1. Elvis PresleyElvis’ Golden Records

My musical education was listening to AM radio, and even though my mother had me take piano lessons when I was very young, my passion was always for the music that I was hearing on the radio. At that time, radio was pretty broad in what they were playing. But when I first heard Elvis, it was something even different from what I had heard on the radio – kind of more raw and sexy and just taking what had been there before but heightening that experience for me. Obviously there weren’t videos at that time, so when Elvis first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show singing ‘Hound Dog’, it was really just an unbelievable experience. The show really was the must-see thing on Sunday nights for all of America. And there was a broad display of talent: there were musicians and he had people spinning plates. He championed a lot of Black musicians, which, at the time, was risky for him, because there were quite a few protests from the South, but he really felt passionate about having those artists on. It was such a big event because, at the time, there weren’t a whole lot of options. When Elvis first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, it was like he just set everything on fire, at least for me. It just struck me in a way that nothing musical or visual had done before. It was like electricity going through me. 

I don’t want to sound arrogant and old but you wish that people could have that kind of experience now. There are so many distractions with video games or whatever. It was a highlight of my life up to that time and that memory has stayed with me until now. It was such a raw and crude performance, in a positive kind of way, that the second time that Elvis appeared on the Sullivan show again they only could show him from the waist up, because it was a little too much for a lot of America to see him shimmying and shaking.