The legacy of George Klein: Elvis, rock ’n’ roll and the local media
“Hey this is DJ GK coming your crazy way on a Monday with records to play, on the scene with my rock ‘n’ roll record machine. Baby, don’t mean maybe, hang with me, cuz it’s just you and me and Memphis, Tennessee.”
That, as quoted by George Klein himself, in his 2010 autobiography, “Elvis: My Best Man: Radio Days, Rock ’n’ Roll Nights, and My Lifelong Friendship with Elvis Presley,” is an example of the “bop talk” that Klein employed to make himself a “hot jock” on the Memphis airwaves in the 1950s.
That was when the city on the bluff staked its claim as the Alamogordo of postwar popular music: The site of the Atom Age implosion of country, pop and rhythm-and-blues that became known as rock ‘n’ roll.
For the next 60-plus years, Klein — who died Tuesday night at 83 at the Memphis Jewish Home, after a long struggle with dementia and such illnesses as pneumonia — continued to walk the walk and talk the bop, so to speak.
True, Klein was an internationally celebrated confidante of Elvis. But in Memphis, the longtime radio disc jockey and television host was something arguably more significant: The kind of influential and beloved hometown media celebrity that may no longer have a place — outside the realm of sports, at least — in the fractured world of cable television, satellite radio and social media.
For years Klein was the city’s approachable ambassador to Elvis. His death erases what might have been Memphis’ truest human connection to the reality of Presley’s blessed and cursed life.
Klein served as the best man at The King’s 1970 Las Vegas wedding to Priscilla Presley, and as a pallbearer at Presley’s 1977 funeral. It seems safe to assume he sometimes marveled at the fact that he had outlived by more than four decades the strange, talented classmate he befriended at Humes High School in 1948.
If Presley spent much of his time in Hollywood or behind the gates of Graceland, Klein — often labeled Elvis’ best friend, no matter how transactional some aspects of their relationship were — was in your home, on your radio and on your television. He talked directly to you, daily.
That made Klein your friend, even if you never met the man, which shortened the distance between you and the Elvis to one degree of separation — or so perhaps you might want to believe, if you belonged to the demographic that was proud to share a city with the King of Rock and Roll.
Unlike many Elvis associates (including the singer’s wife and child), Klein apparently never wanted to live anywhere but Memphis, where his career, and his celebrity, were assured. Such setbacks as a 60-day prison sentence related to ratings fraud — Klein was convicted in 1977 of conspiring to inflate WHBQ’S ratings by faking Arbitron data — seemed instantly forgotten and forgiven, just so much water under the Hernado Desoto Bridge. Elvis played a part even in this: He reportedly tried to contact Jimmy Carter, to ask the president to pardon his pal.
Klein’s heyday was in the post Dewey Phillips, pre-rick Dees era of the 1960s and early 1970s, when he ruled the mic on WHBQ radio and hosted “Talent Party” on WHBQ television. A teen-oriented music program modeled on Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand,” “Talent Party” was an important showcase for numerous local bands as well as the “Whbqties” (pronounced W-h-b-cuties). The Whbqties were young women in mod skirts and go-go boots who provided a pulchritudinous complement to Klein’s turtlenecks and apparent Beatle boots (a fashion term folks no doubt avoided when in the presence of Elvis).
WHBQ television at the time was a talent party all its own. Klein’s colorful contemporaries at the station included “Happy Hal” (Hal Miller), host of a weekday children’s program; and “Sivad” (Watson Davis), the “Monster of Ceremonies” in charge of the weekend horror-movie show, “Fantastic Features”; and Lance Russell and Dave Brown, announcers on the Saturday morning “Studio Wrestling” show (which later moved to WMC-TV Channel 5). Brown also cold-called typically confused Memphians to give them cash prizes on the “Dialing for Dollars” movie show.
Meanwhile, rival stations featured the likes of “Cap’n Bill” and “Mr. Magic” and “Tiny the Clown” and “Ponce de Lion” (a puppet). These people — and things — enjoyed a recognition factor that today’s local television newscasters and commercial pitchmen can only imagine. Back then, if you appeared regularly on one of Memphis’ four TV stations, everybody knew you.
Radio was less universal. On some Memphis popular-music stations, you didn’t expect to hear much Elvis. But Klein in his autobiography expresses a deep love for the blues and R&B he heard on WDIA, the pioneering Memphis radio station aimed at African-american listeners. Klein shared this love with his WHBQ predecessor, Dewey Phillips, and he passed it on to the generation of Memphis musicians weaned as much on the “Q” as on bar-b-q.
“Throughout my Humes High days, the more I listened to WDIA, the more I became infatuated with the music I heard there, and the less interest I had in the smooth vanilla-type pop records being put out by Doris Day, the Ames Brothers and Mitch Miller,” Klein wrote.
Citing such artists as Big Joe Turner, the Clovers and Ruth Brown, Klein added: “That stuff sounded wild and dangerous and I couldn’t get enough of it, even if I didn’t always understand the things that were being sung about.”
Wild, dangerous, beyond understanding. That’s as good a definition of rhythm-and-blues and rock ‘n’ roll as any.
And those of us who love those sounds and the crazy Memphis culture that supported them owe a debt of gratitude to George Klein.