Ends and Odds: The Ravings of an Old Man. Chapter Five Part One.. Elvis the Pelvis.

   Elvis the Pelvis - Part One.


  Before the Beatles, before Dylan, before the Boss, namely Bruce Springsteen, before the Clash, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Smoky Robinson, Aretha Franklin, Beyoncé or Adele, there was Elvis Aaron Presley. He created rock music, or rock'n roll, as it was first called. "If I could find a white man who had a Negro sound," said the Memphis-based record producer Sam Phillips in the early 1950"s, "and this man had a Negro feel, I could make a million dollars."
    Lo and behold in August 1953 a tall 19 year old man showed up in Phillips's small recording studio in Memphis. His name was Elvis Aaron Presley and he revolutionized popular music.  First off, he recorded a song in the studio and it went nowhere. Then in January 1954 he cut another record in Phillips's studio and it too turned nobody on. Yet then times changed. Presley came back in July 1954. He sang a few nondescript songs. Yet then near night time he sang a song first recorded by a black or African American singer called Arthur Crudup. It was called 'That's All Right'.
    Phillips suddenly realized that this young man was the person he'd been looking for. He recorded Elvis singing Crudup's song.  On the record's other side - the 'B' side as it was then called-  he put Elvis singing 'Blue Moon of Kentucky'. In both of these songs Elvis Presley fused  together rhythm and blues which was an African American music with country and western music, which was a white person's music. Presley had invented a new music. At first it was called rock'n roll. He was only 19 years old.
     Phillips soon sold his right to Presley's music to a slick agent called Tom Parker for $35,000. Parker also became Elvis's manager. Parker turned Presley into a super star. In 1956 Presley appeared on three top t.v..shows, including the Ed Sullivan show. Presley's songs now soared to the top of the music charts. 'Heartbreak Hotel', 'Don't Be Cruel', 'Hound Dog' and other of his songs added up to one half of all the records that the giant record company RCA sold in 1956.
    Yet Presley wasn't only selling music. He was also selling sexual excitement. His gyrations and twists onstage, threw young girls into ecstasy and heart throbs. They screamed, cried and yelled as Presley performed.  "I think they were having orgasms," one 20's something male said about Elvis's female fans years later. Ed Sullivan, or some other t.v. emcee stopped t.v. cameras from showing
Elvis below the waist. Soon Elvis was called 'Elvis the Pelvis'.
      The authorities were alarmed. In the mid-1950's, the United States was a totally segregated society. yet here was a white  man, barely out of his teens who sang like a black man and could literally move millions of young people especially young girls. J. Edgar Hoover, the then head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, sounded off about the Elvis phenomenon. "Presley," he said, " is a definite danger to the security of the United States." In the mid-1950's, the U.S. and the communist-ruled Soviet Union  were locked in a titanic struggle for control of the world. Hoover and many other figures of the establishment were terrified of communism. Suppose Presley was a communist primed to subvert the U.S. What would happen then?