Judy Collins, whose latest CD is “Judy Collins Sings Lennon & McCartney,” was never a rocker. In fact, she’s always been difficult to categorize. A folk singer when she first gained recognition in the early Sixties, she’s had only four records in the Top 40 in a career spanning some 45 years: “Both Sides Now,” “Amazing Grace,” “Cook With Honey,” and “Send in the Clowns.”

There you go. A folkie number written by Joni Mitchell. A hymn. I don’t remember “Cook With Honey,” but it probably sounds like its title, a feel-good song that’d fit “light rock” stations, if any of today’s programmers remembered it. And a Stephen Sondheim composition for a Broadway musical (“A Little Night Music”).  

Collins is an album artist. That larger palette gives her a chance to tackle a range of song styles and tempos. In her earlier years, she had great success applying her sweet and sure soprano to works by Leonard Cohen, and “Suzanne” became a staple on the free-form FM rock stations of the late Sixties.

That soprano is as steady as ever, and Judy, now 68, is as good-humored as ever, switching “When I’m 64” to “when I’m 84” at one point, and adding a little scatting to “Norwegian Wood.”

So, why an entire album devoted to John and Paul’s works? She’d done Cohen and Bob Dylan before, she told me. “I find focusing on a particular writer for a period of time to be fun and healing and education. And it just gives me a lot of pleasure.”

When I phoned Judy, who lives in New York, she was wrapping up another call, and saying, repeatedly, “I love you.” It turned out to be Stephen Stills, one of the big romances in her life and perhaps her strongest connection to rock. She, after all, was the subject of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” In fact, she says, the newly unearthed CD of a dozen tunes Stills laid down, accompanied only by his own acoustic guitar, in a studio one night in 1968, includes a short, sweet song called “Judy.”  You could feel the warmth in her voice as she spoke about the song, and about the album (‘Just Roll Tape”). True love never dies.

Click here to listen to Judy Collins explain why she included the Beatles’ “Blackbird” in her album.

Hey, I just got my Official Ballot from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Time to go over the too-few nominees offered up each year by the powers that be. This year, there are nine names to ponder, and I’m asked to vote for five, max, in order of preference. In a couple of months, the Rock Hall will announce the top five vote-getters and, thus, the class of 2008, based on what my fellow music industry peers and I checked off.

Here are the nine:

• Afrika Bambaataa
• Beastie Boys
• Chic
• Leonard Cohen
• Dave Clark Five
• Madonna
• John Mellencamp
• Donna Summer
• The Ventures

A pretty wide range of artists there, including a couple of holdovers from previous ballots. And, as it’s been almost every year, it’s a controversial group of nominees. Madonna, some say, isn’t even rock and roll. But, of course, you could say the same about Leonard Cohen, the folk singer-songwriter who, unless Madonna, never had a hit record of his own. Ditto Donna Summer and Chic (disco and R&B), and, to a lesser extent, Afrika Bambaataa and the Beasties (hip-hop and rap-rock fusion pioneers).

But, of course, from its inception 22 years ago, the Rock Hall has recognized artists in all forms of popular American music (excepting classical and jazz). So all nine nominees are welcome.

I’ll vote for the two rockers—the Ventures, who inspired an entire generation of boys (mostly boys) to take up Fender guitars and form garage bands, and the Dave Clark Five, who were right in there with the Beatles (for awhile, anyway)—and three others. Not sure which ones, yet.

But while I consider Cohen and Chic; the Beasties and Bambaataa; the former Ms. Ciccone and the former John Cougar, I have to think, too, about some of the many worthies who have never even been nominated.

There’s an angry music site, bearing a heading, “The Great Rock and Roll (Hall of Fame) Swindle,” that lists about 200 “overlooked artists” and people who’ve worked as session players, songwriters, and in other positions behind the scenes.

“Obviously,” a writer on the site says, “it's the same cast of dain-bread, drool-drunk idiots who vote on the Grammys...cigar-chomping ‘moguls’ whose musical tastes stopped evolving when they turned 21, so they vote for their sentimental favorites while raking in millions with irredeemable noise designed specifically to separate teenagers from their allowances.”

Well, I’m certainly no mogul, and the only millions I rake in are the leaves atop my garage after a windstorm. I vote every year, and, for a short time a few years ago, did a consulting stint for the Hall of Fame. But I do agree that there are many artists—and what the Rock Hall calls “non-performers” — who have long deserved to be nominated, if not inducted. The “Swindle” site names such wide-ranging figures as the Monkees, Todd Rundgren, Alice Cooper, Grand Funk Railroad, Roxy Music, Heart, Yes, KISS, John Mayall, Paul Butterfield, Three Dog Night, Chicago, and Linda Ronstadt. Among non-performers, it names the late rock critic Lester Bangs, the pioneer photographer Annie Leibovitz, the bebop-to-hip-hop producer Quincy Jones, and the engineer Eddie Kramer.

These are all excellent choices. But in there, I see one of the Rock Hall’s problems. There’s a hipness factor that’s been in play since the beginning. Not that the people I just named aren’t hip. But I’ve noticed, over the years, that while a Ricky Nelson or a Bobby Darin have been (deservedly) inducted, a Neil Diamond or a Johnny Rivers have not. Nelson was always a critics’ darling for his body of work, including his mastery of country-rock. But what about Darin, who happened to record for a label run by the late, great Ahmet Ertegun, one of the founders of the Rock Hall of Fame? In my view, he deserved induction, given his amazing range of skills and his many hits. But, in the rock and pop world, he had three or four hits. (The rest were in pop—“Beyond the Sea,”—or country and folk. Johnny Rivers had a dozen—and was a pioneer in turning live recordings into hit records. And wrote such songs as “Poor Side of Town.” And started his own record company, discovering other major songwriters and artists. He’s never even been nominated.

He appears to be in the same boat as Frankie Avalon, Paul Anka, Neil Diamond, Jackie DeShannon, the Monkees, Three Dog Night, and Pat Boone.

Don’t even get me started about Pat Boone. He deserves his own piece, about not ever being considered for the Rock Hall, and how he feels about it.

So: visit the Hall of Fame’s site, at www.rockhall.com. Check out the honor roll of inductees. Who do you think ought to be in there?

The other night, on what used to be called “the tube,” I saw a commercial featuring a guy doing a wretched version of the 1969 hit, “Build Me Up Buttercup,” in a tiny nightclub.

It was, of course, karaoke.

But the commercial didn’t just take an easy shot at bad sing-along singers. The message, from an insurance company, was one of uplift: “Singing can reduce stress and add 15 years to your life.”

So, I’ve heard, can laughter. Which means that if you get up on stage and do “I Will Survive,” and then sit down and laugh at a friend wrestling with a Four Seasons falsetto number, you get 30 bonus years.

Thing is, not all that long ago, everybody was laughing at the very idea of karaoke, of singing hit songs, over background music, in front of strangers as well as friends. A comic strip defined karaoke as “the combining of people who shouldn’t be drinking with people who shouldn’t be drinking.”

Now? Karaoke, which first became popular in Japan and, in Japanese, means “empty orchestra,” is as American as an X-Box.

In fact, two of the most popular TV shows this summer were based on karaoke: Singing Bee and Don’t Forget the Lyrics. The shows were pretty much twins, except for the hosts (N’ Sync’s Joey Fatone for Bee and Wayne Brady for Lyrics, and the jackpots ($50,000 on Bee, a cool million on Lyrics). They’re throwbacks to that Fifties game show, Name That Tune, in which contestants had to identify a song based on the first few notes of the melody. Here, contestants know the titles; they have to know the lyrics—and sing them.

And, as Fatone tells the people he plucks out of the audience to compete, “You don’t have to sing it well, you just gotta sing it right.”

Oftentimes, they do neither. Just as it is at a karaoke bar or club, you have to weather some pretty wretched singing before you get a jewel. But the shows do say a few things about contemporary pop culture.

Number one: Yesterday’s music is today’s music, too. American Idol’s producers know this; that’s why they’re always forcing their wannabes to tackle Motown songs, or devoting entire competitions to the songs of Elvis, Stevie Wonder, or Rod Stewart. This way, they can draw young and older.

These two shows have learned that lesson well. Although most of the contestants are young, they’re given songs that range from recent hits to (on Singing Bee) “Born to Be Wild” (1968) and “Superstition” (1973) or (on Lyrics) “I Can See for Miles” (1967) and “Heartbreaker” (1980). And they nail them, word for word. Enough of them, anyway, to climb those tote boards, ratchet up the excitement and maintain the audience. Both shows got high enough ratings to get into their respective networks’ fall schedules. Talk about “Higher Ground.”

Number two: Americans are no longer shy. Were we ever? But, if you’ve never ventured into a karaoke establishment, you’ll see, from these shows, just what you’ve been missing (besides shattered eardrums). You can blame it on Idol and America’s Got Talent. You can say that people got tired of ponying up $100-plus for concert tickets and decided to go the DIY route. Whatever. As Annie Lennox might say, singers are doing it for themselves.

And why not? Unless you’re serving a life sentence somewhere, wouldn’t you like to add another 15 years?

It is downright painful to hear that Leave It to Beaver first went on the air 50 years ago, on October 4th, 1957, on CBS—and to know that I was old enough to have been one of its most avid viewers.

I was 12—the same age as Wally when the show started—and I’d watch it, by myself, in a bungalow off route 66 in Amarillo, Texas.

Sounds sad, and it kinda was. I was in the Panhandle with my father, who was a partner-chef in a restaurant there, called Ding How (Cantonese for “very good”).

While the rest of our family stayed in Oakland, Calif., there we were in this little building behind the restaurant. While Dad cooked, I wandered around the place or retreated to the bungalow to do homework, listen to the radio, sing along with Elvis, and watch the Beav.

It was a squeaky-clean family show, but I liked the sharp comedy writing, the innocent  edginess of Eddie Haskell, the lessons imparted in each show—sometimes by the Beaver’s exasperated but good-hearted parents; sometimes by the Beaver and Wally themselves.

A thousand miles from home, Leave It to Beaver gave me a sense of family—and a few laughs to boot.

In Texas, on the radio and in the jukebox at the soda fountain down the street from Horace Mann Junior High, I heard a wider range of music than I’d ever found in Oakland. There was more R&B and, not surprisingly, a lot more country. Sure, Elvis had spread the rockabilly sound, and Johnny Cash and Marty Robbins (“A White Sport Coat”) were on the national charts. But in Amarillo, I got to know lesser names like Marvin Rainwater, Buddy Knox, and Patsy Cline. The week that Beaver made its debut, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and the Everly Brothers were near the top of the charts.

That’s a lot of country for a pre-teen kid from California. Maybe that’s why my first book turned out to be Hickory Wind, about Gram Parsons, who’s widely credited with fusing country and rock in the ‘60s. He was a slick-talking charmer, an Elvis fan who had some of his magnetism. Women loved him, and men were more than a little envious.

Kind of like Eddie Haskell—with a guitar.

Jim Morrison of the Doors got into trouble with Ed Sullivan by singing “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher” after promising Sullivan’s producers that he’d change that line from “Light My Fire.” That was on September 17, 1967. In March of 1969, he got into much hotter water in Miami, where, in the midst of a chaotic concert, he was arrested and later charged with “lascivious behavior,” including indecent exposure, along with profanity and public drunkenness. After a highly publicized trial, he was found guilty of two misdemeanor indecency charges on September 20, 1970.

I met Morrison, accidentally, in early 1971, when he popped into an apartment in West Hollywood, downstairs from where his girlfriend, Pamela Courson, lived. We wound up chatting for more than an hour, and the session is known as the last Jim Morrison interview ever. Weeks after our visit, he left for Paris, never to return.

The conversation, which I recorded on a funky cassette recorder, has been released on a CD, is on exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, and an excerpt, with video of Morrison, me and others, is online (try http://blip.tv/file/308184).

The general consensus is that Morrison was railroaded; that a particularly hard-ass judge with a political agenda didn’t give him anything remotely close to a fair trial. Sentenced to six months in jail, along with a $500 fine, he was out on appeal when we spoke.

“There was no possible way I could have received a fair trial,” he told me, “because of the climate of public opinion that had been stirred up for a year and a half… But one thing I was interested to observe: Every day we would rush home to watch ourselves on TV; they couldn’t film in the courtroom. But going and leaving, they’d film it, and we’d hear the reporters’ views of what happened. The first few days it was kinda the old-line policy, what people had been thinking for a year and a half. But as the trial wore on, the reporters themselves, from just talking to me and the people involved in the case—the tone of the articles, and even the papers, became a little more objective as each day wore on.”

In my book, The Doors By the Doors, I quote Jac Holzman, who signed the Doors to his Elektra record label: “Had Jim lived, he would have rejoiced that the statute on which he was arrested was later found to be unconstitutional. On appeal, his specific case would have been thrown out. And Jim would have savored with a special joy this bit of irony: The judge who tried him was himself disgraced just a few years later for taking a bribe.”

Here’s Jim Morrison.

I liked the Monkees. There, I said it. Yes, they were put together for a TV show. (In fact, they made their debut on NBC 41 years ago this week.) They were dismissed by critics as “the Pre-Fab Four.” A couple of them were more actors than musicians, and most of them didn’t play their own instruments, either on the show or on their records.

No matter. They were cute; they were America’s most direct answer to the Beatles; they were on TV every week, doing a sitcom version of A Hard Day’s Night. And, so, they became big stars and reeled off a string of hits, and topped the charts with “Last Train to Clarksville,” “Daydream Believer” and “I’m a Believer.”

And, because of those songs, written by stellar composers like Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, and the one and only Neil Diamond (“I’m a Believer” and A Little Bit Me, a Little Bit You”), I was a fan.

Years later, I learned, first-hand, that Michael Nesmith was not. He was, by all accounts, the most musically accomplished and cerebral of the Monkees (he wrote their last hit, “Listen to the Band”), but, as he told me for a magazine profile in 1984, the Monkees weren’t a band.

“The four of us were hired as actors. And the show fell right onto the horns of a dilemma. It was perceived not as a TV show but as a rock ‘n’ roll group that had landed a series. We weren’t a rock ‘n’ roll band, but as the thing began to twist around, it became, ‘Here are these guys who’re nothing but a TV show coming on like they’re a group.’

“The fact that the press expected us to make serious music was strange. It was like condemning a Chevrolet station wagon for not performing well at the Indianapolis 500.”

Still, the Monkees scored eleven Top 40 hits, made an acclaimed movie, “Head,” and lasted two years on NBC (longer than most real bands), plus endless reruns. Not all that bad a dilemma.

So, after the first of my string of Elvis Presley blogs began to appear on TV Land, what was one of the very first responses?

A request for a few words about Brian Wilson.

Could Elvis and Brian, the lead Beach Boy, occupy two more different planets?

Let’s see: Elvis was a singer; a master at taking the words and music of others and spinning them into gold records. Brian can sing, and quite nicely, but his whole thing is composing, arranging, and producing records.

And the longer it takes, and, sometimes, the more grueling the process, the better. Elvis learned a song, sang it, and left the building.

Elvis loved company; he hated being alone. Thus, the women. Thus, the Memphis Mafia. Brian? The recording studio was his home. And, at home, there was that sandbox in the living room. “In My Room,” indeed. Say no more.

Brian and the Beach Boys were college prep-clean, in their matching, striped shirts and khaki slacks. Elvis went from pink plaid sport jackets to black leather to seriously sequined jumpsuits. You never mistook the King for a member of the Kingston Trio.

And yet I get why, reading about Elvis, a music lover might call out for Brian. They were both musical geniuses; they both drew directly from R&B (in Wilson’s case, Chuck Berry), they both can be credited with defining their generations, and they suffered, each in his own way, for their art.

I met Brian in 1980 for a TV special about the making of the Beach Boys album, Keepin’ the Summer Alive. After a long hiatus, the guys were back together, and Brian was in great shape. At least when he was talking for the cameras. I especially liked his answer when I asked him about what made him laugh. He said, “Arguments.”

I’ll let you hear for yourself. But come to think of it, Elvis Presley got into a lot of fights himself. Well, in the movies, anyway.

Here’s Brian.

And speaking of what makes him laugh—what gets you chuckling? Especially on TV Land?

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I blew my one chance to visit Elvis Presley back in 1970. It was August, he had a month-long engagement at the International Hotel in Las Vegas, and I was invited. Actually, it was Jackie DeShannon, the singer-songwriter, who was going, and she asked if I’d like to accompany her. She’d dated Elvis in the Sixties, and I was doing an article on her in Rolling Stone.

Unfortunately, I was booked for another interview—with John Kay of Steppenwolf, and had to decline. When she returned, she told me that she’d seen the show and stayed up most of the morning, visiting with Elvis in the kitchen of the International. And I could’ve been there.

I console myself with the fact that I did get to see Elvis in concert, and got to interview various of his buddies and fellow musicians over the years. One such associate was Elvis’ first guitarist, Scotty Moore, who was so important to Elvis’ first records and shows. In 1976, Moore had a CD out, called All the King’s Men. He was top-billed with Elvis’ first drummer, D.J. Fontana, and they were accompanied by some high-profile admirers, including Jeff Beck, Keith Richards, Tracy Nelson, and the Mavericks.

I got a chance to ask Scotty about their first sessions together. Elvis, he said, didn’t strike him as anything special at first—except that “he seemed to know every song in the world.” That was at Scotty’s place on the Fourth of July, 1954. The next day they went to Sun Studio, along with bassist Bill Black. “Those early acetates he made, it was him and a guitar. Sam (Phillips) said, ‘You and Bill come in. I wanna hear what he sounds like with some music.’ They were going nowhere, Scotty said. “And then we were taking a break and he started goofing around, singing ‘That’s All Right, Mama.’ Bill and I joined in at the end, and it was amazing. Sam was at the right place, right time.”

Steve Allen, who was one of the most versatile entertainers on television (he also wrote books, plays, and songs), was a comic genius. But a lot of Elvis fans still think he did their man wrong when he hosted him on July 1, 1956. For “Hound Dog,” Elvis was dressed in a tuxedo, and he sang not to the audience, but to a basset hound set up in front of him.

I met Allen many years later on a radio show I was hosting. He was clearly never an Elvis fan. He’d seen him on the Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show on CBS. “I recognized right away that he had something. It certainly wasn’t a glorious voice, in the sense that Sinatra or Perry Como had beautiful noises come out of their mouths. No, it was kind of a weird noise, but he had something much more important. He had a weird, freaky, charismatic star quality, and I perceived that immediately.”

And then he put it into tux and tails!  But, hey, it was national TV, and, along with Milton Berle, the Dorseys and Ed Sullivan, it helped launch Elvis.

Look, it’s a terrible show, one of the worst TV specials of all time. One only prays that it never finds its way to the Internet. But one thing about the Rolling Stone 10th Anniversary show on CBS in 1977: it sucked. I mean, literally dancing strawberries for “Strawberry Fields Forever”?

But I digress. We were putting the show together when news came of Elvis’ death. By happenstance, we were perfectly positioned to include a tribute. Steve Binder, the director of the Rolling Stone show, had directed Elvis’ comeback special in 1968. (“Elvis loved the special,” he told me. “He must’ve watched it 30 times.”) The costume designer on the ’68 show was working on the magazine’s special, and could provide one of Elvis’ stage outfits (this was long before Graceland and rock museums). I called on a young Bay Area band, the Rubinoos, to perform a song about Elvis. And, just like that, we had a tribute.

It still wasn’t a very good show, but at least, for Elvis, we’d made an effort.

Thirty summers ago, I was in Los Angeles, on the writing staff of a CBS TV special about Rolling Stone. The director was Steve Binder, who’d also directed the “Comeback Special,” as Elvis’ NBC show, which aired on December 3, 1968, was widely known. It’s one of my all-time favorite, and it was a bonus to be able to hear, from the director himself, about that landmark program.

It really was a comeback. Elvis was mired in mediocre movies and their attendant mediocre music, and he went against the advice of his protective manager, Col. Tom Parker, to dress the way he did (in tight black leather suit) and to do what he did, roaming a boxing ring of a stage, jamming with his old musical sidekicks, and singing to his fans, up close and personal.

Binder told me that Elvis, who’d become an anomaly of sorts in the era of the Beatles and the late ‘60s rock scene, was “totally frightened” while doing the show, but that he loved the results. “He said the experience was like a breath of fresh air. He told me it re-inspired him creatively, that he would never record another record or make another movie unless he totally believed in it.”

I met Rick Nelson at a strange juncture in his life. It was 1984, and, at age 44, he was all grown up, his hit-making days long behind him. He was playing the Fairmont Hotel, in a room more accustomed to the likes of Tony Bennett and Ella Fitzgerald. But he was comfortable, tossing out his hits and his wonderful blend of country, rockabilly and rock.

Backstage, before his opening night show, I asked about Elvis. There were rumors about Col. Tom Parker being interested in managing him. He shrugged off that question, but talked openly about his old buddy. When Elvis died, he said, “I was really sad about it. He was a good friend of mine. He inspired a lot of people; he WAS rock and roll.”

Because of their touring schedules, he said, he didn’t see Elvis the last five or six years of Presley’s life. “But back in the 50s and early 60s, I saw a lot of him. We became real good friends. I was a big fan of his, and he listened to my records. He always liked the music, the guitar player, James Burton.” Presley even hired Burton to play behind him, at recording sessions and on tour.

Listen to Rick Nelson speaks about Elvis

It’s amazing. Elvis has been gone 30 years now, and so many of his peers are still around. Chuck Berry. Little Richard. Jerry Lee Lewis. Fats Domino. Paul Anka. Pat Boone.

Of all those musical giants, Pat Boone stands tallest. The clean-cut singer scored 38 Top 40 hits, far fewer than Elvis’ 114, but more than Fats, Ricky and all the others. 

Well, the saddest anniversary for all Elvis fans is only about a month away, and a lot of people are thinking about going to Memphis, to pay their respects at Graceland. My advice, in the words—actually, the word of an Elvis song, is: Don’t.

Of course you want to be there. We as a society have an odd fixation on anniversaries, of events good and bad, and we especially like nice, round numbers. Look at all the hip and hoopla surrounding the Summer of Love. But is it worth braving the crush of the crowds all over Memphis, just to be able to say that you were there on the 30th anniversary of his death? I think not, but I know that, no matter the madness, thousands and thousands of you will be compelled to make the trip. And you’ll manage to have a good time.

Many others will do the saner thing, and go during the off-season—that is, any time that isn’t close to either his birthday or August 16th. 

Dianne, my wife (she saw Elvis in person ‘way early, back in ’56 in Oakland) and I went in late January of 2005, into a cold, damp Memphis.  There was almost nobody else at Graceland when we arrived, and that was fine by us. We could take our time, taking in the rooms, the furnishings, the memorabilia. We could picture him there. And when we got outside, to the memorial garden, we needed our umbrellas. The sky was crying, and so were we.

In other words, it was the perfect time to visit Elvis.

This is the moment. Today, Elvis, life-sized and in bronze, will be unveiled on the site of his 1973 concert, “Elvis: Aloha From Hawaii,” in front of the Neal Blaisdell Center.

The statue, commissioned by TV Land, commemorates the 30th anniversary of Presley's death as well as the historic concert, the first musical event sent around the world by satellite. It drew an estimated 1.5 billion viewers.

That show (along with a rehearsal show) raised $75,000 for the Kui Lee Cancer Fund, in honor of the singer and writer of one of Elvis’ favorite songs, “I’ll Remember You.”

I wrote about that concert in Rolling Stone, and reported that audience members at what was then the Honolulu International Center could pay whatever they wanted for tickets. “A little girl had $1.19, and she wanted a pair,” I wrote. She got in, “along with 300 fans who flew in from Japan and donated $7,000 to see both shows.”

In case you’re scoring at home, that comes out to under $11.70 a ticket.

I had a chance to meet Johnny Rivers a few years back. Turns out that he and Elvis had more than in common than making recordings of Chuck Berry’s “Memphis.” The very first recording he made, when he was still John Ramistella in New York in the late Fifties, was “Baby Come Back.” It wasn’t a hit, but it was composed by Otis Blackwell, who gave Elvis some of his biggest hits, including “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up.” 

In Los Angeles in the early Sixties, he hooked up with Ricky Nelson and, through him, met Elvis himself. This was before Johnny became a star. At Elvis’ home in Bel Air, they talked about music and about Rivers’ hometown, Baton Rouge. Johnny had seen Elvis perform there. On later visits, they jammed on songs ranging from Roy Orbison’s “Running Scared” to Timi Yuro’s “Hurt.”

“Another song Elvis did very well was ‘Unchained Melody,’” Rivers writes in a memoirs he is planning to publish .“We would go from these beautiful ballads to funky blues songs by Jimmy Reed…These images of jamming with Elvis are still very strong in my mind today.”

It’s July, and I always think back to that hot, hot day in Dallas in 2005, when I got a chance to sing Elvis songs with Presley’s last touring keyboard player, Tony Brown, on piano. Not only Brown, but also Richie Furay (Buffalo Springfield, Poco) on guitar and Johnny Reno (ex- of Chris Isaak) on sax. And Holly Williams, Hank Jr.’s daughter, singing backup. Whew!

This was the annual BBQ Bash fundraiser at the Mansion on Turtle Creek, where chef Dean Fearing, a guitar slinger himself, gathered fellow musician/chefs and ringers every summer (until last year, when he left the Mansion for another venture).

I’d covered one of the bashes, and Fearing heard that I liked singing Elvis, and invited me to join the troupe. In 2004, I did Ricky Nelson’s “Stood Up” and Elvis’ “Treat Me Nice.” Now, I’d be doing “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and “Don’t Be Cruel” to about 500 guests.

What a thrill, at rehearsal, having Tony Brown sit down and play that familiar opening run, and then nod for me to begin. On stage, I muffled some of “Cruel,” but thought we did OK. Tony leaned into a microphone and intoned: “Elvis has left the building.”   All around the Mansion on Turtle Creek, audience members called me “Elvis,” and one man told me, “I never liked Elvis, but I liked you singing Elvis.”

Here’s one I never saw coming: I was sitting with the Rev. Al Green in his office in Memphis, just behind his Full Gospel Tabernacle Church, where he preaches most Sundays. The church is just around the bend from Elvis Presley Boulevard, and I wondered, aloud, if Green, who became a sex symbol himself in the Seventies, felt any connection to Elvis.

“I loved Elvis,” he declared. “When I was 14 years old, I had all his stuff; just a whole Elvis collection of five or six records. That was one of my teenage crushes. I loved the music, I loved ‘Jailhouse Rock,’ the shake, rattle and roll, hip-swinging, hair-down-in-your face—that was one of my little fantasies, and this guy filled it really well.”

A teenage crush. A little fantasy. Who’d a thunk it?

As for musical connections: Green recorded Chuck Berry’s “Memphis,” and so did Elvis. And, in the early ‘70s, they both recorded one of Kris Kristofferson’s most beautiful compositions: “For the Good Times.”

So, who was your teen crush; your “little fantasy”? Don’t be shy. (Unless it was Danny Bonaduce…)

Ben Fong-Torres Interview with Reverend Al Green

You can find it on the Internet now, but when I went to Memphis a couple of years ago, the video clip of Elvis on The Milton Berle Show on June 5, 1956, in which he performs “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You” was a true rarity. I got a copy of it from Jamie Aaron Kelley, a young – and very good – Elvis tribute artist.

It features some of Elvis’ earliest acting, as he was roped into doing a comedy sketch. Uncle Miltie is in a record shop, where girls are waiting for Elvis. He brags that he knows the star, but when Elvis strolls in and identifies himself, Berle doesn’t believe him. Oddly, none of the girls recognize him either, until Berle, finally convinced, shouts out his name. The girls scream, mob Elvis, and wind up tearing the jacket off of…Milton! Comedy gold!

Anyway, Presley then does his song, although, possibly unnerved by all the acting he’d had to do, messes up the last verse, singing, “I need you, I miss you, I want you…” But, of course, the girls screamed anyway.

So, go search for Elvis and Milton Berle and check it out. And don’t be surprised if you wind up screaming.

As soon as Elvis got onto the radio, in 1956, I was hooked. As a kid in Oakland, California, I got the first singles, the fan magazines—I still wish I’d kept the one that had a thin plastic recording of an Elvis interview stitched into it—the first everything.

It only got worse a year or so later, when I went to Amarillo, Texas, with my Dad, who had a restaurant venture on Route 66. There, free from my family chores, I could watch TV in the bungalow behind the Ding How, and listen to the radio—to Buddy Holly, Sam Cooke, Chuck Berry, and, of course, Elvis. I began to fantasize about being him. I figure it was pretty much every twelve year-old boy’s dream. And I did that thing that so many of us did: I’d stand in front of a mirror, sing along, or lip-sync with “Treat Me Nice” or “Hound Dog,” and try and move my hips and legs, and shrug my shoulders, like he did. We all wanted to be Elvis.

Back in Oakland, in the ninth grade, I took my Elvis obsession to a humiliating extreme. I loved “I Beg of You,” and got it down enough that I thought I should share my gift with the public. So I tried out for a talent show at Westlake Junior High, plunking a toy ukulele that I didn’t know how to play, and blurting out the song in front of a panel of puzzled-looking teachers who were serving as judges. They took mercy on me. They said no, and I was happy to return to the ranks of Elvis fan. It would be a long, long time before I sang Elvis in public again.

Ben Fong-Torres at the Rolling Stone Office

Meanwhile, I lucked into a career, of writing and broadcasting, that gave me opportunities to get close to Elvis. I blew my one chance to meet him up close and personal—that’ll have to be the subject of another, much sadder blog—but I’ve had many close-to-Elvis encounters: Interviews with superstar peers like Ricky Nelson, Pat Boone, and Johnny Rivers; his two finest guitarists, Scotty Moore and James Burton, Memphis Mafia member Joe Esposito, and gal pals like Jackie DeShannon and Wanda Jackson.

We’ve got a lot to blog about. Thank you for visiting Elvis on TV Land. Thank you very much.