Blogpost #22

Greetings, Elvis fans! This week's show is a memorial tribute to Elvis Presley, who died exactly 32 years ago today on August 16, 1977. We're paying our respects to him with a collection of rare early recordings, including the legendary demo disc he made as a present for his mother in the Summer of 1953, around the time this yearbook photo was taken.

What was Elvis like back in those days? According to information he supplied for his high school yearbook and his driver's license, he had brown hair, blue eyes, weighed 153 lbs, stood 5' 11", and lived at 185 Winchester in Memphis, Tennessee. He had just graduated from Hume High School with majors in Shop, History and English.

He was inspired by an article by Clark Porteous published in the Memphis Press-Scimitar on July 15, 1953 about a recording studio called the Memphis Recording Service run by Sam Phillips, whose motto was "We Record Anything - Anywhere - Anytime". The following Saturday, the eighteen-year old Presley came by with his guitar and cut an acetate disc of two slow ballads from the 1940's: "My Happiness" and "That's When Your Heartaches Begin". Elvis later revealed during the "Million Dollar Quartet" session of December 4, 1956 that he'd lost his only copy of the record. It later turned up in the collection of Ed Leek, a retired airline pilot and former classmate of Elvis who had kept it hidden away for thirty-five years. Both sides of the disc can be found on RCA's "Sunrise" 2-disc collection, available from Amazon.

When Elvis died, it seemed as if everyone of his fans needed to get their hands on some kind of souvenir connected to him. A reporter named Roy Blount, Jr. flew to Memphis and arrived at Graceland within hours of his death. He saw a rolled-up copy of the Memphis Press-Scimitar lying on the ground with a rubber band around it, and the gatekeeper told him it was Elvis' last newspaper. In his book "What Men Don't Tell Women", Roy revealed that he took it as a souvenir, and what Elvis fan wouldn't have done the same thing?

My mom was a diehard Elvis fan as well, and in the week after his death she devoted all of her free time to saving every possible Elvis-related TV and radio program on tape. I found a memorable clip from Eddie Schwartz' all-night radio show in which he announces that Elvis "died of natural causes", which was later proven to be untrue. He had actually died of heart failure caused by an overdose of prescription drugs from a doctor who just couldn't say no. There was a real lesson to be learned from his death, and it was a shame that Michael Jackson never learned it.

Shortly after Elvis' death, his former guitar player Scotty Moore gave an interview to a reporter in which he revealed how they made their first record together in 1954 within days of their first meeting. That interview was quickly issued on record to cash in on the demand for fresh Elvis material. This ghoulish piece of exploitation is now ironically a collector's item, but I included a lengthy clip from the album anyway because it's a genuine eyewitness account of history.

From 1954 to 1956, Elvis appeared practically every week on the Louisiana Hayride radio show over KWKH, Shreveport. He plugged his records and his personal appearances, and he got paid thirty dollars a week for the first year. Only a handful of his live broadcasts were saved, and some of them can be found on "The Elvis Broadcasts On Air", a well-packaged CD collection on Stardust. Sound quality varies from excellent to unlistenable, but it's still available from Amazon.

Comedian and talk show host Steve Allen earned the wrath of Elvis fans when he booked him on his prime-time variety show on July 1, 1956 to sing "Hound Dog" in white tie and tails to an actual Bassett hound, who ignored him for the entire song. It was a humiliating experience for Elvis, who never appeared with Steve again. In 1996, Varese Sarabande issued a CD compilation of clips from his various TV shows, and one of them was a comedy sketch featuring Elvis with Andy Griffith and Imogene Coca as stars of a Western-style TV show. I included it for its rarity, not for its comedy. Apparently the CD is pretty rare as well, judging by the price of a used copy on Amazon.

The phrase "Elvis Has Left The Building" is now part of American pop culture, but someone had to be the first one to say it. According to my research, it was first spoken by KWKH announcer Frank Page at the close of a live radio broadcast on December 15, 1956, and I couldn't think of a more perfect way to close my memorial tribute. The only thing I haven't mentioned from the program is an instrumental song from 1937 that I used as background music. It's called "Smoke Rings" and it's by Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra.

Next week's show will be another tribute to a great rock act. I'll be looking back at the Beatles' farewell stage performance in San Francisco on August 29, 1966. I'll be playing the tape of that concert in its entirety. Thanks for listening.