Jungle Rock Blues, page 27
Now Speed, unabashed, said, “Because if we had a vehicle we could go on over to Kansas City, I hear it’s wild.”
“They got some crazy little women there,” said Caliban.
Everyone looked to see how he might intend this. Caliban wondered if he should sing the whole song for them. But Skip didn’t know anything about music, that had been established. He thought that the music that Caliban talked about was for niggers, he had told Caliban so. Caliban didn’t sing when they were fishing.
“So I guess you want to,” said Speed.
“Want to what?” said Skip.
“Go to Kansas City,” said Speed.
The thing about words was, it mattered very much how you pronounced them. What kind of slope you put on them – was that it? For instance, you could say, “It’s gone,” and that meant there was none left – no sugar in the bowl. But if you said, “It’s gone,” well, that was completely different. That meant it belonged to a special category of things to get wild about, that it was certified good – which was another phrase that Bill made an event out of. Sometimes Caliban wore a shirt that was gone, according to Bill, quite often, in fact. Caliban kept a mental list of things that were gone and things that were not.
But what he wanted most was to talk gone. When he tried, oh dear, it made them laugh – it broke them up. Now, broke them up, that didn’t mean that anything was broken – well, the laughter broke up the conversation, maybe that was it?
But he could sing gone. Oh yes. Caliban singing gone was something that they had worked on and it was a skill he really enjoyed. It had lots of angles to it, and he wanted to master them all. Some words you gave a special shape to, some words you held back. One way to sing gone consisted of taking a little word and doing something with it. The first time he got this right was when they’d recorded Good Rockin’ Tonight. The song had sounded okay, it was working, but then Bill suggested he might add one word to the lyrics and the word was Well. Bill suggested that they put this word right at the beginning of the song, and when Caliban asked him what it meant, Bill said, “Let’s see – Well is like a word you say before you’re gonna say something – right, Scotty?”
They were in the pale green loomy old studio at Sun, which was becoming one of the few rooms that Caliban liked – it wasn’t the smells, it was the sounds that seemed to have lodged in the carpet and wall panels. Scotty, hunched over his guitar, said, “Well now listen up, I got something I’m gonna say – yeah, that’s about it.”
“Somethin’ like, Well, why don’t you get on with it?” This was Sam from the control booth.
“We jest be explorin’ the motherin’ ol’ English tongue here, coach,” said Bill. “The lingo, y’know. The lyrics. Caliban, why don’t you give us a kind of people get ready thing at the intro, there, kind of like you’re gettin’ ready to give it to us.”
And that’s how it occurred that Good Rockin’ Tonight starts with the word Well. But it wasn’t just any old well. This word is drawn out. The more Caliban drew it out, the more gone it was, apparently. Just that one little word, once they got it right, then everything else in the song was sublime-time music right on down the line. Caliban stretches the word out as though it’s a limousine, it’s something you can ride on, he sounds so expansive, it just opens you right up. Wwweeeeeelllllll ... – from there it was good rockin’ all the way to the mighty Pacific.
But that was just the start. A couple of months after they had spent half the night on Well, another little word got a working over. This time the word was Baby. Babe-babe-b-b-b-b-babe-babe – he said the word, the first letter of the word, over and over at the beginning of a new song, Let’s Play House. It was like stutterin’ they said, which wasn’t a term he knew, he would ask later, but he could tell they liked it. They worked on this Baby, then they put it on the record. You can hear it today – he stutters the word seventeen times before the song starts.
And this meant it was real gone. Let’s Play House was his biggest hit yet. It broke out, it went nationwide. It went and it went, that thing just kept on going. No one could hear it enough, when they played it live on stage they had to stand back, it made the audience press forward in a way that seemed dangerous. Wooh, how the girls laughed and screamed at the same time. Those shows were so good-humoured – yearning and craziness, it’s a fireball mix. It got so that he would just utter that spluttering B-B-Baby and the venue would erupt as though the world was ending.
Let’s Play House made the Top Ten on the Billboard Hot One Hundred. Which was the big time.
So was June his baby? Caliban lay in Elvis Presley’s bed and tried to figure it. Your baby was the one who haunted you, she was the one who had power over you – that’s what the songs said. In Elvis Presley’s room, night after night – he didn’t think that word, power, but who thinks in actual words? Rather he had feelings, that were like shapes that moved close about him, shifting, grappling with each other. This was all chemicals, June had said, and electricity – inside his head. Was he in his head? Or in Elvis Presley’s room? The room had a personality that was as strong as his own – was he being taken over by something in the room? He didn’t understand electricity, no one could explain it. He would have to learn to read for that. This was one of the goals he had set for himself, that when he became the person who he could imagine up ahead, when he filled that shape, he would be able to read.
In the blotchy light the faces in Elvis Presley’s photographs were like a circle of judges.
But he could not see that June would be coming close to him again. This thought became certain knowledge almost as soon as it first occurred to him. Then, as he lay there, the knowledge changed, it seemed, and became a feeling – a feeling of sadness. Do you know sad, Caliban? Sadness had Nudu in it, sadness was about his family who he would never know. The cross on the hill. His mother and father, these were shapes he didn’t have and he knew it. So sadness was about what you didn’t have, was that it? About something you didn’t have any more. Every other human being had those shapes within them, it seemed. They had brothers, too, and buddies, and they had childhood friends, people they’d grown up with. Also they had old things. He could smell Elvis Presley’s things, the old ball glove, the clothes still in the closet. Suddenly he was overcome by a desire to have things, things that were old and were his.
So was that what June was, a thing that contained good old feelings? This was kind of sad, too. This was the blues, maybe. The blues were another thing that the songs that said baby said. The blues he thought he understood. It was about a colour, something not unlike the light here in the night in Elvis Presley’s room, a little bit purple, a little bit yellow, murky, shadowy, filled with shapes that you couldn’t properly make out.
Mrs Presley in her kitchen, Caliban at her table, barefoot – she’s making him flapjacks. Her hands reach to open cupboards, they find ingredients, pour salt and flour. The hands move fast but they never make a mistake. Meanwhile she is talking. But it is her hands that Caliban is watching as they move her around the kitchen.
Then everything is in the bowl and now she takes up the eggbeater. For a moment her voice disappears as she concentrates. Caliban watches. He is remembering seeing an eggbeater for the first time. June had shown him how it was operated. But she did not use it. To see this thing now, being used according to design: this is a kind of miracle.
To see how Mrs Presley adds the ingredients. She knows exactly how much. Her hands know. They know when to turn the flapjacks. They drive the eggbeater. They put these things together and make a new thing. This, thinks, Caliban, is what it is to be human.
On tour now, things were getting dangerously wild. There were people who drove miles to see them, fans, who had bought all his records and had brought his photograph, dark and glossy like the ones on the wall in Elvis Presley’s room. They had waited in lines to have him make a mark on the photographs and record sleeves and on their clothes with a ballpoint – his signature. He made two marks, as Marion had taught him, these made a tee, and then three marks, these made a zee, she said, and next to that he put a squiggle – and this apparently was his name. Well, he’d done that thousands of times. Sometimes when he did it it was just good fun, everyone excited, the girls all working themselves up, he could feel it, to touch him, to maybe ask him for a kiss. But sometimes they didn’t wait. Sometimes they just ran at him, and tore at his clothes. Should he just let them? Hell, no! said Bill, they’ll kill us all. But Caliban saw that it was a kind of game – that if he stayed and allowed himself to be fought over the excitement would die down. The idea was to run so that they had to chase him, and to get away so that they weren’t satisfied. This is what Sam wanted, and what Bill and Scotty wanted, and he also understood that really it was what the fans wanted too, so he did it. For himself, he would have just stayed and let them have what they were after.
The fan-dom was taking a shape. It had a name, which was rock ’n’ roll, and it had a sound, on the records, and it had a dance style which, increasingly, was inspired by Caliban himself. Also there was a dress code which he had also been a leader in developing. Plus the hairstyle – already at his appearances there were guys who had gunked up their hair to make it look like his, standing up a little at the front and then falling to make a dark slashed line across the forehead. But most of all rock ’n’ roll was a feeling – that this was a wild new thing, a whole new way of life. Sociologists have written that these were the years when teenagehood was invented, that in the centuries preceding you were just a kid until you grew up. Coincidentally the economy was booming. Coincidentally TV was looking for product, things they could put a frame around and sell. The stars of that day seemed to come closer – Marilyn Monroe, she was so infinitely remote that you could almost touch her.
Now rock ’n’ roll just seemed perfectly designed to bring all of that together into, wah, a whole new thing. It was like an art movement, suddenly everyone finds a way of saying what has been locked up inside.
And the man who seemed destined to carry the movement, the cat who was the wildest, the strangest, yet the least threatening, the one with the most astonishing potential, was Caliban the Ape Man, the swinger with the jungle beat, oh, here he comes now, ladies and gentlemen, you can hear screams from the audience, he’s fumbling with the microphone right now, he’s giving his cue to the boys, he’s winding up his leg. And here he goes with ... look out! He’s snaking his hips! Oh, that shape in the air. That feeling. The girls are screaming right now, they’re starting to weep and tear their clothes. He falls to the stage! Oh! Oh! To be here, ladies and gentlemen, in his actual presence, which is the presence of this whole new way of being, this rock ’n’ roll, to be actually looking at him, watching him do the thing he does – this is it! He is the centre of the new world. Boys and girls, truly: he is the one who can never be repeated.
However such a thing is hard to manage and Sam Phillips was, financially speaking, struggling just a little to stay ahead of it. That seems crazy, when everything was selling so well. But a tidal wave is hard to ride. The orders for Caliban’s records were pouring in, unprecedented, and Sam had to press copies to satisfy that demand. The pressings had to be paid for, cash, the distribution, the promotion, and if he didn’t keep in good with the deejays and jukebox playlist men and the retailers and the boosters, well, the whole thing might fade. These guys were businessmen, they didn’t care about rock ’n’ roll – hell, lots of them hated this crossover stuff, this was Nigra music wasn’t it? Okay, it’s selling now, but this is just a fad. Naw, rock ’n’ roll isn’t going to last. And they’d always had sixty days to pay – so just send us over another ten thousand of that jungle disk, Sam, and we’ll settle with you when the clock runs around.
Sam was all but broke.
Also, he had other things on his mind. Caliban was the first, sure, he was Sam’s personal discovery and would always hold a special place, but if it could happen once, Sam reckoned, it could happen again. No one else thought this, but Sam was always reaching. Suddenly there was all kinds of talent at his door. Sun had previously recorded Negro artists but now, because of Caliban, every kind of wild white-boy singer came forth, and Sam was a man who understood where such talent might be taken. He already had Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee, who were showing promise – but this new signing, Carl Perkins, he could be even bigger than Caliban. No, there was no need to limit your thinking. But you had to ride the wave, and that might require some pretty fancy footwork ...
Increasingly Caliban’s fame – his notoriety – was an interference in any kind of life except being famous. Sure, it was a kick to do the shows, to feel that adoring blast from the open hearts, but then it couldn’t be turned off. He had to be careful where he went – one night the audience learned he was in the movie theatre and they stopped the show. They made such a commotion that the lights came up and then everyone was screaming. And this was in Memphis, where he lived.
So it was that he liked going with Skip down to the riverbank. A car had been purchased, a Cadillac like Sam’s, but pink. At times it was unclear who actually owned the car. Caliban had definitely paid for it. When it came to money, he was like a tourist – point and then pass over a handful of notes, wait to see if that’s enough. In the Caddy they’d been to Kansas City – it was true what the song said – and to other locations, many of them less illustrious, and had always managed to have some fun. There were times when Caliban wondered if they really needed to go to another city just to throw a football, but he didn’t mind being in the gang, at times it was just like roughhousing with the gorillas. The big car had room for six, easy, and so along with Skip, Speed and Frank, they began to be accompanied by two other guys, Delmo and Art. Art was another football player – ex-player, now a bellhop at the Laverne, except that he never seemed to be on duty – but it was Delmo that Caliban came to spend most time with. In some ways Delmo seemed as much a newcomer as Caliban himself. He was Skip’s kin, Skip said, but not close kin, from the questions Skip would ask him – “So where are you livin’, Del?” But the great thing about Delmo was, he liked nigger music. Not that he used that word, that was Skip, that was Speed, Delmo called it R&B, rhythm and blues, and he would sit alongside Caliban in the front seat and operate the radio. He and Caliban would talk music. Delmo was tremblingly excited by what Caliban was doing, beat-wise, his large dark eyes would swell as he went into long rhapsodies, long raves about the history of the rhythm, all the time slapping his hand on his thigh in time with the radio. Delmo had dark hair slicked across and ears that stuck out so wide they seemed likely to impede his progress through the air, but you could see he was a straight man, all heart, and that heart was saved for the music.
They threw footballs in Texas, Kentucky and Kansas. They checked out every burger bar and shake palace for a radius of one hundred miles. Caliban quite enjoyed some of it. But that was true of most of his life. Signing for the fans. Being interviewed. Driving somewhere – sure, why not? Riding merry-go-round horses, riding dodgems. Buying clothes. The movies – sure, let’s go again.
A thing it was possible to like, he discovered, was being the boss. As for the rest of it ...
There were three circumstances he really did like to be in: being on stage, being in the studio, or being with Mrs Presley in her kitchen. From time to time Mrs Presley forgot herself and called him Elvis. He didn’t correct her. In her kitchen, she was like a person who had lost the love of her life and then rediscovered the lover inside someone else. In her kitchen, Caliban always tried to be what Mrs Presley wanted him to be.
So – as she talks Caliban stares up at the light bulb hanging on the end of its cord, burning away above them, tireless, and wonders if the thing that is in it is part of the majesty she is speaking about, the light which comes from God. He has climbed up there and looked, studied what Vernon called the filament up close, it looked like burning spiderweb, like something utterly implacable. Was this the thing which burned inside America? Now, his sentence composed beforehand, he asks her, “Mom, what is the conjunction between electricity and God?”
She rolls her eyes.
“Lordy, Caliban, where did you learn conjunction? From that Speed, I guess.” She pats his hand. “Well, let’s see. Well, God gives us electricity, Caliban, He sends it to us, to light our dark places and give us comfort. That’s about it.”
Caliban nods. “Is that is what is lightning?”
“Oh, son, I don’t rightly know about that. Vernon, what is lightning, can you explain it to this boy?”
Vernon stirs from his long diagonal in the doorway and looks up at the bulb as though he is reading a message. He sighs, and in the kitchen everything seems to be waiting. It’s bright in there, Caliban’s clothes, Mrs Presley’s apron, the yellow paper on the walls, Vernon squints, and they can hear the sound of thought, which is a strange sound, it always makes everyone nervous – have you ever noticed that? How hard it is to wait while someone thinks? Caliban often made people wait, it drove them crazy. Now Vernon says carefully, “It comes from the clouds, I reckon.”
