Music: Last Stop on the Mystery Train

An American legend: Elvis Presley 1935-77

Train I ride,

Sixteen

Coaches long

Train I ride,

Sixteen

Coaches long

Well, that long black train

Carry my baby and gone.

—Mystery Train

As the legend goes, Elvis Presey had only a year's passing familiarity with a recording studio when he cut that record in the winter of 1955. He had wandered into Sun Records with his guitar, two summers before, plunked down $4 to sing a couple of tunes to his mother, Gladys, and left carrying a 10-in. acetate for her birthday present. Sun Secretary Marion Keisker heard a mean, lowdown sweetness in the baritone voice, made a tape of the session and played it back later for her boss, Sam Phillips. He had been looking for a "black sound inside a white boy" to make Sun Records a national mark way beyond Memphis.

Phillips listened, thought about Presley, took his time making a decision. There was no rush. Presley, then 18, was pulling down $35 a week as a truck driver for the Crown Electric Co. About the only audience who knew him were his high school classmates who had watched, stunned, as their shy schoolmate hot-wired a class amateur show. Finally, Phillips called Presley back into the studio, a year after he had left with his gift for Gladys. That marked the last time in his life things would go slowly for Elvis Presley.

A song that came out of those first sessions, That's All Right, Mama, became a substantial local hit. So did the next four singles. By the time the last, Mystery Train, was released, Presley had connected with a deadeye promoter named Colonel Tom Parker, who landed him a national contract with RCA Records for the outlandish sum of $35,000. In the winter of 1956, not six months after Mystery Train came out, Elvis Presley released Heartbreak Hotel and sent American popular culture into a collective delirium that came, after a while, to be called "the Rock Era."

Time passed to a heavy back beat. In a giddy blur, Presley went on the Ed Sullivan Show, intimidated the adults of America and drove their kids into a frenzy. Parents said Elvis was suggestive, lewd, a greaser. To kids that was just the point. Elvis reveled in his performances. He used his music as an open invitation to release, and kids took him up on it.

He inspired scores of imitators, sold millions of records. He got drafted into the Army, got his infamous D.A. and 'burns clipped, served a tour of duty in Germany, sold millions of records. He went to Hollywood, appeared in 33 movies, sold millions of records. He played Vegas, got married, filled amphitheaters, got divorced, lived a gaudy life so high and wide that it seemed like a parody of an American success story. And he kept selling records, well over 500 million in all. The music got slicker and often sillier, turned from rock toward rhinestone country and spangled gospel. Only the pace remained the same. Elvis Aron Presley always lived fast, and last week, at the age of 42, that was the way he died.