By Ray Bennett
Little more than 10 years after the end of World War II, Great Britain was a cold, grey place in 1956 when Elvis Presley, who was born 90 years ago today, dropped from the sky. He changed everything.
Recorded music was very rare on BBC Radio in those days and we had to rely on the erratic signal of Radio Luxembourg on our tinny transistors. When 45rpm singles were introduced, pocket money was stretched with each Elvis release.
It was a dark day when he went into the US Army in 1958 and his words on the EP “Elvis Sails” signalled more than departure for Germany. For many of us he was never the same afterwards.
Presley’s descent into dizzyingly awful Hollywood movies in the 1960s was overshadowed by the emergence of British rock and only when he made the NBC special (top picture) in 1968 did we think he’d been saved.
Two years later, I was working at The Windsor Star, in Southwest Ontario across the river from Detroit when it reported that after more than a decade of “splendid isolation”, Elvis Presley was on tour again and would be in Detroit to perform at the Olympia Stadium on Sept. 11: “Even before the show was advertised, the promoters had a two-foot high stack of letters requesting tickets. Although Presley can demand astronomical prices, he has insisted that the top ticket price can be only $10, less than Tom Jones.”
Other tickets were $7:50 and $5. Newspaper colleague (and now the “Sanibel Sunset Detective” crime novelist) Ron Base and another friend snapped up $10 seats and we were among the 17,000 crowd that saw Elvis perform his hits for 45 minutes. At every swivel of his pelvis, a bank of cameras would flash and the screams were relentless. Still, it was an accomplished and exciting show.
On April 6, 1972, Ron and I were back at the Olympia with more friends to join 16,000 even more hysterical fans who went wild with every Presley move. As John Weisman said in his review in the Detroit Free Press, “he didn’t have to sing … all the crowd needed was to see him”.
Still, he looked heavier than he had two years earlier and Las Vegas Elvis was not far off. They played “Thus Sprach Zarathustra” before he entered and when he was done, when the announcer said, “Elvis has left the building”, it sounded foreboding.
Many years later, I visited Graceland with my brother-in-law Charlie Rich Jr. and while it is kitsch, there also is something profound and moving there. As Paul Simon sang, ‘For reasons I cannot explain, there’s some part of me wants to see Graceland’, and I’m glad I went there. I also visited the Sun Records studio in Memphis and stood on the spot where Elvis caught record owner Sam Phillips eye when he recorded a song for his mother.
My ex-wife, Renee Rich, was friends with Knox Phillips, Sam’s son, and they helped me to land an interview with Sam Phillips at his home in Memphis in 1998 for a story for The Hollywood Reporter about Elvis’s belated entry into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Nashville feared that rock ’n’ roll would kill country music in the 1950s and the early fear bred resentment so that for years whenever Presley’s name came up as a candidate for the Hall of Fame, the idea was shot down.” I was always pleased with my headline for that story: “Elvis has entered the building.”
Phillips told me that Elvis always liked country music as he liked rhythm-and-blues and big bands: “He was a person that loved music, period. Elvis, deep down in his heart, wanted to be recognised by country music authorities. He never said to me, ‘Why ain’t I in the Country Music Hall of Fame?’ He didn’t have to ask me that. I knew that it hurt him but he would never tell one person. He did not tell me, and Elvis told me a lot.”
Phillips said they would have “the damnedest conversations” in his office with none of the performer’s “mafia” around: “He just wanted to sit down and talk. Sometimes, we wouldn’t even talk about the damned music business. We’d talk about women, talk about God, talk about what we’d seen and what we felt, and what was going on in the world. Just the greatest conversations. We didn’t pretend to be an authority on any of it. Well, I accused Elvis of being an authority on a woman every now and then, but not too often.”
Thinking of my Dad on New Year’s Eve
By Ray Bennett
My late older brother Roland phoned from England on New Year’s Eve to tell me that our Dad, Alexander Bennett, had died. I thought it was 35 years ago but another year has slipped by and I see that it’s 36. December 31, 1988. I was living in Franklin, Tennessee, just south of Nashville, alone again, naturally. Ro said Dad had been feeling chipper but that morning he put on jacket and tie as always to walk to the shops but soon returned complaining of chest pains. He had been suffering from a touch of angina. He sat down in his favourite armchair holding his wife’s hand then said “Oh, oh,’ and passed away.
Our family home had been a flat in a converted railway station in Ashford, Kent, until Mum, Winifred, died aged 62 on the same day as Elvis Presley. Sometime after, Dad moved back to his native Devon where, aged 80, he married a sweet and kind widow named Wink and lived with her in a charming bungalow in Budleigh Salterton. We had known her for years as she was the sister of our beloved Aunt Doffy, who was married to Dad’s brother Fred. I spoke to Wink and she said she was okay and grateful that ‘I had seven years with a wonderful man.’ She had two sons from her first marriage who would take care of her.
My younger brother Richard (on the left in the photo next to Ro, Dad and me) joked on the phone that Dad had gone to give god a hard time. We laughed because Dad would have laughed at that as he had no truck with religion. He had a remarkable life’s journey. Son of a farm labourer with nine siblings, he journeyed in his teens during the First World War to faraway Kent to work on British Railways. Labouring as a plate-layer – called a gandy-dancer in the early days of railways in the United States – he went to night-school, won promotions to white-collar positions and ended up as Chief Inspector of the Permanent Way. I never heard the word ‘profit’ growing up. Dad’s only concern was keeping passengers and crew safe as they rode the rails.
Ro said Dad had accepted fate, saying, ‘I had a good innings; I don’t want anyone to be upset.’ It was typical of a hard man with a soft heart, enquiring mind and whimsical sense of humour. An avid reader and skilled gardener, he voted Labour all his life but trusted no-one. When a party member rang our door bell seeking to recruit me, Dad gave him short shrift. He despised Margaret Thatcher, who worked to destroy unions in the Eighties, saying it reminded him of the Twenties when Winston Churchill sent out armed police on horseback to put down protests during the General Strike. ‘We were beetles,’ he said, ‘ and they wore heavy boots.’
Dad taught me an important life lesson when I was 10. For a primary school assignment, I asked him to tell me how the railway worked. He gave me a broad outline and then some specific details always speaking extemporaneously. He knew the railway inside out from the bottom up.
Dad took me aboard a steam locomotive, which was exciting, and inside a railway signal box. A tall boxy structure sitting at a junction, it had steps leading up to a large room filled with rows of multi-coloured, four-feet tall levers that the signalman used to control sets of points on the tracks. We walked along the line, stepping over the wooden supports called sleepers, to see the points – tapered steel blades, movable rails. Each pair was governed by a lever in the signal box.
I thought that being on a train was simple: you boarded, enjoyed the ride and when it reached your destination, there you were. Seeing that signal box and its control of the switching points showed me it wasn’t that simple. On a train, with the switch of a lever, you could end up in London, Birmingham, Edinburgh or Paris. Later, I discovered poets who wrote about crossroads in their lives and taking paths less traveled. They made it look as if were always by choice. The signal box gave me my first clue that in life you might move a lever yourself or the points would be switched by others. When that happened, there was no knowing where you might end up. It depended upon who pulled the lever.
I don’t put too much stock in it but Dad never celebrated New Year’s Eve. Neither do I.