Elvis Presley's From Elvis in Memphis

Eric Wolfson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781501355387
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501355394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

A Classic Rock book of 2020

"I had to leave town for a little while--" with these words, Elvis Presley truly came home to rock and roll. A little over a month earlier he had staged rock's first and greatest comeback in a television program, forever known as "The '68 Comeback Special." With this show, he resurrected himself--at the age of 33, no less--from the ashes of a career mired in bad movies and soundtracks. So where to go from here?

Like a killer returning to the scene of the crime, Elvis came back home to Memphis, where it had all begun. Eschewing the fancier studios of Nashville and Hollywood, he set up shop at the ramshackle American Sound Studio, run by a maverick named Chips Moman with an in-house backing band now known as "The Memphis Boys," and made the music of his life. The resulting work, From Elvis in Memphis, would be the finest studio album of his career, an explosion of mature confidence and fiery inspiration. It was the sound of Elvis establishing himself as a true rock and roll artist--and proving his status as a legend.

1

The Arrival

You will never know how wonderful old Memphis is until you’ve been away for a while.

—Elvis, January 1959.¹

Elvis’s voice rings out strong and determined, with an edge of gruffness brought on by a cold he was fighting.

“I had to leave town for a little while—”

Reggie Young’s slick electric guitar bubbles around, answering his words, drenched in reverb. Gene Chrisman’s drums tumble in, setting the song’s funky rhythm, met by Mike Leech’s thumping bass. Only Bobby Wood’s piano waits in the wings, pouncing on the song’s breakdown in a gospel-style solo. The group plays cohesively, with Elvis stepping in the role of bandleader. RCA Records’ producer Felton Jarvis pays keen attention to Elvis’s mood; American Sound’s producer Chips Moman pays keen attention to everything else.

Elvis owns the room like it is his room, and he fronts the band like they are his band. For many performers, it would take months to feel this assured in an environment, but Elvis is a natural. His ability to read a space, a group of musicians, and a song is uncanny. It is jarring to realize that only seven hours earlier Elvis had entered American Sound for the first time.

“What a funky studio,” Elvis said when he first walked into the studio.² “Funky” was a telling word, evoking both the soulful music that the place produced and the less-than-refined condition of the building itself. American Sound was located at 827 Thomas Street in North Memphis, five blocks away from where Elvis went to high school. It lived in a brick box of a building in the middle of a five-lot strip mall. The studio originally shared one wall with a barbershop and the other with the Ranch House restaurant. George Klein remembers the neighborhood as “slightly run-down and a little on the seedy side—you didn’t fear for your life, but you made sure to lock up your car.”³ When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated a few miles away nine months before Elvis’s sessions, Chips and Tommy Cogbill camped out in the studio for days armed with guns.

American Sound was a far cry from the kind of environment Elvis usually recorded in. The RCA Nashville studios were gilded palaces in comparison, state-of-the-art recording studios safely tucked away behind a labyrinth of secure rooms and offices. American Sound’s front door led right to the studio. And most of the time, Chips didn’t even bother to lock it (although he tightened the security for Elvis’s sessions). The nearby restaurant’s garbage cans attracted rats that squeaked and ran across the rafters. Some claim that just before Elvis first walked into the studio, a rat fell off the roof and landed in front of him.

Chips and the Memphis Boys were pleased to host Elvis, but they soon grew wary. After Elvis set foot in American Sound, he pulled out his smoking item of choice, a thin German cigar. Right on cue, several members of his entourage rushed to meet it with a lighter like a bunch of lackeys trying to appease their crime boss. As was his habit, Elvis was not alone. He arrived with his own producer, Felton Jarvis, and engineer, Al Pachucki, as well as close friends George Klein and Marty Lacker. Freddy Bienstock, an executive who specialized in finding material for Elvis, represented his Hill and Range publishing company, along with Bienstock’s employee (and Elvis’s close friend) Lamar Fike. Colonel Parker was served by the presence of his chief aide, Tom Diskin, while RCA vice-president Harry Jenkins represented the label.

Members of Elvis’s entourage, “the Memphis Mafia,” were also there. “The only ones that weren’t fun were his guys, who tried to walk around with their chests stuck out,” remembered Wayne Jackson, leader of the Memphis Horns. “They were all tryin’ to talk to Elvis at once and we were tryin’ to get a job done. . . . All they wanted to do was entertain Elvis.”⁴ “There was just too many people, and it was aggravating, I guess, on all sides,” Chips later recalled. “But I think they were kind of shocked when I stood up to them. They probably had never had anyone ask them to leave the studio before—but I did, and it turned out better for Elvis.”⁵

“Chips was a no-nonsense guy who always told it like it was,” Klein explained. “He was focused on getting great recordings of great performances of great material and had very little patience for anything getting in the way of that. He was never rude, but he was direct in a very Southern way.”⁶ Not that Chips was above his own admiration of Elvis. Perhaps sensing the import of the session, Chips called a friend to bring over his new Polaroid camera. Snapshots from the day show Elvis wearing a dark blue leather jacket, with a white-collared shirt framing a striped blue handkerchief tied around his neck, like the red one on the cover of From Elvis in Memphis. He has on white pants and black boots, with rings on his fingers. His hair is dark and coifed, with his trademark sideburns running down either side. Still fit and confident from the television special, Elvis looks like a god.

There is one shot in which Elvis sits on a stool, fiddling with Tommy Cogbill’s electric bass, looking out blankly while the Memphis Boys flank him on either side. To the left of Elvis, Bobby Wood looks affable and rather boyish, his face still healing from reconstructive surgery after a near-fatal car crash. Mike Leech stands tall and youthful, with a mischievous smirk. Tommy Cogbill, the oldest member of the group at thirty-six, holds a look of a calm friendliness, despite his narrow-slit beady eyes. Gene Chrisman stands next to him in the back, his small stature hidden by the others and deep-set eyes framed by dark rings. To the right of Elvis, Bobby Emmons looks youthful and scholarly in his glasses and neat haircut, gazing to the side. Reggie Young stands tall and robust with his all-American good looks, arms folded in a confident stance.

Elvis anchors the photograph as the star, but there is nothing to indicate that the men who surround him are anything special. Aside from the handsome Young , none of them are particularly striking or memorable. They maybe could be a pickup band at a blue-collar bar, but nothing more. The fact that these anonymous white faces are responsible for hot songs like for Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man” and Wilson Pickett’s “I’m in Love”—let alone some of Elvis’s finest music—is surreal.

Chips is not in the photograph, although he appears in another one from that night. Elvis sits on a stool with Cogbill’s bass looking outward for a moment, while Chips stands beside him wearing denim jeans and shirt with a black undershirt, arms folded behind his back with the touch of a formal pose. For his part, Chips was a bit nervous beforehand, wanting to make sure that everyone was ready, like an anxious party host. Just as Elvis’s first producer, Sam Philips, needed to provide an environment in which his artists felt free and unrestrained, so too did Chips need to ensure that all parties were primed for maximum possible success. Elvis was trying from his side too. Despite his entourage, he spent an hour saying hello and meeting all of the musicians and soundmen, taking the time to make a personal connection with everybody there. Elvis wanted to show that he was ready to roll up his sleeves and do some real work with these musicians he had sought out. “For all of us, it was the area of the country we lived in,” Young later reflected. “It’s the dead center between Delta blues and Nashville country. Some of the things we cut could have been country. All of the club bands played that way. If you blindfolded me and took me into a club and I heard somebody play that way, I’d know I was in Memphis.”⁷

* * *

Founded in 1819, Memphis was a unique city musically, reinforced by its location, forming a virtual straight shot with New Orleans and Jackson below it and St. Louis above it. This made it a popular route along the Great Migration as African Americans moved north in the early twentieth century, which in turn made it central in the geographical backbone of the blues. “But Memphis developed no single, identifiable blues idiom of its own,” writes Robert Palmer in his definitive Deep Blues. “Delta blues doesn’t seem to have gained much of a foothold in Memphis until the late thirties and the forties, when improved highways and the lure of wartime jobs brought Delta blacks into the city in great numbers.”⁸

When African American bluesmen arrived in Memphis, they soon made their way to Beale Street. “I found Beale Street to be a city unto itself,” blues legend B. B. King remembered when he first moved to Memphis as a twenty-year-old sharecropper from Indianola, Mississippi. “It was exciting seeing so many people crowded on the streets. So much activity, so much life, so many sounds.”⁹ Among the most memorable things King encountered there was “white people shopping the same street as blacks. This was new for me.”¹⁰ Two years later, King got his breakthrough as a deejay on the Memphis radio station WDIA, where he got his nickname “Beale Boy” King. WDIA was run by two white men, Bert Ferguson and John Pepper, but it was the first Memphis radio station to target African American audiences and hire African American deejays.

“The radio station reminded me of Beale Street in this respect: It was a world apart,” King wrote in his autobiography.

In the middle of a strictly segregated South, WDIA was a place where black and whites worked together. . . . I’m not saying it was perfect. Blacks couldn’t be engineers; we couldn’t actually spin the records. That was ridiculous and frustrating and made me mad. But the personalities hired by Mr. Ferguson—black deejays like Theo Wade, A.C. Williams, Hot Rod Hulbert, and Rufus Thomas—were told to be themselves. And they were. They set a style for deejaying that influenced radio all over the country, maybe all over the world.¹¹

Like Elvis Presley, B. B. King left rural Mississippi for the city of Memphis, where he found bright lights and hot blues. He also learned that Memphis wasn’t just a city to live in, but a home where you could make a name for yourself by working hard and embracing your own style, no matter how eccentric.

In Robert Gordon’s loving portrait of the city It Came from Memphis, he describes how Memphis is a city of determination and perseverance where mavericks and iconoclasts like Sam Phillips and Chips Moman took the harsh realities of the city and forged music with staying power. “The forces of cultural collision struck thrice in the Memphis area,” Gordon writes,

first with the Delta blues, then with Sun, then Stax. These sounds touched the soul of society; unlike passing fads, these sounds have remained with us. By definition, most of popular culture is disposable, but Memphis music has refused to disappear. In electrified civilization, even when stripped of the particular racial and social context in which it was born, what happened in Memphis remains the soundtrack to cultural liberation.¹²

Delta blues, Sun, and Stax. From Elvis in Memphis draws a line between these three like little else before or since. In 1954, Elvis took the music of a Delta-native bluesman, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s hit “That’s All Right,” and created a new sound at Sun Records; now a decade and a half later, he looked to rekindle that flame by teaming up with Chips Moman, who cut his teeth helping to get Stax Records up and running. From Elvis in Memphis tells the story from the other side of this music, a record that freely mixes blues, rockabilly, and funky soul in various degrees without ever staying too long in one sound, instead using them like words of a common language. The album is an inheritor of Memphis’s musical legacy and stands as proof that Memphis music was now simply American music.

* * *

“Wearin’ That Loved on Look” was a new song by Nashville songwriters Dallas Frazier and A. L. “Doodle” Owen. It tells the story of a man who arrives home after a little while to find his world entirely changed. Ostensibly, it’s about a lover being untrue, but the story takes on new meaning with Elvis’s circumstances. Elvis sounds as though he is singing not to a person, but to rock and roll music itself—and what a mess it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Track Listing
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: From Elvis in Hell
• The Cover: From Elvis in Burbank
• 1 The Arrival
• 2 The Great Advice
• 3 The Promise
• 4 The Funeral Procession
• 5 The Tear-Stained Pillow
• 6 The Departure
• Interlude: From Elvis in Purgatory
• 7 The Shaking
• 8 The Backroads
• 9 The Confession
• 10 The Cotton Dress
• 11 The Beautiful Bird
• 12 The Vicious Circle
• The Back Cover: From Elvis in Vegas
• Epilogue: From Elvis in Paradise
• Works Cited
• Copyright