Tag Archives: Elvis Presley

The King is Dead: Long Live the King

Posted on by Steve Higgins

As you might have guessed from the title, this week’s theme is Kings. Not quite sure where I’m going to go with that but I thought I’d kick things off with a few words about the guy we’ve known until recently as Prince Charles. Now of course he is King Charles III so before I get to him, I’ll just backtrack and start with the original King Charles.

King Charles

The first King Charles was of course, Charles I. Charles fell out with Parliament over his idea of the divine right of Kings. He was determined to govern without the assent of Parliament and this led to civil war. Charles was defeated and ultimately executed in 1649. One of my favourite historical films was Cromwell in which Alec Guinness gives a wonderful performance as Charles.

Cromwell ruled the country as Lord Protector until his death in 1658. His son took over for a while but was not as successful as his father. Parliament then voted to restore the monarchy and in 1660 Charles II returned to Britain from exile in Europe. Charles, like his father, had his own disputes with Parliament and he too ended up dissolving parliament in 1681, ruling without them until his death in 1685. His last words were apparently to do with his mistress, Nell Gwyn. ‘Do not let poor Nell starve’, he is supposed to have said.

I’m not a great fan of the royals but I’ve always respected Queen Elizabeth. Her quiet dignity and bearing were an inspiration to many. Since her death in 2023 her son Charles has ascended to the throne and I’m happy to see that so far things seem to have continued just as they did before. There was a time when I thought the best way forward for this country was with a president but could a president unite the country in the way that the Queen and her son Charles have done? The Queen has shown herself to be above nationalism, party politics and religion in a way that a president could never do and I hope the new king will continue that tradition.

The Lion King

The Lion King is an animated Disney musical. It was produced in 1994 and was apparently inspired by the Shakespeare play Hamlet. The film features the voices of various well known actors including Matthew Broderick, James Earl Jones, Jeremy Irons and even Rowan Atkinson. The story concerns Simba, a lion cub, who is meant to succeed his father as King of the Pride Lands but he is tricked into thinking he is responsible for his father’s death by his uncle who is known as Scar. Scar assumes the leadership when Simba flees into exile.

The film started life as an animated drama but later evolved into a musical and features original songs by Elton John with lyrics by Tim Rice.

The King of Rock and Roll

On the 16th of August 1980, a young woman called Ginger Alden was disturbed when her boyfriend got up from bed to go to the bathroom. It was around 9am but the two had not gone to bed until 6am that morning. Ginger fell back to sleep but when she awoke, sometime after 2pm, her boyfriend was not there. She went to look for him and found him on the floor of the bathroom, dead. His name was Elvis Presley.

Elvis was the man who had transformed popular music and inspired a generation of musicians that came after him. It could be argued that he single handedly created the youth generation because before he came along there was no youth culture, you were either a child or an adult, there was nothing in-between.

Elvis was born in Tupelo, Mississippi on January 8th, 1935. The family moved to Memphis when he was 13 and the young Elvis went to school there graduating in June, 1953.

Elvis was a great music fan interested in rockabilly and rhythm and blues as well as southern gospel music. In 1953 and later in 1954, Elvis paid to have a disc made in the recording studios of Sun Records. The owner, Sam Phillips, was on the lookout for a performer who could bring a wider audience to the black music on which he focussed. He invited Presley to work with two musicians, guitarist Scotty Moore and upright bass player Bill Black. One great result of a session the new group had together was a recording of a song called That’s All Right. The record took off after it aired on local radio stations and along with live performances the small group began to take off locally.

In 1955 JD Fontana joined the group as their drummer and also Colonel Tom Parker took over as Presley’s manager, negotiating a recording contract with RCA. Elvis released Heartbreak Hotel in 1956 and it became a number 1 hit.

Presley created the rock n roll explosion but by the late 60s and early 70s he was no longer a driving force in music. Groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had moved the medium forward and Elvis, addicted to prescription drugs, was a bloated shadow of his former self. He died in the bathroom of his home in 1980.

Musical Interlude

When You Are a King.

 

The King of Hollywood.

Clark Gable was born on the 1st of February 1901 in a small town in Ohio. His mother died when he was only 10 months old and he lived with his uncle and aunt on their Pennsylvanian farm until his father remarried in 1903. He got on well with his stepmother who adored him but he left school aged 16 to work in the Firestone tyre company. He left home for good at the age of 21 after a row with his father who ridiculed his desire to become an actor.

His first wife, Josephine Dillon was 14 years older than him but she encouraged him to make the rounds of the film studios. With his second wife Ria, he moved to New York for work in the theatre and after some success was given a screen test by Irving Thalberg at MGM. Thalberg hated the test but even so, Gable was given a part in a western, The Painted Desert. As a result, Gable was given a second screen test which led to a contract at MGM.

His early films were of little note but a great success was Red Dust filmed in 1932 in which he starred with Jean Harlow. Gable played a plantation manager involved with Jean Harlow as a wisecracking prostitute and the film’s success made Gable MGM’s most important leading man.

In 1939 MGM loaned Gable to producer David O Selznick to play the part of Rhett Butler in Gone with The Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s story of the American Civil War. If ever there was a man born to play a part, Gable was born to play Rhett Butler, the dashing southern gentleman who falls for Scarlett O’Hara played, after a much publicised search, by Vivien Leigh.

Gable had a number of marriages, actually five in total, but the one that perhaps meant the most to him was his marriage to Carole Lombard. The two were a great match and married during the filming of Gone With the Wind. They bought a ranch in Encino, California and settled down to a happy life. When the USA entered the war, Lombard offered their services to the Government and the President felt that Gable could best serve the war effort by making patriotic war movies. Lombard went on a tour selling war bonds. On the last leg of her journey, returning to California by air, the aircraft crashed and all aboard were killed. Gable was devastated and not long afterwards volunteered for active service.

David Niven mentions the visits he had in England from Gable in his book Bring on the Empty Horses. His wife once found Clark in the garden of their small cottage, his head in his hands, crying for his dead wife.

Gable survived the war and in 1955 found love again with Kay Williams, marrying for the last time. His last picture was playing the part of a modern day cowboy in The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift. Every day he came on set on time and knowing all his lines but usually was kept waiting while Monroe and Clift, both with troubles of their own, were either late or failed to appear.

He died of a heart attack not long after the film was completed. His pregnant wife gave birth to a son after his death.

Martin Luther King Jr

Martin Luther King Jr was an American Baptist minister and was one of the leaders of the US civil rights movement in the 1960s. He led marches and non violent protests for the right to vote, for desegregation and other civil rights. In 1963 he led a march to Washington where he gave his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech.

The head of the FBI considered King a communist sympathiser and a dangerous radical. They spied on his private life and bugged his phones. King won the Nobel peace prize in 1964.

In 1968 he was planning more protests in Washington when he was assassinated.

Sources: Elvis, We Love You Tender by Dee Presley. Clark Gable: In His Own Words compiled by Neil Grant and Wikipedia.

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Writing and What Happened in 1977

Posted on by Steve Higgins

1977 was a different world. There was no internet and there were no mobile phones. The only phones were landlines and they were big and heavy with great rotary dials with which you had to laboriously dial a number. As more people wanted telephones they needed more numbers and so numbers got longer and longer. 061, the dialling code for Manchester became 0161 and the code for London which was 01 became two new codes 071 and 081

I should tell you that I’m actually quite interested in telephones, especially those big heavy ones with a dial. I used to collect them and in fact I have quite a few; my two favourites are an old Bakelite phone from the 1940s and a Trimphone from the 1970s. The Trimphone was a new style telephone created by BT. It was a wedge-shaped light phone and the handset fitted neatly across the dial. Although it’s a phone I’ve always associated with the 1970’s, it was actually first introduced in 1965 and had a warbling ring tone instead of the traditional bell. The original versions had a green dial which lit up in the dark although this was discontinued due to concerns about radiation as the phosphorous which gave off the green glow was energised by a small tube of tritium gas which was mildly radioactive. Personally, I wouldn’t have thought anything could be ‘mildly’ radioactive but happily my two trimphones do not glow in the dark.

Anyway, time for a 1970’s telephone anecdote:

Once in 1977 I had a bit of a crush on a girl named Anne. I was a bus driver and my conductor had gone out with Anne a few times before moving on to someone else. I asked my friend Des for her number and I called her up one evening. I didn’t have a phone so I had to use a call box. I dialled the number and the phone rang for quite a while and finally someone answered.

‘Can I speak to Anne’ I asked.

‘Anne?’ said the voice.

‘Yes, Anne. Tell her it’s Steve.’

‘Steve?’ said the voice.

‘Yes, Steve.’

‘Just a minute.’

I could hear someone in the background asking who is it? And someone saying it’s for Anne and I had the feeling then that Des was playing a trick on me but hopefully the girl, whoever she was, had gone to fetch Anne.

A vintage bakelite telephone bought in France

I waited for quite a while and soon the pips went on the phone and I had to put more money in. I was still hanging on when the pips went again and in went my last coin. After what seemed like ages Anne came to the phone. I told her I didn’t have any money left so I quickly asked her out, she agreed and we set a place to meet, just before the phone finally cut off. When I finally went out with Anne, she told me that the phone wasn’t hers, it was her auntie’s phone and her auntie lived around the corner so Anne’s cousin had to nip round to Anne’s house, tell her there was a phone call and bring her back to the phone!

I remember telling Des about it and he laughed his head off. ‘Why didn’t you tell me it was her Auntie’s phone, you twit?’ I said.  Des just laughed even more.

Anne was the template for the character of Anne in my book Floating in Space. Floating was set in the year 1977 and as I mentioned earlier there was no internet, there were no mobile phones and wireless was an old-fashioned name for the radio. What else happened in 1977?

Jimmy Carter was the 39th President of the USA and he had won the election the previous year, taking office on January 20th, 1977. He was a peanut farmer who defeated President Gerald Ford who had served as President after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974. As I write this, Carter is currently the oldest living former President.

In the UK the Prime Minister was Jim Callaghan. According to Wikipedia, he was the only Prime Minister to have held all the four main offices of state; Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary and of course, Prime Minister.

A previous Prime Minister, Anthony Eden died in 1977.

Today’s blog is my 578th post over here on WordPress. It’s my 578th time of reaching out and showing readers a little of my work and hoping it might stimulate a few of you to click the links above and perhaps buy a copy of one of my books.

Creativity is important to everyone and my creative outlet is here in these weekly pages. For others it might be painting or photography. It might be working on a car or motorbike or even a little woodwork or home improvement. Creativity can take many forms, even making a post on Facebook can be creative. If you are on holiday and take a picture of a sunset and make it into a post, that is creativity. You can even take it further, crop the picture, add a filter to the image. Add a quote, Oscar Wilde is always good for one and so is Noel Coward or the big daddy of the written word; Shakespeare. The more you add the more creative you are. You can even write more on the post, another sentence, another paragraph, even another page. Soon you are on the way to a chapter, then more chapters and in time you will find that you have written a book. You’ve become a writer which, let’s face it, is a big achievement but then you need to write more, you need more pages, more chapters and more ideas.

Some people might write more than 578 posts, others may fall by the wayside after a mere eight, after all we all have things to do, jobs, work, life. All of that gets in the way.

Perhaps it’s time to get back to 1977:

On the 16th August 1977 at 6am, it was time for Elvis Presley to get some sleep. Night and day were reversed in Elvis’ world. He spent most of the night awake doing all the things he wanted to do. If he wanted to see a film at the cinema, he paid the cinema to run a film for him and his friends at night. He ate and played games at night, like the racketball he played with his step brothers and friends before going to bed that morning.

His fiancée, Ginger Alden was with him and Elvis who had trouble sleeping, took his usual assortment of sleeping pills before turning in. Sometime around 9am, Elvis awoke and told Ginger he was going to the bathroom. His bathroom was huge and he had made it into a truly personal and private place. In the bathroom was a circular shower. One wall was mirrored and fringed with those lightbulbs that one sees on the dressing table of a stage or film star and Elvis’ toilet things were clustered around the basin. The room was carpeted in purple and as well as a circular shower there was a couch and a TV set.

Elvis may have been sat on a chair reading The Shroud of Turin by Ian Wilson or he may have been using the toilet however, sometime during the morning he keeled over and fell face down to the floor wearing only a pair of blue cotton pyjamas. Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll had died.

A few months before Elvis died, my friend Chris and I decided to pack in our jobs and travel to Spain and look for work there. His sister had already made the trip and assured Chris that there was a big British contingent and plenty of jobs available in bars and restaurants. Accommodation was readily available too. Chris and I hitchhiked to London where we caught the boat train to Paris. We wandered about in Paris trying to get a ride further south but after waiting for days trying to get a lift, we caught the train down to Spain.

We had a big reunion in a place called Lloret de Mar with Chris’ sister. Two Scots guys fixed us up with a pension, a small place to live and we met them later in the bar and bought them drinks as a thank you. After a while I became a little fed up of buying them drinks, yes, they’d helped us get a place to stay but that didn’t mean I was committed to providing them with free beer for the rest of my life.

I’m not sure they appreciated being told that and afterwards even though Chris got on with them pretty well, I didn’t. The incident contributed towards a certain unpopularity on my part in the local community but at least it kept the cadgers from mythering me. Still, other newcomers to Lloret were pretty popular, they had money in their pockets and the local Brits didn’t.

Quite a few notable people died in 1977. Groucho Marx, Joan Crawford, Wernher von Braun, Roberto Rossellini, Marc Bolan and of course, Elvis Presley.

I stayed in Lloret for two weeks and it was fun. Every night was like a Saturday night but after two weeks I realised I didn’t just want Saturday nights. Sometimes I wanted a normal Tuesday night watching TV. Sometimes I wanted a Sunday night and my mother’s Sunday dinner and sometimes I wanted a rainy Thursday afternoon. After a few weeks in the sun I left Chris in Lloret, hitchhiked north through France and finally back to Manchester.

We didn’t have a telephone at home so I couldn’t call to say I was on my way back. I always remember knocking on the door of our house. Mum opened the door and said ‘What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be gone for six months. ‘It didn’t work out Mum,’ I told her.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do. I threw your old bed out!’

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10 Things you didn’t know about American Pie

Posted on by Steve Higgins

71WZbVhqbkL._SL1300b_Well, here’s the first thing that perhaps you didn’t know; The lyrics to American Pie, or more correctly, writer Don McLean’s sixteen page original draft of the song was sold recently at an auction in the USA for 1.2 million dollars, that’s £806,000 for us here in the UK. That’s a hell of a lot for a few song lyrics but to be fair, American Pie has the most interesting and fascinating lyrics of any pop song ever.

American Pie debuted in 1972 and reached number 2 in the UK charts. I didn’t really get interested in music until 1973 when I started buying singles but also, in that same year, a magazine was launched in the UK called ‘The Story of Pop’ and in one of the issues there was a lengthy article about the song and what it meant and ever since then I’ve been fascinated by the lyrics and what they may or may not mean.

The day the music died

This is generally thought to refer to Buddy Holly’s sad death in 1959 at the age of 22. Holly was only at the beginning of his career and would have gone on to greater success. Even so, he was inducted into the rock n roll hall of fame in 1986.

The Jester

The Jester is Bob Dylan and the coat he borrowed from James Dean can be seen on the cover of Dylan’s album ‘The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.’

The King

The King is of course the King of rock n roll, Elvis Presley, and it was his crown that the Jester stole when the King was looking down.

The beginning of the song looks back to a golden time for Don McLean, the fifties and the birth of rock n roll and artists like Presley and Holly. The sixties gave birth to a new freedom for young people and it was expressed in music and in the use of drugs like marihuana. No wonder the ‘half time air was sweet perfume!’

The Sergeants played a marching tune

The Beatles are the Sergeants, fresh, no doubt, from their Sergeant Pepper album.

I saw Satan laughing with delight, the day the music died

Jack Flash is the Rolling Stone’s Mick Jagger and it is he that McLean sees as Satan. ‘No angel born in hell could break that Satan’s spell.’

This part of the song refers to the Rolling Stones’ concert at Altamont Speedway in northern California. The event was a free one and was anticipated as a sort of ‘Woodstock west’. Various bands played including Santana, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and The Grateful Dead. The fans however, were stoned on drugs and drink and the atmosphere deteriorated, so much so that the Grateful Dead declined to play. The local chapter of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang were hired, supposedly, to take care of security but they later denied this and said they had been promised $500 dollars’ worth of beer merely to keep people away from the stage.

During the concert a fan by the name of Meredith Hunter was killed by a Hells Angel. Hunter had tried to get on the stage during the Stones performance and the Hells Angels had pushed him away. Hunter returned and pulled out a revolver from his jacket. Hells Angel Alan Pissaro charged Hunter; pushed the gun aside and stabbed him. The incident was caught by a film crew which helped Pissaro’s self-defence plea later on in court. Pisarro was acquitted. The clock had turned full circle from the innocence of the fifties to the disillusionment of the late sixties and Don Mclean’s classic song is a wonderful and lyrical evocation of the times.

Click on the video below and enjoy American Pie for yourself.

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Elvis, Charlie Chaplin, and Justin Beiber.

Posted on by Steve Higgins

Elvis, Charlie Chaplinand Justin BeiberAs I’ve mentioned many times before, I write because I’m a writer. That’s what I do, I write and I’ve been writing since I was a school kid. Something else that comes hand in hand with writing is the idea that one day; one fine distant day, I might just get somewhere and get my book published and actually become an actual fully fledged, bona fide writer. Of course, when that happens it will bring a degree of fame which I can imagine being pretty nice. You know what I mean, going into a restaurant and the staff know me and say stuff like ‘the manager would like you to have this bottle of expensive wine on the house’, and ‘could you sign this menu’ and people asking you for an autograph and maybe being interviewed on TV about my latest book (whoa, steady on there!) Anyway, stuff like that.

Of course fame in some ways can be something of a prison. I don’t think life was that great for Elvis Presley for instance. Elvis turned his whole life upside down to escape the pressures of fame. He slept all day and came awake at night. He would hire a whole cinema to run the latest movie for him and his friends. He hired bowling alleys and fairgrounds to open up, during the night, just so he could enjoy life away from the attention of his fans.

picture from flickr

picture from flickr

Another famous man and probably the most famous man there ever was, was Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin had a fame almost a hundred years ago that perhaps no one will ever realise again because Chaplin’s movies went all around the globe. People anywhere could understand Chaplin because his movies were silent. All you needed to understand them was the universal language of laughter. People in Russia, Japan, China, the Ukraine and countless places across the globe laughed and cried with Charlie, as well as moviegoers from the USA and Europe.

Chaplin became a rich man and he hung on to his riches by building his own studio and producing and directing all his films. He did one other thing as well. In an age when a movie had a shelf life of a few months at the most, when no one thought about saving or preserving films for another age of moviegoers, Charlie did just that, he secured the rights to the negatives of all his movies and ensured they lived on into the age of TV, video, DVD, and the modern digital age.

I do love the Golden age of Hollywood and do think sometimes about visiting America to see Chasens’, Romanovs, The Brown Derby, Schwab’s drugstore, Pickfair, The Goldwyn Studios, and even Chaplin’s old studio that he built for himself on the corner of La Brea and Sunset in Hollywood in 1917.

The thing is, out of the above list only one remains. Chaplin’s studios, now owned by Jim Henson and complete with a statue of Kermit the frog on the front gate, in Chaplin’s tramp costume of course.

Who today has the fame that Chaplin enjoyed? Well, out of interest I did a quick search on google and the results were these; Number 1 is Michael Jackson even though he is no longer with us, followed by Lady Gaga, Justin Beiber and Jennifer Aniston. Completing the top ten are Eminem, Johnny Depp, Will Smith, Katy Perry, Beyoncé and Leonardo DiCaprio. Not a completely inspiring list is it? I wonder which of those celebrities, if any, will be fondly remembered in 2114?

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