George Klein
Old friend of Elvis who scouted out girls for after-show parties
GEORGE KLEIN, who has died aged 83, was an influential Memphis radio DJ who promoted the city’s vibrant music scene for more than 50 years and gained wider renown as a friend of Elvis Presley’s from their shared schooldays until the singer’s death in 1977.
One of three siblings, he was born on October 8
1935 in North Memphis, the son of Orthodox Jews who had emigrated from Eastern Europe in the 1920s. His father set up a grocery wholesale business but died when Klein was young; his mother was a seamstress.
Klein developed his passion for radio at high school: he would rush home to listen to the main Memphis station, WHBQ. Sometimes he would turn to the edgier WDIA, which was a pioneer in the South for using black talent such Rufus Thomas and BB King as DJS; they would also shape the musical development of Elvis Presley.
Elvis joined Klein’s class in 1948, having moved with his family from Tupelo, Mississippi. One day, irked at being given a C in music, Elvis persuaded the teacher to let him bring in his guitar. He sang (as Klein recalled) Old Shep, a tear-jerker about a boy and his dog, followed by Cold Icy Fingers. Klein was “amazed and affected”.
He would later be impressed, too, by Elvis’s unique style of dress – “black slacks with a pink stripe down the side and a black sport coat with the collar turned up”.
In his final year at school Klein pursued his obsession with radio by helping on sports broadcasts at WHBQ, and carried on there after he enrolled in Memphis State College to study communications.
After a spell as a gofer for the wild man of radio, Dewey Phillips (the first DJ to give Elvis prolonged airtime), Klein secured his first job spinning records, at an Arkansas station, KOSE. He became versed in the lingo of the day: “Everything’s cool, baby … this is DJ GK coming your crazy way.”
He worked his way up until his Jack the Bellboy R&B show caught the attention of a programmer at WMC who gave him his own show, the Rock’n’roll
Ballroom. Klein claimed to have given Jerry Lee Lewis his radio debut.
WMC dropped its rock’n’roll programming, believing it to be a fad, and Klein was fired. In 1957 Elvis, now a superstar, offered him a job with his touring crew, his responsibilities to include scouting out “the best looking girls” for the after-show party and transporting Elvis’s $2,500 gold lamé suit. In the same year he had a small role in Jailhouse Rock.
When Elvis was drafted, Klein went back into radio. As “GK” or “the Geeker” he soon established himself in Memphis broadcasting, also moving into local television.
At the same time he was at the heart of Elvis’s “Memphis Mafia”. Towards the end of the 1960s he helped to nudge the singer in a bolder direction by persuading him to record at the funky American Sound studios, sessions which produced hits like Suspicious Minds. Elvis, among many acts of generosity, gave Klein a yellow Cadillac convertible, was best man at his wedding to Barbara Little in 1970, and paid for a “nose job”.
The years after Elvis’s death in 1977 were difficult for Klein. He spent two months in jail in connection with falsification of listener ratings, and his marriage ended in divorce.
But he returned to radio with the Elvis Hour and The George Klein Show, and to television with Memphis Sounds, and became a revered guardian of Elvis’s legacy. He published Elvis: My Best Man (2010), and was inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame (2018).
He was remarried, to Dara Patterson, a computer engineer, who survives him.
George Klein, born October 8 1935, died February 5