What’s the best seller at Coletta’s restaurants during the quarantine?
“That’s very easy,” says owner Jerry Coletta. “Pizza, pizza, pizza.”
But their famous barbecue pizza — the logical choice — isn’t No. 1. Round the World, which has everything on it, is No. 1, followed by the All Meat, which has sausage and beef, pepperoni, and Canadian bacon, Coletta says. Their barbecue pizza is No. 3.
Coletta’s, which has been doing takeout, recently reopened its dining rooms with limited seating at both of its locations.
I asked Coletta about the history of the pizzas. “When Pizza Hut started advertising ‘Meat Lovers Pizza,’ we started getting deluged with orders for Meat Lover’s Pizza. So, we call it ‘All Meat.’ It’s really a Meat Lover’s Pizza.” That’s been 15 or 20 years ago, Coletta says. Round the World is much older. “My dad came up with that back in the ’50s.”
Coletta’s is a pizza pioneer in Memphis. “Back in the early ‘50s we had sailors coming in from the Navy base when they had the Navy base in Millington. They had had pizza in New York and Chicago and they were asking my dad why he didn’t put pizza on our menu. Of course, he didn’t know anything about pizza, but he actually went to Chicago to learn how to make pizzas.
“When he came back, he put pizza on the menu, but it wasn’t going over too well ‘cause it was a new type of food. People didn’t know what it was. Then he came up with the idea of the barbecue pizza. Of course, in Memphis everyone knows barbecue, and it sparked an interest in pizza. Barbecue pizza remains our signature item today.”
And that was Elvis’ favorite, Coletta says. The King dined on barbecue pizza at Coletta’s on South Parkway. Priscilla Presley, who likes Coletta’s lasagna and spaghetti and meatballs, used to pick up barbecue pizzas to-go.
The old Coletta’s on Summer was one of my go-to date-night places for dinner, but that restaurant burned a while back and didn’t reopen. Coletta’s has a location on Appling Road, but my all-time favorite is the restaurant on South Parkway. That was the original location of Coletta’s.
Jerry’s grandfather, Emil Coletta, opened Coletta’s in 1923. His father, Horest Coletta, ran the restaurant for years. “In three years we’ll be celebrating our 100th anniversary.”
The South Parkway restaurant originally was much smaller. “The room where the bar is used to be the whole restaurant,” Coletta says. ”The door opened on the Parkway.”
I love that iconic drinking spot with its red vinyl bar. “We put the bar in in 1971,” he adds. ”Liquor by the drink became legal in 1970.” Lots of people love that bar, according to Coletta. “Well, it’s a combination of the black tables and the red. It just lends to a relaxing atmosphere.”
But you can’t kick back with a cocktail in the bar these days. “It’s still against the rules right now to open the bar,” Coletta says. “Just the dining room may be open now.” They opened the dining room May 4th. “We’re taking out of service every other table so the people are eight to ten feet apart. All the servers are wearing gloves and masks.”
Dining in hasn’t been popular, Coletta says. “We’re not having a lot of dine-in business. Some days we only have five or six tables. It hasn’t come near what it was, but the takeout business has been good.”
Coletta never experienced anything like the quarantine during his career. “Oh, this is unreal. Every day is a challenge. I have enough sausage to last me another week. I can’t seem to get enough meat to make my sausage. It’s a challenge to find supplies.”
Patrons still can visit another unusual feature of the South Parkway location: the small dining room at the far South side. “We added on that dining room in 1971. It’s supposed to look like an outdoor patio with the blue sky and the stars at night. That’s the effect we try to make back there.”
That dining room reopened this week. “It was a good time to do some remodeling. We repainted the whole room, repainted the statues. It was just a good time to do some maintenance that had been deferred.”
If you don’t want to order one of the top three Coletta’s pizzas, you’ve got many more to choose from. “I would say the possibilities are endless, ” Coletta says. “We list only about 20.”
Is there a Coletta’s pizza that isn’t popular? “We have an onion pizza. Onion and mushroom. It’s one of my favorites, but not too many people order that one.”
His favorite is their sausage, onion, and peppers pizza.
“People ask me if I get tired of eating pizza and I tell them, ‘No, there’s so much variety. You can order a different topping and you get a different meal. I probably eat pizza two or three times a week. And no, I don’t get tired of eating it.’”
Coletta’s is at 1063 South Parkway East (901) 948-7652; and at 2850 Appling Road, (901) 383-1122.
Last year, the 50th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s triumphant first residency in Las Vegas was memorialized with an extravagant 11-CD box set, Elvis: Live 1969, and it was a revelation. While “Las Vegas Elvis” suggests a rather kitschy affair to some, these recordings (remixed by Memphis’ own Matt Ross-Spang) revealed a crack band, a quintet fired up by new arrangements, embellished with a small orchestra and background singers, with a new lease on rock history, post-’68 Comeback. It was the first iteration of the soon-to-be-legendary TCB Band.
It’s such an intense listening experience, one can’t help imagining hearing it live. Astoundingly, in that embarrassment of riches that Memphians know well, the classic version of the TCB Band will be in our midst this week, when guitarist James Burton, pianist Glen Hardin and drummer Ronnie Tutt appear together at the Soundstage at Graceland on January 11.
Described as “a special concert experience featuring amazing on-screen performances from the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” the footage will have the distinction of being backed live on stage by the TCB Band, plus Terry Blackwood & the Imperials, who also sang with the King in that first residency in Las Vegas. Then, none other than Priscilla Presley and long-term Memphis Mafia member Jerry Schilling will make appearances.
It’s all part of Graceland’s grand celebration of what would have been Presley’s 85th birthday. With such a focus on the passage of time, one can’t help reflecting on the fact that Elvis was 34 when the iconic Las Vegas concerts began: seemingly washed up to the youth-fixated rockers, but in truth more full of energy and wit than he had been for many years previous.
Now, with a generous segment of the TCB Band still alive and picking, such concerns with time seem meaningless. See them now before time rears its ugly head again.
Other grand events for this special anniversary “birth week” include, on the morning of January 8th (the King’s birthday), the Elvis Birthday Proclamation Ceremony on Graceland’s North Lawn. Of course there will be a birthday cake.
Later, The Auction at Graceland will feature artifacts authenticated by Graceland Authenticated. (All the items in the auction will be offered from third-party collectors and none of the items included in the auction will come from the Graceland Archives).
Then, on January 10th, the full dynamic range of Elvis’ repertoire can be heard in force, when The Memphis Symphony Orchestra brings their annual Elvis Pops Concert home to the Graceland Soundstage. Musician and singer Terry Mike Jeffrey and his band will join the Memphis Symphony Orchestra for a birthday salute that will “take you from Memphis to Las Vegas to Hawaii all in one evening.” It’s a fitting tribute to the King, as we imagine how he might be celebrating this milestone if things had worked out differently.
When Elvis Costello and the Imposters took the stage at Graceland last Friday night, the irony was palpable. As it should be, given that this other Elvis is a songsmith and wordsmith of subtle twists and turns of phrase. The fact that he’s also a dedicated fan and historian of Memphis music only gave the irony a more heartfelt touch. This show was nothing if not soulful.
Indeed, when the lights went down and shadows gathered on the stage, the first sounds we heard were exhortations to give our hearts to Jesus and the ecstatic sounds of a genuine gospel band. Then the lights came up and we saw that was all simply a recording, and the band launched into the thundering tom toms of “Strict Time.”
Given that this is the “Just Trust” tour, starting with a track from that LP was not a complete surprise. Nor was the follow-up, “Clubland,” in which the haunts of music scene-makers are cast in a kind of sardonic Cuban son. It’s a tune that allows consummate keyboardist Steve Naive to shine, and shine he did, eclipsing even the glitter laden jacket and hat of Elvis himself.
The bandleader’s whimsical outfit was just one manifestation of the playfulness he brought to the evening, perhaps inspired by the meta-irony of playing literally in the King’s backyard. Dodges, feints, and witty asides were the order of the evening, and such looseness was a perfect foil to some of the thornier content of his back catalog. Brigitte Billeaudeaux
Elvis Costello & the Imposters at Graceland
Take, for example, song four, coming after a propulsive “Green Shirt.” As Elvis said, “I once found myself sitting next to a woman, and I sang this to her…” With that, he launched into the evening’s first nod to the King. Singing the chorus and song title plaintively, “Don’t…Don’t…Don’t…” Elvis then abruptly cut off the tune with a curt quip, “So I didn’t.” Ba-dum-bum!
Later, he revealed that “the woman” was none other than Priscilla Presley, whom he met on a talk show, as he revealed in his generous between-song banter. Other bits of the King’s history found their way into the set from then on: “Mystery Dance” gave way to a bit of “His Latest Flame;” the coda to “Alison” became a stylized interpolation of “Suspicious Minds;” and the old chestnut “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace, Love & Understanding” even had a bit of “Mystery Train” thrown in.
Other gems of Memphis music history were also present: a full-on rendition of Johnny Cash’s “Cry, Cry, Cry;” a quote from “Mr. Big Stuff” at the end of “Everyday I Write the Book;” and an especially gospel-drenched treatment of a Sam & Dave tune Costello put his stamp on decades ago, “I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down.”
If those references weren’t entirely surprising, the new songs from this composer’s composer certainly were, and they revealed a deeper Memphis influence than any lyrical quotations could. The first new, so far unreleased song was a “campaign song” in a gospel vein, with the chorus of “Blood and hot sauce!”
The second, “Face in the Crowd,” revealed the provenance of the new material: “This is from a show coming your way,” Costello explained, describing a live theater event he’s collaborating on, based on the classic film of the same name. As the songwriter noted, “It’ll be like The Sound of Music, with less Nazis.” Brigitte Billeaudeaux
Kitten Kuroi and Briana Lee with Elvis Costello & the Imposters at Graceland
Throughout the evening, the sound was a welcome improvement over the murk experienced at last year’s Imposters show. And, if the front man himself was a bit winded at times by the stream of lyrics composed by his younger self, the band was sharp and on point. Kitten Kuroi and Briana Lee on background vocals seemed more integrated into the sound than last year, Davey Faragher on bass and vocal harmonies was better than ever, and original Attractions Steve Naive on keys and Pete Thomas on drums rekindled the old driving intensity with aplomb. It was a spirited evening, in which Costello’s vocal chops only got better and better. Once again, he showed that one can find a perfect balance between punk energy and musical craftsmanship, between history and innovation, between irony and soul.
Priscilla Presley — actor, producer, and one-time wife to Elvis Presley — still fields a lot of questions about her former husband. One question she gets with remarkable frequency is, “Why didn’t Elvis stay in Hollywood?”
“I get asked that quite a bit,” Presley muses. “It all comes down to not only is it his home, but it’s in his blood, the South. It’s in him as far as the friendships [and] his history in Memphis.”
That’s why Presley is hosting an Elegant Southern Style Weekend at Graceland Friday, September 27th, through Sunday, September 29th. Presley realized the best way to answer that recurring question once and for all was to show fans what drew the King of Rock-and-Roll back home time and again — the friendship, familiarity, and food (for starters) that Memphis is known for. “I just want to share that,” Presley explains. “I want to share that with our visitors.” The event will celebrate the fashion, food, architecture, design, and culture of the South with expert-led seminars, lively parties and events, workshops, and more.
Priscilla Presley
“We have five seminars, every one of them including somebody that touched Elvis’ life in many ways, his friendships. I know he missed that very much when he was here in Hollywood,” Presley says.
“When I first arrived in Memphis on Christmas 1962, all of his friends were there to greet me at Graceland. It was my surprise, all the people that he talked about in Germany were there. I was overwhelmed by the hospitality; I was overwhelmed by the warmth.”
That first show of Southern hospitality struck a chord with Presley, a chord that still resonates. “I’ve lived quite a few places because my father was in the military. I never really had that kind of bonding because I was a young kid going every three years, sometimes two, to a different school. So I embraced that and still do.”
The jam-packed lineup of Presley’s weekend includes several of her friends, as well. Presley’s longtime friend, Memphis fashion icon Pat Kerr, will be a special guest. “I went to Patricia Stevens’ finishing school. I just turned 18 and met Pat Kerr there,” Presley says. “We became instant friends, and she actually taught me how to [wear] makeup back in the day.”
Fashion plays a prominent role in the proceedings, as well it should. As recognizable for his jet-black hair and Lansky Bros. suits as for his voice and hips, Elvis was, after all, one of the first American performers to shatter the mold when it came to crafting his signature look. “I helped Elvis with a lot of his clothing, not that he needed it because he had such style. But I would out go out and get things that I felt that he would like, especially in Vegas. I brought him the belt that he wore in his jumpsuit. I would shop in SoHo in New York. I would take a couple of trips a year and look for things for him that he might want to include in his style and his wardrobe.”
Priscilla Presley
Hitting a little closer to home is special guest Hal Lansky of Lansky Bros. “We know the story about Elvis,” Presley says. “That was his favorite place on Beale Street, Lansky Bros., and he went in because the styles were so different. I really am looking forward to talking about that and what was important to him and why. He never wanted to look or be common in dress. He knew that style really was a part of not only yourself but expression.”
Another cause for excitement for Presley is the selection of guests. Emmy Award-winning costume designer Janie Bryant is scheduled to attend the event. “She is just the perfect person for our first time out,” Presley says. “She did Mad Men and HBO’s Deadwood.” Additional guests include Chef Kelly English of Restaurant Iris, motivational speaker and the inspiration behind the film The Blind Side Leigh Anne Tuohy, and Zoe Gowan, senior home editor for Southern Living magazine.
In short, Presley puts it best when she says, “I really believe that making something an event really makes memories.” Priscilla Presley hosts A Southern Style Weekend at Graceland Friday, September 27th, through Sunday, September 29th.
George Klein will be honored at “The George Klein Tribute Show” on August 11th at 4 p.m. at Lafayette’s Music Room.
It’s fitting that Klein will be honored during “Elvis Week.” He and The King were close friends from the 1950s until Elvis’ death in 1977.
Klein, who died February 5th at the age of 83, was a radio and TV personality. He was a deejay, had his own TV shows, made personal appearances seemingly everywhere, and was in Elvis movies, including “Jailhouse Rock.”
Jerry Williams, a friend of Klein’s for 71 years, put the show together. “He’s a Memphis icon,” Williams says. “He deserves it.”
The lineup includes Carla Thomas, Joyce Cobb, Merrilee Rush, T. G. Sheppard, Ronnie McDowell, Kelly Laing, Wendy Moten, William Bell, Royal Blues Band, and Jason D. Williams. “I didn’t get one ‘no.’ When I would call them, literally every one of them had their stories about George and what he meant to their career – from playing their first record to putting them on the TV show. No conversation was without tears.”
Williams says he could have had 100 people perform, but he stopped at 10.
He specifically picked the date for the show. “It’s on August 11th, the first Sunday of Elvis Week. And, you remember, George always had his events on the first Sunday of Elvis Week. That was sort of George’s day.”
Klein did 37 “George Klein and the Elvis Mafia” shows and 42 “George Klein Christmas Charity Shows,” Williams says.
Williams met Klein in the spring of 1948 “because of the Memphis Chicks baseball team.”
Klein was 11 and Williams was 8. “When the Chicks would start spring practice for the season, we would make 30, 35 cents a day. We would shag balls. We were batboys. We got to know all the guys.”
Their friendship continued after Williams moved to California in 1964 to manage Paul Revere & the Raiders.
And it continued after Williams returned to Memphis. “I came back in ‘69 and built Trans Maximus (TMI) Studios. And from that we had TMI Records.”
TMI was a success. “We stayed on charts at TMI for seven years without coming off. Steve Cropper was in charge of production.”
They cut records for Poco and Charlie Rich, among others. They also cut Jeff Beck’s Going Down album, which was Beck’s signature album with the title song written by Don Nix.
Klein played those albums on his radio show, Williams said. “Absolutely. He played every one of them. George was fabulous about playing anybody local. Anything recorded by local artists and by international artists who recorded in Memphis.”
He and Klein would talk daily after Williams permanently moved back to Memphis in 1971, Williams says.
“Somebody asked me, ‘What do you miss most about George Klein?’ I said, ‘George Klein.’ The reason is very simple. He was always a what-you-see-what-you-get kind of guy. No airs to George Klein.”
Klein “didn’t really know he was important to the world-wide music industry. Did you know he was the first person with a live broadcast show to put an African-American on live in Memphis? Fats Domino.”
He also invited African-American couples to dance along with the white couples on his TV show, Williams says.
“George Klein was a special guy because he did things he thought were right at the time that the world thought was wrong. And he went across the grain.”
Williams will host the “The George Klein Tribute Show,” which will be a first for him. “This is not a wailing wall kind of thing. This is entertainment.”
And, he says, “This is not a sad occasion. This is 10 acts who loved George.”
Tickets to “The George Klein Tribute Show” are $50. VIP tickets, which includes a “swag bag,” are $100. Tickets may be purchased at Lafayette’s Music Room. For more information, call (901) 207-5097 or go to lafayettes.com/mwmphs/event-tickets/
Pop metal may have lost the spotlight when the glammy 1980s gave way to the alternative 1990s. Poison frontman Bret Michaels got his share of hits in before the party went underground — “Unskinny Bop,” “Talk Dirty to Me,” “Every Rose Has It’s Thorn,” to pick a few. He proved to be more resilient than his genre, too, forging a solo career before moving into reality TV with a three-year run as the star of his own dating show, Rock of Love.
Michaels followed Rock of Love with a 2010 win on Celebrity Apprentice (starring a certain US President). Life as I Know It, focused on home and family life. Now Michaels is back on the road with a new single that he wrote with his daughter Jorja Bleu, and he’s stopping in Memphis to headline Graceland’s military appreciation weekend.
The concert is free to active military, vets and first responders.
Graceland Hosts Poison Singer, Reality Star Bret Michaels
Memphis Flyer: You’re coming to town and to Graceland for a show that’s part of a big military appreciation weekend — marking the anniversary of Elvis’s army service — can you just tell me a little about that for starters?
Bret Michaels: Two things that are very important to me: I love Memphis and I’ve been to Graceland many times on my own, for personal reasons. I’m just absolutely honored to do this and for this really important reason: I’m the son of a veteran. A lot of the staff on my road crew are veterans. Every night on stage I honor our vets, and our first responders. I’ve been doing that every single night since the beginning of my career. And I think that’s why so many people know it’s the real deal for me. I never bring politics into it. It’s just simply a big thank you for the freedoms that we get and the sacrifice that the veterans and their families made so that we get those freedoms. This is the most important thing, and I say this every night. My crowd is very diverse. Three generations. But we all come together because I don’t use it as a political stance. It’s just a big thank you — a thank you for the freedom of opinions that we get.
MF: And the concert’s not just for military, it’s for everybody. It’s just part of this special military week event.
BM: This is for everybody. It’s a big party. I’m bringing all the Poison hits. I’m putting on the show I put on every night. I give 1000 percent energy, as does my stellar band. We play all the Poison hits. We play other Bret Michaels songs. We’re going to do the new single “Unbroken.” It’s just an absolute party. I’m a details guy. I want to show that from the minute the show opens. We’re going to have guys handing out picks guitar picks. We got people at the front of the stage greeting people. We go out of our way. It’s just a party, no matter what. And that night will celebrate our veterans too.
MF:You’ve got a new single, “Unbroken.” And you’re back on the road. Is that good? I know everybody has a different opinions about touring.
BM: I love the road. It’s a part of my life. I’m one of those guys, and if you’re around me, this is the real me. I don’t become two different personalities. I literally live my life and am a very grateful person. I get to do what I love to do. I get to travel. I get to play music. And then I go home. And when I’m at home, I’m at home. I’ve got a family. I’ve got kids. And my kids are music-oriented. They play music. They love music. They go on the road with me a bunch. It’s a difficult combination, but I love the road. When I hit that stage, you’ll see I’m still excited to be out there.
Graceland Hosts Poison Singer, Reality Star Bret Michaels
MF: That’s great that you still get excited about it, because it can be tough, particularly if you have any kind of special circumstance.
BM: I’ve been a type-1, insulin-dependent diabetic since I was six. First thing I do when I roll out of bed in the morning is check my blood sugar. Second thing I do is take insulin. Then I eat and get in some form of exercise. I work out at a gym if I can, but whatever is available I make do with it. In Memphis, I’ll go out in the area and probably work out in a local gym there. I like to take in the scenery.
MF: So do fans. It’s good to get out, but after all that TV, I’m sure you get recognized. Do you like interacting with fans?
BM: 1000 percent. If I’m grabbing a bite to eat, or at the gym, people will come up for different reasons. Some because of the music. Some because of Apprentice or Rock of Love. There’s different reasons they know me. I’m grateful.
MF: You’re bringing up the TV — is there more of that? Has that phase passed? Are you back doing music full time now?
BM: I’m a creative person. I like to create stuff and see it through. There are a lot of creative people. My blessing is being able to bridge the gap. Once you create something, then you got to go get it done. You can create a song, but you’ve got to lay it down. You’ve got to record it. You got to make sure it gets out then for sale on iTunes. You shoot the video. There’s a lot of hard work. Being creative is what turns me on. Getting it done is where I’m blessed. I’m a hard worker and I constantly write and record music. In the Great digital world we live in, you don’t have to go in for 6-months and plow it all out at one time. You can go in and write “Unbroken,” and put that out right then. When you feel something like this, it hits you, you write that, you record it, you put it out digitally. That’s the great thing about the world we live in now.
MF: Every artist I know has a mixed relationship with how digital recording and marketing changed the business. You seem to really like it.
BM: It’s where the world is going and went. Go look at “Bohemian Rhapsody” with Queen. Look at the rebirth of that catalog. It’s amazing that this music gets a complete rebirth. And it’s the same with Bret Michaels and Poison. No matter how digitally advanced we get, it still comes down to people. It comes down to hard work, and embracing people. Even if you do EDM you’ve got to go out there and do concerts. You got to mix. I warn every artist out there, no matter what your art genre is, you can be easily exposed in a digital world, and easily disposed. But you got to go out there and take your music to people.
MF: Truth.
BM: The “gatekeepers” went away with digital. So it opened up the world of creativity. The “gatekeepers,” if they didn’t like the shoes you were wearing, could stop you from putting a record out. I’m telling you the truth. The “gatekeepers” are like, “I don’t like that guy’s record. I don’t like the way his shoes are. So we’re going to shelve the record.” That’s all over. So the ability to be talented and creative is now wide open. The downside is there so much — the floodgates opened. The “gatekeepers” went away and the floodgates opened. And when the floodgates opened, the world itself can’t possibly take all of it in. So you, as an artist, have to learn to work even harder now to stand out.
MF:We haven’t talked about the new single yet.
BM: I co-wrote this with my youngest daughter Jorja Bleu.
MF:That is awesome.
BM: She’s my youngest daughter and she goes to a music school, and she’s 13. She was going through a tough time in her life and I’ve gone through a lot of adversity of mine, being diabetic, going through the brain surgery. So we wrote the song “Unbroken,” to be inspirational. It’s about seizing adversity and being stronger than our storms sometimes. It really is resonating with people. It’s exploding organically. It’s helping people, no matter what they’re going through in their life.
MF:Nice. I have musical twins and one’s a songwriter. We’ve done stuff together and it’s like the most fun, rewarding thing younger you never saw coming.
BM: Yes — you said it exactly. It’s a joy this bonding that is unexplainably great.
Graceland Hosts Poison Singer, Reality Star Bret Michaels (2)
What is Military Appreciation Weekend? Via Graceland:
WHAT: Graceland will celebrate the 61st anniversary of Elvis’ military service March 23 – 24, 2019 with its annual Military Appreciation Weekend. This two-day celebration will showcase salute and commemorate Elvis’ patriotism. WHO: Along with honoring active military, retired veterans and first responders, Graceland will also recognize special guests currently serving in the 1st Squadron, 32nd Cavalry Regiment, which was previously activated as the 1st Battalion, 32nd Armor Regiment where Elvis served in his military career.
On Saturday the 23rd at 8:00 p.m. the weekend will be highlighted by a Graceland Live concert featuring Bret Michaels performing live at the Graceland Soundstage. WHEN: 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday March 23 and 24 WHERE: Elvis Presley’s Memphis
Highlights: Free Entry to Museum Exhibits (with Valid Military ID) Daily Flag Ceremonies
Guests are invited to observe flag ceremonies led by troops from Fort Campbell’s 1st Squadron, 32nd Cavalry Regiment at 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. both days at Elvis Presley’s Memphis. Care Package Donation Stations
Graceland will be collecting care package items for deployed service members, veterans, recruit graduates and first-responders throughout the weekend. Letter Writing Campaign
In the Hollywood Backlot Exhibit. Letters will be sent to our nation’s heroes through Operation Gratitude. Photo Opportunity with Elvis’ Presidential Medal of Freedom Veteran & Active Duty Member VIP Gathering
Graceland’s Archives Department will provide stories and an up-close and personal look at special artifacts from Elvis’ time in The US Army. Patriotic Mansion Lighting
Graceland mansion is lit up in red, white and blue all week to showcase our appreciation for Active Duty and retired U.S. Armed Forces members. Kids Crafts and Activities
A family friendly activity where kids of all ages will learn how to create a variety of fun military-themed crafts out of everyday household items.
Graceland Hosts Poison Singer, Reality Star Bret Michaels (3)
Editor’s note: The legendary George Klein passed away Tuesday night. Here’s Randy’s Haspel’s tribute from last August. It seems a fitting farewell — BV
One of my favorite shows on local television is Memphis Sounds with George Klein on the Library Station, WYPL Channel 18. The “Geeker (pronounced jeeker) in Your Speaker” does pretty much what he always has: interview artists and musicians, both famous and non-famous, that figure into this thing we call Memphis music.
The only problem is that for the last several weeks, George has taken a leave of absence because of health reasons. His substitutes, Leon Griffin, Dave Brown, and William Bell, have all been great, but nobody does it like GK. Now in its 12th year, George has interviewed everyone from Isaac Hayes to Justin Timberlake, along with scores of other musicians, while treating disc jockeys from small stations with the same respect reserved for superstars. His encyclopedic knowledge of rock-and-roll and radio give Klein decades of anecdotes to call upon — from being part of the original “Memphis Mafia” to the list of musical giants who Klein has promoted over the years. Always entertaining, Memphis Sounds is dedicated to the promotion and preservation of Memphis music, something that Klein has been squarely in the middle of for his entire professional life.
George Klein
Klein has been a fixture in Memphis radio and television since he was an assistant to Dewey Phillips on WHBQ back in the 1950s. Dewey may have been the first disc jockey to play an Elvis record, but George was the second. Beginning his radio career in Osceola, Arkansas, George worked several small stations before landing a job in Memphis at powerhouse WMC, which wanted to experiment with this new rock-and-roll thing.
After a year or so, the station’s management told George that this rock-and-roll stuff was just a passing fad and let him go. Fortunately, George’s Humes High School classmate, Elvis Presley, hired him on the spot — beginning with a whirlwind year traveling with The King and culminating with a bit part in Jailhouse Rock and, subsequently, seven other Elvis movies.
The friendship between Klein and Presley has become legendary, from George’s book, Elvis: My Best Man, to his radio program, “George Klein’s Original Elvis Hour,” now in its 34th year. His syndicated, “The GK Show,” on Sirius XM, broadcast from Graceland, is in its 10th year. Priscilla Presley even asked George to accept the award for Elvis’ induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
But this is not about what George did for Elvis; it’s what GK has done for the city of Memphis.
I first became aware of George when he was the afternoon disc jockey on WHBQ. He was a rhyming DJ who spoke “hep talk” and could go on a five-minute rhyming patter without missing a beat.
George enjoys the story of how we met when I was 13. Hitchhiking was forbidden in my family … so, I was standing on the corner with my thumb out when a shiny Cadillac pulled over. It was George. He encouraged me when I told him I had started a little band, and when he found out I was heading for Poplar Tunes Downtown, he drove me the entire way and dropped me off at the front door.
That’s the kind of guy George is — generous to a fault. In 1964, GK’s radio popularity led to his hosting a weekly television show called Talent Party. He brought in the finest artists around to lip-sync their latest hits, but most importantly, GK hosted every ambitious, young garage band in town. If they didn’t have a recording, George sent them to Roland Janes at Sonic Recording to cut songs, which they could then perform on Talent Party.
Being the beneficiary of several of GK’s invitations, I can testify that every time we appeared on Talent Party the bookings flooded in. In essence, GK was responsible for the whole ’60s garage-band scene which ultimately produced some of Memphis’ most notable entertainers. Scores of local musicians owe their start to George’s generosity.
Klein also arranged for the first African American to perform live on local TV. Fats Domino not only sang live, he recorded several songs to be broadcast on future shows. After George booked Fats, it was no problem for him to get James Brown, Jackie Wilson, and Sam Cooke. Talent Party was on every Saturday afternoon for 12 years.
I recently spoke with artist manager and music entrepreneur Jerry Williams, George’s friend of nearly 70 years. Jerry said the annual George Klein Christmas Charity Show was the longest running charity in Memphis. The first one was held in a wrestling ring at the Mid-South Coliseum. While the grapplers took a breather, GK featured Charlie Rich, The Bill Black Combo, and Ace Cannon. The next year, the show was moved to the National Guard Armory and then to the Fairgrounds to accommodate the crowds. Major artists donated their talents. Donated items were auctioned with a professional auctioneer, who flew to Memphis at his own expense. In fact, everyone worked for free — the bands, the promoters, the building owners, and the concessionaires. One hundred percent of the profits went to local charities.
After 42 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars raised, the yearly gala ended, but the event’s “Rainy Day Fund” produced enough revenue to establish the George Klein Broadcasting Scholarship at the University of Memphis. Williams said that he knows of no other person who has dedicated more of his life to the betterment of this city than Klein.
Now it’s time to say thank you. Thank you, George, for convincing Elvis that recording at American Studios was a good idea. Thank you, George, for naming the Guilloteens. Thank you, George, for the nights at Fridays or Alfred’s where you spun records and donated the proceeds. Thank you, George, for being the first to play Johnny Cash on the radio and for introducing the Beatles at their Memphis show. Thank you, George, for hosting the Memphis Mafia program during Elvis Week every year from 1978 to 2017 and donating the funds to the U of M. Thank you, George, for all the years of entertainment. And thank you, George, for a lifetime of promoting the great music and artists that come from your home town. We love ya’ madly.
George Klein, Cindy Schilling, Dara Klein and Jerry Schilling at The Blues Ball.
George Klein. Two words you just know if you live or ever lived in Memphis. Or if you’re an Elvis fan.
Klein, a radio and TV personality – and the King’s buddy – died Feb. 5 at the age of 83.
He was a deejay. He had his own TV show. He made personal appearances seemingly everywhere, including Graceland during the commemorations of Elvis’s death in August. He was even in Elvis movies, including “Jailhouse Rock.”
I remember him as gracious and kind. The first time I saw him was in the 1970s at the old Tadpole discotheque. It was like seeing a movie star. I don’t think I said a word to him that night.
Over the years I called him at his home or work to verify something about Elvis or find out something about the King for a newspaper story. He always called me back and he told me everything I wanted to know.
George Klein
One of the last times I called him was to see if he thought Elvis ever ate the meatloaf at the Arcade restaurant. It was for a food story. Klein said he never went with him to eat at the Arcade, but he told me about the type food Elvis liked to eat. I think Klein knew everything about Elvis.
But nobody knew Elvis like his close friends Priscilla Presley and Jerry Schilling.
The first time Priscilla heard about Klein was when she was in Germany, she says. Elvis was telling her who his friends were. “And George, of course, was at the top of his list,” Priscilla says.
“The first time I met him was when I went to Graceland in 1962 for Christmas. When he (Elvis) had asked me to come there for Christmas. And we drove up the drive of Graceland and he opened up the door and all of his friends were there that he wanted me to meet. And he introduced me to family and friends. People that he thought were very special. George, of course, was right there among them.”
Elvis, she says, “really thought George to be a great friend. They had gone to Humes High School.”
Elvis and Klein “kept their friends close to their hearts over the years.”
And, she says, ‘And beyond with George.”
What made Klein special? “His loyalty. His friendship. His support. I don’t think I’ve ever heard George say a bad word about anyone. He remembered everyone. He was charitable. He would emcee foundations. He was just a great human being.
“You loved having him around. His sense of humor. His relationships with all his friends. He had so many friends that embraced him and vice versa.”
Elvis and Klein “had their own language,” Priscilla says. She recalls them saying to each other, “You Got it right, Mister.”
Priscilla, who kept in touch with Klein, spoke to him two days before he died. “I’ve been speaking with him at the hospital.”
The last time she saw him was when she presented him his Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame Award. “I went and brought it to his home.
“It’s just hard to believe that he’s gone. I don’t know what Memphis will be like without George Klein.
“He’s an icon.”
Schilling, a close friend and business associate of Elvis, and Klein were friends for decades. “He has been my dear friend since the beginning – when my mother was his babysitter and we lived across the street from each other on Leath Street in North Memphis – 777 and 780.
“At Humes High School, George was the president of the class. Elvis didn’t have any real friends at that time in school ‘cause he came up from Mississippi. George was just nice to him. It wasn’t like they were best friends in high school, but George was nice to him. And so right out of high school when Elvis made the record and everything, he trusted George.”
And, he says, the “people Elvis remembered who were nice to him in high school” became the “nucleus of the start of the Memphis Mafia.”
Elvis “didn’t hire like an accountant or a bodyguard or a bookkeeper. He hired people he trusted. Because you weren’t just working for him at that time. You were living with him.”
And, he says, “It was a family. We were all brothers. George was really kind of the glue of all the friends and stuff of Elvis. He knew everyone from every era, whether it was Hollywood, Memphis, early days, later days, George was right there.”
George, he says, “was always nice to me. In later years he called me his ‘West Coast manager.’”
Schilling got Klein a writer for his book, “Elvis: My Best Man: Radio Days, Rock ‘n’ Roll Nights, and My LIfelong Friendship with Elvis Presley.”
“I was his friend sounding board. We never had an official management relationship. We were too good of friends for that.”
George Klein was always George Klein, Schilling says. “George was the same George that he was when we lived across the street from each other. He was six years older when I got to know Elvis in ‘54. George never changed. I think he changed a lot of things.”
Klein, he says, was “a pioneer on rock and roll radio. And when he had the TV show at WHBQ he was the first person in Memphis to have black artists on his station. I think Fats Domino was the first artist.”
Along with disk jockey Dewey Phillips, Klein “was right at the heart of it all.”
The last time Schilling saw Klein was two weeks ago. “Cindy (Schilling’s wife) and I went out to the Memphis Jewish Home. George knew we were coming and, thank God, he was having a good day. Which was not a good day normally. But a good day for George. We held hands. We talked almost every weekend of our lives whether on the air or off the air. But we always talked about basketball.”
Schilling became president of the Memphis Music Commission when Coach John Calipari became University of Memphis basketball coach. “He and George and I became really good friends along with R. C. Johnson, the athletic director. Coach Cal, when he went back after the game to talk to the team brought me and George back and we would listen.”
Schilling loved basketball, but he would defer to Klein when somebody would ask them what they thought about the game. Schilling would say, “Yeah, George, tell Coach Cal what we think.”
All the basketball players knew Klein and called him “GK” and “The Geeker.’ He was loved across the board.”
People outside of Memphis knew him, too, Schilling says. “I can talk to U2 or anybody about George Klein. They all know who he is.”
Klein, Schilling says, “never wanted to leave Memphis. He loved Memphis. And he had opportunities out here in Hollywood with the top radio station. He just didn’t want to leave Memphis.”
Then there’s the unmistakable George Klein voice. “Elvis would call it his ‘radio voice:’ ‘Oh, George, knock off that damn radio voice.”
Schilling says he told Priscilla, “I don’t think the bang of George leaving has hit me yet. He was truly for the last 40 years or whatever my best friend.”
Those days when he and Klein lived on Leath Street don’t seem so long ago, Schilling says. “I can hear his mother calling ‘George Boy, get in this house.’ I hope GK hears her calling now.””
Michael Donahue
Priscilla Presley and Jerry Schilling
George Klein with Cindy Schilling, former Shelby County Mayor Bill Morris, Pat Kerr Tigrett and Jerry Schilling at The Guest House at Graceland.
Now that Beale Street has been renovated, and neon warms its coldest nights, it’s hard to conjure up the feeling that must have greeted 37-year-old Calvin Newborn when he returned there after making his name in the jazz world.
“I came back to Memphis in 1970,” he told author Robert Gordon. “Beale Street was being torn down. I couldn’t find no place to play. … [I was] playing with Hank Crawford every six months in California. And when I came back to Memphis, I would stay inebriated. It broke my heart, you know, to come on Beale Street and it wasn’t there. So I just went to the liquor store. When they finally tore it completely down, I thought that was the end of Beale Street, you know. But they started to rebuilding, you know, slowly.”
Christian Patterson
Calvin Newborn
Newborn had dealt with heartbreak before, over the years, in many forms. Happily, he did eventually resume his rightful place as one of Beale’s star attractions. Now the heartbreak’s all ours, since he passed away on December 1st in his adopted home of Jacksonville, Florida. And for lovers of music history, his death marks the loss of more than one man and musician, great enough in his own right. Calvin was the last of the epoch-defining Phineas Newborn Family Showband.
Photo Courtesy of Jadene King
Herman Green
Family Ties
“When I hear stories about Elvis going and hearing [Calvin’s] dad’s band in the Flamingo Room, and borrowing Calvin’s guitar and sitting in with their family band, I think that Elvis probably got a lot of his feel from their family band. I can see how that was an influence on Elvis,” reflects musician and producer Scott Bomar, who worked with Calvin. “It was quite a band. I think Calvin and his family are that missing link between Sun Records and Stax. They were playing on Sun sessions, and you look at all the people that came through that band. William Bell, George Coleman, Honeymoon Garner, Fred Ford, Charles Lloyd, Booker Little. That whole Newborn Family Band was a cornerstone of Memphis music. It’s a chapter that I don’t think has gotten its due.”
Saxophone legend Charles Lloyd recently tried to give the Newborns their credit, when asked to recall his formative years in Memphis. “I was also blessed that Phineas Newborn discovered me early and took me to the great Irvin Reason for alto lessons. Phineas put me in his father — Phineas Senior’s — band. Together with Junior and his brother, Calvin, we played at the Plantation Inn which was in West Memphis. Phineas became an important mentor and planted the piano seed in me. To this day he still informs me.”
Photo Courtesy of Jadene King
Calvin with brass note on Beale honoring the Newborn family.
Of course, Phineas Newborn Jr., or just “Junior,” was Calvin’s older sibling, who some would later call “the greatest living jazz pianist.” Their parents, Phineas Sr., or “Finas,” and Mama Rose Newborn, raised them to love and play music, always hoping to carry on as a family band (with Finas on drums). And, for a time, they did. But, ultimately, Junior was too much of a genius on the ivories to be contained by such ambitions. Indeed, Calvin grew up in the shadow of Junior’s gift, something he apparently did not mind one bit. Though the brothers won their first talent show early on as a piano duo, that moment also brought home Junior’s genius to Calvin, who soon after began guitar lessons on an instrument that B.B. King helped him pick out.
Beale Street held a fascination for the whole family, who would initially make the long trek on foot from Orange Mound just to be there, until they moved closer. Finas turned down opportunities to tour with Lionel Hampton and Jimmie Lunceford just to be near his family and the promise of playing music with them. At that time, a flair for music was often a strong familial force. Dr. Herman Green, master of the saxophone and flute, went to Booker T. Washington High School with Calvin. “We grew up together. We been knowing each other since we were babies,” Green says. “The Newborn family, and the Green family, and then the Steinberg family. We had a lot of families together at that time that were musicians, you know? So we came up together, ’cause we had to go to the same school.”
Steve Roberts
Calvin Newborn, Chuck Sullivan, Richard Cushing, Robert Barnett (back). Dr. Herman Green & Willie Waldman (front) in FreeWorld. ca. 1990.
Though both brothers were soon proficient enough to tour with established acts (as when Calvin hit the road with Roy Milton’s band), by 1948, their father landed the family group a residency at the Plantation Inn in West Memphis. Green, too, joined the band, as did a young trombonist named Wanda Jones. For a time, Finas’ dream flourished. “Oh, we all was good, man!” recalls Green. “We was playing with his daddy. We had some good singers, like Ma Rainey.” Before long, they moved to the Flamingo Room in Downtown Memphis, and then collectively hit the road with Jackie Brenson, who was touring behind his hit record, “Rocket 88,” recorded (with Ike Turner’s band) by Sam Phillips.
If the family band was tight, Calvin and Wanda were getting even tighter. As Green remembers it, “Wanda, yeah — I’m the one that put ’em together. She was the vocalist with Willie Mitchell. I heard her, and I told Finas Sr. about her. And then we ended up using her for quite a while there. Now, Calvin was my right-hand buddy, man. Junior was in and out of there, you know, but me and Calvin were very close. He told me he was getting ready to get married to Wanda. I said, ‘Well, congratulations.’ He said, ‘Well, you ain’t heard the rest.’ I said, ‘Well, what is it?’ He said, ‘I want you to be my best man.’ And then we lived together in my daddy’s house, when he got married.”
The Phineas Newborn Family Showband was the toast of Memphis, with a plethora of future jazz and soul greats rotating through. And Calvin was distinguishing himself with a talent that his gifted brother did not have: showmanship. As Calvin told author Stanley Booth, “You’d have guitar players to come in and battle me, like Pee Wee Crayton and Gatemouth Brown, and I was battlin’ out there, tearin’ they behind up, ’cause I was dancin’, playin’, puttin’ on a show, slide’ across the flo’.” And flying, as captured in an iconic photo of Calvin in mid-air, his eyes fixed with fierce determination on his fretboard, his legs angled high in a mighty leap.
The Elvis Connection
As their reputation grew, the family band began to notice a young white kid at their shows, watching Calvin’s moves like a hawk. As Calvin recalled to Gordon, “I would see him everywhere, he used to come over to the Plantation Inn Club when we was over there.” That kid was Elvis Presley.
“Elvis used to be there, show up every Wednesday and Friday night to see me do Calvin’s Boogie and Junior’s Jive. I’ll be flyin’ and slidin’ across the dance floor [laughs] and I think that’s when he … started to flyin’, too.” Almost as a footnote, Calvin adds, “but he went on and made all that money, made millions of dollars, and I went to the jazz mountaintop and almost starved to death.”
But through it all, Presley remained close to the Newborns. It went far beyond studying their moves and their sounds at the club, as Calvin’s daughter, Jadene King, tells it. In describing her father’s prolific writings, she notes that he penned an as-yet unpublished volume with “a lot of the history between him and Elvis in it.” Titled Rock ‘n Roll: Triumph Over Chaos, “there’s an enormous amount of unspoken-of history of my dad and Elvis’ relationship. Actually, Elvis’ relationship with my entire family,” King says. “A lot of people think he was a prejudiced kind of human being, and from a very bigoted family, but that’s not true. He spent a lot of his life with my father and my uncle, at my grandmother’s home. They were very close. He ate many meals with my dad and my uncle, and my dad was the one that was responsible for a lot of his moves and a lot of his musical talent, as far as teaching him a lot of what he knew. They were very close.”
The Jazz Mountaintop
Family and Elvis aside, Calvin was more concerned with climbing to the jazz mountaintop, especially once the extent of Junior’s deep genius on the piano became widely known. After brief stints in college and the army, Junior was back in Memphis when Count Basie and the great talent scout John Hammond happened to visit, and heard him play. In that moment, the ring of opportunity became the death knell for Finas’ dream of a family band. By 1956, Junior and Calvin had moved to New York, playing in a quartet with two legends-to-be, Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clarke, and recording for Atlantic and RCA.
Before long, Junior would go his own way, and deal with his own demons, leaving Calvin to deal with his. At first, the jazz mountaintop offered an escape from the South’s rampant racism. “I think that’s the main reason why I left Memphis, you know,” he told Gordon, “to play jazz. Because jazz seemed to have put it on an even keel, because a lot of white people respected jazz. And that was the bebop era, you know, and I admired Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday and all the jazz artists, so I was, that’s one reason I was so glad to get away from Memphis.”
But he also fell into the traps of bebop life, as did Wanda. As Booth writes, “Calvin began working with Lionel Hampton, then joined Earl Hines. His wife, who had become a narcotics addict, had convulsions and died in her sleep, and Calvin began using heroin himself.” And yet, he managed his addictions well enough to keep playing, building his reputation every step of the way. As the 1960s wore on, Calvin ended up working with Jimmy Forrest, Wild Bill Davis, Al Grey, Freddie Roach, Booker Little, George Coleman, Ray Charles, Count Basie, Hank Crawford, and David “Fathead” Newman.
Meanwhile, Junior’s eccentricities were turning into full-blown mental anguish, and he spent time here and there in mental institutions, recovering from his alcoholism in hospitals, or simply convalescing in the family home. Still, he would perform and record.
In 1965, Finas, now suffering from heart problems in spite of his then-clean living, ignored his doctor’s warnings against performing and joined his eldest son onstage in Los Angeles. It was the closest he’d come to recapturing the Newborn family band’s glory days. And he died of a heart attack as soon as he walked off stage. Still, Mama Rose kept her home in Memphis, and Junior stayed there more and more.
Thus was the state of his life and his family when Calvin returned to see Beale Street in ruins. He was once again based in Memphis, but toured often. As his daughter recalls: “The first thing I remember as a little girl was him being in the Bubbling Brown Sugar tour. That had him over in Europe for several years, and he lived in Holland, London, Paris.”
King, whose mother was an Italian immigrant whom Calvin met at Coney Island, but who grew up in Jacksonville, goes on: “That’s my first memory of daddy being gone for a long period of time. That was in the mid-1970s. And he did that for a while. He was constantly gigging and touring during most of my childhood, but he would always come to Jacksonville to see me, or I would go to Memphis and spend time with him at my grandmother’s house. Mama Rose’s.”
Staying at the family home or on his own, Calvin would help with Junior’s care and began playing more with his old classmate, Herman Green. The quartet recordings they made as the Green Machine still stand as some of the finest jazz that Memphis has produced. As the 1980s went on, Calvin joined Alcoholics Anonymous, cleaned up his act, made the occasional solo album, and began working with younger musicians. When Green fell in with the funk/rock/improv group FreeWorld, Calvin was not far behind. “Calvin was a member of FreeWorld for about two years, and his guitar virtuosity brought us all up several levels, musically speaking,” says FreeWorld founder Richard Cushing. “Herman and Calvin would occasionally start playing off each other in the middle of a song, pushing each other, cutting heads as only two old-school masters can do.”
Mike Brown
Working in the studio.
New Born
Memphis musician and producer Scott Bomar also treasures his time with Calvin, first as pupil and then as the producer of his phenomenal album, New Born. “I had to put a band together to back Roscoe Gordon, and I asked Calvin to play guitar. That was the beginning of our friendship and the beginning of us doing gigs together. Some of the most amazing musical settings that I’ve had the good fortune to be part of were with Calvin. At one Ponderosa Stomp show, the Sun Ra Arkestra actually played with Calvin and me. That’s one of the most intense audience reactions I’ve ever seen at a concert. And every time I’d talk to Calvin, he would still talk about it. The last time I spoke to Calvin, he was still talking about that performance. It was a tune of his called ‘Seventh Heaven,’ and that was a very, very special performance.”
Even as the next century approached, Calvin had a flair for showmanship. Bomar goes on: “When he got on stage, he had this energy that not many people I’ve ever played with have. He was electric. He could hit his guitar in a way that got people’s attention. His tone — I love his rawness. Of course, he had this deep musical knowledge and was very melodic, but he also had this kind of raw, rock-and- roll edge to his tone and his playing. His tone was always on the edge of distortion.”
By 2003, there was less to keep Calvin here in Memphis. Junior and his mother, Mama Rose, had left this mortal coil behind. And so he settled in with his daughter, adapting to the Sunshine State and a more contemplative life. “My dad had various levels of spirituality, and he studied every religion known to man. He studied Islam, he studied Jehovah’s Witnesses, he studied Judaism, he studied Hinduism. My father was just a brilliant individual. He’s read the Koran three or four times. He’s read the Bible many times. He was just a very well-versed man, and I would say the last 10 years of his life he completely went over to Christianity.”
Calvin also continued to perform at the Jazzland Cafe and the World of Nations festival in Jacksonville, not to mention many area churches. And he remained as feverishly creative as ever. “He has several unpublished compositions that I have,” notes King. “I have several plays, several books, and tons of lyrics and scores for new music, new songs. He had just finished scoring a musical project that he wanted to take to New York and record.”
And then, in the spring of this year, romance came back into his life, in the form of one Marie Davis Brothers, who he had known for decades. “I’ve known her my whole life, for over 43 years,” says King. “Originally, they were together for 12 years, and they separated and were apart for 20 more years. In 2017, they started communicating again. They’d been talking over the phone for a little over a year, and then in April she moved here from Memphis. And in May they got married and they moved into their own apartment.”
Photo Courtesy of Jadene King
Calvin Newborn at the Memphis Music Hall of Fame induction of his brother Phineas.
The Final Chapter
No one expected Calvin Newborn to die this month. “He had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) from the years and years and years of smoking and drinking and just the jazz life, but he’d been sober and clean for over 35 years, and he was doing very very well,” says King. “Just in the beginning of November, his oxygen levels weren’t what they needed to be, but he just went from not having oxygen to wearing a little Inogen [portable oxygen] machine. And then toward the end of the month, that stopped giving him the levels that were needed, and here we are.”
Just before the end, he was still giving his daughter new writings to type up. “In my father’s last couple of months, he wrote a poem called ‘Seventh Heaven.’ It was based on a dream where he saw his great-granddaughter, who he called Bliss, looking out into what he called seventh heaven, and everyone was at peace. There was no more hatred, there was no more racial divide. There was no more poverty. Everything had been leveled out. It was a beautiful world. I guess if my father had an epitaph, it would be ‘Seventh Heaven: There’s no race, just the human race.'”
In Calvin Newborn’s heaven, there’s room enough for everyone to fly.
Steve Binder & Elvis Presley on the set of Singer Presents… Elvis.
Whether you recognize the name or not, producer/director Steve Binder is probably responsible for developing a considerable portion of your favorite pop-culture real estate. Before directing a landmark 1964 concert film, The T.A.M.I. Show, featuring James Brown, The Rolling Stones, The Supremes, Chuck Berry (and Marvin Gay, and The Beach Boys, and Gerry and the Pacemakers, and The Ronettes), and a full roster of future music industry legends. Binder worked on The Steve Allen Show. He partnered with top-shelf music producer Bones Howe. He produced Pee Wee’s Playhouse. Star Wars completists can thank him for directing the Infamous Star Wars Holiday Special, which might have been considerably worse, had Binder not been called in to salvage the project, when the network’s first choice didn’t work out. In 1968, Binder accepted an offer to direct the NBC TV special Singer Presents… Elvis, better known now as the “’68 Comeback.”
This week Binder’s coming to Memphis and Graceland to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of Singer Presents…, and sign copies of his book Comeback ’68: The Story of the Elvis Special. Here’s some of what he had to say about his work on The T.A.M.I. Show, and the NBC special that marked his return to serious recording and live performance.
Memphis Flyer:I know we’re supposed to talk about Elvis, but I don’t think there’s a ‘68 Comeback without the T.A.M.I. Show in 1964. So I’d like to start there, if it’s okay.
Steve Binder: To begin with, I was directing Steve Allen at the time, and in the middle of it we took a hiatus. So I had an opportunity to collaborate again with Bill Sargent, The T.A.M.I. Show producer. Bill was really a great promoter. He didn’t have a lot of input creatively. He’d just finished producing [a filmed version of] Richard Burton on Broadway doing Hamlet. His idea — he was so far ahead of his time. Everything we’re watching today on digital, Bill thought about those things in the 1960’s.
What you guys were basically doing with T.A.M.I. is an early version of HDTV, right?
He took electronic cameras, when everybody had just transferred over to video tape, and he thought Kinescope was over. I don’t want to get too technical, but American television designated, when it went on the air, that it could only have 525 vertical and horizontal lines for the picture. Bill had a technical background in the Navy. He thought, you know, if we’re not being restricted by the FCC, we can have as many lines as we want and make the quality much better than a television picture. Therefore we can project on theatrical screens, 30 feet high. Back in those days he called it either Electronovision or Theatrovision.
Q & A with ’68 Comeback and T.A.M.I. Show director, Steve Binder
And he came to me and asked if I was interested, because I’d done another project with him that was shown in arenas all over the world, starring Burt Lancaster and a whole cast of stars. It was during the period when schools were segregated and this was to celebrate the desegregation of schools. Burt not only hosted the show, he also sang and danced. It was pretty successful. It played in Madison Square Garden. It played at the Los Angeles Sports Arena and places like that all over the country.
So he came to me and said, I’ve just done Richard Burton doing Hamlet and I’d like to do another project right away. So we kind of came up with the idea of doing a rock and roll concert. It was obviously the decade with the Vietnam War, the Kennedy assassinations, and the assassination of Martin Luther King and so forth. This obviously preempted a lot of all of that. But, Bill didn’t give me any restrictions whatsoever. And Jack Nietzsche was the great composer and producer on the East Coast, and Phil Spector on the West Coast, were the two biggest producers in Rock music. And Jack was the musical director of The T.A.M.I. Show. He later went on to do the score for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and other major motion pictures. But Jack is the one who really determined who the hot acts were that year. And gave the Sargent the list.
Sergeant wanted to get the Beatles on the show, but instead he got Brian Epstein to give him Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer. Those were his acts. In fact the songs that Billy sang on the show were written by the Beatles.
And James Brown
I didn’t even know who James Brown was, let alone how to improvise filming him. But I went to James and said we are ready to rehearse your set. He said you won’t need any rehearsal; you’ll know what to do when you see me. Everybody else I got one run through with to at least look at the apps. Obviously I went out and got their albums. None of them were superstars at the time. In fact, when the Rolling Stones were booked they were just the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger wasn’t even popping out as Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. Same with Diana Ross when we had the Supremes. It was just the Supremes and so forth. We mixed in English acts, because the British Invasion it just started. So we mix those acts with East Coast acts, West Coast Acts, Midwest Acts. None of us knew. I think of nine or 10 acts, eight of them are in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame now. Nobody could have predicted that in 1964.
Q & A with ’68 Comeback and T.A.M.I. Show director, Steve Binder (2)
And all of them are huge. It almost seems unlikely that anybody could pick that many winners.
Chris? Who was the biggest star we had on the show do you think?
I’m probably wrong, but I’m going to guess it was Leslie Gore.
She was. She was the biggest recording artist we had on the film.
And she’s amazing. I know she wasn’t out of the closet yet, but re-watching Leslie’s performance of “You Don’t Own Me,” really drove home what an intersectional show this was in 1964. It was male, female, black, white, gay, straight. Like this utopian vision of a better future through rock and soul. And wasn’t a portion of any profit supposed to go toward empowering youth in their communities? Or fostering music scenes. The whole thing feels ahead of its time and I’m not sure there’s really been a concert film quite like it since.
There hasn’t been. Sergeant was like one of the Mel Brooks characters in The Producers. He would go out and sell 300 percent of something. It would turn into a hit, and then he was screwed. So he went bankrupt on every film he ever did practically, throughout his career. He never had a successful movie that he held onto. The T.A.M.I. Show was actually picked up by AIP, who were doing all the beach bunny movies at the time with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. They had Vincent Price doing horror movies. American International pictures. They picked it up and then they called me and said they want to do another T.A.M.I. movie. The concept was we were going to do an annual event. And the money was going to go, or at least a great portion of it, to music acts all over the United States.
The minute AIP took it over, they were just interested in making money for themselves. So they took it. The actor who was the star of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was to host it. They put a lot of acts on the TNT show that weren’t rock-and-roll acts at all. They were very successful acts, but more middle-of-the-road. Even Ray Charles at the time was on the TNT show. As great as he was, he was not considered rock-and-roll. So it was a case of pride and I turned it down. They gave the music concept to Phil Spector, who I did respect in those days a great deal. Phil literally begged me on his knees to direct the TNT show. I said I couldn’t. I mean it’s not the same concept. It’s not going to have the same impact.
Q & A with ’68 Comeback and T.A.M.I. Show director, Steve Binder (3)
I like how real it is. The crowd is excited in a way you can’t fake. But most importantly, the bands seem to be having a great time. A great time playing, a great time interacting with the audience.
The only thing I contributed to that was making sure all the acts participated with no egos. And they would all be there for the entire two days that we filmed. They all rooted for each other. They bonded with each other. A lot of the dancers dated a lot of the acts, as a matter of fact. It wasn’t a case of one-upmanship. It was more a case of trying to do their best. I think Mick Jagger or Keith put out a Rolling Stone interview saying it was the worst decision they ever made to follow James Brown. I think it was the best decision. Because I don’t think we would have gotten that performance out of [Mick]. I think he thought he was James Brown after he saw James Brown perform.
Q & A with ’68 Comeback and T.A.M.I. Show director, Steve Binder (4)
I’ve followed some of that. Brown’s performance is unquestionably the show’s climax, but there’s something nice about starting with Chuck Berry and bookending that with The Stones and Keith Richards on guitar, before bringing everybody back for the finale.
I think so too. And all of that was very intentional. I wanted everyone who saw the film to know it was live. So, we had a first act and all the artists who appeared in the first act come out at the end of the first act. And then having all the artists come out at the end reinforced that they were all there together at the same time.
And very clearly having a blast.
I’ve done nine Diana Ross specials. I did Central Park with her — 1.2 million people there, etcetera. When I think about The Tami Show today, when I had all those dancers go right to The Supremes during their number … To ask a major superstar today, “Hey we’re going to have 25 dancers come through your line while you’re performing.” It would be unheard of. But they all loved it. They loved that they weren’t doing a television show; they were doing a movie movie. That was a big selling point for everybody. They were for real. And that’s what I tried to do with all my shows. I don’t want to see the slicked-down image of a star. I want to see the real inside of a star. You get that. With the Supremes, with Leslie Gore.
Leslie Gore has always been a personal favorite, but it really is hard to imagine her as the biggest star on a bill with The Stones, The Ronnettes, the Beach Boys.
She was phenomenal. I never saw Leslie after that, but stayed in touch. I was happy when she came out. I know the difficulty and the struggle the LGBT community face. Especially being from LA and everything. We don’t have some of the prejudices that other people do in many cases. But they had to fight for every inch of becoming real 100 percent American citizens.
And her performance of “You Don’t Own Me” is just as good as it gets. We’ve talked about how intersectional the film is — and not always in safe ways for the time. I described it as utopian, even. But sometimes, at the corner of a frame, or just for a split instant you’ll see a cop in riot gear. As fun as it all seems, were there also concerns that something might happen?
There were concerns from the city which owned the Santa Monica City Auditorium at the time. And we fought against it. We definitely did not want these uniforms standing in the aisles and so forth. It was interesting because this is the time before any of the kids knew how to react to rock-and-roll. We didn’t have a warm-up guy telling them they should applaud and scream and so forth. We didn’t have signs up saying applaud. This is all real. In fact I didn’t even sweeten the soundtrack. What people saw in the theaters was what happened, because there was no post-production whatsoever. When I looked at James Brown’s performance afterwards one of the engineers asked me if I could hear some of the female kids screaming the F-word. “F-me! f me!” But I couldn’t hear it. It was all natural. It was all really happening. Parents were coming in to drag their kids out of the theater while we were actually filming. It was quite an experience.
We should probably move ahead four years. This utopian vision didn’t quite pan out. Like you said, the country is in turmoil. MLK, Vietnam. It’s a different world when you get the call about directing an Elvis TV special. Music had changed too. And you can’t do it because you’re about to start work on a feature film. Correct?
I was hired by an iconic 1950s producer at the time to do a dramatic feature film. The guy’s name was Walter Wanger. He was famous and he was married at the time to a famous actress. He caught a Universal executive taking her out to dinner and shot him in the balls and became a front-page news story. I think he became more famous for that than his films. Anyway he had a book that he wanted to do, and I just seen the movie Blow Up out of England, and loved it. So I was working on the script when I got a phone call from NBC. I just finished this controversial Harry Belafonte, Petula Clark special.
Bob Finkel was a very good producer and director on his own in the 1950s. He was planning on producing the special himself after they made a deal with Colonel Parker, because Parker knew that the money had dried up in the movie industry to make another Elvis movie. So he went to NBC and said, “I’d like you to finance Elvis’s movie with the caveat that Elvis will do a television special for you.” Well he never told Elvis about this and when he did tell Elvis about this Elvis said, “I don’t want to do television, I’ve been burned on television,” and he had been — except for his first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show.
They made him wear a tuxedo. Steve Allen put a hound dog in front of him while he was singing. Stuff like that. Bob said, “We’ve got a deal on paper, but we haven’t got Elvis Presley.” He said he’d read about my Petula Clark/Belafonte controversy and realized I was around the same age as Elvis, and had a kind of rebel reputation. He said, “I know I’m not going to be doing it because every time I meet Elvis he calls me Mr. Finkel. We need to find somebody he can relate to.” So I said I wasn’t available. “I’m doing a movie movie.” Fortunately, my partner back then was one of the best record producers on the west coast, Bones Howe. Bones was producing all the hit records for the 5th Dimension, and The Association; he was working with Laura Nyro on “Save the Country.”
Tom Waits, also?
That’s right. Bones overheard my conversation with Steve and he said, “I’ve worked with Elvis. I engineered. I think you and Elvis would hit it off great,” he said. “I think you should do both. I think you need to call Winger and see if you can get permission to do the television special and do the movie.” By the time I got around to calling Wanger back, fate lifts his finger; he dies of a heart attack and this movie is canceled. I’m now free. So I called Finkel and said, “Hey, if you’re still interested, I’m out of my commitment and would be interested in doing Elvis — on one condition. I want to meet Elvis one-on-one. I want to meet him alone, without any entourage or anything.
So they call me back and say, in order to do that I have to meet the Colonel in person. The Colonel will decide if I get to meet Elvis or not. So Bones and I truck out to MGM Studios where Elvis had just finished a movie. That’s where the Colonel’s offices were. And we walked in. And now the Colonel hands me a quarter-inch audio tape of 20 Christmas songs that Elvis had recorded and sent out as a gift to disc jockeys all over America. It’s got a picture of Elvis surrounded by Holly and berries and so forth. He said, “This is the show that NBC and myself and decided on.” In my head instantly I knew this is a show I’m not going to do. So I wrote off the meeting.
We drove back to my offices on Sunset where I get this call: “I don’t know what you did to charm Colonel Parker, but Elvis is going to be your office tomorrow at 4.” I was taken by surprise myself. In my book that I just finished, I go into detail on my first meeting with Colonel Parker and what happened when he presented me to the Snowman’s League for membership.
What was the Colonel’s superpower?
In my experience with Parker? I think he felt and really did believe he had power over people. I saw major executives at NBC who were just terrified of not pleasing the Colonel. I couldn’t believe it. He overpowered people. I swear, he tried to hypnotize me many times. He was an amateur hypnotist and he would stare into my eyes. Especially the end. He was trying to will me. I think I was probably one of the only people he met in his life that really wanted nothing from him. I grew up working in my dad’s gas station. My security blanket was always, in show business, if this doesn’t work out I can always go back and pump gasoline and change tires so, you know …
You weren’t getting snowed.
I thought he was a lousy businessman to be honest with you. Elvis wound up not having a piece of any of the movies he made. They’re all owned by the studios themselves. All he wanted was the paycheck. And you owned Elvis from 9 to 5, when he went to work. He’d sing any song, read any script.
The Colonel told me, on the first day at MGM, he had a moving truck parked in the lot, in case he got into a confrontation with the studio, he knew he could move him and Elvis out in an hour.
So you get the meeting. And Elvis shows up …
When Elvis showed up in my office the next day, first of all he saw all the gold albums on our wall. The 5th Dimension.The Association. He felt at home immediately. One of the first things out of his mouth is, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to do television because his turf was in the recording studio. And I said, “Why don’t you make a record, and I’ll put pictures to it.” He said it was the one sentence that really relaxed him. He asked me, “What if it fails?” I said, “If it fails, your career is over. But nobody will forget the success you had in your early recording career and your movies. TV is instant. The minute you appear on TV everybody has an opinion the next morning. If you’re successful, all the doors will open and you’ll have any choice you want. But it’s a gamble and I can’t promise you it’s going to be successful.”
By the time we got to Elvis we were well oiled machine behind the scenes. So this was really the first thing Elvis did outside the womb. In other words, he joined our world instead of me joining his. But, I asked Elvis if he wanted anybody from his world on our staff, and he said only one person, “I want Billy Strange to do my music.”
I’d been working with Billy Goldenberg in New York and on the west coast and thought Billy was brilliant. But I hired Billy Strange. In the beginning, I was more than willing to do. So everyday that we’re getting closer to starting rehearsal in my office is with Elvis I called Billy strange and say where the lead sheets, where are the piano parts? We’ve got to start teaching the material. He’d say, “don’t worry, don’t worry.” Finally after all my frustrations I told Billy if the lead sheets aren’t on my desk Monday morning at 9 he’d be fired. He said, “You can’t fire me.” I said, “Why not?” He said, “I’ve known Elvis a lot better and for a lot longer than you.” I said, “Fine, then I’ll be gone and you’ll be there but one of us is not going to be there.”
Q & A with ’68 Comeback and T.A.M.I. Show director, Steve Binder (5)
So I called Bob Finkel and I told him what I told Billy Strange. He called the Colonel and the Colonel said, “If Billy Strange is not there on Monday, Elvis isn’t going to show up.” So I fired Billy Strange [and hired Billy Goldenberg]. I said, “Billy I’m not asking you I’m begging you, you’ve got to get on a plane and get here.” That changed Elvis’s musical life period. What I didn’t realize was, Elvis had never sung with an orchestra before. He’d only sung with his rhythm section. He’d go home and they’d bring in all the musicians to overdub everything.
When Elvis saw Billy Goldenberg standing on the podium, he’d never seen so many musicians in one room at one time. We had the big Studio One At Western Studios in Hollywood. The recording studio. And he called me out on Sunset Boulevard and said, “Steve, if I can’t sing with this orchestra — if I don’t like what I hear, you’ve got to promise me you’re just going to keep the rhythm section and send everybody else home.” I made that promise to him. I said yes. And we walked back into the recording section and he walks up to conductor stand with Billy Goldenberg. And he loved every note he heard. He bonded with all the musicians. And that was the Wrecking Crew. The most successful studio musicians group in the history of the music. There was not a record made on the West Coast they didn’t work on, almost. The Beach Boys, The 5th Dimension, The Association and just every act used The Wrecking Crew for their records.
And you used several on T.A.M.I. Leon Russell, I think. Maybe Glen Campbell.
Leon Russell played Jack Nitzsche’s piano. And Glen was one of the guitarists. I used the Wrecking Crew throughout my music career practically. So there winds up being nobody from Elvis’s world on my production team.
That’s pretty incredible.
Elvis came to me and he said, “There’s a possibility I don’t have to travel from LA to Beverly Hills.” In those days it was two or three hours in your car. Nowadays it might take 5 hours. But those days it was saving him a couple of hours of driving time to just stay in his dressing room. He said, “Do you think we could convert one of the dressing rooms into a living quarters? So we could bring a bed in and I can sleep there?”
That was the greatest thing that ever happened. Without that, I’d have never ever done the improv. We had two different companies of dancers. I had two separate choreographers; two separate sets of dancers. The show had kind of a combination of his stand-up, when he was in the black leather, doing his old hit records with an orchestra live. And that was basically it. I had not yet chosen how we’re going to close the show. The Colonel kept constantly reminding me that it had to be a Christmas shop song. Also he wanted an old Frankie Laine song called “I Believe.” I don’t know why he thought it was a Christmas song, because it isn’t.
Q & A with ’68 Comeback and T.A.M.I. Show director, Steve Binder (6)
So Elvis is basically living in his dressing room through this. That’s interesting. A little like you talking about how all the T.A.M.I. show musicians were on site for the whole filming.
The entire time that we’re rehearsing the show, Elvis would go into his dressing room/living quarters, and he would jam with whoever happened to be hanging out. Like Charlie Hodge, his army buddy, who he loved. So we go in there and they would just be having fun and talking about the old days and singing songs I’d never heard before. And I said to myself instantly, “This is better than all the big production numbers were doing on stage. We’ve got to get a camera in there.”
And the colonel wouldn’t let me bring any cameras into the dressing room. And it was insane. Because this was the magic.I knew if we were putting out a disc, this is the one that you go platinum. Not the regular show. So I just kept pounding the colonel and hounding him everyday. And finally he broke down. I don’t think he was ever happy that he did it. But he said, “Okay Binder, If you want to recreate it on stage, you can try that but I won’t guarantee it’ll get into the show.”
So I jumped on it. I didn’t even have any money left in my budget to build the set for the improv. Because, I thought, “Hey, he did the stand up In his black leather, and he sang all his old hits from hound dog and Blue Suede Shoes on, and I said let’s use all that set again. And then Elvis said to me, “You know, if we do this, is there any chance I could get DJ Fontana and Scotty Moore to come out?” I said I didn’t know. And he said, “Nobody plays guitar licks like Scotty Moore.”
So I got on the phone, although they hadn’t played with Elvis in years and were totally pissed off at the Colonel. But they only came out for the improv when I taped it. They weren’t in the dressing rooms when the jam sessions were happening and so forth. And that’s where the whole idea came from. And thank God I was able to do it.
When the show first aired as the Singer special, it was an hour. It was cut down to about 48 minutes because of commercials and station breaks and public service announcements or whatever — with only two minutes of this improv. And it still got these gigantic ratings. It was the first time, I think, in Primetime, that one guy did the whole show himself without guest stars.
I had been through the guest star drama on every show I ever did. I’d just come through the Harry Belafonte episode where they didn’t want him on The Petula Clark Show. So I wasn’t going to put any guest stars in the Elvis show. Anyway it was a case of where I went to NBC. And I said, guys, I’ve got this great material in the can. I’ve got to put it into the show. How about buying another half hour of their time. They looked at me like I was insane. And obviously they didn’t.
So I went on my own, and edited together a 90-minute version, which is the one we all watch today. NBC put it down in the catacombs. And when Elvis passed, NBC decided to do a big tribute to him. So they got Ann-Margret to host. And they used the Hawaii show. And they sent a gopher down to the catacombs to track down the Elvis Presley special. And this is a twisted fate. The guy who went down to the basement didn’t know anything about the Elvis Presley special, when it aired, or anything about it. And he pulls my 90-minute version off the shelf, thinking, that’s the show. That’s when they started airing the 90-minute version instead. The 60-minute version even cut out the sequence where Elvis walks into what they call the bordello, with a brass bed and the girls. A lot depended on luck and fate, believe me. I couldn’t be happier.
Coletta’s Italian Restaurant/Facebook 
Photo Courtesy Graceland/Elvis Presley Enterprises 
Stephen Done 
Brigitte Billeaudeaux 
Brigitte Billeaudeaux 
Michael Donahue 
Christian Patterson 
Photo Courtesy of Jadene King 
Photo Courtesy of Jadene King 
Steve Roberts 
Mike Brown 
Photo Courtesy of Jadene King 