The King Is Born—Elvis Presley

There are albums in the history of rock that are as recognisable for their iconic cover art as the music they contain. Even younger listeners unfamiliar with the contents will recognise the cover of Elvis Presley’s debut 1956 album as the inspiration for the Clash’s London Calling. But it was a case of Nashville Calling when Elvis, who had just turned 21, walked into the RCA studios on 10 January 1956 to begin recording his first long-player. (A second set of sessions took place in New York later in the month.)

When Elvis Presley’s impact on music is considered, it is usually measured in songs, often singles. But his first two albums, both recorded and released in 1956 and less than imaginatively titled Elvis Presley and Elvis, still reverberate half a century later. (Confusingly, they were issued in Britain on HMV as Rock And Roll Vol 1 and Vol 2.)

The intimacy of Sun Studios was replaced by the cavernous formality of a studio that produced music in industrial proportions. Elvis performed just as in concert, with a felt pick to muffle his acoustic guitar, which otherwise would have been picked up by other microphones. An indication of how he looked comes from William Randolph’s cover shot of Elvis strumming and singing on stage.

The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was formed in 1919 to sell radios to the US public and within three years had succeeded to the tune of three million units. The business proved depression-proof since, while records became a luxury, radios were still in demand.

In 1929, RCA bought the Victor Talking Machine Company, and it was as RCA Victor that they signed Elvis from Sun. He joined a star-studded jazz-based roster that had included, at various times, Al Jolson, Fats Waller, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington.

Perry Como and Dinah Shore had added pop potential in the ’40s, but it was Elvis who proved far and away the biggest-selling and most influential ’50s star. He was clearly proud of the association, announcing his single Heartbreak Hotel on television in February 1956 as “A little song I have on record, on RCA Victor.”

Sun, by contrast, had come into being as the Memphis Recording Service with a tiny studio at 706 Union Avenue. Had Elvis Presley not passed through the doors in the summer of 1953 to cut a record as a present for his mother, Sam Phillips might have continued scraping a living making blues recordings and leasing them to RPM, Chess and other larger labels.

Most of the artists who followed Elvis cut a few classic tracks and disappeared, in many cases to become cult heroes—people like Warren Smith and Billy Lee Riley, Carl Mann and Ray Harris. Another, Charlie Rich, followed Elvis to RCA.

Colonel Parker first met Sam Phillips, the man who, until then, had guided Elvis’s career, at the Ellis Auditorium in Memphis, where Elvis was opening the show. The Colonel told Sam that Sun was too small an operation to handle an artist with such potential, and Sam knew he was right. Sun Records, with their limited distribution, could only take Elvis so far.

MONEY HONEY

Sam Phillips’ drive to create original music was matched by the Colonel’s drive to make money. However, Sam was also a shrewd businessman who saw Presley’s money-making potential. He let the Colonel have his way.

The stakes were high. A $40,000 Transfer fee’—$15,000 more than Atlantic had offered—was agreed which gave Sam Phillips, Sun’s brilliant but beleaguered owner, a financial lifeline to promote Carl Perkins and others. For Elvis, it was the chance to shine on a world stage. Nevertheless, the decision-makers at RCA were nervous as to whether their investment would pay off. Indeed, the label’s head of pop A&R, Joe Carlton, thought rock ’n’ roll would be a passing craze, and that Elvis might well disappear with it.

Had Elvis stayed with Sun, Hank Davis believes, an album would not have been part of the plan at this stage. “Sam was not a big fan of LPs. They didn’t really make sense to him. RCA were way ahead. As I recall, the first one he put out was by Johnny Cash, and he only did that after he was well established. The same thing with Jerry Lee Lewis.”

Sun’s national distribution, Davis confirms, was poor. “Sam had a very adversarial relationship with his distributors. He would get what looked like a hit and the distributors would pay him in returns. When Carl Perkins hit [with Blue Suede Shoes], instead of getting cheques for thousands of dollars, Sam was getting returns of Little Junior Parker records that didn’t sell.”

For RCA, Elvis Presley was the first pop album to earn more than $1,000,000. It topped the first Billboard album chart and Anally went platinum in 2011 quite a reward for their $40,000 investment. They remained Presley’s record label till the end, and continue to churn out reissues, remixes and compilations today.

The stylistic influences on Elvis in Memphis have been well documented. He was Sun Records boss Sam Phillips’ dream, a “white boy who could sing like a black man”—and that, in a nutshell, is how he created rock ’n’ roll. His country-music leanings were augmented, girlfriend Dixie Locke revealed, by visits to a nearby place of worship. “On Sunday night we would slip out with a group of teenagers to the black church; there were hands clapping, bodies swaying . . . The music had more emotion and expression to it than white pop.”

Another place Elvis picked up many of the black strands that would be reflected in the first album was Beale Street, the city’s musical epicentre. “Elvis was around black folks an awful lot,” said Sam Phillips, “and to my surprise he knew so many of all kinds of [black] music.”

DREAM TEAM

Quitting Memphis’s tiny Sun Records, which had released his first five singles, and signing to the major RCA Records label was Elvis’ first major career move as a recording artist. As with all Elvis’ decisions, it was made by his manager. Colonel Tom Parker, and it was made with money and exposure in mind.

The crucial aspects of how the album would sound were performance, sound and song choice. He was in the company of friends—his group of bassist Bill Black, drummer D. J. Fontana and guitarist Scotty Moore—but also the Jordanaires.

It was the first time he’d met the vocal quartet, led by Gordon Stoker and featuring Neal Matthews, Hoyt Hawkins and Hugh Jarrett, and Elvis pledged he’d carry on using them if this first album was a success. Pianist Floyd Cramer and Chet Atkins, a famed guitarist who probably had more experience of studio recording than any man alive at that time, made up the numbers.

With regards to performance, Chet Atkins’ advice to fellow guitarist Scotty Moore while they were setting up was simply, “Just do what you usually do.” Elvis did just that, confidently following his own star, remaining oblivious to the jangling nerves around him.

The recording process had everybody in a room at one time with no possibility of changing anything. The recorder was mono, so there were no stereo balance issues, but what you recorded was set in stone and could not be corrected.

Producer Steve Sholes recalled Elvis dropping his pick but playing on with his fingers. “When he got done, his fingers were bleeding real bad. I asked him why he didn’t quit, and that son of a gun said: ‘It was going so good I didn’t want to break it up.’ ”

Sound-wise, Sholes aimed to get as close to the Sun sound as possible, but didn’t know how to get it. “The biggest thing,” says Sun label authority Hank Davis, “is that they weren’t using slap-back echo. They were using conventional studio echo instead. Listen to the echo on [the single] Heartbreak Hotel—it’s great echo, but it’s not Sun echo.

“Sam was using tape delay, whereas RCA used a physical, mechanical system in the studio. You get a completely different sound with tape delay echo than you do with studio echo.”

Legend has it a sheepish phone call was made soliciting advice, but Phillips’ head was already elsewhere.

Sholes had sent Elvis a list of songs that he felt were prime candidates for the artist to cover. Of these, only I Was The One—which ended up as the B-side of the non-album Heartbreak Hotel single—found favour.

RCA had purchased all Elvis’s Sun recordings, both released and unreleased, as part of the deal, and five as yet unheard songs were used on the album. Blue Moon was one, and the reason it had stayed ‘in the can’. Hank Davis explains, is that Sam Phillips “was trying to establish him as a quirky country artist, but he was going to do so with his own material.

Sam wasn’t looking for a Rodgers and Hart song that was probably an ASCAP copyright [ASCAP is a performance rights organisation that specialised in show tunes and established writers] and he wasn’t going to have Elvis sing ASCAP records as singles.

“A song like Blue Moon,” Davis adds, “is out of Elvis’ league—he didn’t even know the words! That wordless falsetto thing—they were just kidding around in the studio, and who would’ve guessed it would end up being released on RCA?”

Elvis’ third and fourth singles had contained such Sam Phillips/BMI copyrights in I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone and You’re A Heartbreaker, while future Elvis’ records would see Tom Parker do the same with the Hill and Range publishing company, often inserting Presley’s name as co-writer to gain further earnings.

Among the covers on Elvis Presley / Rock And Roll No. 1 were songs by well known artists like Little Richard (Tutti Frutti), Ray Charles (I Got A Woman) and the Drifters (Money Honey). The last-named, considered by Sun expert Hank Davis “as good as RCA got with Elvis at that point, was taught to Elvis by Buddy Holly on a shared bill in Texas in 1955. The original had topped the R&B charts for 11 weeks two years earlier. Money Honey and I Got A Woman had been in the stage act for around a year.

Opening track Blue Suede Shoes was a US Top 5 success for its writer, former Sun stablemate Carl Perkins. Elvis’ cover, cut in the RCA sessions, made the UK Top 10 that summer, his second British hit. Elvis liked the song enough to sing it at his screen test at Paramount Pictures in April 1956, two months after recording. Welsh rocker turned author Deke Leonard rates the track “remarkable for a host of reasons, not least among them Scotty’s twin solos. Listen to them sometime. They’re an education.” (Leonard analyses Moore’s contribution in great depth his book on guitarists, The Twang Dynasty.) Leonard also rates Trying To Get To You as the outstanding back on the whole record—so much so he recorded it with former group Man and still performs it today in his one-man show. Written by Rose Marie McCoy and Margie Singleton and first recorded by Washington group The Eagles in mid-1954, it was Elvis’s only Sun recording to feature piano, played either by Frank Tolley (of labelmate Malcolm Yelvington’s group) or Elvis himself.

Hank Davis would have included the last two singles. Mystery Train and I Forgot To Remember To Forget. “Even [third single] I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone would have been a terrific addition—an incredibly bluesy alternative version has come to light since.”

When producer Sholes took the recordings over to RCA headquarters, the powers that be remained unimpressed, hearing no obvious singles. Sholes’ job and reputation remained on the line until the separately released Heartbreak Hotel hit the top of chart, LP Elvis Presley following it to #1 in its wake. Advance orders of 362,000 confirmed that this newcomer was no flash in the pan. And the new medium of television would prove to be a big catalyst . . .

TELEVISION POWER

In January 1956, The Dorsey Brothers Show was the first to expose Elvis to a national television audience. It was Elvis’ third appearance in February 1956 and the unveiling of Heartbreak Hotel that truly brought the house down. Vision added to sound had provided the real breakthrough; according to biographer Peter Guralnick, “Television put him in front of more people in a single night than he had seen in his whole career.”

Second album Elvis was cut at Radio Recorders in Hollywood in early September. There was now a new pressure involved, since shooting for Elvis’ first film. Love Me Tender, had already begun. (Some hardcore Presley fans would point to his movie career as the time he truly sold his soul.)

Unlike the first album, Elvis’ 13 tracks were all recorded together, using the same musicians employed previously. Three tracks were borrowed from Little Richard’s songbook this time, while the album did not include Don’t Be Cruel / Hound Dog, just as the debut had omitted Heartbreak Hotel.

Hank Davis recalls “tracks like So Glad You’re Mine or Paralyzed being good and wanting them. Again, they were not released as singles. Colonel Parker would back Presley fans into a corner, saying, “If you want these songs, then you have to buy this LP”. I don’t think RCA would have been quite so cynical and exploitative, but Colonel Parker? God, he was shrewd!”

Issued in October 1956, Elvis entered the US charts at a then-unprecedented #7 on the way to the summit, and by 1960 would be certified as having sold over three million copies. By then, Presley had returned from spending two years as a GI, his destination Hollywood—and there he would remain before donning leathers and making a comeback in the late ’60s as a born-again leather- clad rocker.

Elvis Presley / Rock And Roll Vol 1 was the album that started it all, not only with its music but also its iconic cover, with a photo by William ‘Red’ Robertson, one of the most recognisable in rock history.

An amusing footnote came in 1984 when RCA issued the original 12-track album in reprocessed (fake) stereo on compact disc. This issue was quickly withdrawn, and the album reissued in original mono.

THE END

 

It is a quote. VINTAGE ROCK PRESENTS – ELVIS COLLECTORS EDITION 2015