Rant #2,688: That's All Right

Today is a special day in the annals of rock and roll.
 
Sixty-seven years ago today, in 1954, Elvis Presley’s music first was heard on the radio.
 
His first play on the radio was “That’s All Right,” and when it was played on a Memphis, Tenn., radio station, it was an immediate smash.
 
People were asking, “How can this boy be white—he sings like a black guy,” and quite frankly, nobody had heard a white guy sing black before.
 
There were plenty of what they called “race records” back then, which were really the first divots in the ground for what later became to be known as rock and roll, but they were all sung by black guys.
 
Sure, Bill Haley and His Comets broke through with “Rock Around the Clack,” and that song caused riots during concerts, but everyone pretty much knew that Haley and his band were white, because he simply didn’t sound black.
 
Elvis did, and his success opened the door wide for those black performers who actually laid the groundwork for this new type of music, including Little Richard and Chuck Berry, two of the main architects of rock and roll.
 
Black kids and white kids loved Presley, and white kids grew to love Richard and Berry as much as black kids already did, and other artists reached incredible popularity that they would never had heard of if not for Presley’s success as an across the board star.

 
Presley’s piopularity was so great that his early records charted on the pretty much all black Rhythm and Blues charts, so black kids were listening to him, and black stations were playing his music.
 
Fame came with its problems, and even Presley could not keep up with the pace of his popularity, although he charted dozens and dozens of records not only in the 1950s, but also throughout the entire decade of the 1960s and well into the 1970s before and after his death.
 
But most of those records in the late 1950s, the entirety of the 1960s, and through the 1970s, with a couple of exceptions, were far inferior, and far less influential, than his earlier output.
 
They almost had to be, because throughout his more than 20 year career, Presley made rock and roll what it became, the voice of the younger generation, and artists—just about every rock and roller from then through the current time—owes him a debt of gratitude for busting open that door of acceptance.
 
I really grew to love Presley’s music as I got older.

 
When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s, he was already passé, and was even more so old hat when the Beatles came on “The Ed Sullivan Show” that one February evening in 1964 and changed the world forever.
 
Elvis was the guy in all those flimsy movies, and although he put out just so many records, many of which were big to middling hits, I don’t know, he was just for the older kids than me, the ones who heard him first and had matured to adulthood.
 
Me, I was nine years old in 1966, and the Monkees were the act that did it for me.
 
Presley? The biggest thing about him to me was that his record label was RCA, the parent company of Colgems, which was the Monkees’ record label.
 
As I got a little older, I heard more of Presley’s music—his early stuff—and it kind of grew on me in a really good way.
 
I liked the rawness of the music, the passion that his voice echoed, and yes, the 1950s stuff really got to me as I matured myself, from a kid to a young adult.
 
I think I had my real Elvis epiphany when I was in college.
 
IN 1972, he had one of his biggest hits of all time, the really rocking “Burning Love,” and I was in high school then, and it kind of went in one ear and out the other.

 
Then, while a freshman in college in 1975, I picked up the “Burning Love” album, the usual RCA pastiche of throwaway songs and a couple of then-recent singles that they cobbled together to make a buck.
 
Anyway, I saw it in a record store, I remembered the song, and they got my buck for the LP.
 
I listened to it, and while “Burning Love” remained the standout, I was kind of entranced by the other music too, some of which was good, some of which was pretty bad.
 
I started to collect everything I could find on Elvis, and I remember that right before his death, I  heard “Way Down” on the radio, and I had to have that single, a song that I really liked that was starting to get airplay even on the FM rock stations of the time.
 
So I bought the single, bought the album that it was on, the blue vinyl “Moody Blue,” and continued to buy whatever I could on Elvis, both singles and LPs.
 
Then on August 16, 1977, I was driving home from work—I was a part time security guard in whatever supermarket was operating at the time in the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, Long Island—and as I was driving home and listening to the old FM powerhouse WNEW-FM, they kept on playing Elvis records, one after the other.
 
Finally, classic rock DJ Scott Muni came on the air, and cried into the microphone with his gravelly voice, “If you havent’t heard the news yet, Elvis Presley passed away today.”
 
I nearly jumped out of my car when I heard the news.
 
But in all the ensuing years, I have continued to collect whatever I could on Elvis, and I have a pretty nice collection of records, some of which I have posted here.

 
But it really all began today, 67 years ago, when his music first was heard on the radio.
 
While it began for me many years later, Elvis is the King, will always be the King, and if you need any proof of this, just put on one of those early records and listen, and listen, and listen some more.
 
There has been no one like him in our generation, and there will likely be no one like him in any generation that is forthcoming.
 
He was the real deal, and there are so few people that you can truly say that about in our lifetimes.

Tomorrow, I am going to have to take the day off from this blog because I have a very early appointment, so I will speak to you again on Friday.