Presley Performs on the Sinatra Show

 

The show was actually taped in the grand ballroom of the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami on March 26, 1960. Sponsored by the Timex Company, the program aired nationally on ABC-TV from 9:30-10:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 12, 1960. Compared to Elvis's other TV appearances both before and after, relatively little has been written about the Sinatra show. However, at the time of its airing it had monumental significance in Presley's career. He hadn't appeared on TV since his final Sullivan show in January 1957, nor had he performed in front of any kind of audience since November 1957 in Hawaii. For Elvis, just released from the army, a lot was riding on the Sinatra appearance. To read the reviews at the time, you'd think Elvis's return to the entertainment business was a colossal failure. Below are excerpts from articles in three prominent publications following the show's May 12 airing. The first is The New York Times's morning after review of May 13, 1960. Presley Performs on the Sinatra Show by John P. Shanley The recent liberation from the Army of Elvis Presley may have been one of the most irritating events since the invention of itching powder. While he was in service, he lost his sideburns, drove a truck and apparently behaved in an acceptable military manner. But now he is free to perform in public again, as he did on last night's "Frank Sinatra Show" over Channel 7. Accompanied by an orchestra and the shrieks of a group of his frenzied young admirers, he did several numbers, including a duet with Mr. Sinatra. Although Elvis became a sergeant in the Army, as a singer he has never left the awkward squad. There was nothing morally reprehensible about his performance; it was merely awful. Other participants in this taped show included Nancy Sinatra, the attractive daughter of the show's star; Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford and the Tom Hansen Dancers. In various ways, they made pleasant contributions to the show. But the crowd saved its greatest ovation for Elvis, who alas, is just beginning to obtain revenge for two years of oblivion in khaki. Billboard published its review in its May 16, 1960, issue. Its writer was a bit kinder to Presley but still felt the singer had "much to learn." Elvis Projection Needs Face-Lift Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley had their long-awaited TV get-together this week. The expected dynamite was, to put it politely, a bit overrated. For his reported $125,000 fee, the Memphis rocker offered two tunes, "Stuck on You" and "Fame and Fortune," the two sides of his current disk. Beyond this, he engaged in a bit of repartee and a duet with Sinatra. In this bit, Presley sang "Witchcraft," and Sinatra sang "Love Me Tender." The latter came off better here as Presley had difficulty with the melody of the Sinatra hit. The harmony between the pair on "Love Me Tender" came off in good style. The impression lingers, however, that Presley has much to learn before he can work in the same league with pros like Sinatra, Joey Bishop and especially Sammy Davis Jr., who just about broke up the show with his chanting and impressions. Presley had a disturbing tendency to swing his arms back and forth, a distracting habit which gives the impression he's never at ease. Let nobody touch his singing. That's fine as it. What he needs is a lot of coaching on how to stand and how to talk. Another feature of the show was Sinatra's daughter, Nancy, who displayed charm, poise, pleasant singing voice and an ability to dance. A viewer got the feeling that production values were allowed to slide because of the appeal value of Presley, but the chanter was not strong enough to make up the difference. The real winner was probably the Fontainebleau Hotel, where the show was taped last March. The hostelry got a terrific publicity break. Frank Sinatra Show Review Frank Sinatra blew the works, coin-wide, for his fourth and final special for ABC-TV this season. Parlaying top names from his own show business coterie with the first guest shot by Elvis Presley since his exit from the Army, this stanza had the kind of marquee value that guaranteed a mass audience. In that respect, the talent cost, estimated at $250,000, was no doubt worth every penny. It its runoff, however, the show didn't generate a quarter of a millions dollar's worth of excitement. With virtually the whole show building to Presley's routine, the young rock'n'roller failed to deliver the climactic wallop. Working without his guitar, Presley had to overcome several hurdles. Firstly, there was a recurrent sound of screaming kids in the background. Without a single shot to document that there were, in fact, kids in the audience reacting to Presley, the hysteria could easily have been suspected of being a phone soundtrack appendix. Presley was also hurt by poor miking during his song assignments. As proved by his RCA Victor disks, he can produce a big, rocking sound with infectious beat. On this show, though, his piping registered as anemic and his hip-swivelling antics didn't seem to have any relationship to what he was singing. Finally, Presley was saddled with a couple of juvenile-type songs. Both tunes are currently smash hits in the disk market, but that hardly means they're the best type of material for a television program. The Presley-Sinatra duet on a medley of "Love Me Tender" and "Witchcraft" also failed to jell. The final analysis, however, is always in the ratings, and there Elvis's return was an enormous success. Variety reported that the overnight numbers for the Sinatra special were among the highest in recent years for a prime-time one-shot. Trendex gave the Sinatra-Presley show a 41.5 rating and a 67.7% share of the sets-in-use for the hour. It's clear that Presley's public, desperate to see him again in any venue. They did, after all, watch an hour-long show to see their idol, who it turned out appeared on screen for only 8 minutes.

April 20, 1960

Taken in the early morning hours of April 20, 1960. Title: Elvis Presley in back of taxi being mobbed by people at Los Angeles Union Station, 1960 Published caption: SAME OLD MAGIC-- Elvis Presley proved he has the same old magic yesterday as screaming teenagers surrounded his taxi as it left Union Station. The faithful had waited four hours for their hero. Publication: Los Angeles Times Publication date: April 21, 1960

March 20th '60 enroute to Nashville

March 20th '60  enroute to Nashville, for his first post army recording session. taken behind Graceland..EP stayed at the Anchor Motel, located at 1921 West End Avenue.

Minneapolis, May 13, 1956 at an evening show

from Minneapolis,  May 13, 1956 at an evening show that started at 8 p.m.

Elvis and Chuck Berry crossed paths in Las Vegas

Elvis and Chuck Berry crossed paths in Las Vegas  The only known encounter between Chuck Berry and Elvis took place in 1972. Musician Billy Peek, who was working with Berry at the time, recalls suddenly seeing Elvis in the wings watching Chuck's show at the Hilton: "He was dressed to the nines, he had the cape, he had the whole nine yards. He was with his wife at the time, Priscilla Presley; then he comes back the following night with his wife and he's got Sammy Davis, Jr., with him. So he came two nights to watch Chuck Berry play. It was a pretty big nod to Chuck. I mean you could tell he was enjoying it. Chuck was trying to get him to come up and sing one, but he wouldn't do it. But that was one of the big highlights at the time." Coincidently, that same year Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley converged at the top of the Hot 100 with each singer's final hit record. On October 28, 1972, "My Ding-A-Ling" became Chuck Berry's only #1 record, with Elvis's "Burning Love" right below at #2. It was an appropriate chart-topping meeting of rock 'n' roll's old guard. Chuck Berry was 46 and Elvis was 37.

Elvis's Incredible Record Sales Documented in February 1957 Article

 

Elvis's Incredible Record Sales Documented in February 1957 Article "Memphis' Elvis Outdoes Caruso in Record Sales" was the headline of an article in the Memphis Commercial Appeal on February 6, 1957. The article reminded readers that the concept of "golden disks" began when operatic star Enrico Caruso's recording of "Vesta la giubba" was the first to sell more than a million copies. Caruso later received another "golden disk" for "O sole mio," a tune from which Elvis's 1960 gold record "It's Now or Never" was adapted. The article explained that in a single year Elvis completely eclipsed Caruso's record sales. In 1956 Elvis had five recordings reach million-seller status. They were "Don't Be Cruel"/"Hound Dog" (3,200,000), "Love Me Tender" (2,300,000), "Heartbreak Hotel" (1,600,000), and "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You" (1,200,000). "These and other records pushed his sales to 11 million singles in his first year in the big time, plus two albums," the Commercial-Appeal reported. It also noted, however, that Elvis was still a long way away from topping the all-time top-selling single. That was Tommy Dorsey's "Boogie Woogie," which sold 4,500,000 copies back in 1938. The newspaper also reported that Elvis had been chosen by Photoplay magazine as a recipient of its "Stars of 1957" award. Photoplay's award banquet was broadcast live by NBC-TV from the Beverly Hills Hotel the evening of February 7, 1957. On hand were other award winners, among them Rock Hudson and Kim Novak. Elvis, who was filming Loving You in Hollywood at the time, did not attend the banquet.

 

Broadcaster Bob Blackburn
Cherished His Elvis Moment

On Labor Day in 1957, the lives of a disc jockey, a teenage girl, and a rock 'n' roll star intersected for a few hours in Portland, Oregon. After that day, they went separate ways, each never again meeting the other two. For the girl, it remained a never-to-be-forgotten memory of her youth. The DJ moved on to a Hall of Fame broadcasting career, but always remembered that unique moment in 1957. And the rock star? No doubt for him memory of that particular Portland meeting was lost in the flood of countless such encounters on his journey to becoming the greatest entertainer of his era.

January 8, 2010, would have been Elvis Presley's 75th birthday. That same day, Bob Blackburn, the DJ who Elvis met in Portland in1957, died of pneumonia at the age of 85 in Issaquah, Washington. Many obituaries on the Internet focused on Bob's 20 years as the play-by-play broadcaster for the Seattle Sonics in the NBA from 1967-1987. The obscure encounter with Elvis in 1957 went unmentioned in the death announcements.

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Bob Blackburn, Nancy Welty, and Elvis Presley in Portland, Oregon, September 2, 1957. (Photo courtesy
Bob Blackburn, Jr.)

Blackburn, a DJ on KEX radio in 1957, had run a "Why I Want to Meet Elvis" contest, and that he and the contest winner, Nancy Welty, had met Elvis at his pre-concert press conference in Portland on September 2, 1957.

on the surface their Elvis encounter was really no different than hundreds of others in 1956 and 1957. Once Elvis became a national phenomenon, Colonel Parker decided Elvis should hold a press conference in each city he played just prior to going on stage. To boost Elvis's image with young people, Parker invited fan club officers, radio station contest winners, and high school journalists to the press conferences. After the press finished questioning Elvis, the young girls lined up to meet Elvis, get a kiss, and have their pictures taken with him.

Nancy Welty's encounter with Elvis on September 2, 1957, followed that pattern. Her parents drove her into the city from Salem and rendezvoused with Bob Blackburn in front of the Multnomah Athletic Club. Nancy and Bob entered and took their seats for Elvis's press conference. Afterwards they had their opportunity to meet him. The encounter was brief, as Nancy remembers it. "He just said hello and what's your name and that sort of thing, and then they posed us for pictures. Then he gave me a kiss and then you were kind of on your way." Bob and Nancy then walked to their front row seats for Elvis's show in Multnomah Stadium.

Later Bob obtained two 8" x 10" prints of him with Nancy and Elvis. He sent one signed print to Nancy, along with an apology for not being able to get Elvis to sign it also. He kept the other print. Over the ensuing decades of Bob's successful broadcasting career, many other pictures were added to his collection. But it was always the Elvis photo that stood out, as he explained in a 2005 phone conversation.

"I have a picture gallery in my office downstairs," he said, "pictures I've had taken with a lot of famous people. But the minute anybody sees that one, they obviously recognize Elvis and say, 'Boy, you have to really prize that one.' Of course, my kids have argued through their lifetimes who was going to get it someday."

 

That photo reminded Bob of the days he played Elvis's records on the air as one of Portland's most popular rock 'n' roll DJs in the mid-fifties. "It was the great disc jockey era," he recalled. "Every station had personality disc jockeys on them. I got my main fame because every afternoon I would play all of the top songs. And quite often, if Elvis had a hot one, I'd play that every day."

Elvis was certainly not Bob's favorite singer in 1957, but over the years he grew to appreciate Presley and his music. "To be honest with you, a lot of the early rock songs were a little too raucous to be my favorite songs," he explained. "I played them because I knew they were the favorites of the young people listening to the show. As I listen to them now, and hear—and I hate to use the word—the crap that's on the air now by the current musicians, and you go back to his songs, he was a great artist. He was a great leader in rock 'n' roll music obviously."

While Bob's fame later came in the area of sports broadcasting, he obviously appreciated the opportunity being a radio DJ gave him to meet Elvis Presley in 1957. "He LOVED telling that story," Bob Blackburn, Jr., mentioned  recently.

As for the photograph with Elvis, it became a Blackburn family heirloom. Back in 2005, Bob told me the original would be going to his son, Bob Jr. "I'm going to be giving a copy of the picture to the rest of my children for Christmas this year. I know that they all want one, so I want to make sure that they get it." Bob Jr. confirms that his father did give him the original print and had copies made for his other five children and his wife, Pat. "It is one of my most prized and valued possessions," Bob Jr. says of his father's photo with Elvis. With the image now passed on to his children, the story of Bob Blackburn's encounter with Elvis Presley will no doubt be shared with Bob's 19 grandchildren and passed on to family generations to come.

Bob and Nancy just two of thousands Elvis touched

Although Bob Blackburn's brief meeting with Elvis Presley can be seen as just an interesting incident in a long and successful life, it's a good example of how Elvis affected the lives of so many people with just a passing encounter. There are thousands of others who have had similar experiences, and Bob Blackburn's passing is a reminder to those with Elvis stories to tell that they should document them in some manner before it is too late.

Like Bob's story, most personal accounts of meeting Elvis reveal the man's personal warmth and charm. "It was a nice moment," Bob recalled of his meeting with Elvis. "He was very friendly and affable. He didn't act like, 'What the hell am I doing here with these two people.' He was very friendly. It was just a wonderful time." It's clear that when Elvis Presley and Bob Blackburn met each other face-to-face in 1957, two gentlemen shook hands.