Jungle Rock Blues, page 29
Now the Colonel continued speaking but his voice had changed. “And there are other places that you haven’t been to either. Elegant places, where there are people of distinction. You don’t know the word elegant, do you. There are many, many words that you don’t know, Caliban, and many places, and remarkable people, and things to see that your eyes never get tired of looking at.” The Colonel’s eyes went up to the painting and he and Caliban gazed at it together. Then, moving in the same slow arc that his hand had made, the Colonel’s eyes came sweeping back. Caliban felt them coming, he lifted his own gaze, and there was the Colonel, smiling at him again. The light inside the Colonel’s eyes was pale blue, as though they were holes into a set of rooms which went on and on, rooms where you could wander, filled with lovely things, and the endless blue of wide open skies. Something was out of sight, though. Now the Colonel blinked and then his head lifted and his eyes went away. But there was a smile on his face and, behind the beard, Caliban realised that his face was smiling back.
He could see that the Colonel was a clever man, who could make the world do what he wanted.
“I will arrange everything,” said the Colonel. “You are still a minor, so you can’t sign a contract – do you know what a contract is?” Caliban heard a different sound and he knew that if he could see into the Colonel’s head he would see the thing that had been out of sight. “So I have arranged for Mr and Mrs Presley to adopt you and they will sign on your behalf. Legally, they will be your mother and father, and you will have their second name. Everyone has a mother and a father, Caliban, and everyone has a second name – for the first time in your life you’ll really be legitimate. They will be paid from the contract to look after you and keep you. I will manage you. That is my job. You will be my only client and all my skills will be devoted to you.”
Caliban stood up. He wanted to walk. The Colonel was surprised, Caliban understood that, but he didn’t care. The Colonel rose and accompanied him. Caliban walked fast through the rooms, it made him feel better to walk. He wasn’t looking at anything. Then he stopped and looked sideways at the Colonel. He said, “Could Sam Phillips be my father?”
“No,” said the Colonel. “This is the end of Sam Phillips. Sam Phillips is putting you up for sale.” The Colonel looked to see if Caliban had understood. “Sam Phillips is telling you to go away.”
Caliban went on walking. Then he said, “I want Scotty and Bill Black. ”
“Okay,” said the Colonel. Walking fast had made the Colonel breathless, sweat ran down his face, which he mopped with a huge white handkerchief, Caliban had never seen one so big. “Those guys can be on the payroll, just like Mrs and Mrs Presley.”
There were rooms that lay ahead but Caliban stopped. There were pictures on every wall, pictures so strange that you wanted to look at them for as long as you were allowed. Yes, he liked being here, but there was a pressure. A steady pressure was coming from the Colonel.
23
And then, as though all that had preceded it had been mere prelude, a warm-up act, Caliban commenced to provoke a reaction that was unprecedented, and utterly wild – a contagious mania that spread like ink poured on a map of the American continent.
It was true, as the Colonel said, that Sam Phillips had put Caliban up for sale. But Caliban wasn’t sold to the Colonel – oh, no. The Colonel didn’t pay a cent. It was RCA who paid, $35,000, plus $5,000 to Caliban to cover royalties that Sam owed him but had been unable to pay. RCA was a major label and Caliban now had, according to everyone, the machine to launch him nationwide. This was the deal that the Colonel, with great skill, had brokered.
$40,000 doesn’t seem like much in today’s money, but at the time it was an unheard of amount, a fortune, especially to pay for a singer who didn’t seem to belong to a known category and who had never had a hit outside the South. It was a mad gamble, and was regarded within the industry as a joke.
At RCA there was a fat man named Steve Sholes and he was sweating. (Steve, Speed, the Colonel – increasingly Caliban noticed he was surrounded by fat men. So was he going to be fat himself one day?) Steve Sholes had paid a record amount, a fool’s number, according to the trades, for a freak show, a flash in the pan – a fad that surely had peaked. True, Caliban had five singles out, all selling huge numbers, all charting at the same time – the latest, Mystery Train, was as wonderfully compelling as anything he’d done – but these were Sun records, recorded and produced by the legendary Sam Phillips. Where was the million-selling RCA product? Meanwhile the man Steve could have signed instead, Carl Perkins, was number one everywhere you looked.
And the first RCA session had been a fiasco.
Instead of Sun’s intimate faded old green music room, he was shown into a huge Nashville recording studio where your voice never seemed to reach the walls. Bill and Scotty were there, sure, but there were other musicians too, strangers, session men, names like Chet Atkins who Scotty had worshipped for years, old pros, and the idea was to throw all this together, just play through one of these songs with the tape running, wasn’t it, and it would automatically sell a million copies – isn’t that how you did it, guys? But nothing happened. The songs seemed wrong, tired oldies, or bad imitations of things he’d already done, or else this strange new item, a morbid number based on a true story about a lonely guy in a hotel who shot himself. Bill and Scotty felt they were there on sufferance, and surely someone was missing – where was Sam, who had always found a direction? It was as though they were trying to imitate something, trying to remember something – a good feeling once had. When Steve Sholes took the tapes back to New York, the RCA executives said to him, “You got nothin’ here.” They wanted him to turn around, go back to Nashville, bring in Sam Phillips. Start again.
Of course it was Steve Sholes who had the last laugh.
I have to say that when it comes on the radio I fight with Heartbreak Hotel. Caliban chose it – “that one will be the hit” – and Steve Sholes, desperate, pushed it out into the world, to see what it looked like in the light. I like the words of the song, they’re melodramatic but they do make pictures. I can really see that desk clerk dressed in black. During the early eighties I spent a lot of time in down hotels and those words bring back their every cockroach. The song was based on something that really happened, a story in the newspapers about a guy whose wife left him – he killed himself in a hotel room and left a note, “I walk a lonely street.” And Caliban sings it out with everything he’s got. But the beat ... where is it? The record is stuck in the mud, it just won’t get going. And the sound is also mud. They wanted pistol shots from the drums, the boom of death, and all they got was a dull thud, and Caliban’s voice fighting for some traction. No, you can keep Heartbreak Hotel.
In fact, phew, the stink, you can keep the rest of the RCA catalogue. Yes, let’s do it – let’s burn down the cornfield. Let’s dump twenty years of dreck into the ocean. Okay, at last I’m really going to do this – go down to the end of the wharf at midnight and send everything he recorded at RCA spinning out over the water. The moon will be up there, half-clouded, the sound of the waves slapping against the piles will be the backslap that RCA could never get. The surge, the undersuck. The light will be lemon-black and patchy. There’s no one around. I back my wagon up and open the trunk. And out into the night they fly. They’re all gold disks, of course, every one of these beauties sold by the wagon-train load. But you can’t listen to them. Here we go – stop me if there’s one you’d like to hear. Okay, Jailhouse Rock, a lunker that never did rock – see how those thick old sides of vinyl just frisbee out over the waves. Hound Dog – get serious, it was a joke lyric that Caliban read straight, it’s embarrassing. Teddy Bear. Devil in Disguise. Your Cheatin’ Heart. Wooden Heart. Return to Sender – hey, shout out if there’s ever one you’d like to keep, but, me, I hear any of this stuff I change the station. GI Blues. Good Luck Charm. Can’t Help Falling in Love. Wear My Ring Around Your Neck. All Shook Up. King Creole. If I Can Dream. Moody Blue. It’s schlock – bloated, slow, overheated – honest, it’s just plain awful. And the music from the movies: He’s Your Uncle Not Your Dad. Yoga is as Yoga Does – remember those beauties? Try listening for example to the Roustabout soundtrack. No serious artist should have this stuff in his oeuvre – and there’s truckloads of it. Love Me Tender – okay, I do have a soft spot for that one, let’s keep it for old times’ sake. The rest: everything must go. Those old disks really fly, they skim and plane in the shifting light. Flecks of foam in my face, it’s cold, and there’s so many of these old things, my throwing arm gets tired. But, oh the relief. To be rid of that. Caliban’s post-Sun music, it’s just product. It sleeps with the fishes.
Heartbreak Hotel was Caliban’s first million-seller. The feeling that the record inspired, of that wild jungle man singing his blues in civilisation’s lonely hotel room, well, this was just perfect. This was art – this validated the whole thing. Everyone had to have a copy, they had to be hearing it right now, they had to be having their friends hear it. Billboard shouted out the news: Caliban Hot As $1 Pistol! He was on top of every chart that they made.
After that he was just a product that had to be managed. And for million-dollar management, Colonel Tom Parker was your man.
It was the Colonel who manoeuvred Caliban into the movies. He saw quickly that you couldn’t have your product so visible, seen in the uncontrolled conditions of a live show. Sure, it was wild and you could sell glossy pix to the fans as though they were drops of his blood, but every reporter in the country was in attendance now, and the headlines dripped poison. Caliban Sells Sex to Phoenix. Is it All Right, Mama? He Wants to Rock Your Daughter. No, this was bad for business. Even TV wasn’t the answer. Caliban went out live from the Ed Sullivan Show, it broke every audience record, the fee was astronomical – but what did people see? An organ. A bulge. Man, it seemed like all anyone could think about was his trousers – a whole lotta shakin’ going on. No, that wasn’t going to work either. For his next appearance on the little screen they cleaned him up, put him in a tux, showed him strictly from the waist up, singing Hound Dog to an actual basset hound. But this was just sad and everyone knew it. This would lower the temperature, the thing would fizzle. No, no, get him out of there. He’s only a fad anyway, it’s only a blip in time, this music. Get him into a real industry, where thousands pay to see him, millions, but where what he does is controlled. This was the Colonel’s thinking. Get him singing some nice songs to the camera, put them on a soundtrack – now there’s your modern product.
Shortly he was, according to a press release of the Colonel’s, the highest paid actor working in motion pictures today.
Okay, and now for the movies themselves. They run them for laughs on the late show – these hint at how an era can outstay its welcome. Get set there on the couch next to Loretta and we’ll watch them through together. Here we go: Love Me Tender, Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, GI Blues, Flaming Star, Wild in the Country, Blue Hawaii, Follow That Dream, Kid Galahad, Girls! Girls! Girls!, It Happened At the World’s Fair, Fun in Acapulco, Kissin’ Cousins, Viva Las Vegas, Roustabout, Girl Happy, Tickle Me, Harum Scarum, Frankie and Johnny, Paradise Hawaiian Style, Spinout, Double Trouble, Easy Come Easy Go, Clambake, Stay Away Joe, Wild Jungle Girls, Speedway, Charro!, The Trouble With Girls, and Change of Habit. He made thirty-one movies in thirteen years and not one of them can be sat through without the aid of a tankerload of beer.
Deep-six them entire.
Well, with the movies in the tide, along with the music he made at RCA, that about knocks off twenty years of work. And when you think that Caliban died when he was forty-two, and only came to our notice aged eighteen, well, it means that his period of beauty, of sublime expression, was very short. Maybe two years. Maybe only eighteen months.
Now that I’ve got myself worked up nor do I want to pause for Priscilla. Sure, she’s a person, she is the woman he married. Her black hair was an aspect of her appeal, I have no doubt of that, but she also had something of the angel about her. Oh, she was precious enough, I admit it, but, now I’ve got started on this, she was just his wife. I am not going to be held up by a wife. In the end she was just another girl, and there were more girls in Caliban’s life than anyone can imagine. The guys would go downstairs wherever they were hotelled and review the occupants of the lobby. In the lobby – they called it the Mink Farm – several would be selected, the good-looking ones, according to the judgement of Skippy or Speed or whoever was on duty, and they would come up and sit in the suite, arrange themselves among the couches, and eventually he would appear. He would talk nice to them all, he was always polite, and then drift out again, having given Skippy or Speed the high sign. The guys could have whatever was left over.
Think what you like – it happened.
The lucky girl would be given clean pyjamas, a tooth brush still in its wrapping, told to shower – “Caliban likes you to be really clean” – and then sent through to his room to wait. He would turn up eventually, and then the fun would begin.
And then what should he do all day, between girls?
How many motorbikes can one man ride? Cadillacs? Colt .45s? How many cuddly toys is too many? What does it avail a man should he gain his fortune but lose his soul? Airplanes, horses, personal soda fountains with your name worked on them in diamonds. Custom-made guitars, solid gold taps, a black Rolls Royce with purple leather seats and pink trim – that monster was so big that somehow even Caliban looked diminished beside it, one hand resting possessively on the hood as he gazes manfully at the camera. Movies, oh – night after night at the movies. Caliban was now so big he could not see a movie like anyone else, the screaming would stop the show, so he took to renting movie houses after-hours and going in for all-night five-movie sessions with the guys and whichever girl. This could also be done at the roller rink, the local Lunar Park, any given playground. Ride’em all night, boys, we got the run of the place. Darlin’, another fluffy toy? It’s yours, baby. Sincerely. Now where’s my waterpistol? I need burgers. Yeah, bring on the burgers.
Such fun. In fact the girls were sometimes surprised, when finally they were alone with him in his room, at exactly what took place. He was always nice. They would be, wah, excited, and fluttery, not sure how to act. Some of them would make like they knew what this was about and start to strip – he would hold up a hand. Others sat, adoring, and waited patiently to be told. Some were completely overcome and hysterical. All of them he treated with respect. He put them at their ease – “Hey, lookit you!” And sometimes, sure, they would make out right way. But more often, if there was the faintest hint of a possible distraction from the inevitable, he would take it. So they would find themselves sitting on his lap as he peered intently into, say, a display of tropical fish. He would stare into the warped world inside the lighted tanks as though he had gone into a dream. And then, slowly, turn to look at them, from up close, his famous face so nearby, and it was as though he was now looking into your head and seeing the fish swimming in there too. Seeing your dream. Okay, then the sex – Caliban always took care of business. He would get to know you really quickly, sometimes after twenty minutes with him you’d be in a pillow fight, laughing, screaming, tearing round the room like kids. More sex. All the time you’d be thinking, It’s him. It’s really him. And then he would say it. “Now, could you please look at this with me, please.”
From his bag, from under his pillow, would come something you’d seen in grade school, a reader, he’d bought a box of them at a fair, they were old and faded and you couldn’t believe a rich man like him had such things, tired by the use of the world. Dog-eared, limp. And you would sit beside him, often on the bed, it would be three, four in the morning, you’d had your fun, now what was this? Mrs Clancy Rides the Railroad – number four in the You Can Read series. He would put his finger under the words as he formed them, one by one, his lips carefully shaping the words. “And. She. Paid. The. Man. In. The. Ticket. Office.”
Now could you help me with my reading, please – it really shook some of them, it reminded them who they were sexing with. A man out of the trees. He couldn’t even do the everyday thing that they could all do, which was simply to read the words in these dumb kids’ books and effortlessly know what they meant. For some this was the time to retreat to the bathroom and think. But they always came back. He was too big, now, for anyone to leave. So they would read with him, slowly, word by word, side by side, often naked, his large brown thigh alongside your sleek one, the curtained room full of intimate scents, with sweat and internal moistures at hand, and you listening, tenderly now, as he worked his way through the pages. From the other side of the door music, shouting, the party could be heard, though that door never opened, ever. And in fact it was rather nice to be here with him, this large, frowning man holding the battered old book so seriously.
