Overton Park Shell. All pictures taken by yours truly
Overton Park is a beautiful park to the east of downtown Memphis. The Memphis Zoo is there, as well as a war memorial, and a golf course. There’s an arts center, too. But mainly it is rolling stretches of grass and trees, with picnic tables and benches. We went there on our first morning in Memphis. First, we drove to find the Whole Foods which was all the way out on Poplar Avenue. On our way out there, we passed Overton Park, our next stop. I saw the entrance and felt a wave of emotion. Standing on the ground where something important happened, whether it be Elvis’ first major live show, or where a battle took place (the bullet holes still in the walls of the Dublin Post Office, for example): it gives reality to something that had been abstract, albeit understood.
There it was: Overton Park. Suddenly I thought of Elvis’ parents driving out to the park with relatives, and Elvis’ girlfriend at the time – Dixie Locke – going out there too, driving with Elvis, excited for him, nervous, overwhelmed at what had been happening, and scared that he wouldn’t get a good reception – knowing how that would affect him. Dixie had been on vacation with her family in Florida when “That’s All Right” exploded in July of 1954, and was alarmed by the urgent telegram sent to her by her boyfriend back home: “HURRY HOME. MY RECORD IS DOING GREAT.” Dixie was like: I’ve only been gone for 2 weeks. What the hell is going on back there?? WHAT record? You cut a record?
After declaring to Marion Keisker in the tiny front office of the Memphis Recording Service in the summer of 1953 that “I don’t sing like nobody”, Elvis waited a year before the call from Sam Phillips came. Finally, on July 5, 1954, Elvis – and the two guys Sam had hooked him up with: Scotty Moore and Bill Black – hit the Mother Lode. Local DJ Dewey Phillips played the song over and over the following night, and calls started pouring in, and Elvis found himself famous/notorious. In Memphis, at least. Except for two talent shows, one when he was 10, and one when he was 16, 17 – he had not performed live. But he had been playing guitar for his friends and his family ever since he first got a guitar for his birthday. But he had no experience in front of big live crowds. None. Nada. Zip.
Nobody knew what he would be like live. He was a teenager. He could barely play the guitar. But he had something. Would it translate?
So as “That’s All Right” poured out over the airwaves, Dewey and Sam Phillips set up a plan. Elvis and Scotty and Bill would play in a hillbilly show out at the Bon Air Club (a place Elvis couldn’t even get into as a customer, since he was a minor). There would be other acts playing, and Sam got Elvis/Scotty/Bill added to the bill. At that point, the trio only had two songs under their collective belts. “That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky”. Sam Phillips described the crowd at the Bon Air as “pure redneck”, and Elvis stuck out like a sore thumb in his bright suit and greasy pompadour. The trio bombed.
Although Sam would later say that Elvis “came off real good”, Elvis was crushed by the negative reaction of the crowd. He said to Sam afterwards that he felt like he failed. Sam tried to reassure him, but he knew the truth: Elvis looked miserable onstage, and far too nervous to enjoy a moment of it. There was hostility in the crowd towards this newcomer who was singing hillbilly music but with a blues sound.
Elvis was a mystery – not only to himself, but to Sam, Dewey, Scotty, Bill, and every established musician in that joint. He didn’t look like anyone else. He “didn’t sound like nobody.” Who did he think he was, coming on THEIR stage playing THEIR music but in THAT way?
Sam called Bob Neal (who eventually would manage Elvis for a year) and had Neal add the trio to a “hillbilly hoedown” at the Overton Park Shell, an outdoor amphitheatre with a giant lawn. There were a ton of musicians on the bill. Slim Whitman was the star of the night. Bob Neal added the trio to the list of acts. The show was scheduled for July 30, 1954, not even a full month after Elvis first recorded “That’s All Right”.
Elvis was still driving a truck for Crown Electric. Dixie came back from her vacation. Elvis was relieved to have her back: you can feel his separation anxiety in the telegrams he sent to Dixie during her absence. Dixie would go on his truck delivery route with him, and they would go roller skating at night, and listen to the radio. His two songs would come on, and they would get quiet, listening to Elvis’ voice on the speakers. It felt like something was about to happen.
The first advertisements for the Overton Park show started to appear. Some of the posters spelled Elvis’ name wrong.
Meanwhile, on the ground, strange things were happening. Elvis’ two records were in constant rotation on pop music stations, folk/hillbilly music stations, and what was then called “race programs” – black radio stations. The three diverse and normally separate audiences were all listening to the same songs. This was unprecedented. The songs started to sell outside of Memphis. Orders poured into Sun from all around the South. Only a month before, Elvis’ main goal had been to join a gospel quartet. And now …
On the night of July 30, 1954, Elvis drove over to the show with Dixie. Dixie went out onto the lawn to sit with Mr. and Mrs. Presley. Elvis stood on the steps behind the shell, having a nervous breakdown, and that is where Sam Phillips found him.
Sam Phillips describes Elvis’ demeanor on July 30, 1954.
“When I got there he was standing on the steps at the back of the shell looking kind of pitiful – well, maybe pitiful is the wrong word, I knew it was the way he was going to look: unsure. And he just grabbed me and said, ‘Man, I’m so glad to see you, Mr. Phillips. I – I – I – I —‘ You know, that was just the way Elvis did. ‘I – I – I – I just didn’t know what I was going to do.’ Well, you know, it’s like when somebody’s mother is real sick and you tell them everything is going to be all right, and yet you know there’s the possibility that his mother might die. I said, ‘Look,. Elvis, we’ll find out whether they like you or not.’ And then I said, ‘They’re gonna love you.‘ Now I didn’t know that, and if you want to call me a liar or a fake for saying something that I didn’t know to be the truth – but I believed that once he started to sing and they saw him, I don’t mean the stage act, once they heard that voice and the beautiful simplicity of what those three musicians were putting down … “
The show began. Then it was Elvis’ turn. He entered the stage and Scotty remembers that Elvis was shaking so badly that Scotty could almost hear Elvis’ knees knocking together. Elvis held onto the mike, and Scotty remembers he gripped it so hard his knuckles turned white. They had played only that one live show, but this environment was something else. There were 4,000 people out there. This was insane pressure.
Elvis reminisced many years later about what happened next:
“I was scared stiff. It was my first big appearance in front of an audience, and I came out and I was doing my first number [‘That’s All Right’], and everybody was hollering and I didn’t know what they were hollering at.”
Elvis Presley backstage at the Overton Park Shell, July 30, 1954
One theory goes that it was the nerves that made him shake that left leg, trying to get rid of extra tension, also that nerves made his lip curl up into a sneer. I don’t buy it. Plenty of people choke when they experience that level of nerves. The majority of people, actually. Nerves are something human beings do their damndest to AVOID. Nerves impact the entire body. Nerves make you dry up – physically (you lose your voice, your throat closes up, your breath shallows, leaving you unable to produce sound) – but emotionally. Most normal people have a fight-or-flight response. This is how we are wired. Fear is a great motivator: tunnel vision is one of our best survival techniques. Great fear makes your choices clear: get the hell OUT OF THERE.
But performers have to learn how to cope with nerves, embrace them, use them, turn that stress into expression. It sometimes takes years to master. This is why actors spend so much time in classes learning relaxation techniques, because it’s all well and good to be brilliant alone in your bedroom, but when an audience is suddenly looking at you, or a camera pointed at you with a gigantic crew standing around watching you, shit starts happening to your body that you cannot control. You have to anticipate that as an artist: “Okay, I am going to have a dry mouth and throat, so make sure to drink a lot of water, and vocalize.” “Okay, being scared is a given, so I need to find a way to relax IN THE MIDDLE of a very stressful situation.” This takes training. It takes practice.
Athletes like clutch hitters are those who can come up BIG in very stressful moments. They do not lose their nerve. They are special people, different from most of us. Nerves do not affect them in a detrimental way. On the contrary: nerves are what make the clutch hitters get focused and brilliant. They perform their best when the stakes are high.
Elvis is the definition of a clutch hitter. The unique thing about him is that he had no practice at it. He didn’t even know that he would be a clutch hitter. He only knew his own desire to be in front of people, to be what Dave Marsh so perfectly described as “an unignorable man”. But on July 30, 1954, trembling backstage, all he knew was that he was pissing his damn pants, riding the waves of vertigo, confronting a huge bottomless fear of being laughed at or, worse, dismissed. He walked onstage with no training, but with a universe of perfect instinct.
The second he launched into “That’s All Right”, Scotty Moore remembers Elvis suddenly going up onto the balls of his feet, his body quivering all over … and, as would become par for the course, the audience went apeshit. It was a spontaneous response. A visceral automatic response to the viscerality of the performer. A roar went up, erupting over the lawn. Interestingly enough, Scotty also remembers that afterwards, Elvis had no concept of what had happened. When he heard the crowd response, Elvis initially had thought they all were laughing at him.
Most hillbilly singers stood still and tapped their foot to the music. Elvis moved. He jiggled, shook, and leaped around. Scotty remembered later,
“That was just his way of tapping his foot. Plus I think with those 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 hell was going on under there.”
Bill Black was a showman, and on their second number, “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, he turned the bass sideways and rode it like a horse, slapping on it. It spurred Elvis on. They only did two numbers because, yeah, they only knew two numbers, and Elvis came offstage afterwards, confused about what was going on. He had to be told that the crowd was screaming for HIM, screaming for more from him. He didn’t get it. Bob Neal told Elvis that the crowd had flipped out because of how he moved, and how he jiggled his leg. Elvis hadn’t realized. (If you believe the story. I’m not sure Elvis was that naive, to be honest, but let’s just continue with the memories of those who were there.) The trio went back out onstage to play one more (they just sang “Blue Moon of Kentucky” again, having run out of songs), and Elvis – smarter now – jiggled his leg on purpose in the encore. The crowd went crazy. He listened to the screams, knowing now that they were not laughing at him. They loved him. And it was HE who made them make that sound.
It is difficult to express just how quick a study he was. In the middle of a high-stress situation (the highest stress yet for Elvis, except for maybe first opening that door of the Memphis Recording Service), he understood his own power, and didn’t fight it, question it, or second-guess it. He went back out there, with his new-found knowledge, and immediately used it on purpose. It takes some performers 15 years of live performances to really understand how in charge they are, how to conduct an audience and control them. Elvis got the memo in 10 minutes.
Bob Neal watched the encore from backstage and watched Elvis jump around, jiggling and quaking, now doing it confidently, and on purpose, and could not believe that that was the same shy boy with the debilitating stutter backstage only moments earlier. Nobody could have seen that The Sex Thing (as I call it) was about to come exploding out of this young boy, a boy who was most definitely still a virgin at this point. Nobody could have predicted that. Nobody saw it. (Well, Marion Keisker saw it. Important to remember that the first person who saw the “potential” in Elvis was a woman. Let’s not discount her reaction to his beauty. The men wouldn’t be able to admit to something like that, although clearly it was working on them as well). Elvis learned his power onstage in an instant. Bob Neal said later, “He just automatically did things right.”
Dixie Locke had an odd experience watching all of this in the audience. She knew her boyfriend. She had seen him in action, playing for her and her friends, horsing around. She was familiar with his constantly jiggling leg. Hadn’t it driven her insane on their dates, when he couldn’t sit still? Hadn’t her parents said to her after their first time meeting Elvis, “Can’t that boy sit still?” But to watch him do that same thing in front of a crowd, and watching the Memphis girls erupt into screams – the first girls to scream for Elvis – she wondered what was going on. She felt possessive and wanted to tell the girls to leave him alone. She felt lonely, sitting out there, watching him. Suddenly he didn’t belong to her.
But she was happy for him too, because he was so happy afterwards. He was high. He didn’t sleep for two days.
Dixie said later, “I don’t think he was prepared for what was about to happen. He knew this was what he wanted to do and that it was breaking for him, but I don’t think he ever thought that everybody would just go crazy.”
Visiting the Overton Park Shell on our first morning in Memphis was one of the highlights of my trip. It was a bright and mild morning, and people were walking their dogs, but in general the place was deserted. We had the Shell all to ourselves. We went up onto the stage. We talked to each other across the stage (the acoustics are incredible: you can speak in a soft voice and you are perfectly heard by the person on the other side). We wandered around. Jen sang a bit of “Hound Dog”. Nobody bothered us. Nobody else was there.
Except for all the ghosts.
Approaching the shell through Overton Park
The stage of the shell
The steps behind the shell, where Sam found Elvis freaking out
On the stage of the shell. What Elvis would have seen. Except it would have been night. A packed lawn, an estimated 4-5,000 people out there, which would have been overwhelming
The door onto the stage, where Elvis entered, knees shaking.
