Off-topic:
@cowboyec ? You are the biggest Presley fan I have ever known. Bar none. Serious question. Can you describe how you were feeling or thinking on August 16, 1977?
On that day, I was in Shreveport at KWKH, the first radio station to ever play an Elvis song and can claim discovering him on The Louisiana Hayride radio and TV and where the saying originated "Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building".
When the news came in on the AP wire, all hell broke loose in the station with people concerned about Horace Logan, the man that Elvis credited with launching his career and who Elvis would call often just to talk. The story was Elvis first show wasn't really well received but Logan was convinced the young man with the best manners he'd ever seen had something special, so they signed him. Logan and Presley really loved each other. People who'd been around some of that time said Elvis would drop in to visit and the man they knew, so humble, polite and soft spoken would change before their very eyes into this bigger than life stage presence.
It was a sad day, I called my wife and we both cried because we felt as if part of our lives had died with the man who really was responsible for the popularity of Rock and Roll even though I do consider Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard the co-fathers of R&R.
When we were dating, we went to see "Blue Hawaii" and my wife cried when he sang "I Can't Help Falling in Love with You" and she wasn't the only girl getting emotional. So, it just stood to reason that would play at our wedding and yep, she cried again.....but this time looking at me as I mouthed the words to her.
I think that might have been the reason she got drunk in the car heading to Hot Springs on our wedding night. One of my well meaning fraternity brothers iced down two bottles of champagne in a cooler in the back seat as they had prepared our car for a righteous wedding reception exit. It was raining on the way so I focused on the road lest we die on our wedding night and end up in one of the songs like "Teen Angel" and she focused on one of the bottles she found in the cooler.
I should have known better. Have you ever been stone cold sober and focusing on something like not wrecking your car while your passenger, newly married and very talkative, gets slowly inebriated? Hot Springs is only an hour from Little Rock but by the time we arrived at the hotel, she'd already named two of our kids and was describing the house we'd live in. I wasn't mentally past the wedding night which would ultimately have to wait until the following night but luckily, that was just a mere formality because we'd been doing undressed rehearsals for quite some time.
DE, how's that for Off Topic? Sorry, I see those two words and just see it as a challenge. Going off topic in the OTZ is a double blessing. However, in my defense, the song was in a movie.
