Rock ‘n’ Roll

In January 1954, a fifteen-year-old girl at a church function in Memphis spotted a boy she couldn’t stop looking at. He was nineteen, shy to the point of silence, and had a strange haircut and clothes nobody else in the congregation would have dared to wear. Her name was Dixie Locke. His name was Elvis … Read more

Walk through the Graceland exhibits in Memphis, and you’ll come to a 25-inch RCA color television from the 1970s with a bullet hole in the screen. It isn’t a replica or a prop. Elvis Presley genuinely pulled out a gun and shot his own TV set while it was switched on, and the story of … Read more

In May 1957, Elvis Presley was filming what would become the most famous dance sequence of his career. The song was “Jailhouse Rock.” The scene required him to slide down a pole — and he threw himself into it exactly the way he threw himself into everything. He hit the pole so hard that he … Read more

On Tuesday, December 4, 1956, a guitarist called Carl Perkins booked a normal day’s work at Sun Studio in Memphis. He’d written and recorded “Blue Suede Shoes” and was there to cut some new songs with his brothers. To beef up the sound, the studio boss brought in a young piano player nobody outside Memphis … Read more

On the evening of July 5, 1954, three men sat in a small, boiling-hot recording studio on Union Avenue in Memphis, getting absolutely nowhere. A 19-year-old truck driver named Elvis Presley had been trying for hours to record slow ballads with two musicians he barely knew — guitarist Scotty Moore and bass player Bill Black. … Read more

The phone rang at four in the morning at her aunt’s house in Memphis. Her aunt answered in her politest Southern voice, said “Why, yes, she is — just a moment please,” and then turned around wide-eyed: “Oh my God. It’s Elvis Presley on the phone.” The young woman who took that call was Linda … Read more

In the spring of 1960, a black Lincoln Continental pulled up outside a boarding school in Virginia to collect three small boys. Billy was 7. Rick was 6. David was 4. Their mother introduced them to the man beside her as their new daddy — and then the car drove them to their new home. … Read more

In 1965, a young Welsh singer walked onto a film set at Paramount Studios in Hollywood and got the shock of his life. He was 25 years old, had been famous for about a year, and had exactly three singles to his name. His name was Tom Jones, and he had grown up in a … Read more

At around three in the morning in the summer of 1975, a small Chow puppy named Getlo started behaving strangely at Graceland. Elvis Presley’s girlfriend Linda Thompson noticed something was badly wrong and called out a vet in the middle of the night. The vet examined the dog, then delivered the verdict nobody wanted: “I … Read more

On April 30, 1964, Elvis Presley needed a haircut. He was in Hollywood filming, so an assistant rang a 24-year-old hairdresser named Larry Geller, who worked at a famous Beverly Hills salon and cut hair for Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen, and Paul Newman. Geller drove over to Elvis’s rented house on Perugia Way expecting a … Read more