Scotty and Elvis: Aboard the Mystery Train

7 Scripting the Movie Years

102 Ħ 7 Ħ SCRIPTING THE MOVIE YEARS Our first recording session with RCA Records took place on January 10, 1956. By the time we arrived in Nashville the record label already had released our previous records under its own imprint. Overnight, it was as if Sun Records had never existed in Elvis’s career. That should have been a lesson to the remnants of the Blue Moon Boys, but we were much too busy making music to devote much time to reading tea leaves. RCA’s first release was the last single issued by Sun Records, “I Forgot to Remember to Forget.” It stayed on the country charts for weeks, but did not make it onto the pop charts. Four additional singles from the Sun Records sessions were re-released two weeks before the Nashville session began. RCA didn’t expect the earlier singles to reappear on the charts. They re-released the earlier singles so that they would have records with their imprint to cover back orders, and to “brand” their new artist with the RCA logo as a means of severing ties with Sun in the minds of radio DJs and retailers. For his part, Colonel Parker printed up new souvenir booklets that proclaimed Elvis to be RCA’s “sensational, new singing star.” In small print, the booklet announced, with no special emphasis, that he was performing with the Blue Moon Boys. Within weeks, RCA dropped the band’s name from its materials, and Colonel Parker soon followed—although Elvis and others continued to use the name when introducing us. The interesting thing about the new booklet and all the others that followed is that they did not contain photographs of the band members. It was a transparent ploy by Colonel Parker to disassociate Elvis from Bill, D. J., and myself. In the months that followed, as fan magazines clamored to turn out special issues on Elvis, Parker monitored the reportage with an iron hand. Under no circumstances, he told the magazines, were they to publish photographs of Bill and I. Most of the magazines did as they were told. Those who ignored Parker’s instructions experienced the wrath of the Colonel, who was not shy about administering tongue lashings. 103 Ħ SCRIPTING THE MOVIE YEARS Ħ Typical of the special Elvis publications flooding the newsstands in 1956 was one titled The Amazing Elvis Presley. It contained fifty pages of text and photographs, including four shots of a teddy bear collection said to belong to Elvis: but there were no photographs in the magazine of me and only one of Bill (a long shot in which his hand covers his face). However, Elvis did mention us in the text in a Q&A in which he was asked about us by a reporter. For the Nashville session, Steve Sholes decided to augment the sound that had been successful at Sun. Sholes was more than just a producer at RCA. As head of A&R, he also served as the label’s top Nashville executive . That meant that he often made decisions of a political nature. In addition to Bill, D. J., and me, he booked Floyd Cramer on piano and Chet Atkins on guitar. At that time, Atkins was already a guitar legend, with many hit records to his credit. But he was more than that to RCA, which had hired him as a staff guitarist and consultant; he was the foundation upon which the label would build its roster in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Sholes put Atkins in charge of the session. When Atkins asked Elvis who he wanted for background singers, he chose the Jordanaires, a popular gospel quartet that had been touring with Eddy Arnold. Elvis had met them in Memphis at Ellis Auditorium at one of the many gospel concerts he attended. RCA had just signed a new gospel quartet called the Speer Family. For Elvis’s session, Atkins constructed a trio of his own making. He asked two members of the Speer Family—Ben and Brock Speer—and he added Gordon Stoker of the Jordanaires. Stoker didn’t much like the idea of performing without the other members of his group, but Atkins told him he couldn’t use the entire quartet and needed to use some of the Speers since they were new to the label. Stoker was taken aback by Atkins’s attitude toward Elvis. Recalls Stoker: “He didn’t think Elvis would be around long. He said, ‘You know, we’ve signed this kid from Memphis, but...