On July 5th, 1954, a 19-year-old truck driver walked into a small Memphis studio with no plan to change music forever. The session was going nowhere. The songs weren’t working. Frustrated and tired of trying, he stopped taking it seriously. During a break, he picked up an old blues song just to pass the time….
Los Angeles, 1973. Television specials in the early 1970s occupied a particular space in the entertainment landscape that no longer exists in quite the same way. an occasion, a genuine event, something that people arranged their evenings around because the medium was still young enough that certain combinations of performers on a single stage felt…
July 14th, 1960. Elvis Presley walked into a small neighborhood barber shop in downtown Memphis, wearing sunglasses and a hat, hoping for an hour of anonymity. What he heard in that chair from a barber who had no idea who he was cutting would stay with him for the rest of his life. And what…
Vincent Duca had been a paparazzi for 3 years and he was good at it. He knew how to blend into crowds, knew which celebrities frequented which restaurants, knew that scandal sold better than straight news. He’d made decent money photographing aldermen with mistresses, judges at strip clubs, society wives shopping in stores they couldn’t…
That’s very sweet, honey. But real performers spend years, decades, even perfecting their craft in professional environments. You don’t just wake up one day and become Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley sat at the Warn for Micah counter of Rosy’s Diner, sipping black coffee, listening to a young journalist from Nashville explain why he’d probably never…
Memphis, Tennessee, May 1957. Ellis Auditorium on South Main Street had been hosting events since 1924, which meant it had hosted enough of them to have developed its own particular atmosphere. The specific quality of a building that has absorbed decades of human occasion, celebration and mourning and music and argument, all of it accumulated…
S’s barber shop had been on Taylor Street since 1925. Salvatore Moretti opened it when he was 28 years old. Fresh from Italy. Didn’t speak much English, but he knew how to cut hair. For 44 years, Sal had been cutting the hair of Chicago’s most important men, mayors, aldermen, police chiefs, union bosses, and…
That morning on Crenshaw Boulevard in Torrance, only a few shops were open. It was mid- November 1971, 9:00 in the morning, and the air was unusually cold for Southern California. A grocery, a barber, a small tailor, and among them a little shop called Herukqi’s Martial Arts Supplies. Its display window slightly faded, its…
The tragedy of Steven Crane’s life when he married Lana Turner. There is a quote that Steven Crane never gave to a reporter, never put in a book, never said on record in any format across the 40 years after his marriage ended. But the people who knew him, the ones who…
Dick Van Djk reveals the six actors he hated the most. For 33 years, I loved a woman another man had broken. Not broken the way you drop a glass and it shatters. Broken the way you bend something so many times it forgets how to stand straight. He took six years of her…
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