“Well, Mr. Phillips, I believe I might have syphilis.”

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waking up the next day to read newspaper columnists describing him as “morally degenerate,” “primitive,” “lewd,” “obscene,” “suggestive” and “vulgar,” with one even saying that he looked as though he’d been doing a striptease with his clothes on. They also said, once again, that he couldn’t sing, and that he was leading kids, by way of rock and roll, into juvenile delinquency and drug-taking. The newspaper barrage went on for weeks, wherever he played. As much as the fans would scream with excitement, newspaper pundits, teachers and preachers would howl with rage.

Hot and loud and vulgar music, non-stop for five hours

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To the older generation rock 'n' roll came to mean Teds and violence. There was a riot in Berlin. Some countries banned rock 'n' roll altogether. In Singapore police were called in to stop British soldiers jiving in a cinema foyer after a midnight premiere of Rock Around The Clock. The Rev. Albert Carter of Nottingham denounced rock 'n' roll from his pulpit: 'The effect of rock 'n' roll on young people is to turn them into devil-worshippers; to stimulate self-expression through sex; to provoke lawlessness, impair nervous stability, and destroy the sanctity of marriage.' In Miami, Florida, the head of the local censorship board described rock 'n' roll dancing as 'nothing more than shoving boys and girls around' and 'vile gyrations'! Racialist Asa Carter of the North Alabama White Citizens' Council was scared too: 'Rock 'n' roll is a means of pulling down the white man to the level of the 'Negro'. It is part of a plot to undermine the morals of the youth of our nation. It is sexualistic, unmoralistic, and the best way to bring people of both races together.' Many older musicians hated rock 'n' roll: 'Viewed as a social phenomenon, the current craze for rock 'n' roll material is one of the most terrifying things ever to have happened to popular music ... Musically speaking of course, the whole thing is laughable ... Let us oppose it to the end.'

Big Mama chasing Little Richard with a butcher knife

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Boy, oh boy, the action started. Every conceivable avenue of pleasure was rampant at this center of activity, a drunken man being dragged home by a good Samaritan, a couple of painted lilies standing in the corner smoking and indulging in that favorite West Dallas pastime—profanity. I paused to hear the deluge of obscene language coming from everywhere. A boy, apparently twelve years of age, walked up and asked for a cigarette. I gave him one on his nerve. He took two out of the package. A nickel Victrola started playing “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home?” Couples dancing, couples drinking, some talking in tones that I could not understand. A woman walked up and asked me to put a nickel in the Victrola. In obedience to her command, I placed a nickel in the slot and she requested that I play “Baby Don’t You Stay All Night.” The earthworm wiggling that started with the music was below my dignity, so I moved on down the avenue of “good times.”

“The thing about him is that Elvis doesn’t care. He doesn’t give a fuck."

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Between 1963 and 1965, the chimpanzee was very much a part of the Memphis Mafia. Elvis bought him for a couple of hundred bucks. He was a funny little dude. He learned how to dress himself and we had these little suits and ties for him. He learned to do a lot of other things, with Presley’s patient training. He had a dreadful habit of molesting himself in front of ladies, particularly when he had a few drinks. Man, old Scatter was a damn alcoholic. Never stopped drinking. He would get drunk and start going crazy, doing flips all over the house and yelling like a madman. One day when he had had too much to drink, he completely ruined the entire telephone system in the house. It took the telephone repairman three days to fix it. Presley had another little prank, He would dress the chimp in his Sunday best and then put him in the back seat of the Rolls-Royce. A chauffeur-driven rock ’n’ roll singer was bad enough, but a chauffeur-driven monkey? Disgraceful!

In New York, no one knew diddly fuck about Sun Records

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Oh, yessuh, good people, this is ol’ Daddy-O-Dewey comin’ atcha for the next three hours with the hottest cotton-picking records in town—(aside: Ain’t that right, Diz? “That’s right, pahd’ner.”). Yessir, we got the hottest show in the whole country—Red, Hot and Blue coming atcha from W H Bar B Q right here in Memphis, Tennessee, located in the Chisca Hotel, right on the magazine floor—I mean mezzanine floor (aside to himself: Aw’ Phillips, there you go again, you’re always messin’ up!).

“the doctrine of miscegenation was being practically illustrated.”

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They offer their services to you in the street, speak to you in hotel lobbies, call you by telephone, smile alluringly at you through their own front windows, and coo invitingly to you from automobiles parked — with police consent, I assume — along the curbs. Believe it or not, that’s a fact. Professional sinners, therefore — that is, men and women who run gambling houses, dance halls, blind pigs, policy rackets, houses of ill fame, and all that sort of thing — being cash assets for professional politicians, are not only encouraged to operate but are actually instructed to go ahead and provide everybody, both visitors and home folks, with as much wide-open wickedness as possible. Thus no stranger within the gates of Memphis need worry about how to spend either his time or his money.

Fast Fuckin’ Fannie, Butcher-Knife Totin’ Annie, Pistol Pete

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Wolf and Sunnyland were arguing on the way to a gig one night. Sunnyland ended the argument by yelling, “Hey, I didn’t tell you that when you chopped that man’s head off with a hoe!” Hubert Sumlin asked what he was talking about. Sunnyland said, “I’m just telling it like it is. The motherfucker did chop a man’s head off!” Shaken, Wolf stopped the car and walked away. Taking Hubert home that night, Wolf told him it was true; he’d killed someone. He’d gotten into a fight with a man and hit him with a hoe, slicing the top of his head off and killing him instantly. Terrified, he ran and hid in a drainage ditch while a posse hunted for him with hounds. The next day, his fellow Masons helped him aboard a passing train and he fled the scene.

the dirtiest sound you could ever imagine

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“Sputnik” Rock Monroe was a professional wrestler of considerable renown who had gone through a number of names (“Pretty Boy Rock” “Elvis ‘Rock’ Monroe”) and territories before finally arriving in Memphis as “Sputnik.” He was prone to describing himself in a voice several decibels above the normal range as “220 pounds of twisted steel and sex appeal with the body that women love and men fear.” In looking for a way to distinguish himself that was consonant with both character and commerciality, Sputnik hit upon race. He was a hero to the black man, a villain to the white—he liked to boast that he practically desegregated Memphis’ Ellis Auditorium single-handed, calling up to his colored fans in the “crow’s nest,” with a seating capacity of less than one hundred, “Let my people go.” Every time he threw an opponent down, he would raise up his hands to his fans, and they would just call back, “Sweet man!” When the promoters objected, he said, “Hey, if their money’s no good, just give it to me, and I’ll give it back to them,” and gradually “colored” seating capacity was expanded until the auditorium was de facto integrated. He and Dewey walked a goose down Beale Street on a leash—“Dewey came up with the goose, I came up with the Chihuahua collar and the leash. The people would holler and hug me and jump up and down. I knocked a white guy out on the corner of Third and Beale one time for calling me a nigger-lover, and a little black guy says, ‘Sputnik Monroe, you a mean motherfucker when you drinking, and I believe you drinking a little bit all the damn time.’”

"Dogface, Jet Pilot of Jive, Fatman Smith, Rockin' Lucky ..."

 

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Above all other subjects there is in blues a preponderance of lyrics about sexual love, or merely sex. A complex language of metaphors, often domestic or culinary, camouflaged a multitude of sexual references. ‘I want my biscuits in the daytime and my jelly at night,' declares one singer. 'My stove's in good condition, this is the stove to brown your bread,' his woman replies. A swaggering list of the singer's physical attributes was common, with women no less than with men. 'I'm a big fat woman with meat shakin' on the bone, and every time I shake it a skinny woman leaves her home.' Sexual virtuosity is the subject of scores of blues and the singer played a game with the censor when he sang The Dirty Dozen or Shave 'Em Dry.

torso twistings described in the burlesque trade as "bumps and grinds"

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Elvis sat in the Shalimar Room in the hotel with his three musicians, when 19-year-old Louis John Balint approached Elvis. "Hey you," he said, "my wife carries a picture of you in her wallet, but she doesn't carry one of me. Let us step out-side." He then tried to land a punch on Elvis, but missed. When the police arrived Balint was trying to shove Scotty Moore over a 4-foot-high terrace railing. "Presley is no slouch," police said. "He was really working over that guy. He knows how to handle himself real fine. He threw several good punches." Before pleading guilty to disorderly conduct Balint told the police that he resented having his wife, from whom he was separated, carry Elvis' picture instead of his own. Balint was unable to pay a fine of $10 and $6.90 in costs and he was taken to the Workhouse to serve seven days.

People say we're abnormally sex obsessed, like it's an unusual leaning

 

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I had to stand out and look in the windows, but there were these girls, just the sexiest girls that you've ever seen in the tightest clothes and the one great dance was the Bug. I thought it was the greatest one ever, 'cos they'd just do all this stuff, they'd move around and touch themselves all over, searching themselves as if they had a bug on them, just like a cat or something, and they would just be grabbing it from every place they shouldn't have been, and then finally they'd grab it, and they'd throw it on the person next to them and then that girl would start doing her dance - oh, man. It was kind of a dance; it was more like a conniption fit, but wow, a very sexy dance.

couldn't do nothin' but play guitar, wasn't interested in nothin' but womens

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I don't know whether you wanna hear this one that happened in a little country place of Florida. We had Scarface, John Hoffman, Little Walker, and myself. Anyway, this little place had a little outhouse in the back; so Walker was collectin' money at the door, and Walker had been messin' with somebody's girl up in there, and this guy come to the door; and me playin' the drums, I saw a disturbance, and they got to fightin', and everybody in the house get to fightin'. Somebody got at Hooker, and Hooker broke out the back door, and the guy started chasin' Hooker round and round the buildin'. So pretty soon, Hooker spied this outhouse, and he jumped for that, and he went down in that hole, and they had to go get him out of there! All this stuff was on him, couldn't nobody ride in the car with him, and we all had to hang on outside of the car. He was a mess! He jumped in there! We told him, we said, 'If you can jump in there, why don't you go down and jump in the lake and get some of that stuff off?' He said, 'No, man, I ain't goin' in there. It's too many alligators out there!' We had to ride all the way back to Pahokee. He was drivin', we all hangin' on top, anywhere we could. Another time, we played at a Sunday matinée in that little club out there in Florida, and this woman had a monkey in the back. Hooker would go back there, messin' with this monkey, givin' him cigarettes, and the monkey burned hisself, you know. So this woman finally let him a-loose, Hooker went to go in the bathroom, and the monkey jumped down on his neck. Across the field, Earl who couldn't get rid of this monkey, and the monkey, you know, just grabbin' Hooker's shirt! Hooker come out, he couldn't talk, 'M-m-m-man, somebody b-b-b-better come and get this monkey off of me!' The man shouldn't have messed with that monkey.