Yeah, we were told that Elvis wasn’t discovered as such at all! He was just some freaky-looking kid always making a nuisance of himself around Sun Studios and nobody wanted to know him. Like here’s this guy who dyed his fuckin’ eyebrows and dressed in black pimp clothes—and this was the ‘50s in the South, you’ve got to remember—and Sam Phillips and all the session guys thought he was some disgusting little faggot!
However Elvis did have this one piece of luck. His mother, right, had a really bad weight problem and the doctor prescribed her this enormous supply of diet pills which just happened to be… these pills were just pure benzedrine, right, which is a very potent form of speed.
And all those Sun guys just lived on speed, man. So when Phillips found out that Elvis could get bottles of these things, he let him hang around. So, like, here was Elvis every week bringing huge bottles of these pills to the guys at Sun until, as he was the studio’s main source of supply for speed, Phillips was more or less obliged to let him cut a record.
So like, rock ‘n’ roll was born simply because Elvis Presley was Sun Records’ number one speed dealer.
Lux Interior
So, lemme get this straight… The Cramps recorded with Elvis at Sun Studios so they could get speed?
Hmmm…. I feel like Guralnick would’ve gotten that scoop somewhere along the line.
This sounds like something Alex Chilton told Lux to fuck with him.
With all due respect to Lux’s work with the Cramps, he was full of shit.
Anyway, the Presleys were too poor to support other people’s speed habits. I think I read somewhere that Elvis would raid Gladys’ diet pill supply when he started touring, but even then, that stuff was readily available elsewhere. Lux was right that those guys lived on that stuff, especially on tour.