Word: hounding
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...representative, but, as Phillips insisted to Guralnick: "He was NOT a producer. Steve was just at every session, and he kept his fucking mouth shut." Sholes would propose songs, and Elvis would dispose. In 1957 Leiber and Stoller, the L.A.-based singer-songwriters whose "Hound Dog" and "Jailhouse Rock" would be prime Presley calling cards, took over as producers. Stoller: "We thought we were the only white kids who knew anything about the blues," Stoller told Guralnick, "but he knew all kinds of stuff." Leiber added: "We thought he was like an idiot savant, but he listened...
...frustration after being unable to master the rumbling electric-bass intro for the Leiber-Stoller "Baby, I Don't Care," Elvis picked up the instrument and played the line perfectly. He would also push for extra takes to get a song right. He insisted on 31 stabs at "Hound Dog," then listened pensively to the playbacks and said of the final take, "This is the one." End of discussion. Elvis was the boss...
...singer's early TV appearances, you can hear gasps of incomprehension. They may have been shocked by his gyrations, but even more they were confused. (Berle, sensing audience resistance during at the end of the "Hound Dog" number," rushes out, whistling enthusiastically and shouting, "How 'bout my boy! I love 'im!") Occasional reaction shots of the adult, white, middle-aged studio audience reveal people with annoyed, derisive or baffled looks on their faces...
...Watching the Berle-show "Hound Dog," we can feel the career-threatening danger of his burlesque moves, see his hip-level guitar wagging insolently like the first electric phallus. No wonder the onlookers gasped and giggled. They knew they were present for a cultural sea change; and their animosity was a necessary impediment for the invader to overcome. Exactly the same abrasion is evident in the 1951 film of "A Streetcar Named Desire," in the moment when Vivien Leigh's fluttery Blanche duBois is first confronted with Brando's brutish Stanley Kowalski. It is the instant, epochal collision...
...Adults thought kids picked up an infection too. The same cultural paranoia that had parents burning horror comic books in 1954 had them calling for a TV ban on Elvis the Pelvis, and Presley was obliged to tone down his moves when, on "The Steve Allen Show," he sang "Hound Dog" in a tuxedo to an actual hound dog (in a tuxedo). In a revealing press comment in Charleston, S.C., the week before the Allen show, Elvis put his music and his performance style into cultural contest: "The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like...