In Norfolk, Elvis needed a ... Little good-luck charm

If Elvis Presley hadn’t succumbed to the effects of being Elvis Presley on Aug. 16, 1977, he would be celebrating his 74th birthday on Thursday.

There is still no sign his popularity is waning. Year after year his name is found at or near the head of the class of Forbes magazine’s annual listing of top-earning dead celebrities.

But back in the spring of 1955, when Presley was starting to introduce the world to a new brand of music, the legend had yet to take shape. He was just beginning his evolution from a gangly teenager with an acne problem into a living phenomenon who could make girls shriek with a simple shake of a leg.

On May 13, 1955, Presley jokingly ended an electrifying performance at the Gator Bowl Baseball Park in Jacksonville, Fla., by saying, “Girls, I’ll see y’all backstage.” The offhanded remark resulted in him being mobbed and having his shoes and pieces of clothes ripped off his body by overly enthusiastic souvenir hunters.

The Hillbilly Cat was creating the same level of havoc and excitement nearly everywhere he went. But as Jim R. Eanes reveals in his book, “Elvis in Virginia,” the exception was Norfolk.

“Elvis was being accepted in other places, but for some reason Norfolk wouldn’t warm up to him,” the retired newspaperman said during a recent telephone interview from his home in Burkeville. “It really bothered him that he couldn’t reach those people there.”

Presley’s manager in those rollicking, formative months was Memphis, Tenn., disc jockey Bob Neal. He had taken over management duties from Scotty Moore, who played guitar for Presley’s backup band — which, at the time, included only Moore and bass player Bill Black.

Neal had put the trio, which was calling itself the Blue Moon Boys, on a tour of one-night stands throughout the South to give the rising star exposure. The tour had been wildly successful until the Memphis Flash took the stage on May 15 at the Norfolk City Auditorium.

It was a Grand Ole Opry package show headlined by country music star Hank Snow. Presley opened the show at 3 and 8 p.m. He sang two songs each time, one of them the classic Bill Monroe tune “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” which was one of his first hits.

The hip-shaking performer managed to elicit only a smattering of applause from the audience. The second performance fared no better.

Eanes reveals in his book how hard the future king of rock ’n’ roll took his failure to connect with the audience. Bill “Sheriff Tex” Davis, a Norfolk disc jockey who later would discover Virginia rocker Gene Vincent, had booked Presley to play in the show.

In an interview Eanes includes in his book, Davis said that after Presley flopped again during the second performance he talked with the singer backstage.

He said Presley had tears in his eyes, and couldn’t understand why he hadn’t gone over with the Norfolk crowd.

Davis said he told the downcast performer that the music was so new that the audience didn’t understand it. Presley didn’t figure there was a lot to understand and said, “The kids like it because it’s got a good beat to it.”

The promoter brought Presley back to Norfolk a third time — with the same dismal results.

It didn’t make sense, particularly in view of the fact that he had performed at the Mosque in Richmond and that audience had loved him.

Norfolk might have gone down as Presley’s Bermuda Triangle but for a fortuitous event that occurred on Sept. 9, 1956.

That evening he performed for the first time on “The Ed Sullivan Show” — and an estimated 54 million viewers saw him.

As Presley was catching his breath between songs, he said he wanted to tell all his friends in Norfolk that he was going to perform there next, and he hoped they would all show up. They did.

Davis said he got an early morning telephone call the day following the broadcast from the Norfolk chief of police. The officer told him there were so many people waiting for tickets outside the auditorium that he was afraid a riot would start.

Davis rushed down to the auditorium at Ninth and Granby Streets and found a crowd so large out front that he had to enter the building through a back door. He sold tickets as fast as he could until all three shows were sold out.

This go-around, Presley dazzled the audiences, and the Norfolk jinx was broken.

In later years Roanoke became one of his favorite venues to perform.

“Elvis loved the Roanoke area, and he loved to play there,” said Eanes, who founded the weekly newspaper the Crewe-Burkeville Journal. “His regular routine was to play a town every other year, but he loved Roanoke so much he would sometimes go there two years in a row.

“He would remark to people how beautiful he thought the valley was. Virginia played an important part in helping to launch his career.”

Eanes said during the 45 years he spent as a writer, editor and publisher of the Journal, he saved all the information and stories that came across his desk relating to Presley and Virginia. After he retired he decided to put it all together in a book.

Although the book is fewer than 100 pages long, it’s full of little-known information about Presley and the state. For example, the author points out that Presley’s first major tour outside his home base in Memphis was in Virginia.

Eanes also reveals that it was Crewe native Robert Buckner who wrote Presley’s first movie, “Love Me Tender.”

“I knew Buckner was a famous screenwriter who had written movies for people like Errol Flynn and James Cagney,” Eanes said. “He would come home to visit his parents, who lived in Crewe.

“A friend of mine brought him by the newspaper and introduced him to me. He told me he was working on this movie for Elvis Presley, but he didn’t particularly want him to do it.

“Like a lot of people he thought Elvis was just a flash in the pan — a little old hillbilly country boy. Later, after the movie made so much money, I talked to him again and he said he was thrilled to death how it had all worked out.”

Eanes had become a Presley fan in late 1954, when the singer started being heard regularly on the popular radio show “Louisiana Hayride.”

The future newspaperman had been working as a drummer for a country music group that switched to rock music after hearing Presley belt out songs like “Mystery Train” and “Baby, Let’s Play House.”

“We called our band the Rocks and in 1955 we went on a tour up through the Midwest,” Eanes recalled. “We ended up in Chicago and got a job making record demos for RCA Victor.

“When RCA signed Elvis from Sun Records in November 1955, I really got interested in him. A lot of people at RCA were surprised they paid that much money for him.

“Then suddenly they realized they had orders for something like a million records before he had ever released one for them. They knew they had a gold mine.”

RCA paid $40,000 to sign Presley, which at the time was the highest amount ever paid for a singer. The recording company started cashing in almost immediately with songs like “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Blue Suede Shoes.”

On March 13, 1956, RCA released Presley’s first long-playing record, “Elvis Presley.” Eanes got his hands on one of the first copies.

“Elvis came around the RCA offices in Chicago and gave everybody copies of his first album,” Eanes said. “It was a rush thing and he didn’t really meet anybody.

“He just walked through and was handing out records. I still have my copy, and I could just kick myself for not asking him to sign it. He was very good about signing autographs, but I’m not a pushy person.

“I do remember how happy he was that the record was selling so well.”

One of the saddest connections between Presley and Virginia was his scheduled Aug. 24, 1977, concert appearance at the Roanoke Civic Center. It never happened.

Instead, a free tribute program was held at the center with more than 6,500 fans attending.

Elvis was gone, but certainly not forgotten.

“I’ve seen Elvis perform several times, and he really worked harder to please people than anyone I have ever seen perform,” said Eanes. “I don’t know what it was, but he had this magic about him.

“I did an interview with Scotty Moore and he said the same thing. I had said if it hadn’t been for him there wouldn’t have been an Elvis Presley. Scotty said, ‘Oh, no. Elvis would have come out, because he was so talented and so good-looking.’

“During the interview Scotty explained a lot of things about Elvis to me. He said Elvis didn’t mature like the rest of them, because all this happened to him when he was 19.

“After that he led a very secluded life. I remember very distinctly Scotty saying, ‘Really, you know, Elvis was 19 when he died. He never really developed like me and you and other people in the real world.’ ”

The book “Elvis In Virginia” is $12.95 plus postage. Signed copies can be purchased from Eanes by calling (434) 767-4333 or sending checks to E&H Publishing co., P.O. Box 4, Burkeville, Va., 23922.