06/05/2025
(FROM 2017):
On this day, in 1956, Elvis appeared for the second time on Milton Berle's very popular TV show. He garnered a massive viewing audience; most of the American homes that had TVs at that point tuned in. By now, five months after he recorded "Heartbreak Hotel," 21-year-old Elvis was the biggest thing in pop culture. He was reviled as much as he was celebrated, as his fame and image grew. This show from June of 1956 exemplifies that dichotomy and illustrates the very real threat that he posed to established norms in Middle America.
He did two songs. One, recorded in April during a problematic session that only saw Elvis and the band completing the one song (that went gold, of course), was "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You." That Nashville session was notably unproductive because, apparently, the small aircraft in which Elvis was traveling nearly crashed. He was pretty shaken and studio outtakes revealed that he seemed to have trouble concentrating on the song. The second song was "Hound Dog," a song written by the prolific Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, who would go on to write several big hits for Elvis, including a little ditty called "Jailhouse Rock." The song was recorded by Big Mama Thornton, three years earlier, but Elvis' take on it was more an adaptation of the novelty-song arrangement he saw a group perform in Las Vegas. The name of the group was Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, a fixture in this town for decades. Elvis had been doing the song as his concert closer since his May tour, tagging on a half-time, slowed ending. That's pretty much what you see here. He wouldn't record the song in the studio until July 2, a day after reprising it on national TV on Steve Allen's TV show.
This June 5 performance scandalized America. Its impact cannot be overstated. Nor can Elvis', in general. Elvis was crucified by the vast majority of reviewers and social pundits. Nothing was going to stop his trajectory, though, and the controversy ultimately just added to his legend and to his commercial appeal. When the single did come out, backed with "Don't Be Cruel" (that he recorded on the same day), both sides quickly went gold. Indeed, both sides went to number one on the singles charts, successively. I don't know if that had ever happened before. Elvis actually didn't really like the song that much. He used it as a concert closer because it really seem to go over well, but he wasn't extremely enthused about recording it in the studio and had to be talked into it (basically, the same thing also happened -- 16 years later -- when he reluctantly recorded "Burning Love"). Once in the studio, though, he hammered away at it until he had produced something that matched what he was hearing in his head. It took 31 takes, far more than he usually needed to produce a master take. He followed that with 28 takes of "Don't Be Cruel" and then a good number of takes (12, I think) of a third gold record, "Any Way You Want Me."
Back to this June 5, 1956 broadcast: it was actually broadcast in an early form of televised color, but any color sources appear to have long since been lost. Milton Berle was always somewhat subversive with his humor and he actually not only had Elvis on the show twice, when Elvis was being excoriated by religious and social leaders, but he defended him when the criticism hit like the proverbial ton of bricks. He knew the truth about Elvis; that he was not really some greasy, antisocial delinquent sent by the commies to destabilize white America (ironically enough, when the US Army stationed Elvis near the East German border, "Pravda" claimed that he was sent there to subvert their communist youth; sometimes you just can't win).
I thought that I might find the entire show on YouTube but it doesn't seem to be there. I'm pretty sure that it came out on commercial DVD some number of years ago; my source is a bootleg VHS that I got in the '80s. If you ever get the chance to see the entire show, sit down and watch it. Many of us have many times seen this performance of "Hound Dog," in full or in edited form (it's even in "Forrest Gump") and we're viewing it through the filters of having seen far more outrageous performances since, from Alice Cooper to Marilyn Manson and beyond. It's inevitably difficult to fully appreciate just how powerful Elvis' breakthrough and his total mangling of polite society in the United States was back then, at least for those of us who were not there to behold it and, indeed, even for those who were but who may have since forgotten just how big a deal it was. Watch the entire show, though, and you really see how truly _shocking_ Elvis was. Everything from the kitchen appliance commercials to the other acts on the bill paint a picture of acceptable, middle-of-the-road postwar American culture. More than vaguely Stepfordian. Then Elvis comes crashing through. His singing is jarring by juxtaposition, as are his moves and even his look. He's like an alien. It's like he turned everything upside down in about 2-1/2 minutes. That's actually essentially what happened.
This particular performance of "Hound Dog" -- a song in which the rhythm and unspoken vocal inflections are far more powerful than the actual words, that are largely fairly banal -- became a pivotal point in Elvis' transcendence to rock legend and also to his vilification by a significant section of American society that viscerally hated him and everything he stood for or represented as well as provoking the exact opposite reaction from a burgeoning youth culture. Elvis didn't mean to be an iconoclastic rebel, smashing through barriers left and right, but he was. It was as unselfconscious as his scandalizing performing style. Leonard Bernstein said that Elvis made the '60s happen. Watch this performance and you might begin to see the truth in his words. It's in the context of the entire show, though, that we really can appreciate just how shocking he was and how completely and profoundly different he was from the norm -- ANY norm -- especially in mainstream white American society. No wonder they hated him. Ultimately, they were afraid of him and what he represented. They had every right to be, as social upheavals and events of the next 20 years would prove.
Not surprisingly, the furor resulting from Elvis' performance -- even from the most hate-filled naysayers -- only added to Elvis' bottom line, as his notoriety grew and media attention became around-the-clock. If you hadn't heard of Elvis Presley before the morning of June 6, 1956, you sure had by then. Nobody had ever seen this kind of lightning success before. Almost a month later, on July 1 -- the day before he recorded "Hound Dog" in RCA's New York studio, Elvis performed the song (both songs, actually) on Steve Allen's TV variety show. Steve Allen was hardly a fan of the new music and played up his New York hipster credentials in response to it. His answer to the outcry that followed Milton Berle's show -- don't forget those massive ratings, that means money, that is really all broadcast executives were interested in -- was to dress Elvis in tails, have him sing to a basset hound on a pedestal, and to forbid him to move. Elvis later considered it one of the more humiliating things he had ever had to endure but, again, it kept his name in the news and the backlash against Steve Allen's response to the _original_ backlash created even more publicity, and Elvis sold even more records, en route to making his first movie. Ed Sullivan, who had said he would never have Elvis on his show (he'd also said that he would not allow his daughter to cross the street to see Elvis), finally relented ($$$) and had him appear on his TV show for the first of what turned out to be three performances, in September, 1956. By now, Elvis was a massive star and Ed Sullivan's ratings went through the ceiling, of course. During the third show, on January 6, 1957 (the only show for which Elvis was actually shot from the waist up), Ed Sullivan announced to the nation that Elvis was really a "fine, decent" boy. It was an important and surprising message, closing what turned out to be Elvis' final TV performance until he returned from the army, in 1960, for a TV special hosted by Frank Sinatra. Things had changed a lot, by then -- in the country, in pop music, and in Elvis -- but Elvis was still essentially the same, musically. In some important ways he, creatively, always remained that poor boy from rural Mississippi who almost obsessively sought out all sorts of musical forms and absorbed them like a sponge, producing something musically very different from the sum of all its parts.
This time capsule from 1956, though, gives some idea of what it was like to be there. Again, if you can track down the full show, it's a bit of a revelation. But even this single clip remains a pretty powerful moment, in isolation, even all these years later.
www.lasvegaselvistribute.com
www.vintagevegasentertainment.com
Please Read: The quality varies because the video is made up of multiple clips. I have tried to edit in the best quality video where possible. I have synce...
