"ELVIS PRESLEY SPEAKS"

Another brilliant magazine of-its-time printed by 'Rave Publishing' another early magazine - of 68 pages- totally devoted to America's newest pop-sensation.

Going to print in late June, Elvis' up-coming July 4 1965 Russwood Park concert is noted but there is no mention of Hound Dog or Don't Be Cruel.

Written by Memphis Press-Scimitar journalist Robert Johnson - with photographs by Robert Williams (Memphis Commercial Appeal).

The front cover notes

Read his own story in his own words

Plus 100 New pictures

At the Las Vegas New Frontier Hotel.. because the teenagers couldn't see the regular shows and were clamoring to be appeased, the management put on a special Saturday afternoon Show.

Compared to the earlier Freddy Martin Orchestra "sophisticates" concerts, the carnage was terrific. They pushed and shoved to get into the 1000-seat room and several hundred thwarted youngsters buzzed like angry hornets out-side.

After the show, bedlam! A laughing, shouting, idolatrous mob swarmed him: He fled to the insufficient sanctuary of his suite. The door wouldn't hold them out. They got his shirt, shredded it. A triumphant girl seized a button, clutched it as tho it was a diamond.
A squadron of police had to be called in to clear the field.

A dazed older woman who had been bowled over in the teen-age tidal wave was discussing it incredulously at a bar, over a glass of medicinal beverage to calm her jangled nerves:
"My gawd what those kids did to the ladies room! Lipstick all over the walls . . . baskets turned over and the paper strewn around . . . it looked like a wrecking crew had just finished."

Elvis laughed about it. "Shucks," he said, "it wasn't near as bad as some of the times. Like when they threw rocks in the bus windows so they could grab at me and try to get autographs. The roughest was in Texas. I got scratched all over my back."

Elvis says the later occasion when wire services carried stories about his show being stopped before it was over when the kids charged the stage, and drummer DJ Fontana being thrown in the pit were exaggerated. "There wasn't any pit there", he said. "And I finished my song, altho I did get out in a hurry. I made a new door where one should have been."

How does Elvis feel about this violent affection from his fans?
"Well, I have to defend myself but honestly I love it. They're the ones who like me, and they're just trying to show it."

At Las Vegas with Elvis as valet-companion was his cousin, Gene Smith. Gene's duties are somewhat vague, but he's supposed to take care of the clothes. Mostly, too, it seemed that Elvis just wanted some company.

Elvis in a night club is somehow strange. He doesn't drink or smoke, and he told me he doesn't dance either, aside from what he does in his act.

Mrs. Keisker once told me that soon after Elvis made his first record, he went to Nashville with her and Sam Phillips, and that they went to a roadhouse where Sam wanted to scout some talent.
""There was some drinking at neighbouring tables," Mrs. Keisker said, "and it wasn't a very nice place. Elvis leaned over to me and asked if it would be all right for him to go out and wait in the car.
"He told me, 'My mother didn't raise me to be in a place like this.' "

One thing about his May trip to Las Vegas pleased Elvis - it never goes to sleep. He had company during those long night hours, and night had become like day to him.

He roamed around, caught some of the shows, especially the Four Lads, whom he likes a lot. He never dropped a nickel in a slot machine while he was there.
"It don't appeal to me," he said.
"I'm trying to save.
You know when I first began to get some money, I bought a lot of things I had always wanted. Like cars. My father saw we never went hungry, but - well, you know I never had a lot.

"I did some of the things I never could do before —and believe me it's been fun.
You ask me what I like to do now. . . Well, I'm just having fun when I get the time, but I don't have much time. Like this afternoon, I'm going over and ride the little scooter cars in the amusement park.
"I guess I enjoy dating more than anything. Is that wrong? I think I'd be crazy if I didn't. I like to take a girl out and look around and have fun."

Elvis spent most of his spare time riding the scooter cars.
He rode the little cars every hour he was free in Vegas, spent over $100 on rides for his friends, some girlfriends and himself.
Elvis is fearful that his friends will think he has been changed by what happened to him.

"I want the folks back home to think right of me. Just because I managed to do a little something, I don't want anyone back home to think I've got the big head."
But he knows in his heart that some things have changed.
"I can't just do like I did."

At Las Vegas, the hotel announcing system was calling his name almost constantly. Long distance from all over the country. Girls, and some women old enough to be his mother.
So there has to be a buffer of people around him  - an entourage to give him some free time, protect him from the girl who was just sitting and thinking about him and just had to call him up and sure, 'you remember me, Elvis, I was the one in the blue dress that night, you gotta remember'.

His sleeping and walking hours are turned upside down by his work, aside from his own inability to sleep easily.
Elvis Presley enterprises have become big business, and there has to be some time for talking with his manager, Col. Tom Parker, and making decisions. He has to look over new music possibilities.
In his first year, Elvis did remarkably well. In his second, he will gross between $800,000 and a million dollars.
About $10,000 a week goes to him.

Is he saving?
"Yes, I'm saving. My money goes in the bank, and every three months we make a payment on my income tax. I'm not spending it all.
"I couldn't live the rest of my life on what I've got - not the way I want to live - but I could go quite a few years."

The pressure of the job is terrific. He becomes intensely nervous from lack of sleep and strain. He is alternately intensely interested in something, or quickly bored.

Does he realize that other stars have glowed, and then burned out?
"Sure, I know. It may not last forever. But this didn't happen all at once. Since the beginning, when I first began, it was just the same. The only difference, the crowds are bigger now.
I know it can end, but it won't happen all at once, either. I can always make a living on the road.
What I really want, though, is to be a good actor."

What kind of music does he like other than his own?
"All kinds. I like Crosby, Como, Sinatra, all the big ones. They had to be good to get there. I've always been kind of partial to Dean Martin. I like the Four Lads.
And I'm real partial to good religious quartets -  like the Stamps and the Blackwood Brothers. I've loved that kind of music ever since I was a boy, and especially if there's a real good bass singer.
I'm going to record some religious music one of these days."

Elvis' singing is something unique to himself.
The critics have noted that Louis Armstrong sings as he phrases on a trumpet, that Sinatra's style was influenced by the trombone of his early Dorsey days.
Elvis, with his broken syllables and strange vocal effects, uses his voice like the guitar he has carried since he was a boy. If the critics had looked at it for what it was, an uncultivated but genuine music, on the level with folk music, and if they had looked at it without preconceived prejudices, they might have come to some different conclusions.
But Elvis took a beating in print.

And how did it affect him?
"I don't like it but I have to expect it, I guess," he said.
He shrugs it off - but he has every unkind, bitter, cruel word he has ever come across about himself in a scrap book.
His mother and father keep it for him.
And seldom has there been such a wholesale disregard for the power of the press. 

The press criticized, and Elvis was the No. 1 attraction in the country - stage, records, TV.

One thing which may interfere.
"I'm 1-A in the draft," Elvis said. "I'll go when I have to, of course, but I would like a little more time the way things are. It'll be quite a drop - from $10,000 a week to $74 a month."

Elvis may have to improve his vocabulary. He knows it, and he is acquiring some polish as he rubs against a world bigger than the one he grew up in. He uses a double negative occasionally, and he drops his g's.

He does not talk, in my opinion, like the caricature of hillbilly and hepcap whose jargon has been placed in his mouth so often. He talks so naturally that, unless you're just looking for something freakish, ordinarily you wouldn't think a whole lot about his occasional lapses in grammar.

The Army might possibly be the best thing which could happen to Elvis, although how his nonconformist personality would fit in is a question. But it might give him some time to rest, think, learn self-discipline. He might even enjoy it.
Right now, home still means more than anything to Elvis.
"I'm just a home boy at heart" he says.

And a typical gesture of his generosity was his recent donation of his services free for a big charity show in Memphis. With Col. Parker's concurrence, they picked out July 4 - one of the biggest days in the year for them - and canceled out another date in order to play it.

Then Elvis went one further.
"I've got a ring," he said. "It's a pretty good ring $600 my initials in diamonds. Do you suppose if I gave it as a door prize, it would help us make more money?"

Elvis doesn't write often, but calls his mother and father several times a week. One night when he was playing in Virginia, there was a terrific storm, and he called three times to be sure everything was all right back home.
He still identities himself with his old neighbor-hood, his old friends.

"Not long ago," said his father, "a little 15-year-old girl had a heart attack and dropped dead at one of the schools. Elvis saw it in the paper. She was just a child when he knew her, back in Lauderdale Courts, and he hadn't seen her in several years.
"But he sat around all that night thinking about it. He woke us at 3 in the morning and said he just had to have some company it was worrying him so."

In some ways Elvis is very naive. He likes to read mysteries occasionally, but very little else. He can't sit still long enough. He wants to be on the go.
He'll charter a plane just to get back home a few hours earlier.

His old friends don't have cars, so Elvis gets in one of his Cadillacs and goes to get them, brings them over to his house. It's headquarters for a whole gang of boys.
They stage boxing matches on the patio, play pool in his den.

We were sitting in his newest Cadillac the day he got it while he tried out the air conditioning when a group approached.
"Let me get rid of these little girls," he said. He didn't say it impatiently or unkindly. He opened the window, said, "Say, can I have your autograph?" before they even got their mouths open.

One dusk, with about a dozen youngsters clustered about his patio, he gave in interview to two young ladies, ages 13 and 14, who wanted to write it for their Elvis Presley Fan Club magazine.
"Who's my favorite actress? - Lassie," he said with a straight face, watching them out of the corners of his eyes. Then he broke into laughter.
He talked to them a half-hour or so, told them his favorites are Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger, James Dean, Glen Ford and John Wayne among men stars, Natalie Wood, Doris Day and Kathryn Grayson among women.

By the time he was thru, the entire crown of youngsters had made themselves completely at home, were borrowing the telephone, going into the house for water.

This goes on all the time. Mrs. Presley says she doesn't mind much.
"After all, they like my boy," she said.
But it does get discouraging when they call long distance or knock on the door at 3 a.m.
The phone is unlisted and the number has been changed frequently, but the number somehow leaks out.

"The most expensive thing I've bought is our home," he said.
It is a very nice home - in about the $40,000 class - but far from lavish or pretentious.
But the most important thing about it is that it's home.
That's why he put those Cadillacs in the driveway. 

The Golden Boy of Song - Elvis Presley.
Young man, riding on a cloud.
Reaching out for a star. . .
Hoping it won't turn out to be a brass ring.