Baby, Let's Play House_ Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him - Alanna Nash [51]
Sometimes Dixie would go with Elvis to the recording studio—Elvis often dirty and grimy from work at Crown Electric—and Marion found her to be “a very dear girl, quiet and religious, and his number one booster.”
Marion was struck by how much in love Elvis and Dixie were, and how genuine their feelings were for each other. Elvis would talk about her and quite often show Marion her picture, which he’d tucked inside his gold wristwatch.
“After Elvis’s first record came out, Bob Neal staged a contest asking young ladies to write in to say, ‘I would like to be the president of Elvis’s fan club because,’ in twenty-five words or less. I kept Dixie’s letter for years, because it was the most glowing and loving tribute. It meant so much to her for Elvis to succeed and be accepted. But when he started spending so much time away from home, it was inevitable something would change in their relationship.”
It was during this time, the fall of 1954, that Elvis first played outside of Memphis, in a high school gym in Bethel Springs, Tennessee, not far from Jackson. In the audience was musician Carl Perkins, who was amazed at the “electric effect” Elvis had on his audience, “particularly the girls.”
Bob Neal was booking the trio now, at some point calling Scotty and Bill the “Blue Moon Boys” and Elvis the “Hillbilly Cat.” His early morning radio show “just boomed right down the Delta,” Scotty recalled, so they started working a lot of schoolhouse shows down through that area, traveling 150 to 200 miles around Memphis in Arkansas and Mississippi. Scotty was Elvis’s de facto manager, but Bob would help out and officially assume managerial duties in early 1955. He’d try to get Elvis engagements, help promote him, start the fan club (the stationery was pink and black), advise him on business dealings, and promote his records. It wasn’t always an easy thing to do.
“I had problems trying to get his records played. I knew a lot of people in the business, but the country deejays would say, ‘We can’t play that. He sounds too much like a nigger.’ I tried it the other way, sent them to rhythm-and-blues stations. They said, ‘No, he sounds like a damn hillbilly.’ ”
Bob had never managed an artist before, and “it was pretty much a mom-and-pop operation. Helen went along to the shows many times to sell tickets.” Because he had a 5 A.M. sign-on time at the radio station, Bob would get in the backseat and go to sleep on the way home. Elvis would drive, and he and Helen would talk. She was amazed that he was always seeking reassurance and expressing his ambition to become a big movie star.
“Do you think I can make it?” he’d ask. “I’ve got to make it.” As Bob recalled, it seemed to be more about Gladys than his own desire to be big. “He wanted to be able to provide things for his mother, to buy her a nice home and keep her from having to work, because he adored her more than anything.” Pretty soon, Elvis was “just like one of our kids,” popping in their house anytime he wanted and buddying with the Neals’ oldest child, Sonny, who went on the shows and taught Elvis to water-ski on the weekends.
“When Elvis started along, I would emcee the show and tell jokes, and do my act with my little ukulele. Then I’d bring on the headliner. It’s rather amusing, but in a lot of towns, Elvis was not the big draw. I was. Uncle Bob was the hero, and people would gather around to talk to me afterward. They regarded Elvis as sort of a strange new creation. Instead of the record building him, he built the record when he made an appearance.”
Often when Elvis first came onstage and started performing, audiences didn’t know how to react. “They were in shock,” as Scotty put it. Bill, the clown of the group, would try anything to get the crowd loosened up—ride the bass, or get a pair of bloomers and put them on. “If we really had to attribute concert success to anyone in the very early days, it would have to be to Bill.”
Elvis ran into such a wall on his next big appearance, his one shot on WSM’s revered country radio broadcast, the Grand Ole Opry. Sam had set