Music Historian Peter Guralnick — Serious Jibber-Jabber with Conan O'Brien | Team Coco

hi i'm conan o'brien welcome to serious jibber jabber peter goralnek is one of america's preeminent music writers and historians his two books on elvis presley are recognized as the gold standard of music biographies and have been praised for stripping away the myth and focusing on elvis the musician his other work includes an equally acclaimed biography of sam cook entitled dream boogie and he's currently putting the finishing touches on the life story of sun records owner sam phillips this is stuff i really love to talk about so peter growling thank you for indulging me in being here well thank you i'm really excited to be here uh let's uh begin by mentioning that you were on my late night show and we were chatting and i had such a good time talking to you that i thought we must continue this conversation that was 19 years ago it takes me a while to get to things but thanks for finally making this happen well it's it's good to be able to have that uh you know the sequel yeah and we have a little more time now and i'm a little more experienced uh let's get right into it um i am a big elvis presley fan and had read just about every book i thought on elvis and then your two volumes came along and completely reorganized my thinking about elvis and changed everything and i think the biggest contribution of those books especially the first book is that you you stripped away all the layers of myth and all the iconography and all of these sort of ironic joking about elvis and you got back to this kid this incredible kid this 19 year old uh with an amazing talent who changes the world right what inspired you to do that well you know that was i mean the intention really was to go back to a time when you didn't know how it was all going to come out and the funny thing is the two things that inspired it uh were one i was driving down macklemore avenue where um in south memphis where stax records uh was and where the stax museum is now and i was driving down with a friend who had grown up in south memphis and she pointed out right across the street from the old movie theater that was stacks a boarded-up drugstore where elvis's cousin jean used to work this is way back before i even thought about the book and she just described how elvis would be in there waiting for gene to get off work and she said you know he'd be sitting at the counter and his fingers would just be drumming you know he was just so he was hyperactive and she said and then she just said poor baby and i just had this flash of inspiration i mean this was a kid this is a kid as you said he was just consumed with music i mean any kid who was into music or in a sense who's consumed with anything like that should be able to understand it he was just absolutely and but but he was also just a kid who had dreams but had no you know had no means of achieving them and that was the kid that i really wanted to get back to the other thing and this was almost an equal revelation for me was i i worked i started working on this documentary about elvis this was at a time you know pre-internet when the all the interviews that elvis did i mean i just didn't wasn't aware of them they were not accessible and the documentarians the two people who were making the thing got together all these interviews he had done in 55 and 56 and suddenly it struck me as oh my god elvis can speak for himself and that was really the intention of the book was to have him speak for himself and to write a book that was written i mean this is what i've tried to do with everything i've ever written to write a book that was written from the inside out that wasn't just looking at some mythic thing or oh look this guy came down from another planet right it basically was trying to understand the world that he was looking at and how he responded to it well uh i got the opportunity the honor to to interview david halberstam a number of years before he passed away and he had written a book about fifth called the 50s and i asked him what do you think was the most significant event in the 50s and we're talking about uh you've got everything you've got the korean war and uh you've got uh mccarthy and you've got all these huge seminal events and i said and civil rights and everything i said what was the biggest thing and he said elvis elvis was the event that uh was the most explosive even including the hydrogen bomb he said more than the hydrogen bomb elvis presley right do you agree with that you know i don't know how you compare things like that i i think that elvis was a focal point and and and i mean and in fact on some level i don't know that elvis would agree with that because what i think that elvis elvis saw elvis was he was like an ethnomusicologist without a degree i mean you could not have met anyone who knew more about music of every kind of music he listened to the metropolitan opera he would go to the uh all night uh singings at uh ellis auditorium which was across the street from the public housing where he grew up and they really weren't all night but these were the gospel quartet singings he knew everything about white gospel music he knew everything about black gospel music he just soaked everything up you know like litmus paper but he uh it's i i would say more so than elvis that the 20th century really witnessed the triumph of american vernacular culture and that elvis was part of a movement you're part of a continuum and you could include duke ellington you could you could include louis armstrong you could include hank williams howland wolfe beau didley and for elvis i think he saw he just had the widest scope imaginable and this encompassed every major social racial cultural development and it also went on in a sense i think the entire movement to to create as great a cultural contribution as america has ever made to the world it won it won over the world so it expands beyond it extends beyond our borders and i think that that for me is what it is but no elvis there's no limit in a sense to what you can put into elvis achievement whether intended or not i mean it touched every aspect of our lives i when i was in college um and it's the 80s and i had sort of come of age with 60s and 70s music and uh elvis wasn't a big interest of mine and then i want to say 1983 i listened for the first time to the sun sessions uh elvis's earliest work that he did with sam phillips and it blew my mind it just i couldn't it was like a drug i couldn't get enough of it it made me go out and buy a guitar it made me try and play that music and in a sense i've never gotten past that music i can't get past early elvis i can't get past jerry lee lewis i can't get past carl perkins i appreciate the other music but i'm always drawn back it's just this energy because it it's coming out of the initial explosion of all the i don't know you'd know understand better than i would but all these socio-economic events are there all the cultural events are there and then in memphis this thing happened yeah now it's the confluence of all these influences the confluences of all these different cultures i mean memphis was just at the heart of everything and when you think about sam phillips who recorded all of these uh artists to begin with and recorded b.b king recorded howland wolfe recorded ike turner recorded just dr ross you know the one-man band little junior parker but what what it brought together i mean in a sense it was it was a plot to undermine the sense of separateness that dominated american culture and it was very much what sam phillips envisioned from the moment that he first opened the studio on january 2nd 1950 that he made that declaration to begin with and if you listen it's an amazing thing you listen to bb king's first recordings that he made for for sam phillips so you listen to howlin wolf and what sam was aiming for was rock and roll without there being any title to it it was just a combination of all these different influences in this rhythmic drive and it was a sense of exuberance i think that that more than anything else and you get that sometimes i mean i really dug the band that was on your show tonight but but i mean the point is that so often uh you know music can take on a kind of affectation i mean an a of attitude or whatever well rock and roll is continue it's always uh it becomes laden with all this stuff which can be great but rock and roll is constantly drifting or pop music is constantly drifting away and you're getting orchestras and you're getting you know um people are auto-tuned and then it gets stripped away and people bring it back punk was all about saying let's reclaim this let's reclaim this uh rock and roll is not for really gifted musicians in styx or rush it's for people like us who only play two or three chords but we have this feeling that we need to express well yeah and sam sam spoke about giving voice to those who didn't have voice and he also spoke uh in a sense just about about this sense of perfect imperfection right perfection is boring but what you wanted was the perfect realization of this imperfect striving now the the what what's so interesting i mean i i think i had you know very much the same experience with elvis that you did in the sense of what brought me to elvis was the blues i mean i just fell into the blues when i was 15 or 15 or 16 and i just i mean i never turned back and it was i hadn't heard the sun recordings until after that i mean i had heard elvis's popular recordings but uh when he was in the army in 59 or 60 rca had no product to put out and they put out two albums uh that it contained most of the sun recordings and i recognized them i recognized that's all right i knew aren't the crudups that's all right i recognized mystery train i mean i knew a little junior parkers and it wasn't that elvis's versions were placed at but it was so pure and it was so out of time and that's what i think is so interesting about his early music or jerry lee lewis's early music is if you didn't know it was rock and roll you'd be hard-pressed to find a name for it right because it's so much itself you listen to that that's all right or mystery train and you just listen to that trio recording just his elvis acoustic guitar scotty moore's electric guitar slapping bass and what does that have to do with rock and roll as it's defined and very literally i mean it it just it's it's it's its own self and that i think is what's absolutely that's what's enabled it to continue to have a life of its own it's what's so extraordinary about it is that it lives outside of it's not it's not running after a trend it's not it's just creating its own sound let's step back and and create this moment because you have sam phillips sam phillips is a very unusual guy um he's kind of manic he's very gifted uh and uh but he has this kind of drive this this drive to uh bring black white music together get rid of the the racial barrier he sets up his own studio sun sun studios he knows scotty moore scotty moore knows bill black so he's got these musicians now the great fable is that elvis just wanders in off the street he's a truck driver for crown electric and magic happens that's the movie version right what i was struck by when i read your books is i realized elvis kept coming back he went to sun studios many times recorded it didn't click he would sing ballads he would try things he would hang around and it was only when scottie moore is looking for a singer and and that that and sam phillips says well let's try that kid again and he comes by and and even that session almost didn't work they're trying and trying and trying it doesn't work and then elvis is goofing around and he just starts to play that's all right mama right and that's when the whole thing happened right right so to me it always felt like it wasn't an accident elvis somehow knew he had something and he kept coming back he's like a salmon swimming upstream he probably doesn't even know why he's doing it but he just kept coming to sun studios because he if you have that kind of talent on some subconscious level you must know it well yeah i mean elvis was this guy who had played had not played out in public in any way shape or form right he's a guy who practiced in front of the mirror he's like a kid you know practicing air guitarics i mean he got a guitar and he did there were other kids in the uh in lauderdale courts who were more accomplished and he hung around with them to some extent but he didn't play with a band he didn't right and he uh but but what he did have was he had an innate belief in himself for all of his insecurity he believed in an almost mystical way both he and his mother had a vision very early in in his life of his achieving a kind of success that neither one of them could have named neither one of them could have all together pictured and i don't i don't think he ever had a doubt that he was going to get there but where where there was was not was not exactly clear yeah and he put himself in the way of discovery it's almost like a guy who uses his shyness to make a hit with girls he just kind of you know hangs around he he uses his vulnerability to draw attention to himself and elvis went in there he cut that first record i mean actually if you hear the acetate which miraculously survived if you listen to my happiness and that's when your heartaches begin you hear all the vulnerability i mean you can barely play the guitar right but you hear all the vulnerability you you're all of the feeling you it's such an unusual thing you don't have it's not a trained voice it's some but it's something that that communicates better than so then so many trained voices and so many of the artists that elvis admired because they were such great singers better singers than elvis but even in that first thing at 19 or 18 actually he was able to get that and then he write he kept coming back and coming back just to he he struck up a friendship with marion kaiser i mean like so many women marrying kaiser who was sam phillips assistant just she was the assistant who sort of was the gatekeeper right and she just you know she fell in love with him yeah i mean in in and and i think she uh helped advance his cause with sam and then eventually uh scotty moore uh was and bill black were in a band and as you say uh scotty was looking for a singer who could who could who could travel everybody else everybody had a day job and nobody else was going to travel and and uh so they brought so elvis uh elvis had a rehearsal with scotty at his house went into the studio and sang nothing but balance yeah and they're beautiful ballads but nothing even remotely like well the thing that blew me away is that the people you know uh the people that elvis really admired who influenced him among them are bing crosby and dean martin yeah he wanted to sound like dean martin and you can hear it once once i read that i made the connection you listen to elvis and that kind of and you hear bing crosby too the the low bass notes and the kind of the syrupy kind of you know you have some sense of relaxation yeah you can hear it but if you i'd never make that connection on my own he was listening to everything and some of the influences you'd never guess in a million years well i mean he wanted to sound like bill county of the ink spots you can hear that but when he said when he recorded that's when your heartaches began on his acetate he also wanted to sing like i think was hoppy jones with the bass singer so you've got him singing you know the tenor part and he wanted to sound like clyde mcfadder you know who became the who was the lead singer with the drifters with this beautiful tenor i mean he he would have killed for something like that he wanted to sound like jake hess who was a kind of almost operatic singer for the statesman for the statesman gospel quartet but what he brought to it was something that was so recognizably himself right from the beginning and that's the thing that you know nobody you can hear people who create a sound that's like another sound and who have a lot of success right but what you can't create is that sense of cutting through everything else i mean i remember jake house saying to me jake house was just a great great singer this is the guy who was the lead singer for the statesman and he said you know elvis would hang around when they were playing when they were performing at these all-night singings i i said what did you remember him did you pick him up he said you couldn't miss him he was just such an amazi i can't remember what the phrase is but he was he stood out he was such an amazing kid because he had such a drive he had such a and when he sang i mean jake has recognized this he wasn't like the great singers he wasn't like roy hamilton yeah who was in fact almost an operatic singer he's saying you never walk alone but he communicated in a way that no other singer did somebody like sam cook communicated in the same way you had so many people who sounded like sam cook but no one who communicated and you and you can't write a prescription for that no the what's interesting is elvis as we know it all takes off but it's like anything else people think it's preordained but elvis uh you know that's all right mama they start touring and he's not a great live performer and in fact bill black doesn't get enough credit the bass player he would sometimes carry them in shows because he could clown around and stand on the base and and his antics would sometimes take them through the show it all happened pretty quickly for elvis but when you break it down you feel like it could all fall apart at any moment well it could and yet given elvis drive the drive that you don't see at first i mean for somebody who sam phillips said was the most insecure the most markedly insecure person he had ever run into he said he had the insecurity of some of the black singers that he worked with that sam worked with right and yet for all of that insecurity he was just heading in this direction and what was amazing was that his records went when it came across i mean when that's all right came out uh the um you know that thing where he says you know this became a watch word in memphis not every i mean very few people had seen him right but it was the voice that communicated when he first appeared on louisiana hayride all these kids came out from a local college and they came out to hear somebody who had only communicated with him through the sound of his voice right and when he appeared and he appeared in the middle of all these professional uh groups uh the maddox brothers and rose i mean they had been the stars a week before people who had the most you know highly polished and developed acts and elvis just had something that he was feeling his way towards and if anybody wants to see it they can watch his appearances uh on the dorsey brothers shows which started in early 56 and you can see over the course of six shows how rapidly his his uh you know his performing style evolves yeah um but but it there was something about him that uh you know that that was not to be denied and even if it was crude i feel like there was a couple of years obviously there's a couple of years there when it all first explodes and no one knows what to do with him meaning obviously the the colonel uh knew how to bring elvis to the heights as a business you know and as uh as a recording artist and as a movie artist but everyone treats him like a gimmick he's a gimmick to america i remember asking my mom once do you remember when you first saw elvis presley on tv and she said oh yes well i was my mother was in law school at the time and she said oh i just thought it was the crudest you know how could this ha and i said mom it's elvis what do you mean why didn't you understand that this was fantastic and of course she didn't a lot of people didn't and so you have steve allen mocking elvis and making him dress up in a tuxedo and sing hound dog to a puppy you know right right they turn it into schtick because nobody understands that it's a real huge natural phenomenon is happening so he's a gimmick for a long time and everyone's trying to just figure out how do we how do we use this gimmick well this was at a time when vernacular culture was just absolutely scoring when i started writing about music one of the great thrills for me i mean i did for no you know i did out of nothing but enthusiasm for the music and one of the great thrills was being able to write the name muddy waters in print to write holland wolf it was nowhere these i mean this sounds crazy but there was no above ground publication it was going to consider it because it was just considered sort of beneath contempt i mean you didn't even now without without i'm sorry but well i'm just curious why why is it that even to this day you've changed the game a lot for elvis and the way that he's considered but still there's a there's a condescending attitude about elvis fans there's a condescending attitude about elvis that you don't find say with the beatles of the rolling stones do you agree with that well you don't find it with jerry lee lewis either oddly enough i mean i i can't really i mean when i started writing about elvis this was the only thing i was writing about the within a certain framework wasn't cool i mean you write about mario wolf you wrote about jerry lee lewis your edible blue those are cool guys to write about elvis was not when i mean it was nice is it vegas and the jumpsuit no this was pre-vegas it was probably the you know it was the movies i would say more than anything but but the thing the only thing i'd go back to is this was a clear delineation this this is both a class prejudice and a regional prejudice that uh because when elvis was a regional star in the mid-south and and then reaching out to texas to oklahoma there was no hold back there was no hold back about his face there's a film of elvis and that performing in 1955 at magnolia gardens in houston it's in the afternoon it's a beer garden but this is an afternoon show and it's all ages you see little kids you see middle-aged people they are just absolutely delighted there's no holdback there's no shock there's nothing it was only when elvis became a kind of national phenomenon which was in the spring of 56 really when he appeared on milton berle yeah that all of a sudden all the uh i don't know what you call them not the censors but the uh all the people who snobs as well there's not only snobs they're also the people whether they're ministers or they're politicians who can call attention to themselves by saying that's terrible that's so shocking that's awful and that had never happened before that's actually the reason that steve allen dressed him up in the tuxedo was because there was a huge movement to throw him off of the show for him not to appear after the milton brill appearances right because he needs to be censored but i guess all i'm saying is there was there was there was in the remains just as there remains racial prejudice to an extent that we you know we often don't recognize there was a there was a class prejudice that you know this is the way people will talk about rednecks you know uh and there was also there was a regional prejudice and it came into play only when elvis crossed the mason-dixon line only when he became a national phenomenon comes up to new york and he starts performing for the entire country right and people have a problem with it it's funny the uh you touched on the movies and it felt to me that in the 50s everyone thought that rock and roll is a fad so it's something that you wanted to survive meaning you wanted a career intact after rock and roll so if you look at late buddy holly before he dies he's getting more interested in producing strings there was a whole attempt i think in the early 60s to say like rock and roll is over do you know what i mean that that that happened but now we're cleaning we're going to kill it you want to kill it and get more acceptable you know let's get um you know uh um what's his name from the beach blanket movies you know more excited frankie avalon let's get frankie avalon let's replace these guys who threaten us let's clean this up and this and sometimes a lot of times the stars themselves are eager to survive and become legitimate there's something with elvis where you feel after he gets back from the army he wanted to be thought of his first appearance as with frank sinatra but who is pretty cool appearance though great appearance but there's this sense that now he wants to graduate to i'm tired of being the freak show and i'm tired of being the lightning rod for everybody's anger adulation i'm tired of being now i just i i want to make movies in hollywood they're a good box office i want to be a legitimate star is there something does that make sense i want to be i want to be i want parents to accept me i i think it's there's partially that's true because the whole path to stardom i mean when you mentioned colonel parker before who was a brilliant manager right but who uh and a revolutionary manager who who really uh saw the movies in much the way that the same way that mtd mtv developed where the music sold the movies the movie saw the music uh which made sense up to a point but for elvis elvis never had confined his ambition to one thing he wanted to be a a big movie star he wanted to be james dean exactly and uh and he also didn't want to confine himself to one type of music right and one of the extraordinary things that he does when he came out came out of the army and i'm not an elvis apologist i mean i'm willing to talk about you know but but if you listen to the session the sessions he did in the immediate aftermath of getting out of the army in in march in april or february and march of 1960 it's it's the album that came out was called elvis back and it's such an extraordinary range of material from reconsider baby which is what i wanted which is this low folsom blues where he's playing an acoustic guitar to you know solo meow it's now or never yeah that's what he wanted to do and he wanted to cover the entire range of things uh but i think the the movies are a very peculiar thing and i don't have the answer to it but if you watch if you watch the four movies that he made before he went in the army right you see him love me tender he'd never even been in a high school play and you see here's a kid who comes out there he's 21 years old he's memorized the entire script everybody's part and he's so eager to do it and he has no idea how to do it and he's but he's just totally you know totally into it but it's not a good performance but the enthusiasm is there but he's getting better and better and better in each of the each of the next three movies you see him engage more and more he studies stanislavski yeah i mean he's totally into the stanislavski method he wouldn't take acting lessons but he's he's aware of that and his and his performance is as much listening in the la in the last two movies in king creel and uh jailhouse rock it's as much listening as it is you know acting now i can't for the life of me i've had no idea what happened i mean his mother died and this really that's huge that's huge because he had uh he has this connection with his mom that he doesn't have with his dad um i wasn't disparaging his questions with his dad but he has this thing with his mom that's almost mystical [Music] and his mom uh dies and it's at this time when he's also confronting going he's terrified about going to the army because he thinks this is going to end his career he's convinced of it and he's and he's in the army when his mother dies yeah and he's in the he's in the army and he and he falls apart i mean he falls apart and then uh you get the sense that his mom was really his she had so much belief in him he was so close to his mom that something happened there it's no coincidence to me that he gets back from the army and what i've always noticed about elvis that bothers me to this day is there's nobody who's more talented there's nobody who's better looking he's got he is a rare example of the complete package and he is at the right time and as roy orbison said he's the firstest with the mostest right he's got it all and he is passive he doesn't like the songs they give him in the movies but he sings them he doesn't like the movies but he does them why was he so passive you know why did he sing the song clambake why did he sing i mean these songs are dreadful and you think he was elvis presley why couldn't he stand up and say i'm not doing this get me liebert stoller get me real songwriters let's make a real soundtrack well i think one thing that happened was that the colonel one of the ways the colonel bolsterdale was his confidence i mean there are these letters that he wrote to both elvis and to his father while elvis is in germany in the army and they're the most extraordinary letters to bolster i mean elvis is just in the depths everything's over and the colonel says look i've got this deal i've got that deal when you come home we've got five million dollars worth of movies lined up but but to but to uh do the movies you've got to fulfill the contract and i think that became part of it but but the big thing to me was that um he uh he made a couple of serious movies right after he got out of the army he made wild in the country uh and he made um flaming star and they were seriously antenna don siegel directed flaming star it was elvis admired don siegel i don't think don siegel admired elvis as it turned out but the point is i i can't for the life of me say why it is that in neither in those movies or any others did he show the flair that he had shown in those pre-army movies and i think he i mean in other words what he did in flaming star and wild in the country is you would say you're lying and then i as elvis would just i'd blurt out my line but there was no sense that i was listening to what you were saying there was no connection i mean he and and i that's a hard thing to say but i feel like in in many ways and this is i know it sounds simplistic or maybe it is simplistic his mother's death duke ellington has had a similar crisis of confidence or you know when his mother died he said he didn't write a note of music i think either for a year or two years after his mother died in elvis case though it was almost a matter of belief everything that he had imagined happening happened just like this one after another there was not a false note right from the time he first made his first recording up until he went into the army so from 54 to 59 it's really just an unbroken it's an unbroken and it all happened just as he sort of saw that it would and should and it was all for not just for himself but for him and his parents for his family and then his mother dies and he spent the rest of his life trying to figure out why did this happen what does this mean what's my function on earth i mean and and he explored garcia he explored all kinds of uh new age religions he wanted to join the self-realization fellowship i i met diamata who was a very serious woman you know who was the head of the self-realization fellowship which it started out with with autobiography for yogi swamy i can't pronounce his name but um and elvis wanted to be a monk this was you know he was serious enough about that but i mean he was in total pursuit of the of the answer which of course is always a bad idea since you know you're unlikely to find the answer but i i have but i'll you tell me when are you going to tell me after we're done i'll take you to a special cave but so he so he he gets back from the army you've got this period of these movies which are increasingly dreadful in my opinion and and you know i listen to elvis every night practically on sirius radio there's an elvis channel and i love it but then every now and then they say now we're gonna go to the movie soundtrack uh show and they they play the songs from the movies and i switch the channel i can't take it and uh because it's elvis digging a ditch it's not something he wants to be doing he's doing his best but um artists like elvis who survived into the 80s got a chance to work with rio and 90s get a chance to they're redeemed they get to work with great producers who you know johnny cash gets this whole resurgence roy orbison gets a resurgence they're taken seriously they're treated appropriately as icons and heroes and they their their work is refurbished do you know what i mean there's that beautiful black and white special with royal everybody plays on there's always part of me that's very sad that elvis couldn't have lived to [Music] see how great his work was you know what i mean to see how i know that he knew that he was loved and and idolized but to see that whole generation uh come out and play with him and support him do you know what i mean and and let him know that his work was that he was the king of rock and roll which can sound like a a carnival title but that he was someone who was revered and that his work really meant something in the american tapestry you know and that i don't think he ever got that chance i mean well i think the fact is that he hit the last five four or five years of his life he was what could be called clinically depressed and i'm not not not having my even my honorary doctorate i i feel reluctant to you know give that diagnosis but but uh i i think that were he to look were you able to look back on on from the vantage point of the present day he would be enormously gratified at how seriously his music is taken at this point but i think one of the things that happens uh and it's because of the movies it's because of a lot of career moves but is you tend to miss the miss the musical high points the ev the evolution of elvis music in any number of different directions after he got out of the army so that when he comes out of the army he becomes a ballot singer yeah in a way that he had always that's how he described himself when he first met sam phillips and he sings these beautiful ballads by don robertson by doc thomas and mort schumann i mean he sings in in viva las vegas which to me is i i mean i've never liked well it doesn't make any difference whether i like it or i don't but the point is i'm just not speaking as a fan yeah but he does this song i need somebody to leave to lean on a dog promise and watch human song and it's absolutely gorgeous then one of the things that happened and one of the worst aspects of the movie experience was between 64 and mid-66 he never went in the recording studio except to record the movie songs now the reason was not because the movies were killing him the reason was because the what he was wanted to do every waking moment morning noon and night was to study his religious texts and that's what he did the colonel who had no real input into elvis's creative life i mean he suggested one song um um you know as i'm standing here the stage is bare oh yeah yeah yeah um that was the only sign was the genie you learned something lonesome tonight which gene austin whom the colonel had a lot to do with at once had sung in his career the colonel realizes that they're that they're falling down on their contractual obligations to rca that and the colonel comes up with the idea of elvis recording a gospel album which was always closed that's what brought him back into the studio he recorded how great thou art and that's what brought him while he was recording that he's doing all these other songs like down in the alley i mean he just would go from one to the other that essentially what began his regeneration in music which led to 6868 special and to his recording in memphis in 69 with chip's moment which was the one time after a working at sun that he worked with a producer who was really going to challenge him and then he's got i mean suspicious minds and uh he's back he's back and he's there's a period of time in the late from the comeback special into the early 70s where he really feels like he's rejuvenated he's totally engaged and he's engaged because the shows the vegas shows challenge him uh he's interested and then your thought is that sometimes 73 70 70 72 73 i mean you listen to the music that he's singing it's totally depressing it's an expression of the end of his marriage it's an expression of a lot but it's really an expression of depression yeah and i mean it never come and and you never get that engagement again and he has nobody he's you know he's got his memphis mafia and but there's nobody can there's nobody there to shake him and give him the bad news there's nobody there to say you need help there's nobody and and the other thing i've always remembered or thought about elvis is now we live in this culture where people are sick or addicted and they get help and it's as it's the most common thing in the world just for people to get together there's whole tv shows and there's a whole culture of of you need help we need to talk in intervention interventions and then this is almost this is before that's acceptable that it's before and not that elvis would have had the personality to be able to confront that anyway but you feel like this is before that culture was up and running was that right you're right but but one of the things that the odd things that happened is that all these different people his father for instance tried to confront him who was paying his father's salary elvis yeah right dr nick who's gotten the worst rap of all and who as dr nick himself this was elvis's doctor dr nick would say well i was an enabler and he was right but he made a real attempt to confront elvis he was on elvis payroll he was on his plane red west i mean i'm not speaking these are not i mean all these people made an attempt in their own way in their own imperfect way i mean as you say there was not a culture of intervention and the main thing was that there was nobody outside of elvis's world who had any input with him right so that you know uh you know you don't like it there's a door right and he could say that to his father he could say it to you know his doctor he could say it to the guys who worked for him but but there was a genuine attempt in on many in many ways by people who loved him to tell him the truth uh it was a complete failure right but but i but you know you think about it i i'm sure you've seen this in your life i've certainly seen it in my life and i you know i've seen i've had friends who have fallen on hard times in any number of ways whether you call it whether it's depression or it's drugs or whatever it is and you make an attempt to intervene and you think well i know what should be should be happening here and you you're operating within a within the context of a culture that knows what an intervention is sometimes it works but most of the time it does right right so i i feel like there were there were certainly people who were just along for the ride but there were an awful lot of people who were sincerely concerned about i was vernon i mean the the thing that killed me the most i think in writing the second volume careless love was the scene where vernon is just looking at his dead son or just you know and it's just it's just kind of like i mean it used to make me every time i'd think about it would make me cry but it was just like he's he's it's just i've done everything i i did everything i could i tried to protect you i did i mean he did i forget what exactly it was that he said and it's just devastating and he he was a person of limited sophistication yeah well careless love is great and fantastic and extremely difficult to read it's the opinion your subtitle for it was the uh the unmaking the unmaking of elvis presley and that book broke my heart because uh you know the first volume is all about the explosion and the ascent and then second volume is the you know um so much of the second volume the second half of the second volume is is uh everything coming apart and in this slow tortuous way and i i've found that book very difficult to read it's it's very it's a very sad story it was hard it was hard to write it was but it's like that ford maddox four this is the saddest story yeah and it ended and it is i tried to technically it was really a challenge because what i tried to do was to vary it i what i wanted to do is to create the illusion that this time it may come out different yeah you know you think you know at the end maybe he's maybe he's not going to die this time maybe it's in so for instance i began the book not with him in germany utterly depressed which is the second chapter but with him coming back to this country kissing the ground when he arrives in memphis going into the studio with just these unbelievable you know ambitions and aspirations and achieving them and i tried to sustain that and then using the colonel who whom i very much liked i mean he was a fascinating guy i have to ask you about the colonel yeah because you got closer to the colonel than anybody what about that but well any i don't i don't i don't know another writer that that that got that close to the colonel who didn't let people in and uh what was your take on the man i mean did he after he lived many years after elvis died um did he ever was he ever able to put what he and elvis did together into perspective the colonel was you know elvis chose colonel parker it was not the other way around even as a as a uh 20 year old and for all the loyalty that elvis felt to sam phillips and to what he had done he saw the colonel as being the one person who could take him into other worlds the worlds he wanted to go to so and it was a partnership that worked very well for many years one of the great things about the partnership was that everybody in hollywood everybody everywhere they went and the way you described the steve allen thing took them as total yokels each of them both colonel and elvis and the two of them played their roles it was it was they were like mr inside mr outside in a certain sense but and just chortled i mean and took took these guys who were taking them for ropes for everything that they had i mean hal wallace i mean i found all this correspondence from hal wallace who produced many of who was the first person to sign elvis to a movie contract and produced many of his films he was ready to just tear his hair out to kill himself over the ways over and over again in which he got taken contractually by somebody he felt so superior to but the thing with the colonel was that he he was a the wonderful thing about i i mean he loved elvis i mean in his own way but but it was in his own way but the wonderful thing about whatever interaction i had with him it was like playing chess and it was like playing chess with a master who whatever move you you chose you you knew he was about seven steps ahead of you yeah and my my initial contact with him uh after first meeting him was a correspondence that went on for about a year and a half and i mean i heard back from immediately friend peter your friend colonel and it would be like i would try to approach things in the most circuitous manner trying to get answers and he would just send me back something i remember one letter he wrote i feel sorry for you peter i didn't know you were writing a book about elvis this is after we've been going around for he said i feel sorry for you that's really the word i sent him a draft for a thing you know that's the worst piece of historical inaccuracy i've ever seen you know i don't think you should publish it if you can't confirm that every element of his truth i said you know i wrote i write back to him i say colonel you're absolutely right i said you know but the thing is how is anyone ever going to know the truth if you don't say what and then he he just volleys that right back at me you know but but over the course of of several years while denying that he would that he would or could help because he said i'm not a dirt farmer and i said well me neither you know we're not i'm not looking for dirt but you know it would be uh but he helped me in immeasurably and provided all kinds of insights and answers but they're all sort of subtext but as far as his relationship with elvis went the the the peculiar thing is nobody nobody knew what went on in that relationship with the exception of elvis and the colonel nobody else was in on the meetings and the people who were who i think uh really formed the um portrait of the colonel that has become you know the standard portrait yeah are generally speaking and they're the ones who also formed the portrait of elvis's father vernon you know uh you know it's like in the tony jo white son claimed he had a bad back without her pokes out yeah exactly but they these were the guys who worked for elvis who are totally different i mean jerry shilling is nothing like red west red west is nothing like larry geller i mean so esposito all these guys yeah all of these guys are very different so i mean i'm not tiring them with the same brush but the one thing that i would say is that both colonel and vernon saw them essentially as freeloaders whether rightly or wrongly i mean i i think it's in many cases wrongly and they did everything in their power to get elvis to cut these guys loose and it's not at all surprising that the guys who worked for elvis should have a less than altogether positive view of elvis and colonel and also if you're around a scene like this you never want to say well i have no idea what went on in that meeting despite the fact that it's a closed door meeting so you think that they have turned they a lot of people who don't really understand the colonel have have more or less painted him in an unflattering light well yeah i mean they they'll paint they'll they'll paint a picture of all the business dealings and they may hit on the truth i mean in some cases particularly towards the end i i would say at the very end when colonel saw elvis fired fired colonel in 1973 because colonel said you can't act like that on stage i mean elvis was on stage he was completely stoned he's denouncing the hilton's baron hilton yeah and and colonel told him quite rightly you can't do that and elvis said you're fired and then they went back and forth for about i forget how long it was two weeks three weeks something maybe maybe not that long and colonel said okay fine i'm i'm walking but you owe me 2 million i mean which elvis did anyway from that point on i would say you know colonel's business practices were somewhat uh questionable in the sense that i think he saw this is this could come to an end at any minute and he took advantage of it but but uh but but the main thing was that the deals that they made they were essentially uh what do you call it it's not a partnership but it's it's a shared enterprise it's a and and basically at a certain point colonel had no other clients and i think was around 65-66 the deal that they made was as a 50-50 shared enterprise for not for everything but from for much of what they were doing and that's not and that many people might say well that's terrible and maybe it is but but it but it was it was an aboveboard kind of an agreement and you can understand why it would exist but but it was but basically everybody i i what turned me around was meeting colonel was really interesting but what really turned me around and turned me around as far as vernon went to was getting into the uh the archives uh at graceland i mean both the kernels archives which are just unbelievably extensive and also the elvis archives which are mainly up on the grounds and seeing the correspondence surrounding so many of the deals the contracts the correspondence i mean i i want to write i want to put out a book of colonel's correspondence because i think it would give people it would just be i mean i would annotate it how on top of everything he is yeah and also how funny he is and how clever he is and how again i'm not trying to because he gets dismissed a lot is because he is the guy who elvis is doing a massive show at the biggest hotel in vegas and the colonel's in the lobby selling badges and right and ribbons which and i've seen the footage and it's you think that's not that's not what the manager's supposed to be doing that's uh but he was probably doing it just as much for a fact as anything yeah he was amusing himself yeah he was happy to sell some balloons right right right and acting like it was a carnival ride that people were coming to see yeah yeah no i mean he was a man of of many contradictions and he was not somebody who was ever going to reveal his innermost self either emotionally or i mean in a sense colonel's approach to things was the opposite of elvis approach to music in the sense that elvis revealed a vulnerability and a sensitivity that was antithetical to the music that you know that what popular music had been before him but colonel wasn't revealing that at all right but the letters are just unbelievable you read you wrote a book uh elvis day by day which i've which i love because it takes you literally paging through day by day what elvis is up to it was really fun to write well it's fascinating too because you just see the whole arc and and down to the nitty gritty to you know uh i mean towards the end of his life elvis is is playing would feel to me like these podunk areas like he's is you know he's he's touring and uh you wonder like these tours seem to be taking them farther and farther away from cities is that true i don't think so much cities i think this was this was retracing the steps you know familiar steps of uh not of his earliest career but of of the kind of career that he that that country singers had but one of the things was okay why didn't he go to europe elvis never toured europe and you talk about him being depressed and this is another would have been could have had elvis toured europe in the 70s the pla they would have lost their minds the europeans would have gone crazy for him uh they always desperately wanted elvis to tour and he never did of course the story is that he couldn't go to europe because the colonel uh couldn't travel because he was uh not an american citizen right he was an illegal immigrant he was yeah he would come in under the dream act now yeah but but but but i don't think that had anything to do with it i mean the colonel was working with tom hewlett uh i mean jerry weintraub often gets the credit but tom hewlett was the person who was in charge of the of the tours and he was the person that jerry weintraub went into business with he tom hewlett had been in the uh concert promotion business starting in seattle with jimi hendrix and with big national tours of the first of the big of the big companies and colonel had absolute confidence in tom hewlett and tom hewlett could have gone but in talking to tom hewlett about it i would hear the same thing that i got by inference from the colonel which was basically they were afraid to take him to europe why he'd get busted because they could control what was going on in this country he could he could travel with his doctor or his doctors he had you know legitimate prescriptions people the theory is that elvis did not tour europe because they were afraid because the colonel and his concert promoter were afraid of a drug bust well yeah because i mean that was happening paul mccartney's getting busted there were a lot of bus that were going on but i mean i i would leave the kernel out of it because everybody's going to say oh that's just the colonel he's just you know looking for excuses but tom hewlett was just a straight ahead guy and he had no you know uh he would have loved to have taken he and there was no question about i mean the colonel used the term we can't guarantee elvis's security overseas and you can read that the way i think he meant it i mean he was never going to say it but but i mean elvis at this point we're talking in the 70s now earlier elvis probably could have toured europe but he wasn't doing that he wasn't until 1970 he didn't go on tour at all uh he he went back to he opened in vegas in 69 and then and in 70 he did a brief 271 he really started touring but i think that that was that was what circumscribed his uh i mean there was a genuine concern and most of the people around elvis forget about the colonel if you think that he has a vested interest in it uh tom hewlett um nobody knows who tom hewlett is but many of the people around elvis were aware that this would be taking a risk that because elvis just wasn't from certainly from 72 on he just was not in control of what he was doing and it wasn't that he was joyriding he was taking you know he was taking depression he was taking downers almost exclusively that's what killed him really i mean it was just uh it impacted his digestive system i mean everything uh so it was not he wasn't having a great time doing this right but it was just adding to the to the sense of of depression and of and the one place that he seemed to get some joy although he always you know it was a big movie buff and you know doctor strange love monty python he just loved it loved money python just absolutely recite that in in concerts which is uh bizarre but uh but he loved that kind of absurd humor you know he had he had a photographic memory so i mean it's like when as a kid he memorized uh i mean just without making an effort general macarthur's farewell address yeah he was so admiring of martin luther king and he could recite the i'll have a you know i have a dream thing and then he could recite marty python you know but but really what the i mean the peculiar thing is the tours killed in the sameness of the monotony of them on the other hand the contact with the fans was the one thing that seemed to lift him up even though it became increasingly difficult for him to you know fulfill their expectations on stage so it was a it was he was caught to quote the song he was caught in a trap yeah and uh uh what he needed i mean was he was in the hospital i think in around 73 in memphis for uh uh he had a form of glaucoma and he and dr nick brought in two psychiatrists under the guise that they were ophthalmologists who were consulting and elvis immediately sat through it and that was the end of that so there was an attempt to get him yeah psychiatric health yeah yeah yeah um i feel like you can't talk about elvis without talking about race mm-hmm and and i know that uh you said that sam phillips dream obviously was to record uh you know black musicians white musicians but and and really bring the two together and just make music yes that was his that was his vision elvis obviously there was controversy there were people that initially heard him on the radio think this is a black musician he turns out to be a white kid there's a lot of people subsequently who feel like well he's co-opted african-american music the metaphor for this the idea of cultural theft is basically a metaphor for the very sense of racial exclusion and racial prejudice that could be uh upheld right up to the present moment it makes sense on some level that uh you know that to resent the idea that it's through a white singer that you should um that that black artist should get you know this recognition what sam phillips saw and what i and what he saw from the beginning and he recorded nothing but black artists for the first five years that he had his studio open what he saw and what elvis i think also saw was once this breakthrough was made once people embraced the music that the doors were going to be wide open for african-american performers and that's basically what happened you had artists like little richard chuck berry beau didley fats domino who up until two or three years before would have been confined to an exclusive what was called then the race market right they were to an exclusively black audience they would have been big r b stars they never would have gotten beyond that they became superstars and you can say oh isn't it terrible that you know uh pat boone recorded uh i figured what he recorded tutti frutti or something yeah just uh horrific but but the point is if we were to go around this room or go around the world and say who whose version do you remember right nobody remembers pat boone's version and as and as little richard said on numerous occasions thank god for elvis presley he could have said thank god for pat boone because he had a he had a co-write on the song and probably the most money that he made at that time was i mean this is the music business is based on ownership it's not based on the record that's put out there right and particularly for it's mailbox money yeah and and and so but but the main thing and the by far the most thing is rock and roll i mean rock and roll is just a it's a marketing term i mean you you they're it's a basically it's f it's a it's a variety of folk musics that are sort of put together under this term that that became a way to sell the music right uh but but the point is that rock and roll just broke the racial barriers wide open i mean after that there was no and and there never has been uh yeah this is it wasn't the death of prejudice it wasn't i'm not saying that but but the point is the segregated markets were just forever just busted wide open and that was basically what sam phillips that was his point that was his goal and that's what i think you know he achieved and what elvis achieved so i i know your other book that we mentioned in the intro uh dream boogie sam cook there's no you don't think there's a sam cook unless there's an elvis presley making that possible and he's a gospel singer who then breaks into the the pop world with you send me and then he has this remarkable run in the late 50s and early 60s but is sam cooks i mean is sam cook someone who you think falls in that category of someone who was helped by that oh i think absolutely i mean sam cook wanted to like elvis wanted to reach the widest audience possible he didn't want in any way to be confined right by one genre one type of audience you know one class one race and that you know i mean the peculiar thing with sam cook is what what busted the market wide open in addition to the segregated market was ray charles's i got a woman which came out at the end of 1954 and after a lot of inspirational music prior to that i mean music like shake a hand by faye adams or or roy hamilton you'll never walk alone which is you know a rogers and hammerstein song from carousel i think but it's inspirational music solomon burke started out with that but ray charles would i got a woman for the first time translated directly a uh a a gospel song called um was just a gospel song by the southern tones uh it was based on ananias and translated directly just assigned secular lyrics to it and with that once that happened everybody went for the gospel sound little walter did my babe as a take off on uh sister rosetta therapist this train little richard was was signed up by specialty for the same reason and so sa this in a sense along with what elvis did was was the impetus for somebody like sam cook to cross over and the thing that scared the hell out of him was what if he didn't make it yeah he was his gospel star yeah he leaves to do this so his first record he does under a different name right as under as dale cook and he was terrified that if he didn't make it he couldn't cross back whether that's true or not i don't know but you know that that was that was his great fear but his second record or maybe was just i mean after making that uh lovable i think as dale cook he made you send me less than a year later and uh and it was a number one pop hit he also is unusual he writes the music he owns the music he owns the publishing yeah and then and then he started his own record company started his own record company and he's and you know he's uh african-american singer late 50s early 60s who's doing that that was that was extraordinary they had the foresight to do that he was people say he was barry gordy before barry gordy well in a way i mean he was a different kind of very good he was very good he wasn't the artist too but he uh no he had the good fortune i mean sam cook was was just the most visionary i mean i i don't think i don't think you could run into anyone more brilliant than sam cook he had an analytic cast of mind that was just extraordinary he was an intellectual in many ways constantly yeah read constantly i mean it was just one of the great stories that i ran into was talking to aretha franklin who just was i mean she would tell you today that she was you know just in love with sam cook she loved all the cook boys but sam cook was and she went her first her first pop tour she went out with sam cook and he was reading the rise and fall of the third reich by william shire yeah and uh and aretha said i went right out and i bought the rise and fall of the third right by william shirey to this day i don't as she would tell you she hadn't read a page of it but she just wanted so much to emulate sam cook i mean that it was uh but he uh yeah no no he he had a vision just of it it was like elvis in a way except i think it was more uh intellectually based than elvis and he just had a vision of reaching everybody well i've watched a lot of uh sam cook on talk shows there's a lot of footage of interviews and so quick and so funny and so sharp and uh and witty and really it's just a spectacular personality and incredible like this incredibly good looking natural performer with a great that amazing voice did you ever see where he and muhammad ali are on that british boxing commentator show yeah and he wrote a song for muhammad ali they wrote they did a song together right he wrote the song and he produces it's like hail hail the gangs all here and yeah i forget what it's actually called but that's what it is they're doing it for uh they perform it together and it's really uh impromptu it's really sweet it's really nice but um sam cook is another one of those had he lived you do you have a lot of questions stories i think he he dies in i think december of 64. that crazily insane circumstances that to this day nobody really understands there's a lot of what else could he have done what would he have done yeah no i mean we i mean i i often think with it with elvis what would he have done if he had lived i mean i i'd like to think were he to get well you know i i'd like to think he would have gone back to gospel music and he would have found it enormously satisfying with sam cook i feel like he would have had some kind of public role i mean at least that's how you're becoming very interested in the civil rights movement and wrote and recorded change is going to come and you know that was huge that was a big change for it that was a big change for he wasn't recording that kind of music so well nobody was yeah it was a huge thing and i mean what so what's really interesting about a change is going to come i mean it almost immediately became an anthem or the anthem for the civil rights movement but sam almost never performed it in public now you could say one of the reasons was that he didn't have the orchestration and he wasn't good but but in another way the song in part i think the song scared him for any number of reasons including the explicitness of its message yeah so he performed it the only time uh well i think he performed maybe once or twice more but the one the one made main time he did was right after he recorded it he performed it on the tonight show yeah and the tape was lost well they unfortunate unfortunately a lot of the uh new york tonight shows uh with johnny carson were lost and so there's all those great performances that are gone which is tragic but uh yeah it was uh there's that there's that sense with sam cook and with elvis where you can waste too much time doing this but with both those artists i i spend time obviously wishing there was a different outcome but but uh you know i think about this a lot with with elvis specifically is wishing that or hoping that he could have been well enough to live longer and see you know how respected he is by people like you by intellectuals by people by historians how he's you know yeah achieve that status rather than just the the uh truck driver who the fable that he played a lot in his movies right the country boy who hits a gold mine and it's all a fairy tale you know no i think from elvis point of view i mean you know and and certainly from mine i mean that he was he from the very beginning he was a conscious creative artist he had a vision of what he wanted to achieve and he set out to achieve it and his he and his aspirations remain constant and i mean to constantly grow yeah and i think that's the thing that the fable tends to overlook i mean it's like the fable of the natural in you know in sports i mean and so often you'll see people of great talent i mean generally it's you know african-american but i mean it could be larry bird too and you see people dismissed as somehow they had this gift and that's what it was but that isn't it but it's never what it is i always say talent is overrated talent doesn't interest me nearly as much as perseverance you know and uh that's it's that drive you talk about with with elvis that gets lost in the shuffle a lot which is he was um talk about his legs moving when he performed which was so controversial when he first started doing it people thought it was sexually suggestive he just couldn't stop his leg from moving right and you read those great stories about him driving with the band all night to get to a gig he couldn't go back to sleep right he couldn't sleep and that was a lifelong problem insomnia right and which he self-medicated for which you know caused uh you know probably started a lot of the the problems with medication he was so he was just burned out by the age of 42 he had just burned himself up yeah no i mean he was yeah andy and he was uh and yet you feel that somehow or other there were things if if you listen to a song it was a song that the judge recorded for the heart uh you listen to something like that that he did towards the end of his life and you still you hear that same gospel infusion you hear that same sense of i mean you don't hear it often in in the late songs but there you see him just sinking his teeth into it and putting the same kind of feeling into it that he does into and that and that's what you look for it's it's that it's basically that that that's what is so extraordinary about his music about the music of someone like howling wolf and this is this was you know about sam cook is that they had something essential to convey they had something unique to convey and that whatever else they were going through even at his worst moments you can see elvis uh there's a moment where um i can't remember what the song is now where he's at the piano in one of the very late performances and oh is this where someone's holding the microphone yes charlie hodge is holding yeah yeah i know that i know the performance i'm trying to think of the song but i know that he's at the piano and there's not even a mic stand right right so charlie hodge i think is he's like holding the microphone for him i feel like it's a roy hamilton song but but the point is he's just and i don't even think it's it's not even that his vocal is that it it's not what it might once have been but he is doing everything everything in his power to put that song across he's so invested in that song and that that's all i'm saying is that's what that's what carried him from the start and that's what carried you know him and any other great artist to the to the finish and it's it it was sam sam phillips's point about him about wolf about charlie rich about jerry lee lewis was not that they were uh that they were that they were geniuses and you know that there was no it wasn't a question of they just fell into it they didn't just fall into it they made it happen because of the the depth of their commitment because of the extent because of what they put into it because of the emotion that they just put into if not every song you know every great song that they ever did and that's just not that's not a given with every performer who comes along right it was not a this is a career choice that's choosing a career this was a religious calling yeah yeah uh who's your next obsession well i mean i i'm i finished a complete draft of the sam phillips just before christmas and so i'm just you know i'm just really anxious to finish that up and then after that it's vanilla ice you know yeah i'd say vanilla ice was probably started out young with dreams and changed the world i'm just looking for the next challenge that's a challenge hey thanks a lot thank you that is it for this edition of serious jibber jabber to see more episodes go to teamcoco.com sirius we'll also find a link to petergaralnick.com which features lots of really cool video clips and essays about some of his favorite musicians

Channel: Team Coco

Views: 181,409

Keywords: Team coco, andy richter, best moments of conan, celebrity interview, coco, comedy sketches, conan, conan funny moments, conan o'brien, conan obrien interview, conan obrien podcast, funny, humor, late night show, official, sketch, stand-up comedy, teamcoco, triumph the insult comic dog

Id: VZY7L0p2Gj0

Length: 71min 52sec (4312 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 15 2013