Will Elvis' original fans show up for new shows
RALPH J. GLEASON Posted Feb 01, 1969 12:00 AM
Elvis Presley didn't have on blue suede shoes when I saw him. He wore black pumps instead and when he went on stage he removed his cream-colored striped jacket with the black velvet collar and put on a blood-red one.
Now that his TV special showed he still had the drawing power, Elvis and the
Colonel are discussing his going out on tour and actually making personal appearances. Live concert appearances have been rare in the Presley career. He made half a dozen or so in the beginning and then the TV shows and the hit records spun him right off into the flicks and he was gone.
Back in June of 1956 when Jim Morrison was eleven years old, Elvis Presley came to the Oakland Auditorium Arena across the Bay from San Francisco. It's been renovated since then but it was at the time really raunchy, an old hail with a huge stage, U-shaped balcony and a flat floor with moveable seats. Elvis didn't sell it out.
That was most surprising. He did two shows, which may have been the problem, but he certainly came in with all the press and radio in the world going for him. Full coverage at the airport and the rest. It was a Sunday night but that shouldn't have stopped anyone. After all, it was Elvis. Right?
Before the show he hung around the dressing room, poking his head out the door occasionally to yell at the chickies hanging over the railing above him and talking with friends and people he'd gone to school with. He was afraid of the crowd even though he said he loved them. When he went to the head, he took along a police escort.
The crowd was overwhelmingly female and young. They screamed like their descendents did for the Beatles. The sound, echoing off those walls which had seen Ringling Brothers and the Harlem Globe Trotters and so many old, tired prize fights, was deafening. He signed some programs (one chick fainted just before she got to him).
I asked him about the audience and he said, in a thick drawl, "Ah thunk they-yuh wonderful. It makes muh wont tuh live up tuh they-ah opinion uv muh." Or something like that. The show left him sweating and he stayed in the dressing room for half an hour afterwards until a squad of Oakland cops could arrange an exit to his Caddy. Dozens of girls charged the police escort and almost got him as he climbed into the car (like Dylan in Don't Look Back) and as he drove away they stood there screaming and waving.
Before he made the run to the car, an occasional chick would get past the cops and bust all the way through to the dressing room door. He was sweet to them as earlier he had baited them as they hung over the railing or, when he was onstage, they ran up to the line of cops. He'd slap his crotch and give a couple of bumps and grinds and half grin at the insane reaction it produced each time.
He actually kissed a couple of them on the cheek after signing their programs and it was a clean, kind gesture that seemed quite removed from the hysteria that surrounded the rest of the show.
His Oakland appearance was the week he was on the Milton Berle program with Les Baxter, Debra Paget and a wild looking chick named Irish McCalla. On stage in Oakland he sang his songs and he held a guitar (though he never played it, using it really as a prop). The group with him, described by one of the promoters as high school friends, did all the playing. Elvis just sang and did a kind of prehistoric Twist.
It was the first show I'd seen that had the true element of sexual hysteria in it. There'd been appearances by all kinds of other pop music stars, back to Fats Domino and Chuck Berry and including the Everly Brothers and Paul Anka, but never anything like what Elvis produced. Even Hank Williams at the zenith of his fame didn't arouse the kind of teen age thing that Elvis did.
It wasn't the response The Beatles produced. Then it was love and adulation and the joy of recognition as if they were themselves an extension of the audience. It was somehow different with Elvis and I've puzzled about it in the years since then.
By the time The Beatles hit the U.S. they knew who they were, for one thing. And I don't think Elvis quite had it settled in his head then. Even though he got a lot of radio promotion for the event, the
Colonel and the rest of the show's producers thought he was basically a Country and Western performer. Cowboy deejays sponsored the show and emceed it. Not rock 'n roll people.
Then again Elvis didn't represent at the time, no matter how much he may represent it in retrospect, any dawn of a new youth era. He was just another instant teen age success and the quality that he had, which as I say I think he was unclear about himself, was certainly not clear to his organization.
Johnny Ray had been big by virtue of imitating the rhythm and blues singers from Little Miss Cornshucks on. He came right out of R&B but Elvis came out of R&B and Country and Western and he sang the blues much better than Ray ever could have. After all, the blues had been around in the mouths of white performers before but there was a world of difference between Elvis' approach to it and the approach of Frankie Laine and Peggy Lee. And Elvis may have been a hillbilly but he didn't sound like a hillbilly. He sounded much more relaxed than that and he didn't have the hillbilly whine.
Nobody really suspected what was about to happen. It's a cinch that Milton Berle didn't. After all, he let him get away and the general public and mass media thought of him only as the kid who did the pelvic (remember Elvis the Pelvis?) grinds and made those awful sounds.
Whatever he had that turned them on was not anything that came over to the post-teen set either. Fats Domino reached an older age bracket and so did Chuck Berry and Chuck even reached a lot of white kids that Fats didn't. When Fats and Chuck made their first West Coast tours, the audience was black for Fats and white for Chuck Berry and the promoters, those hard-nosed, deaf-eared realists, immediately classified them accordingly.
The
Colonel was a patent medicine hustler, a real life W. C. Fields circus barker who had the quick reactions necessary in the carny circuit and when he latched on to Elvis he didn't see where it was going but he let it move a little and then he dug the course it might take.
Elvis was simple and direct and uncomplicated. He did the visual thing Jim Morrison does but he did it with less sophistication and without the pure cynicism of Morrison or Mick Jagger. He did it straight and seemed mildly surprised at the reaction and like a good showman, once he knew what they wanted he socked it to them. In later years a man associated with Harry Belafonte wrote a novel about a black sex symbol performer who wore skin-tight pants with a jock strap stuffed with Kotex. That was too contrived for the Presley of 1956. He was just a kid from the town where Nathan Bedford Forrest fought a battle and he sang what he had learned where he grew up.
It was as simple as that, I suspect.
The Oakland Auditorium had five or six thousand kids for those two shows of Presley's. I often wonder what music they listen to now and if they belong to the Playboy Club and live in the stucco and plastic suburban developments and if they ever happened to see Jim Morrison, what they think of it. Elvis' songs were songs of alienation, too, and of young love. None of us knew it then but a whole new world was opening up. I wonder what it will be like when he goes out on concerts now. And will those original fans return?
[From Issue 26 — February 1, 1969]
20.04.2008, 16:30
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