sonny west q&a time

question alright um you got its big concerts and you know Elvis is getting ready what does he do before he goes onstage to prove himself well he usually gets to the show very short time he comes to the intermission when we're on the road and he comes down a little bit earlier when we're in there because he can hang out in the dressing room when we're in Vegas but we developed he was so nervous when he would go on that we developed he and I started in 69 in Vegas we started doing this Indian wrassle stretch thing where he would pull me towards him and I would pull him with our feet side by side like this here like Indian Riesling then we'd switch and do that and he would shake his hands like he was trying to get rid of the energy and everything and he was no no don't know maybe do his boys and Bill Lowe's make some oh and make sure he was ready and that basically it and he was nervous born when he hit that song bang it was gone he was dynamite now but he did nervous Dave okay I know you weren't working for him at this time but do you think he would have ever actually married ginger no no it is nothing against ginger when I say that I know a lot of fans don't like her and for obvious reasons they think she's partly responsible but we know that Elvis is responsible when it comes down to it it's just hard to accept that and say it but I don't think what if I just don't think else would ever have gotten married again to anybody I felt that if he would have he probably would have married Linda Thompson after a cover three years because she took such great care of him great personality and they had a really really good thing but Ellis should never really and this is not a slam on Priscilla never even gotten married in the first place he didn't belong to one woman he couldn't belong to one moment he belonged to the women of the world they loved him that's why I love them you hear him say oh I felt like he was singing just to me well he was to you to you but he communicated he was a great communicator and he made people women especially feel very what are you saying yeah yeah thank you Sonny what was the blue police light that Elvis had in his steps or in a car that he took like to the Memphian or whatever what was the idea behind that policeman thank you no he got he got a badge chief deputy badge he got me a lieutenant badge he got a really lieutenant badge on the Shelby County Sheriff's Department we went through training red and I went through firearm training and everything like that but he got this rid of this blue light that fit on the dash or you've seen it it used to be a red light on Kojak that they can stick up with the magnet on top of the roof in an unmarked car but he would put it up on the dash and he would use that mainly when he wouldn't use to get somewhere but we'd be driving to the movie in some car would speed by he'd put that blue light on catch you up and pull him over and we weren't sure who was in that car that was speeding or why so we had to go up there to him I got to tell you a little nervous going up to these cars we didn't know a drug dealer we don't know what a guy just robbed the bank and trying to get away so we you don't need to do this but he said oh no man that's Peter call caused a wreck I said yeah well if they got a gun he said we got done we'll kill him okay so one night though it's real funny this guy come by us and we cruise along and Elvis is driving and he's doing about the speed limit maybe even a little bit blowing this car goes by us doing about just five or six miles over the speed limit but he did pass us though hit that blue light that car pulls over start pulling on the side of the road and as we get of Elvis man he wasn't really speeding guy you're not even doing the speed limit you know yeah he was so bad the unplugging we kept going that guy's sitting there wondering what's going on you know police like God and it's a Lincoln it's not a police car so that was kind of surprising to him yeah but that's mainly what it was just same thing he had a badge for he wanted to be a cop I think Elvis if you hadn't been a singer probably would have been a FBI CIA or a cop or something you know they very Pro police okay Sonny I know you worked security for a lot of years there did you ever have any close calls close calls or security breaches that was close we had we did that's a good question we had the main the main problem with the security was people accidentally hurting him women reaching for him wanting a lock of his hair or reaching for his arene or reaching up to touch him and scratching him without meaning to this is what we really had to watch out for but we had some really serious threats to kill him that bomb fit some of the buildings we played but the worst one was when we had one from someone out there in Vegas with someone gonna kill Elvis for $50,000 they they would tell who it was they knew who it was and so the FBI was called in and this was in 1970 and we'd been done sir with me engagements of nothing that happened there but this one the FBI said they did a profile said he doesn't care he's caught he wants to get involved he's not gonna shoot from the balcony she's gonna come right down front or he's gonna be sitting down front and he's going to just stand at the shoot so after you explain this to us Elvis took red and myself and Jerry aside and tears came to his eyes he's a man you guys know I have never done anybody for someone to kill me he says I want your word that if it happens you guys get to him first before anybody else he said when his eyeballs ripped out I want him so torn up I do not want a smirk on his face in some courtroom like Charles Manson that his claim to fame was he killed Elvis Presley you guys gotta promise me we promised you minibike Hawley we would have we would have got there but it didn't nothing happened and then the thing ended he wasn't even supposed to have to go on it so tell them you know he said no these people come someone come town someone's gonna be leaving they came here they want to see me they're gonna see a show all he did it thank you but that's the worst serious when we had but we we had other ones where what woman says she don't kill him because he rejected her did you enjoy working and stay away Jo and do you recall any bloopers anything that happened on the set mm-hmm bloopers every every movie many of them and Elvis handled him really great yeah I loved working on on that I played a a guy named Jackson he crow I had a good part on it's like a featured role I played a Indian that grew up with him he was half Indian and we grew up together on the reservation and there was a scene in there when he comes back from rodeos he's got the Congress he's conned them into letting them bring some cattle in Mena and start making some money by raising cattle and selling them and everything he's got though he comes riding in on that bull that's gonna give him all these baby cows well after that we did that he started we started a little kind of a free-for-all fighting and fun and we work our way down and he knocks me over a log and I go over backwards and he someone grabs him and tackles him and takes him down into the dirt I get up and come around so I end up down there and there's this water there it's supposed to be a creek but they just dammed it off and and put some water in there like there was a river you know running through their little creek and I'm supposed to go at him and throw a punch and he takes me and does a throw and throws me into the water I'm first one to go in well he slipped a little bit and there were some rocks there in my head then when we saw it came that close to hitting that rock before I went in the water I didn't realize it because if the rock was behind me I didn't know it but when we saw it Alva saw it when he was throwing me it scared him but he knew when I jumped up out of the water I was okay and everything if I didn't hit it but we had a lot of fun we did that I did a lot of fight scenes with Elvis I doubled two other actors Grier did it all so we fought with those a lot they even got where they cast actors it would be like us so that we would look like them Sonny did the colonel influence of us so much that it changed things he really wanted to do I mean he couldn't do what do you really want to do because of the colonel that we set things up yeah those things happen but it wasn't because of an influence or anything like that word colonel was putting his will out on him colonel strong personality there's a strong businessman and what he did was he signed Elvis to multiple picture deals everyone wanted to have that security Elvis came back from Germany after leaving and not performing and doing anything for two years with the words ringing in his ears of all his critics saying oh he's a flash in the pan he won't last he'll be gone this now well he kind of thought maybe in the army while he was there in that two years that that just might happen that he might be a flash in the pan and the fans not be there well when he came back Colonel started getting these multiple movie contracts signed all of a sudden that was new hey they believed in me still so he felt good about it but Colonel make a bad decision with all that he had to make I'm gonna tell you something I'll tell you this and I mean it my love my heart Colonel Parker if I could go to my grave and make half of the right decisions that he made regarding Elvis I would be very happy that I had really really accomplished more than I ever thought I could and we long with that I would take all of the bad decisions he's made and I take all of them and I'd still be way out balanced but he he was his Elvis was his best interest and there's been things that have come out against him make not I was not doing the stars born but he told Streisand he wanted to do it but after two or three days Elvis realized what a challenge that was he had to lose weight he had to quit taking things that he was taking he'd have to do it for months at a time while I filmed it got to be too big a challenge for him he told Colonel get him out of it so Colonel put the price up too high Colonel said Elvis was to get top billing you know you're not gonna get that Streisand especially if she's the producer she's not gonna let anyone have billing over her so she said these things about the colonel put too much ask for too much really Elvis didn't want to do it Colonel's took the heat never made an excuse and never defended it and there was a story similar that with Judy Garland and Elvis they came to the colonel in the 60s they wanted Judy Carlin and Elvis to do a children's album together and colonel came to elvis you want to do it they often $25,000 I said I don't really want to currently okay so he went back and he told the people he said you know Elvis would have to have $100,000 for Elvis take the time to do that and they said we don't have that on budget Judy's gonna do it for 25 years well I'm just telling you that we have to have that for Elvis for the time it'll take and as we don't have that well they left they came back about a week later that Colonel got the money colonel fast on his feet oh well no when you left here you you said you couldn't do it so he said I've already booked that time he's not available for about four years now that's how you got out of that situation but that's that backs up the thing about Elvis didn't want to do it colonel didn't stop it I always didn't want to do it and the multiple picture contracts kept ours from doing other movies that they've come the offer they want him to do the part of Tony in West Side Story they want him to do Splenda in the grass Elia Kazan with with Natalie Wood who dated Elvis told him about he saw a King Creole he said whoa he can he can act so he wanted him Elvis was booked up on already signed up to a movie he was making three a year he had no time open so that's when Warren Beatty got it and it made him a superstar so these were things that just happened but they weren't intentionally done like Colonel Parker being the bad guy you know because he wasn't he cared about Elvis and he did the best he could and I think he did a hell of a job I worked with him a lot on the tour so I was with him constantly on tour out there I saw what he did for all of us good question yeah sunny lots of nice stories today and events that took place over 17 years I'm curious is there something that stands out maybe more than others I know there were special events along the way but anything in particular that if you reflect back maybe on a one-on-one basis with you and Elvis yeah I would say Jim that father what really sticks out in my mind if you kind of took everything together about Elvis with his humility and his warmth and his compassion and his concern and you take all of this and you could probably wrap it up in one word his humanity his humanity was something like you just don't you know it's such a big word but he covered that word very well it really brings him to it you know yeah humanity

Channel: ajgherts2

Views: 100,805

Rating: 4.7543859 out of 5

Keywords: elvis presley, sonny west

Id: EY-yH-KJjQM

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 06 2017