His Way_ The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra - Kitty Kelley [153]
Still, Frank was the hottest property in show business, and, as such, he fully expected to win the first annual Grammy of 1958 for best male vocal and for his new album, Only the Lonely, which he and Nelson Riddle believed to be their finest work to date. But the new award, voted on by members of the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences, went instead to Domenico Modugno for best male vocal (“Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu—Volare”), and to Henry Mancini for best album (The Music from Peter Gunn). Ali Frank got was an award for the best album cover.
“He was so upset about not winning a music award that he refused to let any of the photographers take our picture that night,” said Sandra Giles, the actress who accompanied him to the Grammys. “He wasn’t nasty to me, but he was very moody and drank a lot afterwards. I was very young then, and didn’t know how to handle him. Looking back, I guess I should’ve been grateful that Elvis didn’t win anything!”
The musical arrival of the former truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, had appalled Frank. Elvis Aaron Presley, the gyrating crooner who wiggled and shimmied as he sang his rockabilly songs, was driving young females into screaming paroxysms of delight with his jumping guitar and long sideburns. Elvis’s clamorous shouts and sexual moans unleashed a frenzy in teenage girls unmatched since The Voice himself had hordes of bobby-soxers shrieking at the Paramount. Yet Frank viewed the twenty-four-year-old singer as a degenerate redneck and musical abomination.
“His kind of music is deplorable, a rancid-smelling aphrodisiac,” he said.
So incensed was he by Elvis the Pelvis that he wrote a magazine article in Western World denouncing rock ’n’ roll and all its practitioners: “My only deep sorrow is the unrelenting insistence of recording and motion picture companies upon purveying the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear, and naturally I’m referring to the bulk of rock ’n’ roll.
“It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people,” he said. “It smells phony and false. It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd—in plain fact—dirty lyrics, it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth.”
Frank excoriated Elvis for appealing to music’s lowest common denominator. He hated his glittery suits and blue suede shoes. While Frank clung to slow, yearning ballads, he condemned the hillbilly interloper for taking these same traditional rhythms and changing them into something blatantly sexual. Perhaps most of all, he resented Elvis for carving a new place and direction in music that had the potential to challenge his own. And that is exactly what Elvis did. By 1956 he had been acclaimed as the king of rock ’n’ roll, and although Frank felt that rock music had no place on the Top 40 charts, Elvis dominated the number-one position for three decades.
Even after his death, Elvis remained on top of the all-time sales list, with The Beatles and Stevie Wonder as runners-up. Perry Como captured the twenty-second spot, while Frank ranked near the bottom at thirty-fourth.
Despite his personal feelings about Elvis, Frank was pragmatic enough to recognize Elvis’s phenomenal appeal. As a way of cashing in on it, he decided to welcome Elvis home from a two-year stint in