Did Elvis Presley invent rock ‘n’ roll when he recorded “That’s All Right,” which was released with no national fanfare 60 years ago, on July 19, 1954?
There’s a popular perception that maybe he did; Rolling Stone once memorialized the blessed event with a commemorative headline about “That’s All Right” that read “Truck Driver Invents Rock.” Nowadays, no one with a sense of history and a straight face would claim that this Sun Records 45 was actually the first rock recording. After all, six weeks earlier, Bill Haley & the Comets had already released “Rock Around the Clock,” though it would take another year and a re-release before it became any kind of hit. And as “firsts” go, there are any number of early-’50s R&B hits that hepcats prefer to cite as The First Rock Record, most notably “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats (spurred on by an uncredited Ike Turner).
But you could make a good case that the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll was invented with this single. Or that Elvis invented himself in that recording session, and that rock, left to less universally galvanizing figures, might never existed as anything other than a short-lived novelty if Presley and his bandmates had given in to the Memphis humidity and left the studio an hour earlier on the night they accidentally hit upon “That’s All Right.”
The A-side was an enlivened cover of an Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup blues song that had failed to chart back in 1946. The B-side, “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” was a wildly sped-up, almost irreverent interpretation of a Bill Monroe proto-bluegrass tune. As Scotty Moore, who played guitar on the sessions, wrote in his memoir: “With ‘That’s All Right, Mama,’ Elvis took a blues song and sang it white. With ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ he did the opposite: He took a country song and gave it a bluesy spin.”
Not everyone was ready for this bastard musical hybrid. As Marion Keister, the front-office woman at Sun Records, said in the book Lost Highways: “On that first record of Elvis’s, we sent a thousand copies to disc jockeys, and I bet 900 went into the trash can, because if a rhythm & blues man got it and heard ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky,’ he tossed it away… same thing if the country man heard ‘That’s All Right.'”
But even if her math is correct, the hundred DJs who liked it really liked it, and helped birth a regional sensation that turned into the biggest pop-culture revolution of the 20th century.
When Elvis first went into the studio, though, “that’s all wrong” might have been the unspoken thought that was going through producer Sam Phillips’s mind. Accounts of the initially nervous July 5, 1954 recording session that produced “That’s All Right” show just how close we came to possibly having 60 subsequent years of rock-lessness.
Elvis had been in Sun’s recording studio twice before, in the summer of 1953 and again in early ’54, but only to make private recordings for his mother. Over coffee at the café next door to the studio on July 3, Phillips was talking about scouting new talent for his label when his receptionist, Keister, suddenly remembered that shy kid with the nice voice. A third person at the table, guitarist Moore, was charged with finding the phone number of the guy with the bizarre name and bringing him in.
The next night, on the 4th of July, Presley showed up at Moore’s house for a tryout. Bassist Bill Black also came by. And although Black kept his standup bass at Moore’s house, because his own home was too cramped to have room for it, he apparently never picked up his instrument, because the ballads Presley liked to sing were hardly the kind of stuff to precipitate a jam.
“Well, he didn’t impress me too damned much,” Black said after Presley left. “I don’t think anyone was real impressed,” agreed Moore’s wife, Bobbie. “He could sing, but the type of stuff he was singing, he was just like everybody else.” But Moore saw a hint of something more than a crooner. “What impressed me the most was how uncanny it was that Elvis knew so many songs — everything from Eddy Arnold to Billy Eckstine, just about every damn song in the world,” the guitarist wrote in his 2013 memoir, Scotty & Elvis: Aboard the Mystery Train.
Moore was desperate to have Phillips let him have some studio time, so he told the producer they should bring Elvis in that next night. The initial few hours they spent in the studio were as mediocre as the informal tryout the night before. “There wasn’t a penny’s worth of songwriting talent between us,” as Moore wrote, so they were reliant on Presley’s taste in cover tunes, which seemed designed to induce deep sleep. Elvis sang the Bing Crosby hit “Harbor Lights,” then Ernest Tubb’s “I Love You Because.” “As the night wore on it became obvious we were going nowhere fast,” said Moore.
In the alternate-reality version of the story, this is where they quit for the night, go seek a cooler spot in 90-degree, 90-percent-humidity Memphis than this un-air-conditioned studio, and Perry Como becomes the dominant musical force second half of the 20th century.
Instead, during a midnight break, there was a spontaneous burst of what Presley would later call “just jumping around in the studio, just acting the fool.” Little did Elvis realize that Phillips had told his receptionist that “if I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars,” and that he was looking for anything but a Bing Crosby wannabe. But Elvis accidentally found out.
“We had sort of lulled ourselves into a post-session stupor when Elvis suddenly jumped up and started playing his guitar,” Moore wrote. “Actually, as I remember it, he beat the hell out of the guitar.” The tune was “That’s All Right,” which somehow had popped up out of a very different corner of Elvis’s memory bank. Black jumped up and started doing the same hell-beating — or at least some serious rockabilly slapping — on his bass. Said Moore, “The uptempo tune hit home with me. Fast music was what I liked. For years I had been making up guitar licks for uptempo music, a combination of finger slides and bent-string pauses, but I had found nowhere to put them. It wasn’t until Elvis was flailing away at his guitar that I suddenly knew where those licks belonged.”
As biographer Peter Guralnick wrote, “Nothing in any of the songs he had tried so far gave any indication that he was drawn to this kind of music at all.” Cue Phillips, coming out from whatever menial task he’d been up to in the control room: “What are y’all doing?”
Just accidentally inventing youth culture, that’s all.
In the nights to follow, they struggled to come up with a B-side, and everyone wondered if that one burst of inspiration had been a fluke, as Presley again brought out ballads he thought they could record. In the meantime, Phillips couldn’t wait to release this lightning in a bottle, so he took an acetate of “That’s All Right” to local R&B DJ Dewey Phillips (no relation), who initially just sat and listened without evidencing any reaction. The following morning, he called the producer and said he was going to put it on the air. What he didn’t say was how many times in a row he was going to play it (which no one quite remembers, except that it was a lot).
Presley heard that the single would get played and was so excited, he tuned to the station for his mama to hear… and he was so nervous, he went to the movies to avoid hearing the airplay himself, in case it went badly. Listeners started calling in, and Dewey Phillips demanded Presley get down to the studio for an interview. Family members were dispatched to the cinema to find him and drag him to the station.
When he arrived, “He said, ‘Mr. Phillips, I don’t know nothing about being interviewed,'” the DJ recalled in a 1960s interview. “‘Just don’t say nothing dirty,’ I told him.” He asked what high school the 19-year-old singer had graduated from — the answer being an unspoken tipoff to the listening audience that Presley was white, since “a lot of people listening had thought he was colored.” Not that that would be a bad thing: Every other artist played on his show was black. At the end of it, Elvis wondered when they would go live on the air. “The mic’s been open the whole time,” the host informed his white (and clearly very green) guest.
The next day, orders for the record began flooding in. It had only been four days since the song was recorded, and local shops wanted 5,000 copies. One big problem: They still only had one usable song in the can. Finally, in another lark, bassist Bill began slapping his bass and singing “Blue Moon of Kentucky” in a falsetto at double-speed. Elvis loved it and took over the vocals. “Hey, that’s the one!” said Phillips. “Hell, that’s fine. That’s different. That’s a pop song now, nearly ’bout.” With a second song in hand, “we sort of had our direction,” wrote Moore… and Phillips had his B-side.
Moore is emphatic in his memoir that in this initial burst, they were considered and thought of themselves as a band, not a solo artist with backup. Indeed, the first two singles were credited to “Elvis, Scotty, and Bill.” Their first gig together went unremarkably, and doubts began to again creep in about whether Presley was a viable live performer, hard as that may be to believe now.
But then, on July 30, they played on a bill at an outdoor venue called the Shell in Overton Park, and another happy accident occurred:
Elvis twitched.
It wasn’t meant to drive the girls crazy. He was just keeping time with his leg the same way he did in the studio. As Moore told Guralnick, “Instead of just standing flat-footed and tapping his foot, well, he was kind of wiggling. That was just his way of tapping his foot. Plus I think with those old loose britches that we wore — they weren’t pegged, they had lots of material and pleated fronts — you shook your leg, and it made it look like all hell was going on under there.” Screams may have ensued.
An American DJ was quoted in the foreign press as summing up Presley by saying he “sings hillbilly in R&B time.” Billboard did at least review the single: “Presley is a potent new chanter who can sock over a tune for either the country or the R&B markets.” But “That’s All Right” never made the national charts. Its flipside did reach No. 3 on Billboard’s ranking of C&W Territorial Best Sellers, hardly the most auspicious of bows.
On the chart of Singles That Rocked Your World and Life As We Know It, Whether You Know It or Not, however, it remains an eternal No. 1 with a bullet.
[Article has a couple of videos as well as the audio from a “Louisiana Hayride” radio show! And a photograph taken at a recording session with Sam Phillips & Elvis.]By Chris Willman | Yahoo Music
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UK COURT ORDERS ‘GLEE’ NAME CHANGE IN LEGAL ROW
LONDON (AP) — Glum news for “Glee” — Britain’s High Court ruled Friday that the musical TV show must change its name because it breaches the trademark of a chain of comedy clubs.
A judge told Twentieth Century Fox that it had to re-name the series in Britain, though the order won’t take effect until an appeal has been heard.
The studio was sued by Comic Enterprises, which operates a string of venues called The Glee Club.
Judge Roger Wyand ruled in favor of Comic Enterprises in February, saying there was a “likelihood of confusion” between the two brands.
Fox said it would appeal, and argued that ordering a name change would be unnecessary, unfair and disproportionate.
But the judge concluded Friday that “Glee” had to go.
“I find it hard to believe that the cost of the re-titling and publicizing of the new name would be so prohibitive compared to the value of the series,” he said. “I was told many times during the course of the trial how this series is a ‘blockbuster.'”
The judge said it was possible the Court of Appeal would take a different view, so he put the re-naming order on hold until appeal judges have analyzed the case.
Comic Enterprises is also seeking damages. The judge said the final amount would be determined later, but ordered Twentieth Century Fox to make an interim payment of 100,000 pounds ($170,000).
http://news.yahoo.com/uk-court-orders-glee-name-change-legal-row-144323793.html
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