John and Elvis

John and Elvis

By Matthew Langford

Copyright 2018 Matthew Langford

Smashwords Edition

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PROLOGUE

It was 1954 and Sam Phillips knew what he wanted. He also knew he couldn’t have it. Couldn’t have it because what he wanted was the music of the black men picking cotton on his parents’ farm to ease their backbreaking work. Songs where the leader called and the men responded. Songs where the leader set the mood and the responders varied the melody in natural harmony.

But what his customers wanted was music from white men. And white men could never produce that earth-shaking soul-piercing feeling of the blues and the work song. If Sam Phillips could ever find a white boy who could penetrate your soul like that, Sam Phillips would be the most contented man in the country. And rich.

Sam thought about Beale Street as he listened to the latest white hopeful. This kid could sing all right. He was good at ballads, and he knew his way around a gospel song. And there was something about his style that Sam couldn’t quite fit into any of the styles – the musical templates – that he’d come across so far. But Beale Street…

Sam had been to Beale Street when he was sixteen and whatever the old Blues said it had talked, and when it talked it was, just as in his childhood, a music that stirred. So different from what you heard on the radio in velvety tones so white and unruffled you couldn’t believe the singers had ever known a day of hardship. The impassioned voices of these men and women on Beale Street articulated the essence of the hardest of hard lives. And so did the way they made their guitar strings tear at the heart.

But his customers weren’t going to buy anything as raw and untutored – as black – as the music of Beale Street.

He could see the kid was becoming nervous. For a kid like him, Sam Phillips was The Man. The founder of Sun Records. He’d given the kid a chance and the kid had run through his entire repertoire. He must have known the end of the session was approaching. And he must have known that Sam wasn’t going to be going home tonight to have dinner with Becky, his wife, and tell her he’d found a new star.

Well, it was what it was. The singer Sam Phillips wanted was out there somewhere. All it needed was patience, and Sam was nothing if not patient. Let’s take a break, kid.

So that’s what they did. And the kid seemed to relax. As though he was realizing this wasn’t going to be his big breakthrough day. Day? It was evening now. They’d be going home soon. Scotty Moore and Bill Black came in with their guitar and double bass, because Sam thought they might as well get the kid to cut some kind of track while he was here. Before he could get them started, the kid picked up his guitar and the three of them started to fool around. The song was ‘That’s Alright’ by Arthur Crudup.

Sam Phillips picked up his bottle of soda. His stomach was on fire. It was cotton picking time all over again, it was walking down Beale Street, it was everything he’d remembered and dreamed of and wondered if he’d ever find. The kid was singing from the heart – and what a heart! It had passion, it had control and it had a voice unlike anything any white boy had ever produced. Sam Phillips had found what he wanted. The white boy who sang like a hungering and deprived black.

He held up a hand to signal Stop. I don’t know what the hell that was, but I want it on tape. And, kid, I want it exactly like you just did it. Same voice, same heart, same soul, same everything. Think you can do that for me?

Sure, said Elvis with that slow smile that in a very short while was going to send the whole world crazy. I can do that.

"If Jesus Christ is alive and well

Then how come John and Elvis are dead?"

George Michael

CHAPTER 1

THERE’S A PLACE

There’s a place I know that isn’t a place at all but it’s so real. I know it as well as I know my own head. Because that’s where it lives. Inside my head.

Does everyone have a place like this? Or is it just me? I’m not going to do the mock modesty thing and pretend I don’t think I’m special, because I do. Not special as in unique – I’m not the only one, there are others as special as me – but not so many. Not so very many.

This place I carry around in my head is, really, the place where I live. Everything else – the bricks and mortar, asphalt, grass, lampposts and bus stops – that’s just the material surroundings. You can’t live in a place like that; it just provides the backdrop. Think of it as the stage and you as the actor. You walk onto the stage, you say your lines and do whatever business you have rehearsed (or, better, what happens to leap into your mind on the spur of the moment) and people watch and they clap or they boo and then you leave the theatre. And it’s then, when the lights have gone out and the people have gone home and you are alone with your own thoughts – that’s when you become yourself. That’s when you live in your special place. The one that’s inside your head. You live in it. And it lives in you.

What’s it like, this special place I inhabit? It’s a town. Not a single town, because I’ve brought in some bits from elsewhere. Not the whole of the town, either, because I’ve left bits out. Boring bits. Or bits that some people might find interesting, but that are just irrelevant to my life. To my story. To me.

In some ways, it’s an accumulation of landmarks. Places that matter to me because of what I happened to be doing when I was near them. They may not be the places that matter to other people, but so what? It’s not just the story you tell on the boards; it’s the props and the scenery that send the audience home happy.

A wrought-iron Edwardian bandstand in the park. It’s painted white and the canopy is a sickly green, but what it makes me think of is cooling my feet in the stream running alongside it that hot summer’s day. A main road that isn’t just a main road because I will never be able to separate it from eyes squinting against driving, horizontal November rain that soaked my almost new suede shoes and stained my soft white feet with blue dye. School. The Abbey. The top floor of the town’s only department store. All these places – I’ve been there, lived there, and they live in me.

So now we have the scenery. What about the actors? They need to look and feel at home in their surroundings and to give themselves so freely that some part of them will always be with me. Friends I dawdled to school with. The tramp who lived in the deserted building at the foot of the lane that spiraled away from the park. Throw stones at his glassless windows and he’d scream all manner of obscenities (though, interesting and innovative though the curses may have been, why would you want to throw stones? It’s embarrassing to think about now, but it’s still part of me).

The teacher with halitosis and rough acne in spite of his advancing years, who talked too close to your ears during lessons and – your ears being not far from your nose – made you aware of personal hygiene. The 20-year-old who hung around the school gates and joined us for a game of football once the final bell had rung. Almost as distressing as remembering throwing stones at the tramp’s windows to recall some of the words that young fella used to hear. He was harmless, however concerned the teachers might have been as they cycled away from school and looked at us with nervous indecision but without, quite, the courage to intervene. Retard? Would I say that now? Why did we say it then? But this, too, was how we – I – once were.

I’m not even going to pretend to have forgotten the girl with long black hair who spoke to none of us. The tall metal railings around her fee-paying school seemed to emphasize her unavailability, but that didn’t stop me dreaming. If I timed my arrival right and had saved the money for the fare, I could sit behind her on the bus. We never spoke. Not in real life, at any rate. In the dreams of my waking and sleeping hours, we spoke plenty.

The cast. The characters of my life. Unremarkable, you might think, but not to me because I was one of them.

Once you’ve done the places and the people, you need to think about the time. And time is more difficult to describe than the other two; the way I experience time is not the way you experience it and my time runs at a rate that is not your time. What’s so special about time is that it is the one resource that cannot be renewed. If your car runs out of fuel, you can drive to the filling station and fill it up. If your pen needs ink, or your pocket needs money, or there are no clean Y-fronts in your drawer – all of those things can be dealt with. But the time you use – even the time you’ve used reading this paragraph – is gone. You’ll never get it back.

I am not, therefore, going to try an objective description of time. But I am going to describe it. A particular time. A time that I may dress up with colors – rose, grey, whatever they may be – that weren’t there before. You may have lived through the same time and your experience of it may have been completely different. I can’t help that. This is my story. If you want your story, write it yourself.

Eccentricity seemed more tolerated in those days, and so did difference. People didn’t scream at you, or no-platform you, or demand that you remain silent because your views weren’t their views. We spoke a number of languages depending on whose company we happened to be in. With our peers, the talk could sometimes be crude, but that didn’t get in the way of optimism and wonder. There was violence sometimes and it might be physical or it might be verbal (and who is to say which is worse?) but life was not unduly stressful. We didn’t have money – not the way the parents of the girl at the fee-paying school had money – but I can’t really say we missed it. Experience was a richness in itself.

And I rattle on like this and, really, I have no idea whether the assessment is fair. How can you tell? You can’t separate time from experience, and you can’t separate experience from the people and places interwoven with it. Everything is so firmly jumbled up in my subconscious that what I’m going to tell you is the truth as I see it. It may, in fact, be a pack of lies, but it’s the only truth I know.

So let’s get started.

After I and the others became famous, some guys who called themselves Manfred Mann also became famous (though perhaps not quite as famous as us) and they had a big hit with a single called My Name is Jack. Jack lived in the back of the Greta Garbo Home for Wayward Girls and Boys. My name is John, which is close to Jack but Jack is a name I never wanted to be known by, and I live on the eastern side of town. To be precise, at 251 Menlove Avenue, a comfortable though far from luxurious residence in a leafy suburb that had nothing special to commend it but nothing, either, to damn it. Menlove. I always thought the name a little inappropriate since the only love I received was from my mother and Aunt Mimi.

Uncle George doesn’t count. Uncle George was a dairyman and a crossword master and the important things he gave me were to do with language. The ability to find hidden meanings in words and sentences. An understanding of synonyms, antonyms, homophones and homonyms. A liking for anagrams. When Mimi wasn't there he would give me kisses, which he called squeakers, but neither of us would have called that love.

In an unguarded moment (which didn’t come that often) Aunt Mimi might say she loved me, but Aunt Mimi’s love was strict and a little frightening. But the most confusing love came from my mother. It was capricious, it was inconsistent and it didn’t have the safe boundaries I got from her strict sister or indulgent Uncle George. One day, I would garner fame and fortune for extolling the virtues of love but it wasn’t an approved topic of conversation while I was growing up.

I wonder if any generation of children has ever been taught as firmly as mine was to be grateful. I had to be grateful to the midwife who delivered me, and grateful to the mother who pushed me out. Both, I imagine, were encouraged not to linger at their tasks by the sound of Hitler’s bombs raining down in the dark. I had to be grateful for food and I had to say so at the start of each meal and be mindful of those children unfortunate enough to have been born in another country. God was responsible for what we ate. Indeed, God was at the root of everything we had to be grateful for. I was even expected to be grateful to God for misfortunes that occasionally befell us, because they could be blessings in disguise.

As well as all-encompassing gratitude to a divine being, we were not allowed to forget the debt owed to the soldiers who had fought for us all. The war was over now and some of them had come back alive and well – depending on how you define well. Some had come home with wounds, which might be visible but might be inside their heads. Some had returned in a wooden box, and some had not come home at all. None of that mattered, and gratitude was due to the living, the disabled and the dead. What mattered was that they had saved us. All of us. It was never made clear what they had saved us from and it wasn’t a good idea to ask. It was something to do with freedom. Freedom was something else we had to be grateful for.

So grateful was my mother to Mr Churchill for helping us to avoid falling bombs during her labor that she gave me the name Winston to follow John. I became John Winston Lennon. Better than Adolf or Benito, I suppose.

Good health was something else to be grateful for and all the new hospitals being built suggested that that happy state might continue. Some of my contemporaries were described as delicate, but I was strong. I had all my fingers, all my toes and all my marbles. I could ride a bicycle and play football and uncle George would wink at me after a particularly complicated bit of word wrangling and say I was ‘as sharp as a tack.’ Which was also, I happened to know, what Aunt Mimi thought, but she didn’t say so. Compliments should be used sparingly. There was so much to be grateful for and if we ever took it for granted and stopped giving thanks it might be taken away from us.

Let’s go back to the town. A wide river flowing swiftly from north to south divided the town into two distinct and different parts before it emptied itself into the sea. First to develop was a settlement on the east side and that’s where the historic core of abbey, castle and smooth stone buildings grew up. As the town got larger, entrepreneurial and adventurous people along with those who had nowhere better to go moved to the western side where there was more land and more freedom from the strictures of their ancestors. The first making that journey went by boat, which became a ferry, and the river claimed some of the passengers as rivers are prone to do but, before long, there were bridges so that the less adventurous could make the crossing. Today someone driving a car can get over the river in about a minute, as long as the traffic lights are with them.

The Abbey on the east side was built over hundreds of years but mostly in the thirteenth century by Augustinian monks. Their cloisters surrounded a grass quadrangle and in the evenings plainsong gave to God a gratitude far more attractively expressed than ever mine was. To the west was