Jungle Rock Blues, page 23
“Whose boy died, whose boy Elvis sadly died, and they put you up, right there in their house, like kindly folks, an’ you recorded this – tell the people how this perticler slice a vinyl came into the world, Caliban.”
Long pause. “I am sorry, sir. I do not understand.”
With Dewey’s fatherly assistance, Caliban made his way through the interview and then, parked there in the opening in the corn, cars going past on the Interstate, the dash melting in the sun, June and Eve heard him for the first time go into the actual singing of That’s All Right.
They stared at each other. It was like seeing your brother playing at being the president – and pulling it off! His singing had such style, such appeal. It sounded so utterly fresh, sweet, like a new variety of fruit.
While they listened, Dewey raved about the disk, about Sam Phillips, about the song, about the sound, and all the time the phone kept ringing, kids calling in, just begging him to play it again. “An’ okay, this is for lemme see the seventh time this hour, you heard it right here, live from the centre of the universe, this is the sound of the day – man, this is the sound of the century! It was recorded right here in Memphis, this is Caliban, on your mark, ready, get set, and – go, baby, go!” From the speakers came the slap-back sound of Floyd’s plunky little guitar, and then, like a river of feeling, here came his vocal.
“June,” said Eve in a voice faint with wonder, “Caliban is going to be a big star.”
Do you remember hula-hoops? How everybody just had to have one. Rubik’s cube, there’s another example. Yo-yos, knucklebones, the Twist. Frisbees, the incredible flying disk, suddenly everywhere you looked bits of plastic were sliding through the air. Skateboards. Super Balls. Fondue. Davy Crockett hats. Trivial Pursuit.
Another category is for instance that year when everyone put plastic bottles of water on the lawn to keep dogs from crapping.
Television was maybe the biggest, it arrived in the early 1950s and has stuck around the house ever since, suddenly you weren’t alive unless you were watching it. It’s kind of worn off now, unless there’s a new war, but remember when. Television is I think more relevant here than the earlier examples, because in its own strange way television has a life. It changes with the times, it has an active presence in the room. This is closer to what I’m talking about.
Of course there’d been fad people before. Movie stars, sporting heroes, singers – Chaplin, to pick a name. Heming-way. Sinatra. Eva Peron. Adolf Hitler should get a nod here. Moving on – the Beatles (but not the Rolling Stones, and not Madonna, she turned every trick in the book but failed to get anyone interested in the drama of what she might be, she was just popular). Muhammad Ali. Maybe Michael Jackson – that freak was global. Princess Diana, definitely.
But Caliban was bigger than them all. He was the most photographed person of the twentieth century. He is estimated to have sold over one billion records. In tiny atolls in the blue depths of the Pacific the guys climbing for coconuts copied his hairstyle – probably aliens on distant planets also. Kids screamed at him, they tore his clothes. Girls scraped the dust off his car and kept it in their hankies. They licked his car – and this is back in the 1950s when there was still some restraint. At his height he was so big, you couldn’t actually do anything with him. He couldn’t play concert halls, the kids just ripped up the carpet. He couldn’t go out for blocking the traffic. He could literally wiggle his little finger and drive people into a frenzy – this actually happened.
Even now, it makes me proud.
All of which quickly had the effect of masking the music. People began to review the phenomenon, and they saw just the teen hysteria, a commodity being sold, and the commodity was a person. Well, to be frank, in time it did become that – but later. First, it really was about the music. If you want to say the rest was bubblegum with sex appeal, I don’t mind. I think you miss Caliban’s charm, his unique qualities. He spoke to something inside people. They saw in him something they thought they wanted to lose – their place in the scheme of things. Right at the time when America was going modern with a vengeance, here was something so completely up to date, completely fresh and new – and yet embodying the primitive. But that is all so much socio-logy. Music was what it was all about. Caliban was a great stylist, a great, great singer. He still is. And don’t you forget it.
Meanwhile, he was learning how to correctly dry and put away Mrs Presley’s dishes.
Meanwhile, he walked alone in Memphis. After the interview with Dewey Phillips, Caliban found himself on the walk outside the studio, people going past, bumping his shoulder – suddenly Dewey’s voice wasn’t there running things. He first went back to the movie house. He was in a kind of daze. But the movie was over.
He wandered downtown, past the bars and steakhouses, went among the long, shiny vehicles, the shiny-faced people. A person could just wander, apparently, you didn’t have to have an idea. The streets had music in them, he could hear snatches of it, fragments, from doorways, car windows. People shouted out words, steam hissed from pipes, engines throbbed. The ringing of a cash register, a telephone, the city produced sound after sound, it was over here – now it was over there. And among the sounds was the one he had made. He understood that. Somewhere, people were listening to him singing on the radio.
He walked and walked, half-aware of his reflection accompanying him in the dark glass of the shop windows. In America you always knew you were there, you saw your own shape all the time. You were the thing you saw most, you and you, repeated. But no one knew your name. Even if you were on the radio, even if you spoke in an interview, America was busy with the mirror and no one knew you.
A car pulled up alongside and someone said his name. It was June McMay.
“June, June ...” Caliban embraced June and right there on the walk in downtown Memphis he undid her top button. To pull her hard against him, this was what he wanted, and she was kissing him back, not like angry Laura – so was this evil?
June was laughing, excited. “We went to Sun Studios, Sam Phillips sent us to the Presleys – and they said you was lost. Was you lost, darling? Probably you just wanted to get lost from that woman!” Holding June, he loved the way she made him feel he was really there. “The whole world is looking for you – we heard your record! Eve says you’re going to be a star!” June ran her fingers though his hair – her expression said there was something she didn’t like, but she went on. “Mr Presley says he’s thinkin’ on goin’ out in the Lincoln, look fo’ you, if only he could find some coal, I guess, to put in the engine of that thing. Sam Phillips said most likely you was captured by the Mafia, as a ransomable commodity – did you know there’s a Mafia in Memphis, baby?”
Caliban held her hard against him and he was just glad all over. He caught sight of their reflection, the two of them. This was different, to see them instead of just him, it was somehow exciting. “Baby,” he said, trying out the word.
Eve drove them to a hotel, the Laverne, and they spent the night. Caliban could feel that, over at 462 Alabama, Mrs Presley was searching for him, going from room to room, and coming out onto the sunporch to speak sharply to Vernon. It was, he knew it now, evil to hide from her. Now he had it. Evil was when you knew what people wanted you to do and you didn’t do it. All right. All night he stayed in the hotel and was just evil with June.
The two of them ate a late breakfast, fried things, animals and their eggs, cooked Southern good, he liked the taste but then couldn’t get rid of it, and after they walked by the river. Caliban could feel that strong pull from Mrs Presley and he worked at ignoring it. He could also feel the laughing girl beside him, his armful, her hip pressed against his thigh, and he wanted to keep feeling that. Suddenly he felt completely solid inside himself. They kissed on a park bench, then crept off into the bushes. Just like in the bed of grasses, June thought, except for the smell of that old river. Then, at two after noon, they headed back to the hotel, to meet Eve Kersting.
Eve was standing on the walk, alongside the brass-and-drape of the Laverne entrance, arms folded, behind her dark lenses, pretending not to watch the people who went up and down the street. “Where’s the car?” said June. Eve pointed to the ground – it was in the parking lot, below them. “So you gonna get it?”
“Where are we going?” said Caliban. The pull of Mrs Presley was quite strong inside him now.
“We’re going home, honey.”
When June said this, it was a simple statement of fact, no great feeling in it, and at first Caliban just nodded. June looked around as though the car might be appearing at any moment. It was Eve who made Caliban think. She was watching, he realised, to see what would happen. In the same voice as June had used, just easy, he said, “I will go to Scotty Moore’s house tonight, to get wild.” And at the thought a big grin spread across his face.
“No, baby,” said June, “tonight we’re going to be in, oh, Kansas City, miles away.”
“Kansas City,” said Caliban. Half a smile came to his lips. “They’ve got some crazy little women there,” he said, “an’ I’m gonna get me one.”
June stared at him. Eve said quickly, “It’s a song – it’s a song, June!”
There are a number of accounts of this sidewalk moment. Eve wrote it up but didn’t include it in her New Yorker piece. Her early draft has been used by some of the later biographers; here’s the actual extract: ... and the gap between California sunshine, so clean, and good ol’ Southern sweat was revealed right there. Caliban had come home to the sound he could hear inside him, and June was always going to be a campus girl, a beach and country club girl, who read scientific journals and listened to Bartók. Inevitably she would soon be wearing eyeglasses and pinning her hair into a chignon. Whereas Caliban ... He was real estate of a completely different location. How he would wear his hair was not yet clear. When June met him it was full of oil – greasy kids’ stuff, she said, and she had him wash it out in the hotel shower. But he ran his fingers back through it, as though he was missing something ...
The description June wrote in her book went to the heart of the matter. To whom did he belong? I knew that he was mine. I found him, I taught him. His great big beautiful self, standing there on the walk outside the Laverne Hotel, completely relaxed in his bones, and listening all the time, watching. I was so proud of the way he had coped. He’d been away from me and he’d managed. He’d learned. I was so utterly proud of him.
And, amazingly, he’d engaged with the machines and the processes of the industrialised world and he had made something – a record, that was good enough to be played on the radio. This was an astounding achievement.
But then I began to understand that he had an idea of himself that might be stronger than the idea of him and me together. This was the most painful knowledge of my life. It was such a lesson to me, and I have tried to take what I can from it. Everything has its essence, and what we are here for is to express that. To be truly ourselves. And he had a vision of himself and he was going to pursue it. If I was there with him, well, that would be nice. If not – well, that would be sad, but he could live with it.
I looked at him and grasped that he knew all this. Maybe not to put into words, but he had the emotional truths. He’d figured it all out, and I had not.
Now June and Caliban went back to the river, back to the park bench. That old man river just kept rollin’ along. But this was not the bed of grasses.
Sitting on the bench on the riverside, June had her head on his shoulder, was crying into it, when they were approached by a man in uniform – a policeman. He had a gun, it was right there on his hip, Caliban wanted to hold it. June was rearranging her clothes. “Excuse me, suh, are you the one they call Caliban?”
And so they were taken back, in a patrol car, to 462 Alabama, and the patrolman, whose name was George Sprule, delivered them up to Mrs Presley’s care. He walked them up the path of her house – hand in hand they followed – the parties came together at the bottom of the steps. In that homely place there was the meeting of a number of strong forces, the glances ricocheted like a pinball. However, there was no visible disturbance. George Sprule merely said, “Well, here ya’ll are then, Caliban, son. Don’t you go wandrin’ off now. You shouldn’t be makin’ poor Mrs Presley worry.” He ran his cop’s rude stare slowly up and down Caliban, then brought his eye up to hold the big man in judgement. “I have heard that record of yours. I’m not sure that ought to be allowed.” Ah’m. Orta. “You keep decent, now, y’hear?” He gave a little huff of contempt, hitched his gun belt, and went away.
A long pause. A shifting of the forces, like something big rolling its shoulders.
Finally Mrs Presley, it was her house and so it was her right to do some eyeballing now, finally she said, “Well – I imagine you should better come inside. Lord knows where you’ve been, son. I was worried sick. Vernon, could you right now go upstairs and please ring poor Mr Phillips.”
June came with him, defiantly. She was heartsick. But she wasn’t letting go of his arm for that fat old cow. And, right there in Mrs Presley’s kitchen, she kissed him on the cheek.
That night June McMay and Eve Kersting accompanied Caliban to Scotty Moore’s house and there they really saw something.
Caliban had used the words get wild and both women had noted them as maybe the first informal expression he’d been heard to utter. Now, in the small crowded room at the front of Scotty’s house, they were witness to a scene that was, well, a shock.
Scotty’s house was everything that the California girls thought of as Southern. Heavy drapes, old dark furniture, dim rooms which made the blood run slow just to enter them. Here, in their pastel slacks, they felt utterly modern. But then something was happening in this house that was turning that feeling on its head.
Was it the music? True, it was too big for the room – everything, the curtains, the chairs, everything was too big for the room. But that wasn’t it.
It was Caliban. He shook when he sang, shook something terrible. Was it nerves? Energy? Neither June nor Eve had ever seen him in anything that resembled a state, but plainly that’s what he was in now. What was it? It was impossible to know why, but something had loosed a force inside him. Up close, it was terrifying. His chest shook, his fingers shivered. Most of all it was in his legs, especially the left leg. It was as though an earthquake was shaking his body from the inside, his left leg seemed to kick and break. In the sweaty, crowded room, the musicians urged him on, and suddenly there was Scotty’s wife, Bobbie, who was dancing with him – well, not with him, but trying to copy him. Or was she coaching him? June and Eve had never seem anything like it. The music was fast, wild – simple, but somehow also wonderfully fresh. And pungent. Caliban threw his head back, then forward, and his hair, heavy with sweat, fell down over his eyes. Oh, he was mesmerising. The fascination wasn’t necessarily so much in what he was doing, which was often awkward, grotesque even, but in the search. He was on the trail of something, they all were. They were after a new thing under the sun. And they were finding it, too, right here in this room, you could see it – that’s what they thought. They were all believers. There was a bond between them, they would grin at each other and whoop – Caliban also.
One glance at this and June knew he would never leave Memphis.
All eyes were on him, he was the difference, a random thing, the nonce element. He could be led. Bobbie, who could really move, would from time to time suggest things to him. And there would be contributions from Bill’s sisters Evelyn and Mary-Ann, who didn’t dance but clapped, not in applause but rhythmically, clap-clap, ah-clap-clap. All suggestions were taken seriously. They tried new songs – a rocked-up version of Over the Rainbow just didn’t work – and new tempos, new approaches. The music wasn’t really loud, but it was just too big for the room. This thing was busting to get out. “Oh, that is so gone!” declared Bill. It was the highest praise.
They walked out in the Memphis night, Caliban and June holding hands, Eve behind, hardly there. It was two a.m., Caliban was sweaty, tired, but also exultant. The gladness in him seemed to glow in the murky street lighting, along with the sheen of sweat. June was sad, yes, but even she couldn’t help but be thrilled by the sheer pleasure of being so close to that naked flame. That comet from outer darkness.
From her place in the observation lounge, Eve produced a question. She asked, “What are you going to wear, Caliban? When you perform. You guys are going to perform these songs, aren’t you.”
It was a good point. Tonight he was in a white tee and chinos, this was fine for Scotty’s front room, but when he was up and lots of people were looking at him? He had wondered about the suit. But it would be too hot, and you couldn’t move inside it. “In Elvis Presley’s room,” he said, “there is a shirt. Could you look at it, please, Eve.”
They walked on, getting used to the idea of Eve in the role of consultant. If Caliban was aware of June’s feelings, he didn’t let on. But, oh, it was such a night, there was no room for feeling small. June tried to tell herself that.
What a way he’d come.
Then they were outside the gate at the Presleys’. Eve looked off into the shadows while June and Caliban stood under the pale street light and kissed. They took their time. Suddenly everyone knew that if this wasn’t actually the last dance then it wouldn’t be long. Moths flew up into the cone of light. Caliban and June cast long dark shapes on the pavement, which moved apart and then came together again. He was cooling now, less steam was rising. You could see that the evening had taken everything from him – so much concentration. To be learning all the time, it was like a child with growing pains. June had pains growing too. She held him but she was looking away into the night. Her heart was like a red, wet thing ragged inside her.
Over the next several days they had a wonderful time. Caliban slept late in his single bed at the Presleys’ house. Eve and June stayed at the hotel, and they all met in the park. They went shopping. Sam Phillips, on hearing of the get-him-dressed project, advanced some money, which they took to the shop that had made Elvis Presley’s pink-and-black shirt, Lansky’s on Beale Street, and had a copy made for him, only bigger. In the store there were other things, bright, vivid garments that were strange to see on a white man – maybe he even looked a little draggy. Seeing this, June showed him how to paint his eyes – might as well go the hog. Unselfconscious, he went with her to the druggist and bought cosmetics. Mrs Presley was scandalised when she saw, she told him to go wash his head, immediately, but he kept the things, the pencil and the black sticky stuff in the little bottle. Then, at night, they would all go to Scotty’s for a session – with Caliban now in what Bill called his cat clothes, the whole mood had changed.
