elvis – The Hip Quotient

We All Will Be Received in Graceland — Except for Bruce

Dana Spiardi — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 04:00:00 +0000

All The King’s men. That’s a royal court that could include every seasoned rocker whose creative spark was first lit by the sight and sound of Elvis Presley. They started out wanting to be him, and spent their lives dying to meet him. Some were fortunate enough to encounter The King long before their moms bought them their first guitars. Future country rock pioneer Gram Parsons was 9 years old when he shook hands with the new singing sensation backstage at the Waycross City Auditorium in Georgia in 1956. Tom Petty was 11 when his uncle introduced him to the star while he was filming Follow That Dream in Florida in 1961. Petty and Parsons were lucky; most artists had to wait till they were big league players before even contemplating a face-to-face with Elvis. And even then it wasn’t easy to enter his well-guarded world.

By the mid-1960s the sharecropper’s son from Tupelo, Mississippi, had begun to develop a suspicious mind regarding the new crop of electrified rockers – especially four long-haired boys from England who were inciting even bigger riots than he did at the height of his fame. But The Beatles were oblivious to all that; part of the thrill of conquering America was the chance to finally meet their idol. After much logistical wrangling, Elvis handler “Colonel” Parker and Beatles manager Brian Epstein finally arranged a get-together on the evening of August 27, 1965. The Beatles were staying in a rented house in Los Angeles, having just played two shows at the Hollywood Bowl. They were to visit Elvis at his home on Perugia Way in Bel Air, where he was relaxing after completing his latest film. The meeting began in an uneasy manner, with the awestruck Beatles at a loss for words (even John!). Finally, Elvis said, “If you guys are just going to sit around and stare at me, I’m going to bed.” That broke the ice, and The King and his adoring subjects spent the next four hours shooting pool, listening to records, jamming with Elvis’s guitars, and talking about current movies. But the relationship ended there. Years later Elvis would criticize the Beatles for what he called their “anti-American spirit.”

Through the years, the increasingly medicated Elvis would meet increasingly odd fans who idolized him. Some encounters were quite bizarre, like the time in 1970 when he invited Alice Cooper, Liza Minnelli, Chubby Checker, and Deep Throat porn star Linda Lovelace to his Las Vegas penthouse after a show. What an ensemble! Shock-rocker Cooper later told The London Mirror: “Elvis took me into the kitchen, opened a drawer, and pulled out a loaded pistol, telling me to put it to his head. A little voice in my left ear was telling me, ‘Go on, this is history — kill him. You’ll always be the guy who killed Elvis.’ A fraction of a second later Elvis did a flying kick on the gun and sent it flying, before tripping me and pinning me to the ground by my neck, announcing, ‘That’s how you stop a man with a gun.'”

Elvis owned quite an arsenal, but guns or no guns, he was still a few years away from climbing that final stairway to heaven when he met the hard rocking Led Zeppelin. Sometime in the early ’70s (dates vary), the four members of the British band attended an Elvis concert, during which The King gave them a nice shout-out from the stage. Legend has it that Elvis stopped singing a song and jokingly told his band, “Wait a minute…if we can start together fellas, because we’ve got Led Zeppelin out there…let’s try to look like we know what we’re doing.” At this point, Zeppelin albums were outselling Elvis records by the millions. But the rock gods posed no threat to the man whose devoted worldwide fans outnumbered theirs, then and now. One night after a show, Elvis agreed to meet Zeppelin’s two frontmen – guitarist Jimmy Page and singer Robert Plant – in his hotel suite. And no, they didn’t spend the night browsing through Elvis’s personal copy of The Physician’s Desk Reference.

Here’s how Plant described the encounter to Paul Cole in the British tabloid Sunday Mercury: “As we all chatted, Jimmy Page joked with Elvis that we never bothered much to do soundchecks before our gigs. But when we did do them, all I wanted to do was sing Elvis songs! Elvis thought that was really funny and asked me what my favourite song was, which tunes I enjoyed the most. I told him I liked the ones with all the moods, like that great country song ‘Love Me.’ You know, the one that goes: Treat me like a fool, treat me mean and cruel, but love me. We had an illuminating and funny 90 minutes with Elvis. When we were leaving, I was just walking down the corridor when he swung ’round the door frame, looking quite pleased with himself, and started singing that song to me: Treat me like a fool… I turned around and did my best Elvis right back at him. We stood there for quite a while, singing to each other!” Imagine — two of the world’s most sought-after hunks, serenading each other in a hallway. Oh, to have had cell phone video cameras back then.

Paul Simon once sang, “I’ve a reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland.” And indeed, millions of fans – including hundreds of rock stars – have been welcomed at Elvis’s former estate since it opened for public tours in 1982, five years after his death. Few, if any, musicians were lucky enough to be invited to the house while Elvis occupied it. But one late night in 1976, a skinny Jersey boy on the cusp of superstardom had the chutzpah to drop by the mansion, uninvited, to pay Elvis a personal visit. (Much like The King had once dropped by The White House, uninvited, to pay Richard Nixon a visit.)

Bruce Springsteen is one of the world’s biggest Elvis fans. Like scores of boys growing up in the 1950s, he asked his mom to buy him a guitar the very day after seeing the singer perform on The Ed Sullivan Show. Flash forward to 1976: Bruce was in the middle of his phenomenal “Born to Run” tour to promote his third LP. Despite having been featured on the covers of both Time and Newsweek magazines on the same date – October 27, 1975 – he was still a bit of a cult star, playing small clubs and college auditoriums. On April 29 of the following year, Bruce and the E Street Band had just wrapped up another one of their four-hour extravaganzas, this one in Memphis. A wired-up Bruce decided the time was ripe to visit the man who started the whole ball rolling. So, with sidekick Steven Van Zandt in tow, he hailed a cab to Graceland, saw a light in an upstairs window, and knew just what he had to do: walk right up to the front door, ring the bell, and ask to see Elvis. Now, if he could just jump over that wall and convince those security guards…

In the video below, Bruce tells the entire funny story. It used to be one one of his favorite concert tales. The song he sings in homage to Elvis is called “Johnny Bye Bye,” based on the old Chuck Berry tune, “Bye Bye Johnny.” Nobody pays tribute to the founding fathers, or articulates rock-roll passion, quite the way Bruce does. What a pity the man we call The Boss never got to meet the man we’ll always call The King. They woulda got on like a house on fire.

Leaving Memphis with a guitar in his hand
With a one way ticket to the Promised Land
Hey little girl with the red dress on
There’s a party tonight down in Memphis town
I’ll be going down there if you need a ride
The man on the radio says Elvis Presley’s died

Bye bye Johnny
Johnny bye Bye
You didn’t have to die
You didn’t have to die

© Dana Spiardi, May 2, 2013

Robert Plant: In the House of the Holy with The King

Dana Spiardi — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 04:00:34 +0000

Rock blaster Robert Plant, like his Led Zeppelin bandmates, was known to have entertained thousands of groupies in hotel rooms all across the land, back in the day when cocksure male rock gods reigned supreme. But when Elvis came to town, the tables were turned, and Mr. Plant found himself playing the part of adoring groupie. Just what went on behind closed doors between those two? The story goes like this…

Sometime in the early ’70s (dates vary), the four members of rock’s loudest band attended an Elvis concert, during which The King gave them a nice shout-out from the stage. Legend has it that Elvis stopped singing a song and jokingly told his band, “Wait a minute…if we can start together fellas, because we’ve got Led Zeppelin out there…let’s try to look like we know what we’re doing.” At this point, Zeppelin albums were outselling Elvis records by the millions. But the rockers posed no threat to the man whose devoted worldwide fans outnumbered theirs, then and now. One night after a show, Elvis agreed to meet Zeppelin’s two frontmen/fans – guitarist Jimmy Page and singer Robert Plant – in his hotel suite. You might imagine these three chemical-loving artists spending the night browsing through Elvis’s personal copy of The Physician’s Desk Reference. But it wasn’t like that at all.

Here’s how Plant described the encounter to Paul Cole in the British tabloid Sunday Mercury in December 2008: “As we all chatted, Jimmy Page joked with Elvis that we never bothered much to do soundchecks before our gigs. But when we did do them, all I wanted to do was sing Elvis songs! Elvis thought that was really funny and asked me what my favourite song was, which tunes I enjoyed the most. I told him I liked the ones with all the moods, like that great country song ‘Love Me.’ You know, the one that goes: Treat me like a fool, treat me mean and cruel, but love me. We had an illuminating and funny 90 minutes with Elvis.

“When we were leaving, I was just walking down the corridor when he swung ’round the door frame, looking quite pleased with himself, and started singing that song to me: Treat me like a fool… I turned around and did my best Elvis right back at him. We stood there for quite a while, singing to each other!”

Imagine — two of the world’s most sought-after hunks, serenading each other in a hallway. Oh, to have had cell phone video cameras back then!

I’m sure Mr. Plant warmed up for this classic Led Zeppelin number by singing an Elvis tune.

Yes, Elvis — all true rockers love you.

© Dana Spiardi, Aug 20, 2014

Elvis 11 Times

Dana Spiardi — Tue, 18 Aug 2015 04:43:20 +0000

My mom was washing dishes and I was drying them when we heard the news on TV that Elvis died – August 18, 1977. Like the day President Kennedy was assassinated, you always remember where you were and what you were doing the day the King left the throne. (Actually, he had fallen off the toilet, but you get my point.)

Here’s one of my favorite works of art: Andy Warhol’s Elvis. It’s based on a publicity shot for Presley’s 1960 movie “Flaming Star.” This piece is one of a series of screenprinted Elvis paintings Andy created in 1963. The biggest is at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. It’s 36 feet long, 6.5 feet high and features 11 Elvises. Magnificent!

Music writer Peter Guralnick penned two excellent books about Elvis: “Last Train to Memphis – The Rise of Elvis Presley,” and “Careless Love – The Unmaking of Elvis Presley.” I Highly recommend them. There was a lot more to The King than you might imagine. In addition to being an enormous talent, he was intelligent, kind, and compassionate. Sure, he didn’t invent R&B wailing and fancy legwork – he copied much of that from the Southern black artists he loved – but he had the smarts to repackage it and the moxie to present it to a white audience trapped in an era of conformity and conservatism. RIP, Elvis!

Thank you, Elvis (and Radio Luxembourg)

Dana Spiardi — Thu, 08 Jan 2015 05:00:07 +0000

Like many sprouting rock fans living in the hinterland – in the days before cool FM radio, streaming Internet and MTV – I stayed up till the wee hours, slowly turning the dial on my little radio, in search of The Hits of the Day. Finding nothing but yakety-yak talk shows and cryptic transmissions sounding like they originated from an intergalactic battlefield, I embarked on a nightly airwave expedition to find new sounds to satiate my growing musical appetite. Suddenly, at around age 9, this night-owl-in-the-making stumbled upon WOWO – 1190 AM, from Ft. Wayne, Indiana. To a solitary child like me who had never travelled much beyond a 25-mile radius of my PennsylTucky home, Ft. Wayne became my musical mecca.

What fun listening to commercials and weather reports from a far-away place! WOWO played everything I needed to hear, bridging the gap between my love of pop and my red-hot passion for rock. Oh, those simple days before I discovered eardrum-destroying headphones, Led Zeppelin, and herbed-up, late-night hippie DJs who had the freedom to play whatever they liked.

The nocturnal search for good music in a sour milk sea of standards is a tradition that started long before I picked up my first transistor radio (the Westinghouse H-901P7GP). Way back in drab, post-war England, teenaged boys with bad teeth and sun-starved skin – bored to tears with BBC Radio’s unflinching policy of airing nothing but show tunes and classical music – were stringing wires around their small, government-built “council houses” so they could tune in to the one radio station that gave them a reason to live. What they found – from across the English channel – was the infamous “pirate station,” Radio Luxembourg. What they heard was a black-sounding white man named Elvis Presley. And what changed their lives was a moody little tune called “Heartbreak Hotel.”

The young Elvis had recorded several songs at Sam Phillips’s Sun Studios in Memphis, among them “That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” before discovering the song that would catapult him to eternal famedom. Songwriters Mae Boren Axton and Tommy Durden penned “Heartbreak Hotel” after reading a newspaper report about a lovelorn man who jumped from a hotel window, leaving a suicide note with a single line: “I walk a lonely street.” Axton presented the song to Elvis at a country music convention in 1955. The soon-to-be-king was intrigued by the song’s soul-searing, bluesy feel and agreed to record it at RCA studios – much to the dismay of friends and producers who found it gloomy, unappealing, and unworthy of Presley’s high energy talent.

According to Elvis biographer Peter Guralnick, Sam Philips described the finished product as a “morbid mess,” despite the fact that two legendary artists – guitarist Chet Atkins and pianist Floyd Cramer – contributed to the track. But Elvis had good instincts. The song became a number one hit record, his first million-selling song, and the biggest-selling single of 1956.

I believe that this song – delivered by a poor white boy in the sex-drenched tradition of black R&B – changed the course of music. More than any other song up to that point, it inspired young men to pick up guitars and dare to stretch their coming-of-age vocal chords — all to carry the message of this new thing called rock-n-roll. And nowhere was this more evident than in England, where rock’s future superstars were driven to distraction by their desire to emulate Elvis. The Beatles changed the world in the 1960s, but only because Elvis changed their world in the 1950s.

“Before Elvis, there was nothing,” John Lennon once said. “When I first heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ I could hardly make out what was being said. It was just the experience of hearing it and having my hair stand on end. We’d never heard American voices singing like that…Suddenly there’s this hillbilly hiccupping with echo and all this bluesy background going on. We didn’t know what the hell Elvis Presley was singing about or Little Richard or Chuck Berry…To us, it just sounded like great noise.”

Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards echoed this sentiment in his memoir, Life: “Good records just get better with age. But the one that really turned me on, like an explosion one night, listening to Radio Luxembourg on my little radio when I was supposed to be in bed and asleep, was ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ That was the stunner. I’d never heard it before, or anything like it. I’d never heard of Elvis before. It was almost as if I’d been waiting for it to happen. When I woke up the next day I was a different guy.”

Says Sir Elton John: “I remember so well the day my mother came home with a 78 of ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ She said she’d just heard it in the record shop and she knew she had to buy it straight away. So she put it on for us both to listen to and I’d never heard anything like that before in my whole life. It completely changed the way I listened to music forever. It was just so primal…I’d never been around music like that, music that was so powerful.”

So, whatever image you may have of Elvis – be it the gorgeous, hip-swiveling sensation of the 50s, the perfectly-coifed singing movie star of the 60s, or the paunchy, pill-addicted Vegas act of the 70s – don’t ever forget that he was the man who set the music world on fire. He didn’t invent R&B wailing and fancy legwork – he copied much of that from the Southern black artists he loved – but he had the smarts to repackage it and the moxie to present it to a lilly-white audience trapped in an era of conformity and conservatism. Happy 80th birthday, Elvis. Long live The King!

Here’s he is, belting out the song that set the world of fire.

Dana Spiardi, Jan 8, 2015

Happy Birthday, Scotty Moore: Rock’s First Lead Guitarist

Dana Spiardi — Sat, 27 Dec 2014 05:50:47 +0000

“Everyone else wanted to be Elvis; I wanted to be Scotty,” Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards once told music writer James L. Dickerson. He’s referring, of course, to Scotty Moore, the finger-picking phenomenon who has long been considered rock’s first lead guitarist. Mr. Moore, who turns 83 today, was Elvis Presley’s sizzling sideman from 1954 through the mid-’60s. The guitar he played in the early days was a Gibson ES-295, nicknamed “The Guitar that Changed the World.” Bill Black played double bass and D.J. Fontana played drums in Elvis’s original band. Together, these backup players were known as the Blue Moon Boys.

It’s been said that Elvis “wore” a guitar more than he actually played one. He left the musicianship to Scotty. The farm boy from Tennessee combined elements of country, western, blues and R&B to create the signature sounds you’ve heard on countless classic recordings: “Hound Dog,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “That’s All Right,” “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” and “Mystery Train,” to name a few.

In Mr. Richards’ memoir, Life, he says, “Scotty Moore was my icon…To this day there’s a Scotty Moore lick I still can’t nail down and he won’t tell me. Forty-nine years it’s eluded me…And Scotty’s a sly dog. ‘Hey, youngster, you’ve got time to figure it out.’ Every time I see him, it’s ‘learnt that lick yet?'” (The lick Keith’s referring to is from Elvis’s song, “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone.”)

When Scotty and D.J. Fontana recorded an Elvis tribute album titled “All the King’s Men” in 1997, guitar heavies like Keith, Jeff Beck and Ronnie Wood were thrilled to take part in the project alongside the pioneer who inspired them. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted Scotty in 2000, and in 2011, Rolling Stone Magazine listed him at #44 in their list of Greatest Guitarists of All Time.

Hey, Scotty: here’s to Good Rockin’ Tonight…and every night!

The quality of this video clip is inferior, but it’s a nice look at Scotty being honored at a ceremony in London. The clip features Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Jack Bruce, Alvin Lee and other rock guitarists paying tribute to the man who inspired them.

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