Rod Argent: “Elvis’ Voice Sounded Transcendent In Those First Three Years. I Still Think It Does, Actually.”

Thank you, Kate, for alerting me to this wonderful interview on NPR with the founding members of the British Invasion group The Zombies, Colin Blunstone and Rod Argent. Rod Argent was asked, “What turned him on to rock and roll in the first place?”

Rod Argent of The Zombies replied:

The guy that really turned me on to rock and roll – I grew up for the first 10 years of my life not liking pop music, but then I heard Elvis sing “Hound Dog” and it absolutely spun my world around and I just wanted to hear the rawest rock and roll I could lay my hands on. You have to realize that in that time, in 1956, America and the music that was coming from America, felt like a parallel universe. It felt like absolutely another place to anything we could imagine. And Elvis’ voice sounded transcendent in those first three years. I still think it does, actually. I’ve still got the records of those first three years on my jukebox at home. In ’65 we decided to visit Elvis. We were still kids, we were 18 years old. We were playing in Memphis on our first tour and I said to Colin, “Lets go and visit Elvis.” So we walked up his drive – there was no security at all – we opened those famous gates, which were a bit rusty I remember at that time. We walked up the drive, knocked on the door, and this guy came to the door who I’m pretty sure was Elvis’ father Vernon. And we said, “Hello. We’re the Zombies from England. Is Elvis in?” And he said, “No, Elvis is away filming, but he loves you guys, and he’ll be real sorry to have missed you. Take a walk around.” And I thought, “What a lovely bit of Southern hospitality. Elvis obviously doesn’t know who the hell we are. What a lovely piece of Southern hospitality.” Anyway, I was telling this story more than 30 years later to an Irish DJ and he stopped me and he said, “I can’t believe you don’t know this. Did you not know that Elvis had your songs on his jukebox?” And I was absolutely flabbergasted and in fact Ken Sharpe yesterday on the phone said the same thing to me. And this dreamlike existence where … this god who just seemed so remote and who completely changed our lives and changed my life – there he was with a song I’d written and that we sung – on his jukebox. Absolutely extraordinary.

I find it interesting that “Hound Dog” was something Elvis and the boys added to their act during their disastrous stint in Las Vegas in 1956 as sort of a novelty. Written from the female perspective, it was interesting to hear a young man sing it, and of course Elvis went apeshit during the performances. It was his performing of this song on the Milton Berle Show, with the crazy elongated half-time ending (that seems to go on FOREVER when you watch it – you can’t believe he sustains it) – that started the real national-level controversy about him.

Elvis Presley performing “Hound Dog” on the Milton Berle Show, June 5, 1956

Please note that one of the things you hear during the half-time ending is not just screams. But collective laughter. Elvis is laughing, too. Again, Elvis was funny, he liked goofing around, even when letting The Sex Thing out for all to see, and the girls watching got the joke. There’s that burlesque act quality to his work, the striptease, the friendly tormenting of the sexually charged audience. It’s all deliberate. It’s fun. A male, offering himself up as an object of desire, unselfconsciously, openly, deliberately, was seriously unbalancing. He can’t mean it, can he? That is supposed to be women’s job. Women turn themselves into objects of desire, because we all know that men are the only ones who need sex, right? We are told over and over and over and over again that men are visual, women are not (the biggest lie ever perpetuated upon the American public – all I know is is that I was never polled), and that women need love/kindness/marriage/romance as their only context for sex. Our entire society rests on that philosophy! Women don’t respond to visual cues. They don’t desire sex just by seeing something.

Elvis, in this performance, is basically saying, “Oh, yeah?”

Not surprisingly, immediately following that appearance, he was excoriated from the op-ed column pages across the land, and preachers went into overdrive. There’s that creepy local commercial you can see in any Elvis documentary of a salesman standing in front of a sign that says: “We serve White Customers Only” and going on and on about how he was going to go to every restaurant and soda fountain in town and check the jukeboxes, and if they had any Elvis Presley there, he would warn his customers to not go to that establishment. Lovely. But it was typical. Elvis Presley, dragging the mike stand across the stage, standing on the tips of his toes, with his pelvis jutted forward for what felt like TEN MINUTES was the most scandalous thing white America had ever seen, apparently. The song continued to be one of the show-stoppers in his act, however, so on July 2, 1956, he went to the RCA Recording Studios in New York to finally get it down. It proved difficult to capture the quality the performance had in the live act, however. But I think the final version does get that excitement and visceral nastiness into it (which you can clearly hear in the live recordings of Elvis doing it, not to mention the notorious Milton Berle performance), but it took some experimentation in the studio. They finally got it on Take 31. It’s the first song where the Jordanaires were used as backup. I love the syncopated clapping.

I just love, too, the image of the Zombies at the door of Graceland.