had been rooted in tradition and filled with pious sentiment—it was a music that was "morally good," as one of the Carter Family's old concert posters proclaimed. But after the war, a new style, called "honky-tonk," had captivated country listeners, allowing a new strain of realism to appear in songs about fast living and hard drink­ing. The dreamy ardor of "The Tennessee Waltz" was out, the sear­ing intensity of Hank Williams' "Lovesick Blues" was in; and as the title of Williams' song suggests, much of honky-tonk owed its emo­tive charge to the use of stylistic devices borrowed from jazz and the main currents of the African-American blues tradition. (They called it "honky-tonk" because that is where the music was commonly played: in the roadhouses, or honky-tonks, dotting the South, places with a bar for drinks, stools for drunks, and a hardwood floor for dancing.)

As postwar country music evolved, it developed in two contrasting directions, both epitomized in the work of Hank Williams, the great­est of the honky-tonk singers of the early Fifties. On the one hand, Williams wrote wailing laments, songs of melancholy and heart­break; but he also knew how to play music with a beat, performing country boogies and up-tempo dance novelties like "Jambalaya." As the country music historian Rich Kienzle has written, these two strands of the genre faithfully expressed the oscillations in mood at a typical honky-tonk, where "patrons swung between wrenching de­pression over lost or unrequited love and liquor-fueled cockiness and occasional violence.

Carl Perkins—unlike Elvis Presley, who didn't drink—knew a lot at first hand about honky-tonks. When the Perkins Brothers Band worked, it was in local bars and dance halls, playing the hits of Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell and Ernest Tubb. "I would mix beer with whiskey," Perkins later wrote of his honky-tonk days, "and, with soul on fire, I'd stand on the table tops striving for the attention I thought my music deserved."

Then, one day in 1954, Perkins heard a new record on the local country radio program. "The first time I heard Elvis was when my wife was in the kitchen," Perkins later recalled: "and she said, 'Carl, that sounds just like y'all.' "

It's true that Elvis shared the same instrumentation with the Perkins Brothers Band: electric lead guitar, acoustic rhythm guitar, and bass. It was also true—and this impressed Perkins deeply—that Presley recorded for a small company just seventy-five miles down the highway from Jackson, Tennessee. Perkins had already tried, without success, to peddle tapes of his original songs to RCA and Columbia in faraway New York City. Now, he decided, he would contact Sam Phillips.

At first, Phillips wasn't interested. He was too busy trying to mar­ket Presley.

Perkins wouldn't give up. A month later, he coaxed his brothers into packing their instruments and making the trip to Memphis. They drove straight to the Sun studios at 706 Union Avenue, and walked right in. Marion Keisker, as usual, was behind the front desk. She gave Perkins the brush-off. Desperate, Perkins and his band waited outside. Time passed. Finally, Sam Phillips pulled up in a Cadillac. "Sam later said he felt sorry for me," Perkins recalled. "He said I looked like I would have died if he hadn't listened to me. And I might have."

As Sam Phillips quickly grasped, about all that Carl Perkins had in common with Elvis Presley was the composition of his band and the color of his skin. Presley at heart was a dreamy balladeer, a vocalist who preferred the rapturous joy of gospel songs to the moping laments and mid-tempo bounce of honky-tonk, a teetotaling pop stylist with a knack for singing the blues and scarcely a hint of coun­try influence: in conversation, he may have sounded like a hillbilly, but when he sang, he sounded more like Dean Martin than Hank Williams. In this respect, "I Forgot to Remember to Forget," the song that finally, in August 1955, turned Presley into a national country star, was an anomaly—the only hard-core honky-tonk song that Elvis Presley ever recorded.

Perkins, by contrast, was country to the core. "He was a tremen­dous honky-tonk picker," Sam Phillips recalled years later. "He had this feel for pushing a song along that very few people had. . . . But I was so impressed with the pain and feeling in his country singing, though, that I wanted to see whether this wasn't someone who could revolutionize the country end of the business."

In October of 1954, when Sam Phillips did his first session with Perkins, it was to record two songs: a straight country-western ballad for one side, with a country dance tune for the other. Eight months later, Phillips followed up by releasing a similar pair of songs. With Presley still recording for Sun, Phillips was less than eager to push Perkins in the direction of rhythm and blues.

Perkins was growing impatient. Thrilled by Presley's sound, and able to play a mean country boogie himself, he yearned to record something different. "I stood backstage many times," Perkins re­called, "watching Elvis stir audiences with music with a beat. I was longing to throw away my ballads and join him."

In the fall of 1955, Carl Perkins finally found a way to do just that. One night playing in a honky-tonk, Perkins chanced to see a dancer get mad with his date for scuffing up his blue suede shoes. The incident struck him instantly, since only days before, Johnny Cash, another struggling local performer and Sun recording artist, had suggested that Perkins compose a song about blue suede shoes. Later that night, unable to sleep, Perkins jotted down the words for a new song, carefully misspelling the title: "Don't Step on My Blue Swede Shoes."

The pretext was shoes; but the subtext was Elvis Presley. And with "Blue Suede Shoes," Carl Perkins finally convinced Sam Phillips to let him make the leap from country to "music with a beat."

Not that Phillips needed much convincing. On November 15, re­quiring a large amount of cash in order to prevent Sun from going bankrupt, Phillips had sold Elvis Presley's contract to a partnership formed by RCA records, Hill &c Range song publishers, and "Colonel" Tom Parker, a onetime carnival barker and country-west­ern impresario who had just become Presley's exclusive manager. With Presley gone, Perkins became the most logical Sun artist to fol­low in his footsteps.

Like Phillips, Perkins had grown up in rural poverty. Like Phillips, too, he would in later years remember visiting a local black oracle, an aging sharecropper who sat on his front porch, picking guitar, singing the blues, handing the music down. Whether or not the South was ever so densely populated with such musical missionaries, the stories carry a certain biblical weight. Phillips recalls receiving the gift of the blues from a neighbor named Uncle Silas Payne; Perkins got his gift from Uncle John Westbrook. "It was his inspiration," Perkins has said, "that let me know what it was I wanted to do for the rest of my life."

By the end of 1955, Sam Phillips had sound business reasons to bring out the blues strain in Perkins' music. Thanks to Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard, rhythm and blues was hot in the pop marketplace; and thanks to Elvis, string-band music with a blues feel was hot in the country field. Having just escaped his creditors and been handed a handsome sum of money in addition, Phillips was in a position, as never before, to promote a pop record—all he had to do was find the right song.

On December 19, several weeks after composing "Blue Suede Shoes," Perkins and his band arrived in Memphis for their third Sun recording date. Besides "Blue Suede Shoes," Perkins brought three other songs to the session: a laid-back boogie called "Honey Don't," a honky-tonk novelty called "Tennessee," and a sad-sack country ballad, "Sure to Fall." Those involved recall a long but relaxed day of work, starting in the afternoon and stretching far into the evening.

After recording a low-key, almost diffident first take of "Blue Suede Shoes," Phillips set to work suggesting changes: "I told Carl that [singing] 'Go Man Go' [in the first verse] made it sound too country. 'Go Cat Go' made it into something altogether different and new"—and of course pitched the lyrics directly at the same white "cats" that Ahmet Ertegun and Randy Wood had been trying to reach in different ways with the Chords and Pat Boone.

Besides changing the lyrics, Perkins and the band revised the end of the song, closing with a boogie vamp ("blue blue blue suede shoes"). As the session progressed and the liquor flowed, the music got tougher, harder, looser. Perkins was no virtuoso; he sounded as homespun as he looked; but he played with passion, and on the final version, he sang "with soul on fire."

Sam Phillips could feel it. Jettisoning his country strategy for mar­keting Perkins, Phillips shelved the session's two honky-tonk songs, and paired "Blue Suede Shoes" with "Honey Don't," slipping ad­vance copies of these songs to Dewey Phillips and other local disc jockeys. Released on January 1, 1956, the record was an almost in­stant hit on country radio stations, crossing over within weeks, be­coming a hit on pop radio stations, and then—astonishingly enough—on rhythm and blues radio formats, too. On March 17, Carl Perkins became the first country artist to reach the national rhythm and blues charts. Shortly afterward, "Blue Suede Shoes" be­came the first Sun recording to sell more than one million copies.

By then, it was clear that rock and roll was a way to make money in the music business. It was also clear that rock and roll as a genre, was, as Billboard said of "Blue Suede Shoes," a "mongrel music." The genre combined aspects of jump blues and Tin Pan Alley pop with country and gospel and fiddle hoe-downs from long ago and far away. A cacophonous style of dance music, aimed more or less self-consciously at a growing mass of mostly white teenagers, it was still a music made mostly by blacks. But Carl Perkins heralded a revolution. For another kind of history— this time, cultural as well as musical—was about to be made by the original "Hillbilly Cat," Elvis Presley.

Part Two:

June 5, 1956: Although its lasting cultural significance-if any-re­mained unclear, rock and roll by the spring of 1956 was ubiquitous. Strains of the "Big Beat" (as some now dubbed it) could be heard on radio, in film, on recordings. Only one mass medium in the United States had yet to register fully the force of the new musical style— and that was television.

These were the years when America's three major television net­works—CBS, NEC, and ABC—had finally emerged, for better or worse, as the nation's most powerful arbiters of aesthetic taste and political judgment. By 1956, there were tens of millions of TV sets in the United States, far more than in any other country. The networks fed programming to affiliates located coast to coast, uniting the na­tion as radio had the previous generation. Successful programs ran the gamut: in 1955-1956, the hits included quiz shows (The $64,000 Question, the year's top-rated program), screwball comedies (I Love Lucy], and—above all—a wide array of variety shows, sometimes aimed at kids (Disneyland}., sometimes aimed at adults old enough to have seen the same routines in vaudeville. At the dawn of the televi­sion era, in the late Forties, the most popular variety hour of the week belonged to Milton Berle, the host of The Texaco Star Theater. In the early Fifties, the format's leader was Arthur Godfrey—it was on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts that Pat Boone had made his tele­vision debut. But by 1955, Godfrey and Berle had both been eclipsed by The Ed Sullivan Show, which for an hour every Sunday night fea­tured a dizzyingly indiscriminate array of jugglers and movie stars, opera divas and Borscht Belt comics, crooners, animal acts, and Shakespearean actors—almost anyone (or anything) regarded as able to entertain viewers for a few minutes.

As 1956 began, media tip sheets were buzzing about a fresh new face from Memphis, a Southern boy with a funny look and a wild way of singing. His name was Elvis Presley, and he made his televi­sion debut quietly, on January 28, 1956, appearing on Stage Show, a program hosted by two veteran big band leaders, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey. At first, few people noticed; Stage Show was not widely watched. But his first TV appearance coincided with the release of his first recording for RCA, a dour blues lament, "Heartbreak Ho­tel," that would shortly turn Presley's world upside down—and change the face of American popular culture.

Recorded at RCA's studios in Nashville, Tennessee, on January 10, 1956, two days after Presley had turned twenty-one, "Heartbreak Hotel" was a stark performance, with a walking bass line, a smoky blues piano part, and a strident but effective electric guitar solo. In­spired by a news story about a suicide who had left a note saying "I walk a lonely street," the lyrics strained for Gothic effect. Presley de­livered them with heartfelt conviction, in a heavily echoed, highly stylized wail, full of garbled gospel devices, as if the lovelorn singer no longer had the will to live (never mind enunciate clearly). It be­came the prototype for a new genre of morbidly self-pitying rock songs (a genre that flourished well into the Eighties and Nineties, thanks to the moping mood evoked in popular songs by bands like New Order, the Smiths, and the Smashing Pumpkins).

From the start, Presley's new manager, Tom Parker, was angling to break his client nationally. In Cleveland, he had the support of disc jockey Bill Randle, who was also playing Presley's records on a Sat­urday afternoon network radio show. In New York and Los Angeles, he got even more crucial help from Abe Lastfogel, head of the William Morris Agency, and Harry Kalcheim, his associate, though it was Parker himself who got Presley onto Stage Show.

Presley was scheduled to appear on the Dorsey show for four Sat­urday nights in a row, with an option for two more appearances if the show wanted him back. The day before his debut, RCA released "Heartbreak Hotel" as Presley's sixth single. But for the first Stage Show, on January 28, Presley did two other tunes, neither of them then available on record, a medley of Joe Turner songs, and a version of Ray Charles' "I Got a Woman." For the second show, on Febru­ary 4, he did "Baby, Let's Play House," his fourth single (originally released on Sun), and a version of Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti." It was only on the third show, after "Heartbreak Hotel" had started to get exposure on the radio, that Presley finally debuted his new recording on television.

When he wasn't in a New York City television studio, Presley was on the road, playing one-nighters from St. Louis to Tampa, gradually expanding his base of operations beyond the mid-South. While Presley hit the hustings, Bill Randle kept plugging "Heartbreak Hotel" on his various radio shows. Randle's support, together with the Stage Show appearances, for the first time made Presley credible as a main­stream performer. At the same time, "Heartbreak Hotel" was selling briskly enough to reach the Billboard chart of Best Sellers in Stores— the first time that one of Presley's recordings had accomplished this feat. With this new evidence of his growing popular appeal, the Dorseys invited Presley back for two more appearances on Stage Show, on March 17 and March 24.

Each time, he sang "Heartbreak Hotel." Each time, sales of the recording snowballed.

That exposure of a song on television could dramatically spur record sales had been shown in 1954, when an unheralded singer named Joan Weber became an overnight sensation after her version of the song "Let Me Go Lover" was featured six times on Studio One, a prestigious drama showcase on CBS-TV. The arithmetic was compelling: one performance on TV could reach more people in an evening than a year of performing live at clubs and concert halls.

Pulling out all the stops, Abe Lastfogel asked a favor from one of his prominent clients, "Mister Television" himself—Milton Berle. He asked the old trouper to let the young Presley sing "Heartbreak Ho­tel" on his April 3 show. Though he was in the twilight of his televi­sion career, Berle still had an audience. And for the first time, on April 3, 1956, large numbers of Americans, having finally heard "Heartbreak Hotel" on their radios, tuned in to see Presley sing the song on television.

A little over two weeks later, on April 21, Presley's recording jumped to number one—and there it stayed for two months, the most widely heard song in America. It was in these weeks that "Elvis" became a household name—at least in those households where people paid attention to what was reportedly being talked about in every other household in America.

On June 5, 1956, in the midst of the national hubbub over the new singing phenomenon, Presley paid a return visit to The Milton Berle Show. By now, Elvis was the talk of the town, even in normally unflappable New York City. As a result, an unusually large number of influential cultural commentators were primed to pay careful at­tention, many of them for the first time. And this is what they saw:

Presley appeared with his hair slicked back in a ducktail, wearing a baggy light jacket, dark pants, and white socks. His face cocked in a nervous grin, he faced the camera without a guitar, his customary prop. When his small band (electric guitar, bass, and drums) began to play, he grabbed the microphone. His left hand fluttering, he began to gyrate wildly. He was singing a song about a hound dog, the same song Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller had written for Big Mama Thorn-ton. In the mouth of Big Mama, "hound dog" was a figure of speech for a gigolo. In Presley's mouth, the phrase meant nothing. He looked—and sounded—ridiculous.

That was the point: the singer was cracking a good-natured musi­cal joke.

Midway through the song, Presley and his band cut the tempo in half. To a striptease beat, Presley did a bump and grind, lurching back and forth with the microphone, knock-kneed, quivering with mock emotion.

The studio audience reacted with stunned delight. Three nights be­fore, at a concert in Oakland, California, music critic Ralph J. Glea-son had watched in fascination as the singer had turned the same stunt, whipping an audience of mainly teenaged girls into a collective state of erotic frenzy. "It was the first show I'd seen that had the true element of sexual hysteria in it," he recalled years later. "He'd slap his crotch and give a couple of bumps and grinds and half grin at the insane reaction it produced each time."

On the Berle show, Presley's act was over in a flash—less than three minutes of music sandwiched between the usual variety of jug­glers and clowns.

The fallout from Presley's burlesque, however, lasted for weeks.

The pundits weren't laughing. Leading the pack was Jack Gould, the respected television critic for The New York Times. "The con­science of the industry," as he was sometimes called, Gould was con­stantly trying to stiffen the resolve of craven television executives by blasting the networks for their mindless commercialism, and doling out favorable reviews to shows that he felt had some redeeming so­cial merit.

Elvis wasn't Jack Gould's cup of tea. "Attired in the familiar over­size jacket and open shirt which are almost the uniform of the con­temporary youth who fancies himself as terribly sharp," Gould huffed, "he might possibly be classified as an entertainer. Or, perhaps quite as easily, as an assignment for a sociologist." To Gould's ear, "Mr. Presley has no discernable singing ability." He sang "in a whine," with all the finesse of an amateur crooning an "aria in a bathtub." His only skill was anatomical: "He is a rock-and-roll vari­ation of one of the most standard acts in show business: the virtuoso of the hootchy-kootchy," a specialist in the sort of gymnastic exhibi­tion "that heretofore has been primarily identified with the reper­toire of the blonde bombshells of the burlesque runway."

Traveling, as always, in a herd, the mainstream critics rallied to the flag of good taste. (Decades later, in one symptom of rock and roll's lasting cultural impact, the same sorts of critics would have dis­paraged, in unison, the very idea of "good taste.") "He can't sing a lick," declared a reviewer for the New York Journal-American; even worse, added the same reviewer, Presley indulges in "the weirdest and plainly planned, suggestive animation short of an aborigine's mating dance."

"He gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar," chimed in the Daily News; this "kind of animalism," the critic chided, "should be confined to dives and bordellos."

Within days, politicians had piled on. "Rock 'n' roll has its place," Congressman Emanuel Celler conceded, at least "among the colored people." But white folk had better watch out: "The bad taste that is exemplified by the Elvis Presley 'Hound Dog' music, with his animal gyrations which are certainly most distasteful to me, are violative of all that I know to be in good taste."

It is a rare event that can trigger this kind of reaction. And in or­der to understand why, it is useful to recall the broader context.

In the United States, the Fifties were the heyday of the nuclear family—a mythical, and intensely moralized, object of cultural (and commercial) concern. Ideally, moms took care of meals while dads brought home the bacon. Everyone was supposed to smile and be happy, cheered by the endless acquisition of fabulous new labor-sav­ing devices—roll-on deodorants, electric can openers, frozen TV din­ners. Kids, in turn, could glory in fabulous new frivolities: Sugar Frosted Flakes, Davy Crockett hats, cartoons on TV, not to mention Mad magazine and rock and roll records.

But for teenagers, and particularly for teenage girls, these were not the best of times. As Anne Stevenson, an acute historian of the era, has remarked, "Middle-class teenage Americans in the 1950s subscribed to an amazing code of sexual frustration. Everything was permissible to girls in the way of intimacy except the one thing such intimacies were intended to bring about. Both partners in the ritual of experimental sex conceded that 'dating' went something like this: preliminary talking and polite mutual inspection led to dancing, which often shifted into 'necking,' which—assuming continuous progress—concluded in the quasi-masturbation of 'petting' on the family sofa, or, in more affluent circumstances, in the back seat of a car. Very occasionally, intercourse might, inadvertently, take place; but as a rule, if the partners went to the same school or considered themselves subject to the same moral pressures, they stopped just short of it."

It was no mean feat to maintain this code of teen sexual etiquette, particularly in the context of the popular culture of the Fifties. The obligation to remain abstinent had to contend with Marilyn Monroe, Playboy magazine, and—after June 5, 1956—with the putative con­cupiscence of Elvis Presley.

The people handling Presley were simultaneously elated and alarmed. The publicity was priceless. But they were walking a fine line: under the prevailing terms of the culture industry's tacit contract with civil society, titillation was okay, but really lewd behavior was taboo. The publicist for Presley's record label, Ann Fulchino, artfully reminded journalists of one key difference: "Elvis is the equivalent of a male strip teaser," she said, "with the exception that he doesn't take his clothes off."

Colonel Parker worried that the controversy could spoil the plans he had carefully laid to have his singer follow in the footsteps of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. If all went well, Presley would become a family entertainer, at home on stage and screen.

A complex struggle over the Presley image—and hence over the cultural meaning of rock and roll—unfolded quickly in the weeks that followed. At the center of this struggle, and in critical respects no longer in control of his destiny, was Presley himself.

He had to be stunned. Throughout the winter and spring, he had watched as his career had suddenly taken off, propelled by his first number one hit recording, "Heartbreak Hotel," and by his series of television appearances on Stage Show and then on The Milton Berle Show. Now, there was a risk, however slight, that his momentum might be slowed. And all because of a musical joke!

As it happens, Presley had first discovered "Hound Dog" in April, during a two-week stint playing the Venus Room at the New Fron­tier Hotel in Las Vegas as an accompanying attraction for bandleader Freddy Martin, renowned for jazzing up classical warhorses like Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto in B Flat. It proved to be a tough crowd: the pseudo-sophisticates who loved Freddy Martin hated the "Hillbilly Cat." To kill time between sets, Presley and the members of his band sampled the other acts then playing in Vegas, which in­cluded (in addition to one of Elvis' personal idols, Liberace) a sextet from Philadelphia called Freddie Bell and the Bellboys. A jump combo loosely modeled on Bill Haley and the Comets, Bell and the Bellboys had recorded virtually nothing, though in 1955, an obscure small label, Teen Records, had released one of their trademark spoofs, a send-up of Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog" complete with vulgar beat and mock drum fusillades.

Like Presley, the Bellboys were new to Vegas, fresh from the Mid­west, where they had built their reputation in nightclubs. But unlike Presley, who had bombed with the big rollers, the Bellboys had be­come bona fide stars on the Strip. They would spend most of 1956 working the lounge at the posh Sands Hotel, building up a reputa­tion as one of the hottest nightclub acts of the year (and also earning themselves a cameo role in the film Rock Around the Clock).

> "We stole it straight from them," Presley's guitarist, Scotty Moore, later recalled: "He already knew it, knew the song [presumably from Big Mama Thornton's recording], but when we seen those guys do it, he said, 'There's a natural.' We never did it in Las Vegas, but we were just looking on it as comic relief, if you will, just another number to do onstage."

As their giggles and laughter will attest, the small audience assem­bled to see Presley and his band perform "Hound Dog" live on the Berle show got the joke. But after the controversy in the press, Tom Parker wasn't inclined to take any chances the next time around; and neither was comedian Steve Alien, the host of the television show that Presley was next booked to play.

Nobody, of course, wanted Presley to drop "Hound Dog." Plans were already under way to have him record the song, and the contro­versy almost guaranteed a large audience for Alien's upcoming show, scheduled to air on July 1, 1956. The trick was to imbue Presley's performance with some semblance of "good taste"—that is, to drain the song of its disturbing erotic overtones. "You can rest assured," said Steve Alien, "I will not allow him to do anything that will of­fend anyone."

Alien's strategy was simple. His network, NBC, told the press that Presley would be appearing in black tie and tails—and singing to a dog! Presley was a dutiful young man. As his biographer Peter Gural-nick puts it, "Elvis was fresh-faced and eager to please, pure plastic­ity in an informational age that required a protean hero." He wanted to be a trouper, if only to show people like Steve Alien that he had a real future as an all-round entertainer. In April, he had taken a screen test for Paramount. He was poised to make the transition to larger-than-life fame and easy money that, in 1956, Hollywood alone could offer (though Presley's impact would soon enough change the rules of the game). Elvis Presley, in short, had good reason to become the willing butt of any jokes that Steve Alien wanted to crack.

But he wasn't happy about it. He was stung by the New York crit­ics. On June 26, shortly before his appearance on the Alien show, his anger boiled over in an off-the-cuff interview (one of his last):

"Did you see the show?" he asked a reporter in Charlotte, North Carolina, referring to his television appearance on the Berle show. "This Debra Paget is on the same show. She wore a tight thing with feathers on the behind where they wiggle most. And I never saw any­thing like it. Sex? Man, she bumped and pooshed all over the place. I'm like Little Boy Blue. And who do they say is obscene? Me!"

In a touching gesture indicative of a more innocent era, Presley in­terrupted this tirade to flirt with the waitress, fingering her lace slip when she brought him a cup of coffee. "Aren't you the one," she asked.

"I'm the one, baby!"

He turned back to the reporter, ready to nurse his sense of hurt again: "The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I'm doin' now, man, for more years than I know. They played it like that in the shanties and in their juke joints, and nobody paid it no mind 'til I goosed it up. I got it from them. Down in Tupelo, Mississippi, I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now, and I said if I ever got to the place where I could feel all old Arthur felt, I'd be a music man like nobody ever saw."

Did Elvis Presley ever manage to "feel all old Arthur felt"? How would we know? And what were the relevant feelings about? Sexual freedom? Suffering? Being hopelessly misunderstood?

Presley's appearance on The Steve Alien Show on Sunday night, July 1, went smoothly. As planned, he sang "Hound Dog" in a tux, and even agreed to kiss the pooch that served as his stage prop. Pres­ley's handlers were relieved.

The next morning, when the singer arrived at the RCA Victor studios to record "Hound Dog," he was met by fans carrying picket signs. "We Want the Real Elvis," read one—and "The Real Elvis" they would soon enough get (a fact not lost on the record company, which would subsequently release the results of this recording ses­sion in an extended-play disc entitled The Real Elvis}.

Defying Steve Alien and every other uptight arbiter of good taste, Presley and his band methodically turned "Hound Dog" into a shocking burst of noise. As he ended up recording it, the song wasn't a joke anymore. With drummer D.J. Fontana's machine-gun fills and Presley's snarling vocal, it sounded more like a prison riot.

America got the message—and so did the world. "Hound Dog" went on to overtake both "The Tennessee Waltz" and "Rock Around the Clock," becoming the biggest hit record of the Fifties, and selling more than seven million copies.

Elvis would become the "King of Rock and Roll," a cultural monarch universally recognized by his first name only.

And last but not least, the arbiters of good taste, led by America's most popular TV variety host, Ed Sullivan, would admit defeat, wel­coming Presley into the mainstream of American popular culture.

Years later, Jerry Leiber, who had written "Hound Dog" with his partner Mike Stoller, looked back in wonder at what had happened, still amazed that a singer of such raw talent, singing a song of such little musical value, could have become an Olympian figure of post­war global culture.

"You could say this guy is a monumental cosmic success," mused Leiber. "Maybe what he wanted to do was more important. Maybe Coca-Cola is more important than Eugene O'Neill—maybe in the fi­nal countdown of America that's what's more important."

As the arbiters of "good taste" intuitively understood, these were the stakes in the rock and roll revolution. For after Elvis, only a fool would venture to say with confidence which was more important: The Emperor Jones or "Hound Dog."

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