Free Screening Room by Alan Lightman Page A

lead and one rhythm, keyboards, a stringed bass, and a drum set.Rock and roll had a boogie-woogie beat, with a backbeat slyly slipped in by a snare drum. An early devotee of rock and roll was my mother. For most of the 1950s and 1960s, she taught a dance class to teenagers and stayed current with the latest “Memphis sound,” as well as with the older waltzes, tangos, and fox trots. I remember watching her with her students, laughing and swaying as if she were sixteen years old, barefoot and with a ribbon in her hair. If the record player stopped, she would sing the rest of the song.
    Sometimes on Saturday mornings, Joel and I would make a pilgrimage to Sun Studio, just to stand outside quietly and pay tribute. White guys and black guys went in and out carrying guitars and saxophones. It was a modest two-story red-brick building with green awnings over the second-floor windows, a semicircle of neon letters spelling “SUN” above the front door, and a painted sign on the side of the building reading “Free Parking in the Rear.” From looking at the building, there was no way to know the tidal waves of music set moving there.
    One Saturday morning in the summer of 1953, an eighteen-year-old kid named Elvis Presley walked into Sun Studio with a cheap guitar and sang for Sam Phillips. At the time, Elvis was living with his family in Lauderdale Courts, a federally subsidized housing project in Memphis. Although Sam Phillips needed a year to digest the new sound he’d heard, he was impressed. For some time, he had been looking for a white man who could sing black. Phillips later commented that “Elvis had sex written all over him from the day he walked in the door.”
    In 1954, Phillips decided that Elvis was what he was looking for and recorded Elvis’s first song, “That’s All Right, Mama.”

G.I. Blues
    At the time Elvis first performed for Sam Phillips, he was working as an usher at the Loew’s Palace movie house, a few blocks away from Malco Theater.
    Malco Theater, the flagship movie house in M.A. Lightman’s empire, was a grand establishment on the corner of Main Street and Beale. Its interior—with plush carpets, a terrazzo tile floor in the lobby, ornate carved moldings on the ceilings, crystal chandeliers, and sweeping banisters leading up to the gilded balconies—resembled a nineteenth-century German opera house more than an American cinema. The theater proper was an enormous cavern with 2,500 seats and majestic walls rising thirty feet up to the balconies and another twenty to the filigreed ceiling. Standing inside the space felt like lying on your back in the basin of the Grand Canyon. At this time, in the 1950s, a grand Wurlitzer organ played for fifteen minutes between the two films of a double feature. Until the intermission, the organ hid in the orchestra pit near the stage. Then, at the appointed moment, the magnificent instrument, along with the organist, would slowly rise on a platform, illuminated by a spotlight.
    During his breaks as an usher at the Palace, Elvis would sometimes wander through the doors of Malco. There, he befriended Paul Schaffer, who worked in Malco’s booking department. Schaffer was a friendly, husky former football player. He also had a mischievous bent. When my grandfather and father playedhorror movies at one of their Memphis cinemas, Schaffer would don a Dracula costume and entertain crowds in front of the theater from a flatbed truck. On one occasion, Schaffer scared some of the local residents so badly that they went screaming down the street calling for the archangel St. Michael. On another, a badly frightened woman, not having a wooden stake handy, fired a pistol in Schaffer’s direction. Fortunately, she was a terrible shot, and the bullet only shattered the window of an unoccupied room in the Chisca Hotel.

    ( photo credit 17.1 )

    ( photo credit 17.2 )
    “Elvis was generous to his friends,” says Lennie. “After he was making money faster than a boll weevil