News & Media
About Kay Wheeler

" Rock Baby Rock It" was one of those classic, black-and-white, low-budget movies that was essentially marketed to cash-in on the youth-driven rock'n'roll craze of the late 1950s. According to the liner notes of this soundtrack CD, "Rock Baby Rock It" was filmed entirely in a Dallas, Texas, hotel lobby in 1956, and it grandly debuted at a theater in the vast concrete wilderness of Big D in March of '57. Although the somewhat predictable plot follows the routine pubescent story line of all the other rock'n'roll-flavored motion pictures of that particular era, what really sets "Rock Baby Rock It" apart from the rest of 'em is its outstanding musical content (and Kay Wheeler's wildly wiggling dance acrobatics, of courseŠ va-va-va-voom!). There's the jumpin', swingin', jive-wailin' fury of The Cell Block 7; the boppin', upbeat, pelvis-shakin' splendor of Don Coates & The Bon-Aires; the lively, lovelorn, doo-wop glow of The 5 Stars; the gritty, smokin', late-night rhythm-and-blues strut of Preacher Smith & The Deacons; the virile, robust, juke joint-style R&B growl of Rosco Gordon & The Red Tops; the savage, wild'n'woolly rockabilly brashness of Johnny Carroll & The Hot Rocks; and the folksy, frolicking, Everly-like rural harmonies of The Belew Twins. In all, you get a grand total of 18 stellar tracks, and I'm here to tell you that there ain't one sour grape in the entire bunch! (Goofin Records, P.O. Box 63, 01601 Vantaa, Finland / www.goofinrecords.com or Kay Wheeler, P.O. Box 53042, San Jose, CA 95153 / www.kaywheeler.com) - Roger Moser, Jr. ("Rockabilly Revue")

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Why Elvis?
"Elvis is something for the girls. He is what every guy wants to be-a hunk, a hunk of burning love!" - Kay Wheeler, 1st Fan Club President.

By Susan Whitall - If you don't like Elvis Presley, find a cabin in the woods right away with no TV, radio, Internet access or newspaper delivery. Hide under the bed for good measure, and do it now, before the 25th anniversary of his death rolls around.
       Because as intense as the coverage is now - the King can be heard on the radio singing the re-released "A Little Less Information" and seen on TV as the morning news shows crowd Graceland's gates - it's all going to grow to a crescendo of Elvis mania by Friday.
       Since Elvis Aaron Presley's death on Aug. 16, 1977, millions of Elvis records have been sold, millions of people worldwide tour Graceland and there are so many Elvis impersonators they have an official organization. There are Elvis references in every part of our culture - postage stamps, black velvet paintings and jokes about Elvis sightings at Burger King restaurants. Why are so many of us still infatuated with the former truck driver born in Tupelo, Miss.?
       Over the years, many have wondered why Elvis is the King of Rock 'n' Roll and why not Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry or Highland Park's own Bill Haley and the Comets, whose frantic song "Rock Around the Clock" still sends shivers down the spine when it kicks off the movie "Blackboard Jungle."
       To fans and pop culture experts, Elvis is the ultimate riddle: an enigma cloaked in mystery. Yet his appeal abounds, because everyone has an opinion about what made Elvis so unique.
       That includes Kay Wheeler, the feisty Texan who formed his first fan club back in 1956 before she hit it big as a wild, bop-dancing rock girl in movies like 1957's "Rock Baby, Rock It!" Wheeler, now a Realtor in Silicon Valley, Calif., travels the country giving talks on her memories of Elvis while demonstrating the bop, a dance she says would be considered X-rated today.
       "Elvis will last as long as there are women around," Wheeler says flatly. She ought to know - she not only started up his fan club when she was 15, but she dated him as well.
       "Elvis is something for the girls, and he's what every guy would like to be," Wheeler opines, "a hunka, hunka burning love. He really let go on stage, he made love to the audience. And there was more intensity in his little finger than anybody had in their whole body."
       That intensity, and his wild shaking as he performed led to cameramen on "The Ed Sullivan Show" being instructed not to shoot Elvis from the waist down. Wheeler believes that Elvis is appealing because he blew right through the inhibitions most of us have.
"He didn't worry about body language, he just did it," says Wheeler, who also danced the bop in the Gene Vincent movie "Hot Rod Gang." "He was uninhibited, and it gives us a release to watch him."
       According to a Harris Poll released this week, while Elvis' strongest fans are women 50-64 years old (45 percent), it's surprising how potent his appeal is with 18- to 24-year-olds, for whom there never was a living Elvis.
       Thirty-nine percent of 18- to 24-year-olds have watched an Elvis movie, 38 percent have danced to a song by him, and 37 percent have seen an Elvis impersonator.
       But for that age group, the fat, bloated Elvis of the Vegas years is a familiar joke figure, far from a real person. For them, and for that matter, anyone younger than 55, it's necessary to look back to the pre-Elvis 1950s through the eyes of those who were there.
       Imagine a time when there was no youth culture, when teen-agers listened to Perry Como's "Hot Diggity Dog" with their parents and wore smaller sizes of adult-styled clothing.
      "There was nothing for us," says Wheeler, 61. "It was a Donna Reed kind of world. So when rhythm and blues started in, it was an underground movement. If you listened to it, you were considered a dangerous teen-ager. The kids would sneak over the 78 records and we'd have bop parties when our parents were at work. We'd play Hank Ballard and the Midnighters' 'Sexy Ways' and 'Work With Me, Annie,' and the Clovers' 'Little Mama.' When I heard those records, I flipped! We learned how to dance and bop and do things way beyond what Presley was doing."
      In Detroit, hometown of Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, rhythm and blues was part of the radio diet for black and white teens. White disc jockeys would slip rhythm and blues records into their shows increasingly in the '50s, led by Mickey Shorr, because it was what the kids wanted.
      Robin Seymour started spinning records in Detroit as a teenager on WJBK-AM, then moved to WKMH-AM. "As a kid, I didn't know what I was doing," he says with a laugh. "I played records by black artists on labels nobody heard of. The station, 'KMH, was in Dearborn, and management used to give me hell about it. But they were selling radio (ad) time, so they let me do it."
      Detroit teens liked the way Elvis blended rockabilly with R&B and flocked to his 1956 shows at the Fox Theatre. Because of their devotion to Elvis, Seymour concocted a stunt to get their attention which backfired completely. Although he had espoused R&B for years, the DJ decided to "ban" Elvis records from his program, "Bobbin' With Robin," saying he thought Elvis was just a fad that would go away. The results were dramatic.
      "Two hundred kids showed up on their bikes in front of my house on West Franklin in Dearborn," says Seymour, who now lives in Los Angeles. "They had signs, 'Ban Bobbin' With Robin.' The newspapers came out. It was tongue in cheek!"
      Musically, Elvis delivered the potent excitement of R&B and rockabilly combined in a freewheeling way, complete with shaking hips abhorred by parents.
       Bill Haley almost achieved it with ''Rock Around the Clock,'' but he wasn't as subversively photogenic as Elvis. Nor can one imagine anyone studying Haley in a comparative religion class.
       Norman Girardot, a professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, uses Elvis as an example in his comparative religion class, along with Mao Tse Tung, of a person who is worshiped like a god. "Why Elvis?" Girardot ponders. "There are two primary reasons: Elvis was truly a charismatic figure. Whatever one thinks, he aroused emotion in people. He became a focal point of people's fears and hopes. Of course, there are plenty of charismatic folks around, why isn't Kurt Cobain or Jerry Garcia a god?
      "He was also the right person at the right time," Girardot says. "American culture was at a crucial turning point in the '50s, even more so than the '60s.
       "The transformation of American society is the great gift of African-American culture," he says. "It loosened us up! It made the whole culture realize that spirit is the most important thing, not petty hatreds. Sexuality was part of that, and when Elvis twitched his hips, thousands of teen-age girls realized that they were sexual creatures."
       What truly makes Elvis worthy of study in a religion class, Girardot believes, is the mystery at the core of his appeal.
       "The mystery, the ubiquity of the Elvis phenomenon -- how do we explain that? There's a kind of spookiness attached to it." And always, fans bring it back around to something simple. "Elvis made us happy," says his fan club president Wheeler. "You came back from an Elvis show on a real high. When you hear his music, you still feel happy. People need to feel happy."

WACO TRIBUNE-HERALD
August 15, 2002

Rockin' and Rollin' with The King at HOT Coliseum
By CARL HOOVER Tribune-Herald entertainment editor

Elvis Presley last performed in Waco on Oct. 12, 1956, and the galvanizing rock 'n' roller was red hot. His first appearance on the national "Ed Sullivan Show" had taken place a month earlier and the night before his Waco gig at the Heart O' Texas Coliseum, Presley had pulled 26,500 screaming fans - the second-largest crowd in his young career - to Dallas' Cotton Bowl.
       A day later, Presley couldn't sell out the Heart of Texas (HOT) Coliseum. He brought a crowd of more than 5,000 shrieking fans to blissful, ear-shattering ecstacy, but 2,000 more seats went empty. Welcome to Waco.
       The less-than-capacity crowd incensed 17-year-old Kay Wheeler, the Dallas-based president of the national Elvis Presley Fan Club, who publicly berated Waco as "the squarest town in America." "Why those people just sat on their hands while he sang," she fumed to the Associated Press after the show.
       The Waco News-Tribune 's review described Presley, wearing a green jacket, black slacks and blue suede shoes, in action: "Presley went through his regular 'routine' of dancing all over the stage, pulling at his hair and having the appearance of being unable to control himself."
       The squarest town in America, like much of mainstream America, was ambivalent about the new star and the rock ¹n' roll that he championed. News of his Coliseum appearance was carried low on the front pages of Waco's daily newspapers, below news that tickets were going fast for Baylor Theater's May production of "Hamlet" starring Burgess Meredith.
       Elvis, after all, had been in Waco the year before as one of the featured artists of the Louisiana Hayride, which brought its country acts to the HOT Coliseum. Elvis took third billing on that night. The evening's headliner? Slim Whitman.