The Young Man In Gold Lamé—Elvis Presley

John Sebert’s photographs of Elvis Presley—then a mere 22 years old and making his first ever personal appearances outside of the United States—offer some of the most vivid and dynamic images ever taken of the singer. We see Elvis backstage at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens, regaling the assorted journalists and equally enthralled fan club presidents with his easy, homespun humour, as he offers his thoughts on his success, and gently quashes probing questions concerning marriage: “I’ve thought about it, but when I think about being married to just one woman—uh huh.”

Attired in his gold lame pants, silver lame shirt, and the red jacket which would feature so prominently on the covers of both the Jailhouse Rock and One Night singles, Elvis appears perfectly at ease, despite the fact that his pre-show press conferences—which had by now largely replaced the more intimate, one-on-one interviews of the previous year—could often be mistaken for public interrogations. In the photos taken that night, he throws up both hands as if to ‘plead innocent of all charges’, just as he would during his celebrated Madison Square Garden press conference, some 15 years into the future.

On the evening of April 2nd 1957, Elvis (still catching his breath from the 6pm show) sat cross-legged on a table in the dressing room of Toronto’s premier ice hockey arena and prepared to hold court.

The best early Elvis photo: “I didn’t even remember shooting it—it was a very hectic night—but the art director found it and used it”

June Callwood, writing for the June 1957 issue of women’s lifestyle Chatelaine magazine, was reporting on the event. “The conference was attended by the oddest assortment of reporters, columnists and disk jockeys that has ever graced a mass interview,” she said. “A famous woman fashion commentator, swathed in pale mink, sat beside a man who announced he was the dean of country music in Canada and wore a white Stetson, pancake make-up and a red string tie to prove it.”

Also among the crowd of curious onlookers, baffled media folk and staunch Presley devotees swarming the dressing room that night was photojournalist John Sebert, also commissioned that day by Chatelaine, and today, John is in no doubt as to which category he fell into. “I was 27 at the time and a bit over the hill to appreciate him ” he admits. “June, the writer, was in the same boat as me. We obviously had no ide a of the impact that Elvis would eventually have on the world.”

This lack of foresight was often evidenced by the rounds of questions typically fired at Presley by reporters, many so utterly trivial it is a wonder that he bothered to acknowledge each with a response, especially when one considers the fact that Elvis held at least one press conference in each of the 17 major cities he visited that year.

For John Sebert and June Callwood, Presley’s appearance in Toronto provided an opportunity to observe first-hand a cultural phenomenon, and to at least try to make sense of the hysteria surrounding ‘the young man in gold lame’. Callwood’s subsequent article, published two months later under the heading “Why do Canadian youngsters worship Elvis Presley?”, was hardly an endorsement of Presley or the rock ’n’ roll craze he had spawned, but it was at least a serious attempt at establishing the nature of his success and at beginning to understand the man himself.

Elvis cuts a fine dash as he poses for cameras at the press conference

Callwood, a highly respected columnist and a campaigner for social justice, likens the Presley mania to a disease, an endemic and corrupting influence which targets teenagers simply because they don’t know any better. She strikes a particularly patronising tone with regards to Presley’s simplicity, and her assessment of the singer’s appeal, couched in cold, analytical terms, and loosely supported by the theories of a number of esteemed psychiatrists, painfully underscores the tremendous progress of a then-burgeoning generation gap. “He is now what he was then, a semiliterate Tennessee youngster with a man’s body and lusts and the simplicity of a guileless 10-year-old,” she wrote.

Caught in the spotlight: Elvis rallies the Blue Moon Boys to the delight of squealing sea of Torontonians

It was this same childlike simplicity which initially endeared Elvis to John Sebert. “Certainly backstage between shows he was congenial and quite funny, just like a big kid,” he avers. “I mentioned before his finding a hockey stick and having a game of ball hockey with his pals.” Indeed, reporters perhaps expecting to find the uncouth, sex- crazed delinquent of legend were soon won over by the singer’s sense of humour, his humble demeanour and the honest answers he gave. “After the interviews I got to quite like him,” John reveals. “I was prepared to dislike him.”

Reporter June Callwood collars “the worldly youngster” himself, Mr. Elvis Presley

Some of the initial questions and answers give an idea of what Elvis was up against. Reporter: “Have you ever thought of becoming a doctor, psychiatrist or something like that?” Elvis: “I haven’t thought of becoming a psychiatrist, but I’ve thought of going to one.” Reporter: “What is your [vocal] range?” Elvis: “I don’t know. I don’t read music at all. In my line of music, you don’t have to.” Reporter: “Do you like classical music?” Elvis: “I don’t understand it, I just don’t understand it. I’ve got some of it at home.” Reporter: “Do you ever play it?” Elvis: “No, sir, I don’t.”

Softened by their initial encounter with Presley, many critics were quick to observe that the young singer could offer little in the way of explanation for his meteoric rise to stardom, and proved equally clueless on the subject of rock ’n’ roll’s projected longevity. When pressed for comment he declared: “I’m never goin’ to quit this business, though it may quit me. Show business is so uncertain, you never know. That’s why I take every day as it comes. I don’t ever look into the future.”

As charming a personality as Elvis was in the dressing room, however, he did not welcome any new converts to the Presley fold, so appalled were his detractors at the spectacle which later unfolded on the stage, and at the reaction which it generated in the stands—a point June Callwood acknowledged in her Chatelaine column. “The bitterness many parents feel toward Presley bypasses the rather disarming openness of his nature and concentrates on the lewdness of his performance,” she pointed out. “This is the aspect of the Presley mania that most parents find unacceptable, the fact that it is so fiagrantly rooted in eroticism.”

For 45 electrifying minutes, Elvis roamed the makeshift stage, caressing the microphone, dragging it around with him, and treating the Toronto faithful to a barrage of hits, including Heartbreak Hotel, Long Tall Sally, Don’t Be Cruel, Love Me, his latest single That’s When Your Heartaches Begin, Fats Domino’s Blueberry Hill, Too Much, Butterfly (a cover of Charlie Gracie’s hit record), and the perennial closer Hound Dog. Occasionally, Elvis, struggling to hear himself above the roar of the crowd, would cover up his ears in a futile effort to muffie the din. Although Colonel Parker would later praise the Torontonians for being “one of the quietest and best-behaved crowds ever to watch Elvis in action,” the primitive public address system and Scotty Moore’ EchoSonic custom-built amplifier were no match for the lungpower of some 15,000 animated teenagers.

John Sebert recalls: “It was so noisy that night from young girls screaming I had no idea what he as singing. I was actually floored by the performance and the reaction of the fans. I had never seen anything like it. The kids went wild. I equated it to Frank Sinatra and the Dorsey Band where 15 years earlier the fans went crazy. I could see the appeal, hut could not understand it. I still don’t.”

Despite Parker’s reputation as an officious and overbearing manager (famously forbidding Bill Black to sell pictures at concerts and even wandered among the stalls peddling his own Elvis merchandise), John remembers having complete freedom to shoot Presley as and when he pleased, with no restrictions placed on the amount of film he used. “I shot a lot,” he points out. “You never know just when you get the great shot. If shooting in the privacy of a studio you try to get [a subject’s] personality. But at something like a rock show, you just shoot everything and hope for the best.”

Among the 500 or so photos taken by John that night, one in particular stands out. Taken from backstage, it shows Elvis mid-song, face beaded with perspiration, his jet-black locks suitably tousled and his Gibson J-200 with its tooled leather cover slung over his shoulders. At his side, a greasy-haired D. J. Fontana pounds away on his classic four-piece Gretsch drum kit. With the crowd also permitted to shoot their cameras at will, the arena explodes with a thousand flashbulbs, bathing singer and band alike in a sea of light. In the iconic picture, Elvis’ four-thousand dollar suit, woven of gold thread with jewelled lapels, positively shimmers—though John maintains that he did not use a flash.

“I was a purist at that time, only using available light, so no flash,” he emphasises. “It was a good choice as I have seen other Elvis shots done that night and the flash didn’t work on his gold lame outfit, which I understand, as you mention, was the last time he worked in it.” It was a wise choice, for on his face Elvis wears a million-dollar smile which easily eclipses the flamboyance of his dress. The old adage is ‘a picture tells a thousand words’, and one has only to glance at this picture to read the sheer delight on Elvis’ face, and his obvious relish in appearing before another ravenous live audience.

June Callwood concluded her 1957 article by posing a rather unsettling question: “How can Elvis Presley mature without destroying himself? His prospects look heavily seeded with tragedy” Her gloomy prophecy would ultimately come to fruition two decades later. She was not alone, however, in eagerly presaging the deaths of both the Presley phenomenon and that odious craze he had sired: rock ’n’ roll.

Several of her peers published similarly despairing forecasts. “The teen-agers instinctively sense that Elvis will not last,” claimed the editorial piece that ran the Toronto Telegram. “Lines will soon grow on that smooth face. The spring in his step that enables him to bounce onto the stage . . . will vanish soon enough. This,” the article continued, “may explain why teen-agers reach out to him. They want to hold on to the golden hours of youth. Elvis’ quality, like the green years, is ephemeral, but while it lasts it needs to be savoured and relished.”

John Sebert’s timeless stage photograph of Elvis Presley boldly counters the assertions of these purported soothsayers. It is a picture of Elvis in his golden youth; his early vigour still very much firmly intact, and his damp brow yet to be wrinkled by the ravages of time. It is a picture to be savoured and relished for years to come, by new legions of Elvis fans. John considers his portrait of Elvis to be “the best early Elvis photo”, and this writer is inclined to agree.

Elvis, at the 9pm show that night, accompanied by Hoyt Hawkins on piano

ElVIS: THE TORONTO OUT-TAKES

Not all of the many photographs taken by John Sebert that day in Canada are still in existence, but those that do remain valuable records of that day—and we’re happy to be able to show some here.

“I do have several pictures from the Eivis project, not terribiy interesting but different,” Sebert explains. “They were taken along with the ‘good’ Elvis shot at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto’s hockey arena at the time, in 1957.

“It was a photojournalistic job I was doing for Chatelaine magazine, a big Canadian women’s magazine. The gal in the close-up is June Callwood, one of our best journalists, who was working the story with me. I took some 500 shots of the man that night. Some were quite interesting, like Elvis playing ball hockey with an ice-hockey stick he found.

“When I retired I donated all my negatives to the Archives in Ottawa, which turned out to be a not too good decision. I had an arrangement that I would have access to them, but it has proved difficult over the years.

“A couple of years ago I came across a print of June, the journalist, head to head with Elvis, and sent it to her. Now June Callwood was one of Canada’s finest reporters, having interviewed everyone of note back then. June wrote me to say that her kids had never paid attention to her celebrities, but when they saw June with Elvis they were awestruck. I wish I had kept more of the remainder of the Elvis shoot.”

 

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