A shredded pink sports jacket, scathing editorials and a lot of young enthusiasm are part of the memories of Elvis Presley's first Miami performance.

BY MARGARIA FICHTNER, Miami Herald, 3 Aug 2006

Fifty years ago yesterday, a 21-year-old former truck driver wearing a pink sport coat and black pants slipped onto the stage at Miami's Olympia Theater. Grabbing the microphone, Elvis Presley managed to husk one word -- ''Thisss. . .'' -- before his voice was smothered by frantic squeals. ''I couldn't believe what baby-fine skin he had,'' says Joanne McCool of Miami Gardens, who was 14 and sitting with her mother in the third row. "My other remembrance is how angry I was because everybody was screaming, and you couldn't hear him sing.'' Tickets were $1.50. Presley played seven sold-out performances over two days. The Olympia, now Gusman Center for the Performing Arts, had not seen such excitement since one of the Rathbone Sisters lost the top of her costume while swinging from her trapeze. ''Everybody was rushing the stage and dancing in the aisles,'' says Francis Marinelli of Homestead, then a 15-year-old high school sophomore who butch-waxed his hair and shined his stepfather's Plymouth to impress his date, a senior cheerleader. Opposite: Elvis live in Miami in 1956

'You know the expression that somebody is treated `like a rock star.' Well, Elvis was treated like a super-nova rock star,'' says former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, then 19, who was standing in line near Parks.

PHENOMENON

In fact, no one in Miami had ever seen or heard anything quite like this big-shouldered kid with the three-octave vibrato, flopping forelock and agitated hips.

It was one thing to have watched him on TV -- even that embarrassing basset-hound serenade on The Steve Allen Show -- but who would have thought that Ellllvis!!!!! would just roll into town like any other tourist; well, any other tourist with a new lavender Lincoln. The car quickly was covered with lipsticked love notes and phone numbers, so Presley went shopping and paid $10,800 for a clean, white Continental.

''He was on his way to somewhere else,'' says biographer Peter Guralnick, who details the Miami gig in Last Train to Memphis. ``This was really the tail end of his touring of the South. He'd been doing that for almost two years. . . . But now, you know, the Florida tour was really an interlude on his way to making the first movie, which was, in essence, the end for almost 15 years of his career as a live performer.''

MORAL DEBATE

Though in some ways still the aw-shucks boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, in this summer of Don't Be Cruel, Presley was not only the hottest hit-parade idol since Sinatra but also, because of his smoked-velveteen voice and aerobic swivels, a moral lightning rod. Miami News columnist Herb Rau labeled him ''the biggest freak in modern show business history'' and suggested that his fans deserved "A SOLID SLAP ACROSS THE MOUTH.''

''Well, I genuinely think we were there listening to the music,'' says Graham. ''. . . Think of how many Elvis songs people still sing. It wasn't as if he was singing just throwaway trash, and he had a good voice. And so before you got to his, what would you call it? '' -- Sexiness? -- . . . he had a lot going for him.''

Still, McCool says, ``I've always wondered how much my mother liked him as an entertainer, or if she went with me because my parents wouldn't let me go by myself.''

''I'm not trying to look sexy,'' Presley insisted to Miami News reporters Damon Runyon Jr. and Bella Kelly. ``I move around because that's the way I feel when I sing.''

''He was really quite gentlemanly,'' Kelly said. ``I guess I expected him to walk like he danced, and he didn't.''

It is, of course, a curse of hindsight to realize that in that summer of 1956, Presley's life already was half over.

Fran Marinelli had his Olympia ticket stub framed, but he could not hang onto the cheerleader. ''I never saw her again,'' he says. ``It was my first experience at being an adolescent. She broke my heart.''

Joanne McCool saw Presley once more, at his Sportatorium concert a few months before he died in 1977. ''I have my ticket stub from then,'' she says. ``It was $15, and I was a single mother with three kids, and it took everything I had to scrape the money together, but, boy, was I going to go.''

Bob Graham had taken another young woman to the Olympia, but the first time he kissed Adele Khoury, his future wife, they were at Gainesville's old Suburbia drive-in watching a familiar, dark-haired figure in Love Me Tender.

Quote:

"Elvis Presley is the supreme socio-cultural icon in the history of pop culture"

(Dr. Gary Enders)

Quote:

"Elvis is the 'glue' which holds our society together....which subconciously gives our world meaning"

(Anonymous)

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"Eventually everybody has to die, except Elvis"

(humorist Dave Barry)

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"He is the "Big Bang", and the universe he detonated is still expanding, the pieces are still flying"

(Greil Marcus, "Dead Elvis")

Quote:

"I think Elvis Presley will never be solved"

(Nick Tosches)

Quote:

"He was the most popular man that ever walked on this planet since Christ himself was here"

(Carl Perkins)

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"When I first heard Elvis' voice I just knew I wasn't going to work for anybody...hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail"

(Bob Dylan)

Quote:

"When we were kids growing up in Liverpool, all we ever wanted was to be Elvis Presley"

(Sir Paul McCartney)

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"You can't say enough good things about Elvis. He was one of a kind"

(Johnny Cash)

Quote:

"And don't think for one moment he's just a passing fancy....he's got enough of it to keep him on top for a long time"

(R. Fred Arnold, Fury magazine, Aug 1957)

Quote:

"It isn't enough to say that Elvis is kind to his parents, sends money home, and is the same unspoiled kid he was before all the commotion began. That still isn't a free ticket to behave like a sex maniac in public"

(Eddie Condon, Cosmopolitan)

Elvis records reaching #2 & #3 on the Cashbox Pop Singles chart:

#2: A Fool Such As I (1959)

#2: A Big Hunk Of Love (1959)

#3: Hard Headed Woman (1958)

#3: One Night (1958)

#3: (You're The Devil) In Disguise (1963)

Elvis Facts:

Tickets for Elvis' show on March 29, 1957 in St. Louis cost $2.00 to $2.50

While in Germany Elvis was hospitalised with tonsillitis in October 1959

Despite being an illegal immigrant, photographic evidence shows Colonel Tom Parker traveled to Canada with Elvis in 1957

Elvis strongly believed there weren't enough good songs in King Creole to justify releasing a soundtrack album. RCA initially agreed, releasing two very successful EPs from the movie. A soundtrack LP eventually followed

During the 1960s Elvis had his own football team, Elvis Presley Enterprises, which played in the Memphis touch football league. In the 1962 final, EPE narrowly lost to Delta Automatic Transmission, 6-13

In Clambake, (Elvis) Scott Hayward's driving licence shows February 23, 1940...taking 5 years off Elvis' real age

In the 1970s Elvis was offered $5m to stage a concert in front of the Pyramids in Egypt. When the Colonel declined the offer, Saudi billionaires raised the offer to $10m