chapter ten
Elvis receives his regulation military haircut.
(Bettmann/Contributor)
On December 19, 1957, Elvis Presley got a phone call from the head of the local draft board. He’d been expecting to hear from them ever since, some months back, he’d been classified 1-A, and now he had. He’d waved off offers from some of the armed forces, offering to give him special treatment, like assignment to a special Elvis Presley unit filled with guys from Memphis, or else the kind of deal some other performers got, working with entertainers on the USO circuit while in uniform. Elvis was at the height of his career; he’d just bought Graceland, an eighteen-room mansion on Highway 51 south of town, that had belonged to a respected physician whose daughter was a classical musician. It cost $102,500 just for the house and acreage, but Elvis had hired the decorator who was doing Sam Phillips’s new house and had ordered cast-iron gates with music notes on them, as well as a large swimming pool out back, all of which would cost him a half million dollars before it was finished. A chicken house for his mother’s chickens was also constructed, and by the end of the year Graceland had become Elvis’s clubhouse, with a fully functioning soda fountain for Elvis and his friends to use. The walls were painted new colors, selected by Elvis and his mother. He was touring constantly when he wasn’t making movies—1957 had seen his first dates in Hawaii—and there were new films being lined up all the time, so it was good to finally have a place to relax during the downtime.
Elvis drove downtown to pick up his draft notice, stopped in at Sun to show it off, and then went back to Graceland, where his friend George Klein saw the notice and asked what he was going to do. “Man, I don’t know,” he told Klein. “The Colonel says we might could get a deferment to make King Creole [his next film], but he says I probably got to go.” The Colonel was adamant that no boats should be rocked at any time in Elvis’s career, for a good reason that didn’t surface for many, many years: everyone knew he’d bought his “Colonel” title, but he wasn’t Tom Parker at all. He was Andreas van Kuijk, a Dutch citizen who’d escaped the law (perhaps, as his sister later surmised, for indictment for murder) and stowed away on a ship to America in his late teens. He wasn’t an American citizen, didn’t have a passport because he was in the country illegally, and, thus, would never leave the United States and deflected all the government’s gaze away from Elvis and, by association, himself. Throughout Elvis’s career, he paid their taxes with the simplified Form 1040, although it meant giving up loads of deductions he could have claimed (and, at a 50 percent management fee, wildly disproportionate to the 15–20 percent other managers charged, taking money out of his own pocket), and refused huge offers to have Elvis appear overseas. For all of Colonel Tom Parker’s bluff and colorful image, Andreas van Kuijk lived in a world of fear. Colonel Tom knew people who could fix things for Elvis. Van Kuijk didn’t dare call them.
On Christmas Eve, Elvis sent a request to the draft board saying that he was ready to go in right away, but knowing that Paramount had already spent several hundred thousand dollars in pre-production expenses, asked to delay his induction for sixty days so he could make the movie. The board agreed to wait. A visitor, however, noticed that Elvis wasn’t his normal cheerful self; he was visiting Graceland when the doorbell rang and Elvis signed for a package, returned to the room, and tossed it on the couch. Eventually, he was asked if he wasn’t going to open it. He did. “Oh yeah,” he said. “My gold record.” He put on a good face for the public. “I’m kinda proud of it,” he said about going into the Army. “It’s a duty I’ve gotta fill, and I’m going to do it.” But first there was a film to make, so Elvis and the Memphis Mafia packed up and went to California, where Elvis reported to the director, Michael Curtiz, the man who’d made Casablanca and Mildred Pierce, and started work on King Creole. Simultaneously, or, rather, around the scenes he was in, he was recording the soundtrack album under Leiber and Stoller’s guidance, with some new songs from them. RCA was trying to load up the vaults with material they could release while he was in the Army, and Elvis had become somewhat superstitious about needing the two songwriters in the studio while he recorded, so with time being short, RCA scheduled a last session for February 1. Unfortunately, Jerry Leiber was recovering from a particularly nasty bout of pneumonia in New York, and his doctor refused to let him travel. Then the Colonel started threatening him, and asking him if he’d signed the publishing contracts he’d sent while Leiber was indisposed. Leiber replied that he’d looked at some, but not all, of them and Parker suggested he open the rest. One was a blank page with the Colonel’s signature and a space for Leiber’s. “Don’t worry,” he advised Leiber, “we’ll fill it in later.” It was too much. “We never worked with him again,” Leiber said later. “That was it. We never talked to each other again.” The men who’d written “Hound Dog” were out of the picture due to the Colonel’s power play. It was only the first of many incidents that would pull Elvis away from his roots so that the Colonel could make a buck.
And there were bucks to be made, on Elvis, and on other rock & roll phenomena. Television dance shows, for instance: even the Memphis madman Dewey Phillips had one, at least until his on-screen sidekick, dressed in a gorilla suit, got a little too suggestive with a pinup of Jayne Mansfield on camera. Dick Clark’s star was rising so fast that ABC-TV gave him a Saturday night show in prime time, one act after another lip-synching their hits in front of a seated theater audience. It didn’t last very long, but the fact that a network would provide rock & roll such a visible slot was significant.
Another source of bucks was records, of course. New record labels were popping up all over the place, while others, unable to adapt to contemporary sounds, began to fade. In Los Angeles, Liberty Records was founded in 1955, and made a star out of Julie London, but it was Eddie Cochran who made them rock & roll fans in 1958, and just to make sure they had the R&B end covered, they signed Billy Ward and His Dominoes, current lead singer Eugene Mumford, formerly of the Larks. United Artists became the latest film studio to open a record label to distribute albums of their soundtracks, but they’d soon be looking at individual artists. ABC-Paramount came into the business, headquartered in New York, but also with an interest in soundtracks and individual artists. All of these were well funded through their other corporate connections. So was Roulette, opened by Morris Levy, owner of the legendary New York jazz club Birdland and friend of various well-connected people with money to launder.
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Some of the pioneers weren’t doing too well. Before joining the ministry, Little Richard had left a trove of recordings, so Specialty was able to make hits out of “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “Oooh! My Soul,” and “Baby Face,” as well as releasing an album, even though the star wasn’t around to promote any of it with live appearances. They’d also signed Larry Williams, a flamboyant and unstable performer whose two 1957 hits “Short Fat Fannie” and “Bony Moronie” mined Little Richard influences, and then went on to record “Slow Down” and “Dizzy, Miss Lizzy” with Richard’s recording band. His last recording for the label was the self-descriptive “Bad Boy,” with “She Said ‘Yeah!’” on the flip, this last produced by a new kid Art Rupe had found who had his ear on the Los Angeles scene, Sonny Bono. Bono also worked with a duo Rupe had found, Don (Terry) and Dewey (Harris), whose “Justine” was another Little Richard homage, also recorded with Richard’s band. But with the exception of Richard’s records, none of these were exactly smash hits, nobody was walking in the door, and Rupe had sent Sam Cooke and Bumps Blackwell packing, thereby seriously shooting himself in the foot.
Aladdin was doing much worse, probably because they concentrated on older-style urban blues and jazz; the Mesner brothers would eventually sell the inactive label’s catalog to Imperial’s Lew Chudd in 1961. Those other brothers, the Biharis, continued to put out singles on Modern, and release B. B. King records on RPM, but found it most profitable to re-package past triumphs as budget-style albums on the Crown label, notorious for covers featuring a painting of a star with the name in huge letters, and, once you got the thing home, finding out that the LOWELL FULSONalbum you’d just bought only had a couple of his tracks on each side, with the rest of the album filled by no-names from the Modern vaults, who were only identified on the record label itself. Well, what do you want for $1.98? And elsewhere on Central Avenue, John Dolphin, who’d been in business since the late 1940s, was talking to a disgruntled songwriter, one Percy Ivy, about their business relationship when Ivy pulled a gun and blew him away. The murder was witnessed by some white teenagers—Dave Shostack, Bruce Johnston, and Sandy Nelson—who were hoping for an audition. Shostack was hit by a ricochet and was bleeding from his leg, Nelson dropped his soda and ran to get the cops, and Johnston stayed behind, comforting the distraught Ivy—and offering to represent him as publisher for the songs he’d write in jail. Oddly, it didn’t seem to discourage Nelson and Johnston from careers in the music business.
Atlantic was an exception to this decline. With the foresight to hire Leiber and Stoller for their teen touch with the Coasters while holding on to Ruth Brown and LaVern Baker and developing Clyde McPhatter into a nightclub act, their breadth of approach meant that they always had a record on the charts. They were still signing people and making them modern; Chuck Willis had had a long string of dull blues records on Okeh dating back to 1952, but when Atlantic grabbed him, he started making stroll records, catching the dance craze just as it was starting, and watching his popularity soar. As a gimmick, he wore a turban onstage, and there’s no telling where he might have gone if he hadn’t died while being operated on for a bleeding ulcer in Atlanta, aged thirty, on April 28. His posthumously released two-sided top-ten hit was “What Am I Living For?” and “Hang Up My Rock and Roll Shoes,” hot on the heels of Atlantic’s rewarding him with an album, King of the Stroll. (In 1963, they issued another album, which included these last songs, I Remember Chuck Willis, with a rare lapse in taste for an Atlantic album cover, a photo of his gravestone.)
Chess was certainly doing all right with Chuck Berry. With “Rock and Roll Music” still getting lots of play, he delivered the story of “Sweet Little Sixteen,” about a teenage girl who can’t get enough rock & roll—and rock & rollers. She’s a nice girl, though, we’re assured, which, given some of the stories beginning to make the rounds about Berry, was good news. And while she was ascending to #2 on the pop charts (Berry’s best showing to date—and his best until 1972), he came out with another song for the ages. “Johnny B. Goode” certainly wasn’t autobiographical, at least not in its precise details, but its story about a poor boy who rises to stardom thanks to his proficiency with a guitar certainly was, and Chuck showed off his playing (“Go! Go, Johnny, go!”) brilliantly. Over the years, it became a song that transcended Chuck Berry, but not guitar players. Nor was Chuck Berry the only one making money for Chess in 1958. They’d introduced two new labels, Checker and Argo, with the idea that Checker would be more for rhythm and blues artists than the hard-core blues artists like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and Argo would be for jazz. Argo signed a star out of the Pershing Hotel’s lounge, a famous Chicago jazz club, pianist Ahmad Jamal, and then recorded him there for a hit live album. Jazz was still big on jukeboxes, especially in black neighborhoods, and by the end of the year, Jamal would have a hit single in “Secret Love.” Chess also signed pianist Ramsey Lewis to Argo, but one of the biggest rock & roll records they had was also on Argo, and it was by a vocal group, the Monotones, high school students who, they claimed, were rehearsing their song “Book of Love” one day at school while other kids were outside playing basketball. The lead-up to the verse, “I wonder wonder who do-do do do do!” was suddenly punctuated by the thud of a basketball hitting the window in perfect time, providing the song with the hook that would take it to the top ten on both the pop and R&B charts. Meanwhile, Chess switched both Little Walter and Bo Diddley over to Checker, and Oakland blues singer Jimmy McCracklin’s dance novelty “The Walk” (which was even easier to do than the stroll, since according to McCracklin all you had to do was close your eyes and walk) was also on Checker. There was probably a logic to it, but they were too busy selling records to explain.
Perhaps influenced by Chuck Berry’s almost documentary approach to songwriting, rock & roll lyrics started getting into situations other than boy-girl dramas, although having a boy-girl situation to hang them on didn’t hurt. America was undergoing an economic slowdown, which brought about one of the year’s first big hits. The Silhouettes were a Philadelphia vocal quartet, and quite talented, so they had no problem getting the tiny Junior label to take a chance on them. Their song, “Get a Job,” combined tough lyrics, skillful harmonies, and a bridge that featured them stomping their feet and clapping their hands, and immediately flew off the shelves. Dick Clark heard it and loved it, but he had a strict rule: American Bandstand went out nationwide, and he wasn’t playing any record that didn’t have national distribution. But New York’s Herald-Ember Records had had hits before (the Five Satins’ “In the Still of the Night,” for one) and bought the record from Junior, and when Clark saw that it was now on Ember, he played it right away. Said Al Silver, who headed the label, “When I walked into the office the morning after he played it, there were telegrams with back orders for about five hundred thousand records underneath the door … Eventually, that record sold a couple million.” What on earth was on that slab of plastic? Very simple: the travails of a (presumably black, male) teenager looking for a job. And there was something else: “When I get back to the house,” went the bridge, “I hear my mother’s mouth / Preachin’ and a cryin’ / Sayin’ that I’m lyin’ / About a job / That I never could find.” Parents just didn’t understand, did they? So Leiber and Stoller abandoned their feeding the Coasters exotica (they were just coming off a weak showing with “The Idol with the Golden Head”) and wrote them the biggest hit they ever had, “Yakkety Yak.” This featured yet another parent preying on yet another teenager, ordering chores, reminding about homework, and commanding him to “Tell your hoodlum friends outside / You ain’t got time to take a ride / Yakkety yak / (Don’t talk back).” Ooh, that stung, and not even the gabbling saxophone, played by New York’s new studio star Curtis Ousley (a.k.a. King Curtis) could take the edge off. It was hard out there for a teen, and not everyone could be Johnny B. Goode. (And, of course, there were vocal group records whose lyrics were perfectly impenetrable: “Shombalor,” by Sheriff and the Ravels, a Brooklyn group discovered by a West Indian guy who wrote the song with Elmore Sheriff, the lead singer. It’s virtually unknown, but you could make the argument that this rapid-fire tongue twister from which words like Frankenstein and Nazi emerge was a form of protest, too.)
Of course, no smash hit could be without an answer record in those days, and “Get a Job” spawned “Got a Job,” full of perky can-do optimism and some fairly decent lyrics. It was by a group from Detroit that had been looking for a break, and got it when George Goldner’s End Records picked it up. The Miracles was a group that was just one of the projects being developed by a young black entrepreneur in Detroit, Berry Gordy Jr. Gordy’s family had a sort of corporation whereby family members could apply for a loan or other help and pay it back without having to resort to the banks, and they’d already financed Berry’s failed jazz record shop. Gordy had been working with a former boxer—and, briefly, a former member of Billy Ward and the Dominoes—Jackie Wilson, a familiar face in Detroit’s black club scene, who had a remarkable voice and stage presence, and a record deal with a Chicago label, Brunswick. (If you were a Detroiter and wanted to make a record, you more or less had to go to Chicago.) Gordy wrote songs with his friend Tyran Carlo, and managed to have four hits with Wilson in 1958: “I’m Wanderin’,” “We Have Love,” “To Be Loved,” and, at the end of the year, “Lonely Teardrops,” which was Wilson’s breakout record, #1 R&B and top-ten pop. But the Miracles? Nothing. Oh, well, at least Brunswick would pay him. Maybe.
Slowly, a new crop of stars was appearing. Buddy Holly and the Crickets were red-hot; the end of 1957 had seen the release of “Peggy Sue,” a Buddy Holly record using the name of Jerry Allison’s girlfriend in the title and Buddy’s trademarked hiccup in the vocal, followed by “Oh, Boy!” and “Maybe Baby” by the Crickets appearing in early 1958. In January 1958, the band toured in the summer sunshine of Australia with Jerry Lee Lewis and Paul Anka, then returned home to work the hits and jumped on another plane to play England in March, thereby igniting a love affair that has never ended; with the Colonel making Elvis unavailable overseas, Buddy was the kind of rock & roll star any British kid could emulate, and they did, although arcane import laws made it impossible to get American-made electric guitars, and the domestic ones were pretty weak. They also did a couple of appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, and jumped into Norman Petty’s studio to record whenever they had time.
The Crickets were evolving. Niki Sullivan was out, and they found guitarist Tommy Allsup, who’d been part of Johnnie Lee Wills’s Western swing band and was a versatile player Norman Petty had found and offered session work to. After working with Buddy in the studio, he wound up going on tour with the Crickets, and his guitar solo on “Heartbeat,” credited to Buddy and Bob Montgomery (although there’s no record of them ever having performed it in the Buddy and Bob days), shows him off to good effect. But Buddy was very ambitious, and in August, the Crickets visited the offices of Peer-Southern Music to visit Murray Deutsch, and the minute Buddy’s eyes beheld Deutsch’s new receptionist, Maria Elena Santiago, he was in love. He took her out to dinner that night and asked her to marry him. On August 15, she flew to Lubbock and they got married, and Mr. and Mrs. Holley gave them their blessing, although they worried about the success of a mixed marriage; Maria Elena was Puerto Rican. Then things really started moving; Buddy and Maria Elena rented an apartment in Greenwich Village, and Buddy moved to New York. He severed his relationship with Petty, and also the Crickets, although he continued to use some of the members as sidemen for his solo performances. He was writing songs like crazy, including “Peggy Sue Got Married” (which she had) as a wedding gift to the new Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Allison, and he began recording with a string orchestra arranged by Dick Jacobs. When he wasn’t doing that, he was in the apartment recording demos on an Ampex tape recorder he’d bought from Norman Petty, and on a couple of the so-called living-room tapes, you can hear Maria Elena in the kitchen frying something, and Buddy talking to her between songs.
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Jerry Lee Lewis, for his part, was racking up hits, with “Breathless” coming first and then “High School Confidential,” so titled because he played it at the start of the film of the same name, on an upright piano on a flatbed truck with his band in front of the high school where the film’s action—a sordid tale of dope, sex, and Mamie van Doren—would unfold. In May, a British promoter set up a tour, and Jerry Lee took an entourage including his sister, Linda Gail, and his new wife, Myra Gale, and her parents. As with many American stars, a press conference was set up at the airport, and Myra wanted to share the spotlight with her husband. This was not a good idea. They’d gotten married in Mississippi in December, and both Sam and Jud Phillips had urged Jerry Lee to hush it up. For one thing, nobody was sure of the status of his previous two wives, one of whom he may not have finished divorcing. For another thing, Myra Gale was Jerry Lee’s third cousin—her father was his bass player. At Heathrow, Jud Phillips, who was along as tour manager, suggested Jerry Lee leave her behind while he went out to talk to the press, but she wanted to stick to his side, and Jerry Lee told Jud, “Look, people want me and they’re gonna get me, no matter what.” Oscar Davis, Jerry Lee’s new manager, begged him, but the star dug in his heels and went out into the press conference. Immediately, one of the reporters asked who the girl was. “This is my wife, Myra,” he said, a bit defensively. The next question was how old she was. “Fifteen,” said Jerry Lee. Then someone asked her if that wasn’t a bit young, and she answered cheerily, “Oh, no, not at all. Age doesn’t matter back home. You can marry at ten if you can find a husband.” (This wasn’t true; the current age of consent in Mississippi was seventeen, and she’d told the judge performing the wedding that she was twenty.) When news of the press conference hit the United States, a reporter at the Memphis paper did a little digging and discovered that she wasn’t fifteen at all; she was thirteen, and the Phillipses’ suspicion was well founded—Jerry Lee’s latest divorce wouldn’t be final for five more months. The first concert of the tour was a disaster; empty seats outnumbered full ones in a 25 percent–full house. The next night the hall had hecklers calling him a sissy and a cradle robber. The next night, there was no show; the promoter canceled the tour, and the Americans flew back home, but not before being mobbed by reporters and photographers at the airport, causing Jerry Lee to kick a photographer. It was the same in the United States: Jerry Lee insisted he hadn’t been deported, which he hadn’t been, and said he’d gotten homesick, which he might have been, but it wasn’t the reason he was back. To the question of whether his bride was a bit young, Jerry Lee seethed, “You can put this down: she’s a woman,” and stomped off.
Sam Phillips must have been reeling. Although he paid for, and ghostwrote, a full-page ad in Billboard in which Jerry Lee defended himself, after a fashion, and although “High School Confidential” was still selling, Dick Clark had served notice to Oscar Davis that he wasn’t going to book him again, “a very cowardly act … for which I’ve been very sorry ever since,” Clark admitted in his autobiography. But Sam was having other woes: Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash had both signed with Columbia, he hadn’t held on to Roy Orbison, whom the Everly Brothers had wooed away with a big publishing contract with Acuff-Rose, and his roster of stars was running low. That summer, he’d watch as Harold Jenkins, who’d recorded some stuff at Sun that didn’t get released, took a page from Vernon Dalhart’s book and put two Texas towns together for a stage name, and, as Conway Twitty, had a smash hit on MGM with “It’s Only Make Believe.” Jerry Lee was just about all Sam had until he could develop another star, so to his credit he stuck with him. At least for a little while.
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Elvis was getting ready to go in the Army. On March 24, 1958, at 6:35 A.M., with his parents and some friends in tow, he reported to the induction center in Memphis. The Colonel worked the crowd, handing out balloons advertising King Creole, and eventually Elvis and his fellow inductees got on a bus for a hospital where they’d take blood tests and the other routine medical exams the Army needed. Finally, US53310761, as he was known after being sworn in, got back on the bus and headed to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, to begin basic training. Every step of the way, he was followed by press, fans, and photographers, and there was more than a little schadenfreude expressed when the pictures of Elvis getting his military haircut hit the wires and started appearing in papers. Things got chaotic at that point, and Elvis forgot to pay the barber the sixty-five cents he owed him and had to go back and pay up. Next stop was to call his mother from a pay phone, but here the Colonel blocked reporters’ access, figuring Elvis had a right to some privacy at that moment. The next day the Army announced that Private Presley had been assigned to the Second Armored Division, and would train at Fort Hood, just outside of Killeen, Texas. It was a famous outfit, once commanded by George Patton, and along with his regular training, Elvis would learn how to drive a tank, a long way from the “long, black sonovabitch” of a Lincoln he’d jokingly said good-bye to in Memphis.
Elvis arrived at Fort Hood on March 28, where the press had been waiting patiently for his bus. The base’s information officer, Lieutenant Colonel Marjorie Schulten, had never seen anything like it, and told Colonel Parker, who’d arrived to manage things, that she was laying down the law: the press could have him for the first day, but after that, Presley was off limits. On May 31, he got his first furlough, and flew to Memphis to see his parents, hang with his friends, and go to Nashville for a recording session. When the time was up, he headed back to the base and found that Colonel Parker had found a paragraph in Army regulations that a soldier, once he’d completed basic training, could live off base if his dependents were nearby. Figuring that his parents were his dependents, he set about finding a house for them in the vicinity, and soon they moved in and were socializing with Eddie Fadal, a guy who’d briefly worked on tour with Elvis and lived in nearby Waco. Elvis stayed with the Fadals whenever he had time off, and they’d even gone so far as to add a wing to their house for him.
It was all very nice, but Elvis’s mother, Gladys, was worried; after basic, the unit would deploy to Germany, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to live in a foreign country. But that was a way off, and between the Presleys’ house and the Fadals’ there were plenty of visitors to entertain and cook for. As the summer wore on, though, Gladys started feeling poorly, her digestion acting up. For a while, she could eat nothing but watermelon and Pepsi, and her doctor told her he wasn’t licensed to practice in Texas, so on August 8, the Presleys got on the train for Memphis. She was admitted to the hospital the next day, and nobody could figure out what was wrong. Elvis was beside himself with worry, even threatening to go AWOL if he couldn’t get emergency leave. (The Army’s position was that if he was granted leave, the press would say they were giving him exceptional treatment.) But things looked grim, and Gladys’s doctor pleaded with the brass, and on August 12, Elvis flew back to Memphis and headed straight to the hospital. After a long visit, which her doctor said did her a lot of good, he left, but he was back the next day and spent the whole day and much of the night there. His father, Vernon, stayed on a cot in her room. At 3:30 the next morning, the phone rang at Graceland, and Elvis had an intuition what it was. After speaking with his father, he drove to the hospital: Gladys had woken up, struggled for breath, and died. Father and son broke down, wailing so loudly you could hear them down the hall, and finally a hearse came for the body. Graceland was in chaos, and Elvis was useless; except when he answered the door to let mourners in, he sat by the body, cuddling it, touching it, crying, or just sitting there in a daze. Finally, the funeral home took Gladys to get ready for the funeral. Elvis had arranged for her favorite gospel group, the Blackwood Brothers, to fly in and sing, and somehow everyone got through the funeral and the interment, and the well-wishers congregated at Graceland, waiting for Elvis to come out of his room. His friend Red West had applied for leave when he’d heard about Gladys, and it was denied, but then his father had died suddenly, so he, too, was back in Memphis and was shocked that Elvis showed up for his funeral—hadn’t he had enough? But Elvis was supportive, and in the end, Red was happy to have him there. At the end of the week, Elvis returned to Killeen. Now there was nothing but to wait for the trip to Germany.
Elvis could not imagine a world without Gladys, but rock & roll was going to have to imagine a world without Elvis. There was Ricky Nelson, but he didn’t have Elvis’s edge. There were the Everly Brothers, who were good with the slow stuff—“All I Have to Do Is Dream” was a smash in the spring, and its B side was “Claudette,” written by Roy Orbison (for their publishing company) in tribute to his new wife—but when they warned “Bird Dog” to “stay away from my quail,” the threat didn’t sound as real as when Elvis sang “Trouble” in Jailhouse Rock. In the Bronx, a vocal quartet fronted by a clean-looking lad named Dion DiMucci, Dion and the Belmonts, released a record, “I Wonder Why,” that was a breakthrough for white vocal harmony groups, just as tough as a lot of the black groups, and he might be a contender. Although the next Elvis wasn’t appearing, someone did find the next Little Richard.
Or, as it turned out in later years, the original Little Richard: Steven Quincy Reeder, a.k.a. S. Q. Reeder, a.k.a. Esquerita, was a piano-playing maniac that Paul Peek of Gene Vincent’s Blue Caps had found playing in the same seedy bars the Blue Caps had hailed from. As Richard recounts in his autobiography, Esquerita taught him to play piano after picking him up at the bus station in Macon back in the early ’50s, and he also helped Richard develop his hairstyle. At the time, he was touring with a female evangelist whose gimmick was selling “blessed bread,” but he appears throughout the decade under a number of similar aliases, and during the disco era as Fabulash. Capitol didn’t have a clue what to do with him, although they did record enough tracks for an album. Of course, Capitol didn’t have a clue what to do with Gene Vincent, either; he was far more popular in Britain than in America. Eventually, Esquerita disappeared and popped up in New York in 1975 working as a parking attendant, but his records continued to confuse and entertain people, especially his operatic instrumental with wordless wailing “Esquerita and the Voola.”
But wait: what if, as some people surmised, teenagers were fed up with all this hillbilly and ghetto music and what they really wanted was the next Sinatra? It was time for good music to make a comeback, and Chancellor Records in Philadelphia stepped up to the plate. Run by Bob Marcucci and Pete DeAngeles, it aimed for a stable of good-looking, traditionally oriented teens singing the kind of songs that teens’ parents could reluctantly admire. “We now run a school where we indoctrinate artists into show business,” Marcucci told Billboard. “We worked with Frankie Avalon for three months before making ‘Dede Dinah.’” The record in question was a top-ten item at the start of 1958, and one might legitimately wonder what Avalon (originally Francesco Avallone) had sounded like before going to school, although it did take advantage of his Philly accent in rhyming “nothin’ finah” with “Dinah.” Avalon was good-looking in an anodyne, non-ethnic kind of way, and so was Fabian, whose last name was Forte, whom Avalon had introduced to Marcucci, and who required a lot more work in the vocal department. Needless to say, Dick Clark was all in favor of Chancellor, and featured their artists and records heavily on American Bandstand. Local boys and all, they could have been pulled off his dance floor.
Another contender was Canadian Paul Anka, whom ABC-Paramount snapped up and who began 1958 emoting “You Are My Destiny,” a follow-up to the previous year’s smash “Diana.” Anka was a good investment; not only was he a talented pop singer, he was also a songwriter who produced material for other singers. He would chart sixty singles in a recording career that only ended in 1983.
The closest contender for the “next Sinatra” title was Bobby Darin, born Walden Robert Cassotto in the Bronx, who appeared on Atlantic in the summer of 1958 with “Splish Splash,” a silly tune not unlike “Dede Dinah” that was twitchier than rocking, but his strategy seemed to be, like Frankie Avalon’s, to grab the kids’ attention with a novelty and then move into supper-club mode.
Both Darin (“Early in the Morning,” “Now We’re One”) and Anka (“I Guess It Doesn’t Matter Anymore”) had their songs recorded by Buddy Holly without the Crickets. Nor were these purveyors of good music all male; Connie Francis (Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero) had been around for a couple of years, recording for MGM, before she broke through in February with “Who’s Sorry Now,” a weeper of a ballad that headed straight to the top ten and started a run of hits that lasted into the late ’60s, recording in both English and Italian. Her other notable hit of 1958, though, was yet another wacky, twitchy number, “Stupid Cupid.” There would be more of these people; their music fit into Top Forty programming brilliantly.
But a lot of the time the airwaves were filled with instrumentals or novelty records. Ross Bagdasarian was a songwriter who was tops in the apparently lucrative but little-known Armenian American pop market, and it was he who took the idea of “Flying Saucer”’s last words, “Good Bye Earth Pee Pul,” clumsily spoken on tape and sped up, and turned it into a career. Using the name David Seville, he recorded one of the year’s bestselling records, “Witch Doctor,” whose nonsense chorus was rendered in a sped-up voice. That caused Sheb Wooley, a country singer with a side career in acting, to craft “The Purple People Eater,” about the ultimate alien, who also spoke like that. Encouraged that the world needed more of this, Seville waited until Christmas, always a time for awful records, to unleash “The Chipmunk Song,” featuring three voices singing in sped-up harmony, and starting a torrent of Chipmunk and Chipettes records that has yet to abate.
Seeking relief from squeaky artificial vocals, people turned to such instrumentals as Pérez Prado’s cha-cha “Patricia,” the “Tea for Two Cha-Cha” by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, bebop drummer Cozy Cole’s monotonous drum solo “Topsy, Part Two,” and a twangy guitar instrumental with an unusual echoey sound, Duane Eddy’s “Rebel Rouser.” This last was by a guitarist based in Phoenix who’d been collaborating with a young music-biz hustler there named Lee Hazlewood. It appeared on the B side of “Stalkin’,” a slow instrumental that Hazlewood was certain was a hit, and the master tape had gone from Phoenix to Hollywood, where Hazlewood, in collaboration with another ambitious producer, Lester Sill, the guy who’d introduced Leiber and Stoller around Hollywood, added a saxophone to it. Sill had connections with Jamie Records, another up-and-coming Philadelphia label, and Dick Clark went on “Stalkin’” immediately, but it failed to sell. But when DJs turned the record over, they discovered a guitar instrumental that was considerably more sophisticated than Bill Justis’s “Raunchy,” and suddenly Eddy, Hazelwood, and Sill were going places.
Eddy had originally hoped to be a country star, although the path he wound up on was far more lucrative. But what had happened to country? The answer was that the guard was changing. For one thing, younger singers were blurring the line between old-style country and rock & roll; the Everly Brothers and Johnny Cash were harbingers of this, as was Johnny Horton, whose 1957 hit “I’m Coming Home” rocked like crazy, although the pop charts ignored it. Marty Robbins, too, was straddling the line, although more conservatively (he was over thirty), with titles like “A White Sport Coat (And a Pink Carnation)” and “Teen-Age Dream,” the former of which was a pop hit. Over at RCA, Chet Atkins, a virtuoso guitarist who proved to be a canny producer, had begun taking hints from Harold Bradley’s production techniques, and started de-emphasizing fiddles and steel guitars and adding strings, occasional brass, and backup singers to country records, with the result that Don Gibson, one of his early protégés, had a top-ten pop hit (and a #1 country hit) with “Oh, Lonesome Me.” The Nashville Sound, as it was soon dubbed, was born in RCA Studio B and Bradley’s Barn, and would become the new default for some country stars, including Ray Price, whose “Crazy Arms” Jerry Lee Lewis had covered, and who got a lot of mileage out of the so-called Texas shuffle his band, the Cherokee Cowboys, played like nobody else. (Price’s road band around this time included guitarist Roger Miller and bassist Willie Nelson, both of whom he’d acquired in Fort Worth.) But it’s evident what was happening by looking at the list of 1958’s #1 country singles: they were by Marty Robbins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Don Gibson, the Everly Brothers, Faron Young (whose 1955 hit “Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young” was attitudinally rock & roll, although he’d calmed down in later years), and Ray Price. And another performer who’d wanted to be a country star, Eddie Cochran, had a hit on the charts that summer, “Summertime Blues,” a teen protest song about mixing life and work while out of school that was so hot that nobody realized he’d multitracked the whole thing, playing all the instruments himself.
On college campuses, students were abandoning rock & roll, the music of their childhood, for other things. Sophisticates went for jazz, which rarely made it onto the pop charts (except for Ahmad Jamal and Moe Koffman’s catchy but insubstantial “Swinging Shepherd Blues”) but sold substantial quantities of albums, particularly such contemporary stars as Miles Davis, Ahmad Jamal, and Chet Baker. Intellectuals went for folk music. This wasn’t the first time this had happened; there had been a folk revival in the 1930s, when it was the soundtrack to the American left during the Depression, most notably with the Almanac Singers, who lived in a sort of commune in New York, and whose numbers included a young Harvard graduate with a folklorist father, Pete Seeger, as well as future actor Lee Hays. Some of the survivors of that era (notably Seeger and Hays) banded together in 1948 as the Weavers, who had hits with Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene,” and the Israeli folk song “Tzena Tzena,” in which Pete Seeger’s homely banjo did battle with Decca’s house arranger Gordon Jenkins’s massed strings. (Jenkins, remember, later worked with Buddy Holly.) The group’s career was killed at its zenith by the McCarthy hearings in Washington (and, indeed, several of the members, including Seeger, had joined or supported communist-aligned groups in the ’30s, not that such a thing was illegal), but Seeger continued to perform at schools, camps, and college campuses, his infectious personality and nonsectarian advocacy of peace and nuclear disarmament gaining him a growing number of fans, who also bought his banjo instruction books and his recordings for Folkways.
Folkways itself was a remarkable record label. Headed by Moses Asch, son of famed Yiddish author Sholem Asch, it, like its predecessor Asch Records, didn’t shy away from politics—or anything else. Folkways had in its catalog Bela Bartok’s recordings of Hungarian folk music, Alan Lomax’s recordings of the British Isles, Italy, and the Deep South, Harlem stride pianist James P. Johnson playing his classical compositions, and Kansas City bandleader Mary Lou Evans’s suite based on astrology, as well as recordings of the James Joyce Society’s meetings with Joyce reading from his works. It also, in 1952, released six LPs that would change American music forever. Arranged in three boxes with two discs each, it was called The Anthology of American Folk Music, but it was in fact nothing of the sort. What it actually was was the record collection of 78s acquired by an eccentric painter, filmmaker, and amateur anthropologist named Harry Smith, who needed some quick money and offered Moe Asch the collection, further offering to arrange it for LP release by picking titles and writing about them, as well as designing the cover and the accompanying booklet. The price was right, so Asch went for it, and Smith got to work. The three volumes were Ballads (narrative songs), Social Music (dance and church music), and Songs (blues and other non-narrative songs, with a couple of Cajun recordings thrown in). The booklet was a collage of woodcuts and poorly reproduced pictures of some of the artists, each ballad summarized in headline style (“Frankie,” by Mississippi John Hurt: ALBERT DIES PREFERRING ALICE FRY, BUT JUDGE FINDS FRANKIE CHARMING AT LATTER’S TRIAL), with notes (“Allen Britt shot Frankie Baker of 212 Targee Street St. Louis Missouri, October 15, 1899. The song was first sung by, and probably written by, ‘Mammy Lou’ a singer at Babe Conner’s famous cabaret in that city.”) and a discography and bibliography, which made it look like folklore scholarship, but in fact these were early commercial recordings (among the artists are the Carter Family and Blind Lemon Jefferson) and Smith noted in the foreword to the booklet that the records used were from 1927, when electric recording started, through 1932, when the Depression shut down folk music sales (or so Smith said). He also promised three more volumes, “devoted to examples of rhythm changes between 1890 and 1950,” but the first three were enough for Asch, so he turned down volume 4, although Smith had it ready. The first three didn’t sell, and they languished in the back room with copies of Readings from the Ramayana and Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit & English and Music of the Belgian Congo, Vol. 1 (East). Or, rather, they didn’t sell well at first. But with such a definitive title, libraries and other institutions started ordering it, and people heard it, including some of the kids who’d been inspired by Pete Seeger. Some of them saved up for their own copies (Folkways Records, selling mostly to libraries, were expensive, several dollars more than normal LPs), and they became sources of songs for incipient folksingers to learn. They also inspired people to go out and find more of the kind of music that was on the six albums, going door-to-door in the South to buy old 78s, and, later, to find the artists who’d made them. (This wasn’t as hard as it sounded; after all, in 1958, these recordings were barely thirty years old.)
But on most college campuses, folk music meant the occasional trio of guys playing banjo, guitar, and bass, a kind of stripped-down template of the Weavers’ lineup that had been adopted by the Tarriers, the group that had had the original hit with “The Banana Boat Song (Day-O)” before Harry Belafonte. Scarcely interested in authenticity, groups like the Gateway Singers, the Easy Riders, Bud & Travis, and the Kingston Trio shared bills in clubs that also booked jazz, sharing sets with comedians. In 1958, Capitol Records took a chance with the Kingston Trio, named for the city in Jamaica, but more interested in Hawaiian music than calypso. Two of the group had grown up in Hawaii, and played Hawaiian music together at college, and on adding their third member started doing satirical songs and some light pop material, working with their new manager, Frank Werber, a Bay Area publicist, to develop an act that would be suitable for San Francisco clubs. Their break came over Memorial Day weekend 1957, when Phyllis Diller canceled her weeklong engagement at the Purple Onion, and Werber talked the club into booking his act. They went over well, and soon more bookings happened, and Werber, seeing the future, insisted that any record label that signed them would release LPs only. The first album did okay, but not spectacularly, until a disc jockey on a station in Salt Lake City played one track, “Tom Dooley,” on the air and the phones went wild. Eventually, Capitol was forced to release it as a single, and it was a major hit in the summer of 1958, hitting #1. The album stayed on the charts for four years. Ironically, “Tom Dooley” was an authentic American folk song, collected by a folklorist, Frank Warner, in the 1950s from Frank Proffitt, a banjo maker and singer in Kentucky and released on Folkways, but the Kingston Trio mostly avoided that sort of material.
Pete Seeger’s stepbrother, Mike, however, did not; the Seegers grew up in a house filled with folk music, thanks to their ethnomusicologist father, Charles (and their babysitter, left-handed guitarist Elizabeth “Libba” Cotton), and by the time he was twenty-five, Mike was not only a walking encyclopedia of old-time music, but also a multi-instrumentalist, capable of playing in a number of styles. In New York, he collected two like-minded friends, photographer John Cohen and mathematician Tom Paley, and they started playing clubs in Greenwich Village as the New Lost City Ramblers. They, too, made an album in 1958, self-titled, for Folkways, who else?
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On September 22, at the military ship terminal of the Brooklyn Army Terminal, Elvis faced the media for the last time before sailing to Germany. Representatives of his record company, his label, his family, the Colonel and his entourage, and about 125 reporters and photographers were there for a last press conference. Would he miss his singing career? (Yes.) What did he think about marriage? (It was a good idea to give a relationship time so you were clear about it; that was something he’d learned from his parents.) How would he characterize his ideal woman? (“Female, sir.”) Finally, the Colonel arranged some photo opportunities and to the strains of “Tutti Frutti,” arranged for military band, Private Presley marched with the rest of the soldiers up the gangplank of the ship, leaving everyone else in the United States to deal with Frankie Avalon and the Chipmunks as best they could. As for the Colonel, he took the tape of the press conference and had RCA edit it into the weirdest Elvis single ever, “Elvis Sails.” It did not chart.