The cultural impact of Elvis Presley is hard to overstate; when he exploded on the scene, the whole phenomenon of youth entertainment exploded with him. John Lennon said: “before Elvis, there was nothing”. Now, whilst this might be an over-egged point, given that even in the ‘40s Frank Sinatra was inspiring devotion from teenage “Bobby soxers”, nonetheless there’s no doubting the cultural paradigm shift that Elvis launched. His records, his look, his moves, his ducktail quiff, his clothing…these all became embodiments of the new rock ‘n’ roll style, and, with economic prosperity putting more money into American teenagers’ pockets, it spread like wildfire.
This sensation didn’t occur overnight, however. By the end of 1955, Elvis had already recorded two dozen singles, but these were only hits on the Country and Western charts, not the main Billboard charts. That changed with his debut single for his new label, RCA Victor – Heartbreak Hotel. This time, Elvis did shoot to the top of the pop charts and stayed there for seven weeks, turning him into the darling of radio and record stores up and down the country. It was, however, television that truly made him the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll”, and if any one appearance might be called his coronation, it was this appearance on the Milton Berle Show on 5th June 1956, when he set his guitar aside and put his whole being into a scorching and scandalous performance of Hound Dog.
Previous television appearances had featured Elvis either in close-up, singing a slow ballad, or of his full body but with his movements somewhat restricted by the acoustic guitar he was playing. But here, for the first time, the 21-year-old Elvis Presley was seen from head to toe, gyrating his soon-to-be-famous (or infamous) pelvis.
You can bet that the reaction to Elvis’ performance in the mainstream media was almost uniformly negative. The New York Daily News described Presley’s performance as marked by “the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos”. The Journal-American said that Elvis “can’t sing a lick and makes up for vocal shortcomings with the weirdest suggestive animation short of an aborigine’s mating dance”. The Catholic weekly periodical, America, got right to the point, meanwhile, with its headline: “Beware of Elvis Presley”.
The complaints and concerns of these reactionaries, however, was pretty much drowned out by the screams of young girls, and by the end of 1956, when the Wall Street Journal was already commenting that “Elvis Presley is today a business”, they had to accept that the times had changed.