Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [50]
“When Elvis came on, he automatically started with a wiggle and a shake. The audience was just screaming and shouting. There was no hype. They were simply reacting to what was on the stage before them. It was almost unbelievable.” Of course, this was his hometown, Neal realized. “But still he made a big hit right there. He stole the show right from the first.”
When Slim Whitman came on, the audience nearly turned him away. “Bring back Elvis! Bring back Elvis!”
Among the enthusiasts was Marion Keisker.
“I’m a very restrained person, and I heard all this female shrieking. One voice just completely stood out. Suddenly, to my chagrin and horror, I realized it was me. Here I am, mother of a young son, on my feet, screaming and whooping like I’d totally lost my stupid mind. I was just transported. But the whole audience was exactly that. He just had that magical, once-in-a-lifetime quality.”
Dixie was wild with pride that night, but the extreme reactions of the women shocked and angered her. “I was like, ‘Good grief!’ I couldn’t believe it. Because I wanted to say, ‘Hey, he’s already taken, so y’all just back away!’ ”
From then on, Dixie was afraid of how Elvis’s new fame would affect their relationship, especially after they married. Elvis told her not to worry. He was just playing the little clubs around town—the Bon Air, and soon, once Scotty and Bill split off from the Starlite Wranglers, the Eagle’s Nest. But Dixie still fretted.
“I said, ‘I want him to sing, and I want him to be successful, but I want him to go to work at nine o’clock and come home at five. I don’t want him to be out all hours of the night in all these clubs.’ ”
Looking back, she sees that was the dividing line. “After his records got so popular, life was never the same for us.”
Carolyn Bradshaw and Elvis, backstage at the Louisiana Hayride, June 25, 1955. “He was just madly in love with her,” says fellow Hayride performer Nita Lynn. (Courtesy of Carolyn Bradshaw Shanahan)
Chapter Five
“You Need to Be Kissed”
Dixie was too young to go into some of the little bars and clubs Elvis was playing around town, but he continued to spend all his free time with her, taking her wherever he could—to a radio appearance over in West Memphis, Arkansas, and to his performance at the Katz’s Drug Store opening, where he sang for a huge crowd of teenagers from the back of a flatbed truck. His high school chum George Klein, by now a gofer for Dewey Phillips, emceed the event.
On September 11, 1954, two days after the Katz opening, Elvis was back in the studio, laying down covers of Dean Martin’s “I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine,” and on the flip side of the dial, bluesman Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight.”
Marion remembered he never came to a session ready, and when he started “I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine,” he knew only one verse and the chorus, which wasn’t enough for a record. Sam was eager to get something down, though, because the Disc Jockey Convention was about to take place in Nashville, and he wanted to be able to promote Elvis’s second single. So during a break, Marion sat down and wrote some additional lyrics: “I don’t care if it’s rain or snow / Driving’s cozy when the lights are low.”
When the record came out, Marion got a call from the music publisher, saying he’d noticed Elvis’s version contained an added verse. Marion said yes, she’d written it, and told him why. (“It’s the middle of the night and we’ve got to get a record out.”) That was fine, he told her, but she couldn’t put her name on it, or collect any royalties as a writer.
“Every time I turned on the radio I heard someone singing my lyrics, and I was so mad and upset. I wouldn’t care if we had gotten some benefit. But that was just indicative of the way the sessions went. If we needed more hamburgers, somebody went out and got them. If we needed more lyrics, somebody wrote them. With what we lacked in money and resources, we had to be inventive, but I think that’s what made the music so exciting and