Crazed Crowds and Movies

The audience response at Presley's live shows became increasingly fevered. Moore recalled, "He’d start out, 'You ain’t nothin’ but a Hound Dog,' and they’d just go to pieces.   They’d always react the same way.    There’d be a riot every time."    At the two concerts he performed in September at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show, fifty National Guardsmen were added to the police security to prevent crowd trouble.    Elvis, Presley's second album, was released in October and quickly rose to number one.    On October 28, he returned to the Sullivan show, hosted this time by its namesake.    After the performance, crowds in Nashville and St. Louis burned Presley in effigy.

His first motion picture, Love Me Tender, was released on November 21.    Though he was not top billed, the film's original title—The Reno Brothers—was changed to capitalize on the popularity of his latest single: "Love Me Tender" had hit the top of the charts on November 3.    To further take advantage of Presley's popularity, four musical numbers were added to what was originally a straight acting role.    The film was panned by the critics but did very well at the box office, becoming the 23rd-highest grossing movie of 1956, despite being released fewer than five weeks before the end of the year.    Presley would receive top billing on every subsequent film he made.

On December 4, Presley dropped into Sun Records where Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis were recording and jammed with them.    Though Phillips no longer had the right to release any Presley recordings, he made sure the trio's performance was captured on tape.    (Johnny Cash is often thought to have performed with them, but he was present only briefly at Phillips' instigation for a photo opportunity.)     The recording, long speculated about, would eventually surface in 1977 on a bootleg titled The Million Dollar Quartet, and RCA would finally release an authorized version a few years later.    1956 ended with a front page report in the Wall Street Journal suggesting Presley merchandise had grossed more than $22 million in sales, and a revelation by Billboard that he had placed more songs in the top 100 than any other artist since record charts began.

Presley made his third and final Ed Sullivan Show appearance on January 6, 1957—on this occasion indeed shot only down to the waist.    Some commentators have claimed that Parker orchestrated an appearance of censorship to generate publicity.    In any event, as critic Greil Marcus describes, Presley "did not tie himself down. Leaving behind the bland clothes he had worn on the first two shows, he stepped out in the outlandish costume of a pasha, if not a harem girl.    From the make-up over his eyes, the hair falling in his face, the overwhelmingly sexual cast of his mouth, he was playing Rudolph Valentino in The Shiek, with all stops out." Then, displaying his range and defying Sullivan's wishes, Presley closed with a gentle black spiritual, "Peace in the Valley".    At the end of the show, Sullivan declared Presley "a real decent, fine boy".    Two days later, the Memphis draft board announced that Presley would be classified 1A and would probably be drafted sometime that year.

Each of the three Presley singles released in the first half of 1957 went to number one: "Too Much", "All Shook Up", and "(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear".    Between film shoots and recording sessions, he also found time to purchase an eighteen-room mansion eight miles south of downtown Memphis for himself and his parents: Graceland.    Loving You—the soundtrack to his second film, released in July—was Presley's third straight number one album.    The title track was written by Leiber and Stoller, who were retained to write four of the six songs recorded at the sessions for Jailhouse Rock, Presley's next movie.    The songwriting team effectively produced the sessions, and they developed a close working relationship with Presley, who came to regard them as his "good-luck charm".    Their title track was yet another number one hit, as was the Jailhouse Rock EP.    Presley undertook four brief tours during the year, as well.    He continued to generate crazed audience responses.    In Detroit, a newspaper suggested that "the trouble with going to see Elvis Presley is that you're liable to get killed."    In Philadelphia, Villanova students pelted him with eggs. In Vancouver, the crowd rioted after the end of the show,  destroying the stage.

Frank Sinatra, who had famously inspired the swooning of teenaged girls in the 1940s, did not have a high opinion of the new musical phenomenon.    In a magazine article he was credited as writing, he decried "the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear—I refer to rock 'n' roll.    It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people.    It smells phoney and false.    It is sung, played and written, for the most part, by cretinous goons. ... This rancid-smelling aphrodisiac I deplore."    Asked for a response, Presley said, "I admire the man.    He has a right to say what he wants to say.    He is a great success and a fine actor, but I think he shouldn't have said it. ... This is a trend, just the same as he faced when

he started years ago."    Leiber and Stoller were again in the studio for the recording of Elvis' Christmas Album.    Toward the end of the session, they wrote a song on the spot at Presley's request: "Santa Claus Is Back In Town", an innuendo-laden blues.    The holiday release stretched Presley's string of number one albums to four and would eventually become the best selling Christmas album of all time.    After the session, however, Moore and Black—still
drawing only modest salaries, sharing in none of Presley's massive financial success—resigned.    Though they were brought back on a per diem basis a few weeks letter, it was clear that they had not been part of Presley's inner circle for some time.    On December 20, Presley received his draft notice.    Paramount and producer Hal Wallis had already spent $350,000 on the forthcoming film King Creole, and the draft board granted Presley a deferment to finish it.