Bill Haley & Elvis Presley - October 20, 1955
Perhaps the most eagerly sought after rock ‘n’ roll artifact
is a short concert film that was shot at a high school auditorium in a suburb
of Cleveland, Ohio, on October 20, 1955.
Not only is the whereabouts of this film unknown, but it has never been publicly
screened.
Most of the interest in it
stems from its inclusion of a five-song set performed by Elvis Presley, which
almost didn’t get filmed at all.
Cleveland disc jockey Bill Randle had established himself as
the nation’s leading D.J. at the time and had been written up as such in Time magazine, no less. In addition to his six-days-a-week radio show
on Cleveland’s WERE Radio, Randle also hosted a Saturday afternoon show out of
New York. Like his contemporary
Cleveland D.J. Alan Freed, Randle was in the vanguard of disc jockeys who
played the new hybrid music that was quickly becoming known as rock ‘n’
roll. Indeed, Freed laid claim to
coining the very phrase “rock ‘n’ roll” and was so successful that he had moved
from Cleveland to New York, where he was a leading radio voice and concert
promoter, always cultivating both white and black performers while championing
the new music.
Randle was introduced to Elvis by fellow WERE D.J. Tommy
Edwards during Elvis’ first sojourn north, which had taken him to Cleveland in
February 1955. There, Elvis created a
sensation at the Circle Theater and was interviewed on the air by Randle, who
also played some of his Sun Records recordings.
When Elvis returned to Cleveland the following October, Randle had set
up a film shoot at Brooklyn High School that included Bill Haley and His Comets, who had scored rock's first mega-hit with "Rock Around the Clock," Pat Boone, who had already
scored his first number one hit, the Four Lads, a Canadian quartet whose
records also had scaled the charts, and Patricia
Wright, also from Canada, who had scored a hit record with the somewhat unsettling
title "Man in a Raincoat." Elvis
was the only act on the bill without a national hit, nor was he well
known outside the south.
The film short, perhaps
the first rock ‘n’ roll concert film, was shot by a crew from
Universal International Pictures and directed by Arthur Cohen, who had seen
Elvis perform the previous evening, again the Circle Theater, and was decidedly
unimpressed. He was even less sanguine about Elvis during rehearsals
the following day and ultimately refused to film Presley, considering him unworthy of the expense. Randle stepped in and offered to pay those
costs himself and also arranged to pay cameraman Jack Barnett out of his own
pocket. Thus, one of Elvis’ earliest
live performances was preserved on film, months before his first national
television appearance and even longer before his first hit record climbed the
charts. It was also Randle who introduced Elvis to the nation on his first TV appearance in January, 1956, on Stage Show, hosted by Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey.
In the Brooklyn auditorium, Elvis reportedly performed five
songs: “That’s All Right,” “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “Good Rockin’
Tonight,” “Mystery Train,” and “I Forgot to Remember to Forget.”
Pat Boone, who waited, with increasing
trepidation, in the wings before following Elvis on stage, later recalled his
surprise at how powerfully Elvis electrified the audience, only losing them
when he attempted to engage them in patter that Boone described as hopelessly
“hillbilly.”
Boone also recalled how
difficult it was for him to win over the audience after they’d seen Elvis.
A second performance was filmed that night at
St. Michael’s Hall, where there were no teachers present to restrain girls from
screaming, rushing the stage, and generally going mad.
Randle reported that Elvis broke his guitar
strings, smashed the instrument on the floor, which resulted in complete
pandemonium.
Randle called it “mass
hysteria.”
Bill Randle, Scotty Moore, Elvis, & Bill Black
Filming was to have continued the following month in New
York, with big band and jazz artists like Benny Goodman and Stan Kenton. However, a strike by the electricians union
shut down production and the film was never completed. Its subsequent fate remains a mystery with
few clues. Although shot by Universal,
no trace of the film or any records relating to it have ever been found in the
studio’s archive. No copyright for the
film has ever been registered under any of the film’s reported tentative
titles, which include The Pied Piper of
Cleveland, A Day in the Life of a
Famous Disc Jockey (sometimes cited merely the film’s subtitle), and Top Jock, a title Randle himself used in
a newspaper column he wrote shortly after the Cleveland concert had been
filmed. Reportedly, some 48 minutes of
footage was shot and was either edited to around 15 minutes, or was planned to
run no longer than that. The short running time and two of the prospective
titles suggest that the film may have focused on Randle, rather than the
performers.
In January 1993, People
magazine reported that Randle had sold the
rights to the movie short for a reported $1.9 million to a British production
company, which later sold it to Polygram for $2.2 million. Randle reportedly retained a copy of the
film, or at least some of the footage, or at least implied as much in later
interviews. An October 29, 2005, NPR radio broadcast included an excerpt from a
1978 Randle telephone interview with Pat Boone, which included the following
exchange:
Boone: “I refer to Cleveland
as the cradle of my career because it was there, you were there, certainly you
were the midwife. There’s a film, what, in the Universal vaults?”
Randle: “That’s
right, MCA. Somewhere, somebody’s going to go through that untouched film and
they’re going to find 14-and-a-half minutes of yourself, Bill Haley and the
Comets, and Elvis Presley and (chuckling) it’s going to be worth around a
quarter of a million dollars.”
Randle is also heard in an
unidentified, undated interview clip from a “local TV station”, likely from
early 1993, following the People
magazine story, which is mentioned:
Interviewer: “Now, you’ve just
most recently sold it to a British combine?”
Randle: “Very deep pocket
British . . . .”
Interviewer: “And, according
to the People magazine, they paid you
$1.9 million . . . .”
Randle: “Oh, that’s tabloid,
you know.”
Interviewer: “When will we
ever see that? They now have it and they’ll probably work it into some kind of
a project along the way.”
Randle: “They’re working on
the definitive Elvis Presley.”
Randle gave similar accounts
up until his death in 2004 at the age of 81 and most of what we think we know
about the film comes from Randle, whose stories varied with the years and were
sometimes contradictory. The Pied Piper of Cleveland remains
missing and may no longer exist. At
least on report claims that its soundtrack was destroyed somewhere along the
way. Nonetheless, even a brief glimpse
of the unbridled Elvis Presley late in 1955, before he had been absorbed into
the mainstream, would be among the most important images we might have of the
man. A few early clips of him have
survived, but this footage truly remains the holy grail of rock ‘n’ roll. The search goes on.
