1971 – Never a Dull Moment
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First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Bantam Press
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Copyright © David Hepworth 2017
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For Clare, Henry and Imogen
The age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has passed.
The idea of the rock star, like the idea of the cowboy, lives on.
There are still people who dress like rock stars and do their best to act as they think rock stars would have acted in an earlier time, much as there are people who strap on replica holsters and re-enact the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. It’s increasingly difficult to act like one or the other and keep a straight face.
The true rock stars rose and fell with the fortunes of the post-war record industry. They came along in the mid-fifties and they passed away in the last decade of the century just gone. We came to know them as rock stars but at first they had no generic name. In the early days, when Elvis Presley, Fats Domino and the like were coming out of nowhere, they might as easily have been called hillbilly cats, rhythm and blues shouters, specialists in western bop, plain pop singers or promoters of dance crazes.
The term ‘rock star’ really came into widespread use in the seventies and eighties when the music business was looking to sustain the careers of its biggest names. The business was no longer happy to hop from fad to fad. It was beginning to realize the value of brands. There was no better brand than a rock star. A rock star was supposed to be somebody you could rely on, somebody whose next record you had to have, often regardless of its merits. After that it was increasingly applied to everyone from Elvis Presley to David Bowie, from Morrissey to Madonna, from Ozzy Osbourne to Björk. By the twenty-first century, the term had been spread so thin as to be meaningless.
In the twenty-first century it seems rather inappropriate, to use a popular twenty-first-century term, to describe Kanye West, Adele or Justin Bieber as rock stars. These people are cut from a different cloth. The age of the rock star ended with the passing of physical product, the rise of automated percussion, the domination of the committee approach to hit-making, the widespread adoption of choreography and above all the advent of the mystique-destroying internet. The age of the rock star was coterminous with rock and roll, which in spite of all the promises made in some memorable songs proved to be as finite as the era of ragtime or big bands. The rock era is over. We now live in a hip hop world.
The game has changed. Rock stars were the product of an age when music was hard to access and was treasured accordingly. The stars of music no longer have a right to public attention simply by virtue of existing. Their products now compete on a level playing field with everything from virtual reality games to streaming movies. What was once hard to find is now impossible to escape. Music no longer belongs in a category of otherness. It’s just another branch of the distraction business, owned by the same multinational conglomerates as the theme parks and the multiplexes.
This kind of change has happened before – when talkies replaced silents, and then when TV stole the thunder of the movies. When record shops were replaced by online streams, twelve-inch records were exchanged for a ribbon of noughts and ones, and your favourite stars took to publishing pictures of their diurnal round on social media, everything changed. You simply can’t live the life of a rock star any longer. The mobile phone alone saw to that. The rock star’s mystique is at an end.
I may be wrong. I am of a certain age. I have prejudices, as do we all. It could be that the chart botherers of today, the people picking up their awards at the end of the year and headlining at the burgeoning number of rock festivals, the people getting those slightly trying-too-hard reviews in the posh papers – well, it could be that they will still be around in forty or fifty years’ time, the same way that Keith Richards and Bruce Springsteen have been; it could be that with time they will prove every bit as mythic as their predecessors of the sixties and seventies. If they are I won’t be around to tell you how surprised I am.
What interests me is this. If we no longer have a breed that qualifies for the description ‘rock star’, how can it be that the idea of the rock star as a social type remains so strong? This didn’t happen yesterday. Back in 1973, just two years after the death of Jim Morrison, just as a new generation was beginning to warm to David Bowie’s tongue-in-cheek rock-star figure Ziggy Stardust – a rock star in inverted commas for people who were beginning to find the unvarnished article just too corny – a magazine called Texas Monthly published what was the first recorded example of the term ‘rock star’ being applied to describe somebody who wasn’t a rock star. In that case they were actually writing about a ballet in which one character was much adored by the others. ‘He’s a Christ, a Buddha,’ they said, and then, stretching for a parallel a young readership might relate to, ‘a rock star’. In the years since 1973 we have grown increasingly used to ‘rock star’ being employed as a descriptor. Bill Clinton was supposed to be the first rock-star President. Russell Brand is a rock-star comedian. Marco Pierre White is a rock-star chef, Andre Agassi a rock-star tennis player. These days you can even be a rock-star fund manager.
In characterizing people as rock stars we are superimposing on them qualities we associated with actual rock stars in the past. It’s only when we describe people who aren’t rock stars as being like rock stars that we get an inkling of the qualities we came to associate with rock stars as a tribe.
What kind of qualities? Swagger. Impudence. Sexual charisma. Utter self-reliance. Damn-the-torpedoes self-belief. A tendency to act on instinct. A particular way of carrying themselves. Good hair. Interesting shoes.
Similarly there are qualities rock-star types do not have. A rock-star chef will not refer too closely to the recipe. A rock-star politician will not be overly in thrall to the focus group. A rock-star athlete will not go to bed at the time specified by the coach. A rock-star fund manager will make a huge call based on a gut feeling rather than indulge in a prolonged period of desk research and make a sober examination of the evidence.
Recklessness, thy name is rock. In fact a deficiency in reck is the defining characteristic we ascribe to rock stars as a social group. We believe in this recklessness so strongly we even ignore any evidence to the contrary, of which there is plenty. Keith Moon never did run a Rolls-Royce into a swimming pool, the Beatles never did smoke grass at Buckingham Palace, the police never did drop in to find guests at Keith Richards’ home munching a Mars bar between Marianne Faithfull’s legs; but such is our need to believe that generations of followers of rock myths and legends have laid their heads on their pillows and screwed their eyes tight shut, hoping against hope they might wake to find out such things had been the case.
Rock stars didn’t just live their own lives. They also lived a life on our behalf. They lived in our heads. If you were born in one of the decades immediately following the 1950s, a pantheon of rock stars provided you with a cast of fantasy friends who lived out their lives in a parallel universe of which you could only dream. They did things you wouldn’t dare do with people you would never meet in places you could never afford to go to. Yet you felt, because you had in a sense both started at the same point – them as musician, you as fan – that you shared a certain kinship for ever. You checked in with them when the time came for them to release their latest album or visit your town on tour, tried to detect what might be going on in their personal lives from the remarks they made in interviews, looked at the state of their hairline or waistline and silently measured your vital signs against theirs. Sometimes in the middle of dull days you even found yourself wondering what they might be doing at that precise moment. That’s one definition of a rock star.
The worship of rock heroes has some of the characteristics of religion. We believe rock stars know something we don’t. Grown men who have long ago ceased believing in comic-book heroes have no trouble convincing themselves that the people who are their heroes because they once played a memorable tune on the electric guitar can offer them wise counsel in middle age. In the 2000 movie High Fidelity, Bruce Springsteen appeared to the hero to advise him on his unsuccessful love life. This is interesting because the one thing we know about Springsteen is that for much of his young adult life his love life was a disaster area, albeit one palliated by the ready availability of sex with beautiful women. The principal reason why his love life was so unsatisfactory was connected with the fact that he had, by dint of talent and superhuman dedication, turned himself into the rock star he had always wanted to be. In fact he was so busy becoming that rock star that he had no time for the things that being that rock star was supposed to give him mastery of.
We didn’t see it that way. We thought of rock stars as living a life far removed from our daily cares. In doing that we saddled them with the often impossible requirements of our fantasies about what that larger life was. We liked to think of rock stars as being as rich as Croesus while not giving a fig for material possessions. We liked to think they had struggled to the very peak of one of the most competitive professions on earth without exhibiting any unseemly glimmer of ambition. We wanted them to become ever more famous and successful but reserved the right to complain if the popularity that we wished on them made it harder or more expensive for us to see them. Furthermore it was a condition of rock stardom that our favourites were either underrated or rated for the wrong things. We liked to think we could discriminate between the common herd and ‘the real fans’. We liked to feel that these rock stars were broadcasting on a particular wavelength which could only be picked up by true initiates like us – or, to be more precise, me. And most tragically and inevitably of all, we demanded that they remain unchanged, forever young on our behalf.
There was a greater premium on these rock stars remaining young as we got older; the need for them to embody what we saw as rock and roll values became more intense as our lives changed. The more the majority of the people who had grown up with rock and roll spent their days tethered to a work cubicle, earning their livings tapping at a computer keyboard, the company’s badge on a lanyard round their necks, their every move tracked by an all-seeing corporation, and the more they found that in public life they were compelled to curb their tongues and bite back on whatever they were just about to say, the more they looked to rock stars to be the people they were no longer permitted to be.
We wanted rock stars to be glamorous but also authentic. We needed to feel that they were forced to beat off willing sexual partners with a stick while also living a fulfilled family life. We saw them as staying up too late, sleeping through the morning, never quite giving any one thing their full attention and yet still, by dint of some special rock-star magic, operating to their full potential.
If they were still performing in their fifties and sixties, that wasn’t simply because they wanted to. It’s because we demanded it. Being a rock star, as Bruce Springsteen said to me thirty years ago, retards adulthood and prolongs adolescence. This is precisely what we found so attractive about it. We imagined these rock stars, as somebody once said about Keith Richards, not so much burning the candle at both ends as applying a blowtorch to the middle. That’s a rock star.
Ultimately, as another rock star observed, all things must pass. Now, like the cowboy, the cavalier, the wandering minstrel, the chorus girl, the burglar in the striped sweater, the top-hatted banker, the painter with his beret and the writer in his smoking jacket, the rock star must finally be consigned to the wardrobe of anachronistic stereotypes. In real life he has been overshadowed by hip hop stars who are brazen enough to make the most shameless rock star blush, and overtaken by talent-school munchkins who are far more manipulative than he would have dared be. His power base has been destroyed by the disappearance of the record industry, his magic fleeing in the twenty-four-hour daylight of social media.
Whether you think this is the end of that particular road or just a pause for breath, now is as good a time as any for an account of the rise and fall of this tribe of rock stars, who came to the fore in the years following the Second World War, waxed in the seventies, and waned with the twentieth century. They were a product of the rise of post-war prosperity and the end of an age of actual warriors, of a time when a new generation looked around for a new race of people to idolize, this time for different reasons. They rose on the back of the record business, which fancied it was going to be around for ever but lasted not much longer than the people who made ‘What the Butler Saw’ machines. Along with that business they have now departed the stage.
While they were on the stage they captured our imagination and our trust in a way no movie star or sports star or writer managed. They changed the way we looked, the way we talked, the way we walked, and what we considered an acceptable way to behave. We considered them more worthy of our trust than politicians, spiritual leaders or captains of industry. This is particularly amazing since, as most of the people who have been responsible for managing rock stars will tell you, many of them had difficulty finding their way from their hotel room to reception in time for the bus, let alone organizing a workable energy policy.
This is of course a cliché. But then it’s a cliché that has been built up over fifty years. It’s an interesting cliché because we’ve all had a hand in developing it. If being a rock star has been the ruination of some people then we should all accept part of the blame, because in a sense we helped do that to them. This book is about the people the rock stars were before being hit in the small of the back by rock fame, it’s about the fantasy figures that rock fame transformed them into, and it’s about the personal price they paid for playing a starring role in our dreams. It’s about the people who found themselves becoming rock stars, about their abrupt social elevation, the changes that affected them and the people around them, and the consequences for their nearest and dearest.
There was never such a thing as an original pure rock-star archetype. Our mental picture of what a rock star is supposed to amount to has been imperceptibly built up over half a century as each successive tide of music has come in and gone out and left its mark on the shore. If there is a rock-star stereotype it has to encompass Little Richard and also Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney as well as Janis Joplin, Bruce Springsteen alongside Sid Vicious, The Edge with Bob Marley and both Kurt Cobain and Keith Moon, and on into infinity. The idea of a rock star contains, if not exactly multitudes, then certainly a number of facets all of which speak to our depths.
There is a good theory that musical eras tend to have a life span of around forty years. You can certainly say that for the era of the rock stars. In the pages that follow I’ve profiled one rock star per year over each of the forty years from 1955 to 1994, and listed ten records, either singles or albums, that were made, released or were hits that year in order to give a flavour of the time. I’ve done this to construct a big picture of all the many layers that went into building our idea of what a rock star is. Careers are surprisingly long in popular music. Inspiration, on the other hand, tends to be fleeting. What I’ve tried to do is focus on one day in these people’s lives. These were the days when, for good or ill, their life changed in some respect. Something happened: it might have been the day they made one of those records which they then carried around on their backs for the rest of their lives; it might have been a day when they felt their old life slipping away; it might have been a day of great happiness or great sadness; it might have been the end of one phase or the beginning of another; it might have taken place on the concert stage in front of thousands or in a tiny rehearsal hall with barely any witnesses; it might have been a day when the tide of circumstance picked them up and delivered them to high ground, or a day when that same tide deposited them back on the beach. What all these stories have in common is that they form part of the biography of not just these particular rock stars but also The Rock Star. Each story, I hope, is not only interesting and illuminating in itself but also contributes something to the bigger story.
Why the title? Rock stars were uncommon people. They came from the masses and got to the top without the help of education, training, family ties, money or other conventional ladders. They came from ordinary lives and had no reason to expect that they would ever be special. At the same time they refused to accept that they would ever be anything but exceptional. Most surprising of all, many of them had careers that lasted far longer than they had any right to expect, because long after the hits stopped coming, their legends continued to endure. They endured because, like the stars of the great cowboy films of that earlier age, they were playing themselves and, at the same time, they were playing us.
David Hepworth
London, 2017
LITTLE RICHARD WAS unusual. He had always been unusual. He was one of the ten children of Leva Mae Penniman. She said he was more trouble than the rest put together.
According to Richard, who began burnishing his legend from an early age, he was born deformed. One eye was clearly bigger than the other. One leg was certainly shorter than the other. Hence Richard walked with short steps, which gave him a mincing gait. In the Pleasant Hill section of Macon, Georgia during the Second World War, at a time when sympathy for differences was in short supply, he came in for rough treatment. They called him faggot, sissy, punk and freak. And those were his friends.
Among his classmates he had a reputation for being happy to do the thing they were too sensible to do. At the age of twelve he placed one of his bowel movements in a shoebox, presented it to an elderly woman in the neighbourhood as a birthday present and then hid to witness her reaction as she opened it.
He had his first homosexual experience with a local man known as Madame Oop. Madame Oop was a friend of the family. Sometimes white men would pick Richard up in their cars and take him out to the woods.
His father, Bud, would beat him, say he wasn’t a real boy. Bud ran moonshine whisky and was eventually shot and killed in front of Macon’s Tip-In Inn.
The young Richard was excited by the gospel acts that came through Macon. Because they worked on the Lord’s behalf these people seemed to be licensed to act crazy. Sometimes it wasn’t possible to tell whether they were singing about heavenly or earthly reward. They were clearly moved by the spirit of free enterprise. Richard ingratiated himself with Sister Rosetta Tharpe when she played Macon. She allowed him to open her show and then crumpled $30 into his hand. This was a life-changing moment.
In 1949, at the age of seventeen, Richard went on the road with a snake oil salesman. Like many features of Little Richard’s early life, this is not a metaphor. This is the reality in which he was raised. He performed with Doctor Nobilio, who carried with him ‘the devil’s child’, allegedly a dead baby with the feet of a bird. He joined the minstrel show of Sugarfoot Sam from Alabam, who introduced him as Princess Lavonne. He performed in a dress.
As a teenager Richard had a job washing dishes in the diner in Macon’s Greyhound bus station. Interesting trade would pass through, particularly in the night-time hours. This is how he met a fifteen-year-old from South Carolina called Eskew Reeder, who styled himself Esquerita, sported a pompadour so high there was snow on the top and was camp enough to make Richard seem like a longshoreman.
Richard took him home, and copied the hair-do and his hammering right hand on the piano. In fact Richard, who was to spend the rest of his life complaining that other people had stolen his style, picked up something from almost everybody he encountered. He played in the band of Billy Wright, who piled his hair up high and impressed upon him the value of a make-up range called Pancake 31. He observed a mountainous woman called Clara Hudmon who performed in shimmering raiment and went by the name of the Georgia Peach.
In the same week in September 1955 that Richard arrived in New Orleans for his recording date, two men went on trial in Money, Mississippi for having brutally beaten and murdered Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago who had been visiting relatives down south and made the mistake of addressing a white woman in a way she took to be fresh. The only reason there was a trial was because his mother had insisted his appallingly damaged body be flown back north and displayed in an open coffin. The killers were acquitted, as was the custom of the South, but the trial pricked the national conscience.
Even in the rest of the country, which didn’t have the same history of slavery, the best that black people could hope for was indifference. It wasn’t until 1950 that Life magazine considered it acceptable to put a black face on its cover, and even then it was Jackie Robinson, whose entry into the big leagues of baseball had taken place against a background of abuse. In January 1955 the white disc jockey Alan Freed had opened the doors to his ‘Rock’n’roll Jubilee Ball’ at St Nicholas Arena in New York and been amazed to see seven thousand kids flocking in. He was even more amazed to see they were white as well as black. It had never occurred to him that white kids might be listening to the rhythm and blues records he played on the radio.
Radio was the one medium that could afford to be colour blind. A year earlier, in the summer of 1954, the boy Elvis Presley had made his first broadcast appearance on the Memphis radio show of Dewey Phillips. Dewey made sure that the listeners knew he went to Humes High School. That way they would know that he was white.
The colour blindness worked the other way as well. Up in the far north, in Hibbing, Minnesota, fourteen-year-old Bobby Zimmerman had taken advantage of the night-time ionosphere effect to tune in to Frank ‘Brother Gatemouth’ Page who was playing rhythm and blues records on a station out of Shreveport, Louisiana, fully a thousand miles away. Page talked the jive and played the blues but he was no blacker than his pale Jewish listener in the frozen north. On the air you could be whoever you wanted to be.
Everybody involved in the music business knew rock and roll was happening but only Freed had seen with his own eyes the way that it was happening. Few had much hope it would turn out to be more than a fad, much as calypso and Latin had been the previous year.
When producer Bumps Blackwell had been sent from Los Angeles to New Orleans by Specialty Records to see if he could get a record out of Little Richard, a boy who had already been recorded a handful of times but had never had a hit, he didn’t have anything particular in mind. The most-played record on American juke boxes that week in September 1955 was ‘Maybellene’, the first release by Chuck Berry, a former ladies’ hairdresser from St Louis. Berry had a gimmick. He was offering something that sounded like a comical country song but with a heavy backbeat. Blackwell didn’t know exactly what he had to come up with but he was alive to the possibility of making a comparable leap.
The studio they were in that day was the size of a motel room. The band squeezed into the room contained a number of the regulars in Fats Domino’s outfit. When the twenty-two-year-old Richard appeared, wearing a shirt of a violent hue with a high collar that made him look like a pantomime queen, with his pompadour kept in place by lacquer of industrial strength, his natural skin tone concealed beneath a full inch of Pancake 31, the band rolled their eyes at each other but then got down to work.
‘We recorded “Kansas City” and “Directly From My Heart To You”,’ Blackwell recalled later. ‘They were OK. Good songs, and he was a good singer. But we weren’t really getting anywhere.’
They took a break and went across the street to the Dew Drop Inn. This was a famous New Orleans spot where musicians hung out. According to a city ordinance it was supposed to have a partition separating the white drinkers from the black drinkers, but the owner couldn’t be bothered. The Dew Drop Inn made its own law.
‘All the boosters, rounders, pimps and whores were sitting around,’ remembered Blackwell. ‘And there was a piano. Well, all you need to do with Richard is give him an audience and the show’s on.’
Richard approached the piano and called the patrons of the Dew Drop Inn to attention with a yelp that rent the frowsy lunchtime air. That yelp was pitched like a cross between a football chant and an order barked across a parade ground. Like a stone skimmed across the profound stillness of a vast pond, that yelp went on to echo around the world.
It went as follows: ‘Awopbopaloobop.’
It continued: ‘Alopbamboom!’
That’s all it was. It was just a little riff of Richard’s, an imagined percussion fill which he was in the habit of beating out on the lunch counter of the bus station in Macon. This time it tumbled without interruption into a sort of song, a song that was greeted throughout the Dew Drop Inn with the knowing smirks of those whose chosen lifestyles meant they were not readily given to indignation.
The song, if song it could be called, was a selection that could only be sung, if singing it could be called, in front of the kind of people who spent their lunchtimes in the Dew Drop Inn, an establishment louche even by the standards of Planet New Orleans. Its title, if it could be said to have one because nobody had ever considered it fit enough for publication, was ‘Tutti Frutti’.
Its subject matter was, not to put too fine a point on it, anal sex.
It began ‘Tutti Frutti, good booty’. It then added ‘if it’s tight, it’s all right’. It developed that idea further with ‘if it’s greasy, it makes it so easy’.
As Little Richard hammered at the high keys of the piano in the way he’d learned from Esquerita, howled in the way he’d stolen from Rosetta Tharpe and made show in the way he’d seen so many artists do out on the chitlin circuit (the colloquial name given to the road that led from the upper Midwest, New York and Washington DC down into the South, then further into the Deep South, named after the pig intestines, or ‘chitterlings’, enjoyed by the black customers who came to its performance venues), Bumps Blackwell found himself wondering if it might be possible to take some of ‘Tutti Frutti’’s fetid energy back into the studio and clean it up a bit.
He put the idea to Richard. Now Richard was a strange combination of libertine and prude. He’d run wild in the streets during the week but submitted to the discipline of the church on Sunday. He said he didn’t want to record the song ‘because it’s dirty’. Blackwell reckoned they might be able to fix the words. Which is where Dorothy LaBostrie came in. Dorothy was twenty-seven at the time and was working as a waitress in New Orleans while raising a couple of kids. She was tall and thin and fancied herself as a poet and songwriter. She’d been bombarding Blackwell with lyrics for some time.
Blackwell called her over to the studio and instructed Richard to sing his ‘song’ to her. Richard agreed to do so but only if he could sing it with his back turned. He ran through it a couple of times as she took notes. She didn’t want the job but Bumps said she owed it to her children. Fifteen minutes later she returned with a clean version, in which the references to buggery had been replaced by the slang term of approval ‘aw rooty’ and a girl named Daisy had made an appearance, who apparently drove the singer of the song crazy.
It took them three takes but by the end of the session they had a record. It was a record that sounded like no record had ever sounded before. ‘Tutti Frutti’ began like a stick-up, built up to a riot, and stopped as suddenly as it had arrived. It was like a jet plane passing over your head close enough to part your hair. It was hilarious if you thought about it. The important thing was not to think about it.
When it came out a few weeks later the only people who didn’t find it meaningless were teenagers, for whom its delirious exuberance meant more than mere words ever could. ‘Tutti Frutti’ got to number two on the rhythm and blues chart and as high as number seventeen on the main pop chart. It wasn’t as big a hit as the inevitably pallid cover version served up for white radio by Pat Boone. Nevertheless the record they’d lashed together in such unseemly haste at the end of that session on Rampart Street reached around the world and electrified the people who mattered.
Richard recorded further smashes with Bumps Blackwell over the next two years: ‘Lucille’, ‘Long Tall Sally’, ‘Rip It Up’, ‘Keep A-Knockin”, ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ and ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’, which he also sang in the movie of the same name. That run of successes made Little Richard into the first true rock star. He was a few months ahead of Elvis into the national spotlight, which gave him first-mover advantage. More than that, whereas Elvis took the conventional idea of male beauty into almost Venusian hyper-reality, Richard remained the runt of the litter, a limping, one-eyed grotesque who seemed to turn himself into a star by sheer force of will. Richard’s unrestrained sexuality was doubly threatening because it wasn’t clear whether it was directed at your daughter or your son. Where Chuck Berry’s records seemed to be about rock and roll, Little Richard’s records were the embodiment of the simultaneous rage and joy of the thing itself. That opening shout of ‘Awopbopaloobop alopbamboom!’ seemed like the answer to a question nobody had yet thought of posing.
Richard was young enough, unsettling enough and clearly invested enough in the revolution announced by ‘Tutti Frutti’ to be that figure. It helped that he looked the way he did and acted the way he did, and had a name and a persona which placed him in the appropriate category of otherness. Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and Bill Haley were all too old and too detached from the world of their music to be the standard bearer of this new crusade. With Little Richard you finally had a personality who lived up to the sound. It was this new combination of mayhem and personal magnetism, this marriage of walking and talking, the intimation that even though the record may have reached its end the consciousness from which it sprang was alive out there in the world, carrying itself in a certain way and behaving in a way that the fans would dearly like to have had the permission to behave, that made Richard the first rock star.
Richard called, and many answered. They answered from all over the world. ‘Tutti Frutti’ was covered by Elvis Presley in his first album the following year. It was in the vast white audience to which neither he nor Blackwell had ever given a moment’s thought when they made the record that his sound had its most profound effect.
It was released in the UK in January 1957 on the B-side of ‘Long Tall Sally’. David Jones, a nine-year-old at Burnt Ash Junior School in Bromley, later recalled that his ‘heart burst with excitement’. Keith Richards, who was twelve and attending Dartford Technical High School for Boys, said ‘it was as if, in a single instant, the world changed from monochrome to Technicolor’. And Bobby Zimmerman, the boy who’d been tuning his radio to the sound of Shreveport from up there in the Iron Range of Minnesota, led a group called the Golden Chords who appeared in a school concert playing their own version of Little Richard’s song. It was an unimaginably hot, exotic sound to be attempted by anyone other than the people who made it that day in New Orleans, let alone a bunch of Jewish adolescents from the frozen north.
Regardless of that, the die was cast. The high-school yearbook entry for Bobby Zimmerman’s final year at Hibbing High in 1959 announced his ambition. He didn’t want to run for President. He didn’t want to write the Great American Novel. He wanted one thing: ‘To join Little Richard’.
Little Richard, ‘Tutti Frutti’
Chuck Berry, ‘Maybellene’
Frank Sinatra, In The Wee Small Hours
Bill Haley and the Comets, ‘Rock Around The Clock’
Lonnie Donegan, ‘Rock Island Line’
Fats Domino, ‘Ain’t That A Shame’
The Platters, ‘The Great Pretender’
Pérez Prado, ‘Cherry Pink And Apple Blossom White’
Elvis Presley, ‘Baby Let’s Play House’
Wanda Jackson, ‘Silver Threads And Golden Needles’
FIVE OF THEM were packed into the white Lincoln Continental Mark II that day. A two-door vehicle wasn’t the most sensible choice for the two-hour ride between Memphis, Tennessee and Tupelo, Mississippi. However Elvis Presley had only bought the Lincoln in August. Since then he’d either been in New York, making his first appearances on the top-rating Ed Sullivan Show to sing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ – his first hit record on RCA – for an audience of fifty million, or in Hollywood, making his first movie appearance in Love Me Tender. Hence he was still eager for any opportunity to take the big luxury coupé for a spin. He was all the keener since on this day he was going to show it off to the folks in his home town.
He had rehearsed this special day in his head many times. Finally it was happening. The homecoming wasn’t just for Elvis’s sake. The two people in the back seat had also taken the same journey in the opposite direction in 1948. At the time their chariot was a ten-year-old Plymouth and the circumstances not quite so carefree. In 1948 Elvis’s parents, Vernon and Gladys, couldn’t wait to get out of Tupelo. Too many people knew Vernon had served time in Parchman Farm for trying to pass a dud cheque. They feared, with some justification, that they would never escape the stratum of society respectable folks called poor white trash.
Every marriage requires at least one grown-up. In this marriage, Gladys was the adult. That wasn’t only because she was four years Vernon’s senior. It was also because she was a grafter, stitching shirts at the Tupelo Garment Company for $13 a week. Vernon, on the other hand, could never seem to find the job he considered worthy of his talents. She was dark-eyed, almost Spanish-looking; he was blond. She was homely; he was a rake. She was outgoing and gregarious; he was sullen and resentful. They married on the same day in 1933 that Pretty Boy Floyd killed four lawmen in the Kansas City Massacre. Unusually, Vernon was seventeen and Gladys was twenty-one.
They started a family home in the only way open to poor people in the South in those days: they built it themselves. The following year Gladys became pregnant with twins. She was so sure they were going to be boys that she had already picked out their names, Elvis Aron and Jessie Garon. She felt it was important their names rhyme. On the night of 8 January 1935, Gladys went into labour. The first boy was stillborn. The second, who arrived half an hour later, survived. The Presleys couldn’t afford the $15 to pay the doctor.
The first of millions of formal pictures of Elvis Presley was in a group with his mother and father. It was taken in the Lee County Jail immediately prior to Vernon’s move to Parchman. At the time it was just a standard family portrait, such as might be ordered by any mother wishing to record a precious, fleeting stage of family life. Regular publication over the years since has lent it an iconic status. It seems possible to read shame in Vernon’s expression, tight-lipped exasperation in Gladys’s and the shadow of perplexity across the beautiful face of the three-year-old twin who had survived.
Through his formative years Elvis came to believe that the only person he could rely on in the world was his mother. Gladys returned the compliment by actively discouraging any sign of independence in her adored boy. She walked him to school every day, took him into her bed at night when Vernon was in prison, and rarely let him out of her sight. As a child Elvis was never lonesome, particularly at night. This was a state of affairs that was to continue throughout his life. He didn’t call her Mom, like the other kids did theirs. The two had an entire secret language of baby talk. His name for her was ‘Satnin’.
Elvis began school in Tupelo. He was no trouble. In fact he made little impression on anyone. His first singing performance was at the age of ten when he warbled a sentimental song about a dog in front of a couple of hundred people at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show. And now, a decade later, they were sitting in the back of a Lincoln Continental, a car so exclusive the dealers were instructed to sell them only to clients with the requisite prestige, returning in glory to the same event in the same town they’d had to slink out of ten years earlier with their tails between their legs. All this was because over the last couple of years Gladys’s boy had had a number of regional hit records on the Sun label. These had led to regular appearances on the Louisiana Hayride. Next thing she knew her boy was the one everybody wanted all across the South. And now that his contract had been sold to RCA Records he was going to New York City to make records and appear on national TV shows. For a woman who had been born into a world without radio and raised in a house without electricity, this was a dizzying transformation.
Lolling across the front seat that day was Nick Adams, a twenty-two-year-old actor Elvis had befriended on the second day of shooting Love Me Tender in Hollywood. Elvis was impressed that Adams had played a small part in East of Eden, the James Dean picture that had been released after the actor died the previous year. Adams recognized that a friendship with Presley could be beneficial to his own career. He knew Hollywood people were quicker than music business people when it came to seeing how popular Elvis could be. ‘He’s Marlon Brando with a guitar,’ pronounced Jackie Gleason. Old hands who were bullied into the screening room to see Love Me Tender dailies detected a self-sufficiency in front of the camera nobody could coach.
The fifth person in the car was Barbara Hearn, a pretty nineteen-year-old girl the fan magazines had taken to calling ‘Elvis’s Memphis girlfriend’. The conditionality of this description recognized what was apparent to anyone in Elvis’s circle at the time: that the rough equality of family life was slowly being replaced by something that operated more like a royal court, and in a royal court everything revolves around just one sovereign. Elvis was now being asked the same questions any twenty-one-year-old was being asked. His new status meant he was free to answer in a way they never would. When he was asked who he was dating at the time he would mention Barbara but also seventeen-year-old June Juanico, who lived in Biloxi. Then he would grin and tell the truth: ‘I’m dating about a hundred girls.’
Barbara had few illusions about how she figured in his life. She knew that like everyone else in his social circle the events of the last year – the hit records, the TV appearances, the screaming crowds, the sudden geyser of cash, the frenzy of renown – had relegated her to the status of supporting player. During the drive that day Elvis turned to her and asked if she’d brought the shirts he’d given her to hold back at the house. She said she hadn’t. They found a payphone and made sure that somebody back at North Audubon Drive brought along the two shirts, the blue and the red velvet blouses. He didn’t tell Barbara that he’d been given these shirts by his new Hollywood girlfriend Natalie Wood; Natalie had had her dressmaker run them up. Barbara already knew she wasn’t the only one, but these shirts were an indication of the new competition she could expect to face. Girls with their own dressmakers.
The Mississippi-Alabama Fair generally had a theme. In September 1956 the theme was Elvis Presley. The city fathers had been hoping that the boy they had taken no notice of when he was growing up in the town would be the main attraction of a motorcade down Main Street. Colonel Tom Parker, who had recently taken over Elvis’s management, had told them that would simply be too dangerous so they’d had to settle for him doing two shows, one a matinee and one in the evening, in the amphitheatre of the show ground, within sniffing distance of the new swine barn in which so much local money and pride had been invested.
It was a hot day and the Presley family were dressed more for formality than comfort, Vernon in a dark suit and tie, Gladys in a heavy brocade dress with an Elvis button, the star of the show in his heavy velvet Hollywood shirt. For Elvis this whole day was the culmination of a wish-fulfilment fantasy. In the breast of every adolescent boy burns the hope that one fine day he will get the opportunity to return to the playing field where nobody picked him, to the dance floor where the scars of his minor humiliations were first sustained, to climb the school platform to which he was never summoned to receive a prize, there to extend his wings to their fullest span and, like a butterfly in the sun, soak up the full measure of the adoration, sexual desire and throbbing envy of those who considered he would never amount to anything.
26 September 1956 was truly the day of reckoning. Little Richard may have been the first rock star but Elvis was the first rock idol, the first to take that curious, unprecedented journey from the back of the class to the cynosure of all eyes, from an existence as that boy who dressed a little strange to being the one everybody else wished to emulate, from whispered mockery to open adoration, all in what seemed like the blink of an eye.
To his new fans he had always been attractive, but those who’d grown up with him knew that in his adolescent years Elvis’s looks didn’t fit. As he grew into a young man he accentuated this difference by adopting the frilly shirts and tight pants of the gigolo, as if daring the good old boys in town to take exception to him. This revolution in his appearance came before any revolution in music. From early on his hair was a statement, a form of expression every bit as vital to him as music. His hair was the one non-negotiable. He lost two jobs for not getting it cut. He devoted hours to arranging it. He loved looking at himself. This wasn’t mere narcissism. Narcissism is a shallow infatuation with one’s own appearance. With Elvis it was far from shallow. It was the real thing.