Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [48]
Afterward, Scotty got on the phone to Sam. “Well, the boy sings pretty good, but he didn’t knock me out.”
“Well, what do you think? Do we need a song, or what?” Sam said.
Scotty thought for a minute and then replied, “Yeah, with the right song, I think he would be good on record.”
The next night, they were all in Sam’s little two-room studio for what was supposed to be basically a rehearsal. The first song Elvis put down on tape was the Leon Payne ballad “I Love You Because,” and then he sang a couple of country numbers. They were all right but not special, so they took a break, and got some coffee and a Coke while Sam monkeyed with the console.
Then Elvis remembered an old loose-jointed Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup song, “That’s All Right (Mama),” that he’d heard on Dewey Phillips’s show. Crudup was a man apart. His music didn’t follow standard black blues patterns—a mile-wide hillbilly streak ran through it—which is probably what commended it to Elvis. Now he picked up a guitar and banged on it and started singing, keeping the primal energy of Crudup’s recording but hopping up the vocal, jumping around the studio in a dance, just cutting up to break the tension. Bill picked up his bass and started slapping the strings, helping the beat along, and clowning, too, and then Scotty tried to get in somewhere with a rhythm vamp. They were just making a bunch of racket, as Scotty saw it, not realizing they were striking rock’s seminal lightning bolt.
“The door to the control room was open, and about halfway through Sam came running out, saying, ‘Wait a minute! What the devil are ya’ll doing? That sounds pretty good through the door.’ Everybody looked at each other, like, ‘What were we doing?’ We said, ‘We don’t know.’ Sam said, ‘Well, find out real quick and don’t lose it! Run through it again and let’s see what it sounds like.’ ”
“Sam,” Scotty said, “it just flipped him. He thought it was real exciting.”
They backtracked, playing it twice, once for Sam to get a balance. Elvis ran the words again in his head and changed Crudup’s line, “The life you’re living, son, women be the death of you,” to, “Son, that gal you’re fooling with, she ain’t no good for you.” Then they put it on tape.
That one simple action set the wheels in motion to make Elvis Presley the most important star of all time.
The following day, Sam called Dewey Phillips and told him he had an acetate he wanted him to hear. They sat together and listened at the WHBQ studios at the Hotel Chisca, and Dewey jumped out of his seat, wanting to know who it was. Nobody would believe Elvis was a white boy, not sounding like this. Dewey played the song on the air July 8, and the switchboard lit up, so he spun it over and over, finally calling Gladys and Vernon and asking them to get Elvis into the studio. He wanted to interview him on the air.
Elvis had been too nervous to listen, so he went to the movies to try to take his mind off it. The Presleys went to the Suzore No. 2 and combed the dark aisles, peering into the long rows of faces until they found their son. Down at the station, Dewey could tell how rattled Elvis was, so he just made casual conversation with him, never telling him he was on the air until it was over.
Sam Phillips, awed by the reaction, knew he’d finally found a white man with the black sound, and called the trio into the studio the next night. He needed a second side to release a single, but the problem was finding something in the same vein, as Elvis seemed stuck on ballads. Again, the guys ran through every song they could think of, and then Bill took off on Bill Monroe’s bluegrass waltz, “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” He rendered it as a kind of goof, souping up the tempo with a rhythm-and-blues feel, and mimicking Monroe’s high-lonesome tenor as he slapped the bass. Elvis joined in, scrubbing the rhythm on his acoustic guitar, and then Scotty laid