Elvis Presley Was on a Couch When the Opening Act Canceled — What He Did Next LEFT All in TEARS D

Elvis Presley was waiting backstage at a Memphis venue in 1963 when the opening act canceled. The stage manager asked if anyone could fill 20 minutes at the piano. Nobody expected the man who stood up. It was the evening of Friday, November 8th, 1963, and the Ellis Auditorium in Memphis was 45 minutes from showtime with a problem that the stage manager, a man named Gerald Potts, had been trying to solve for the better part of an hour.

The headline act that evening was a touring review, a collection of performers assembled under a single promotional banner that had been doing well enough across the mid-south circuit to fill medium-sized venues. And the problem was not the headline act, which was accounted for and present and ready.

The problem was the opening act, a three-piece group from Nashville that had been contracted to play 30 minutes before the review, and that had, at approximately 5:30 that afternoon, called from a truck stop outside Jackson, Tennessee, to report that their vehicle had broken down on Route 70 and that they would not be making the show.

Gerald Potts had been managing stage operations at Ellis Auditorium for 9 years, and he had encountered a version of this problem before, which was useful because it meant he had a protocol for it. The protocol involved a sequence of calls to backup performers, several of whom were generally available for short notice work in Memphis on any given weekend.

He had worked through the sequence. The first backup was playing a private event in Germantown. The second was out of town. The third had a sick child. By 6:45, Gerald Potts had arrived at the end of his protocol with a problem that remained unsolved and a crowd that was going to begin filling the auditorium in approximately 30 minutes.

The green room backstage at Ellis Auditorium was not a large space. It held a couch, a coffee table, several chairs, a long mirror with light bulbs around it of the kind that appear in every backstage green room, regardless of the venue’s budget or ambition. And at any given point in the evening, a rotating collection of performers, crew members, managers, and the various people who move through backstage spaces on show nights.

For reasons that are sometimes clear and sometimes simply the result of knowing someone who knew someone who had a pass. On the evening of November 8th, 1963, the green room contained eight people when Gerald Potts walked in and said he needed everyone’s attention for a moment.

He explained the situation plainly. The opening act had not arrived and would not arrive. He needed someone who could fill 20 to 25 minutes on the piano. Not a full performance, not a polished set, just enough to keep the crowd warm and the evening on schedule while the headline act completed their final preparations. He said he understood this was short notice and that he was not asking for miracles, only for 20 minutes of competent piano playing from anyone in the room who could provide it.

He looked at eight people. Two of them were crew members who played no instrument. One was a publicist from the review’s management company, who said she had taken piano lessons as a child, but that childhood piano lessons were not what the situation required, and everyone in the room knew it.

One was a performer from the review, who said he played keys, but whose expression when he said it communicated that playing keys in the context of his act and playing piano in front of a waiting crowd were not the same category of thing. Two others said nothing and looked at the floor in the way of people who have correctly identified that this problem does not belong to them.

The seventh person in the room was a man who had been sitting on the couch near the end of the coffee table with a cup of coffee for the past 20 minutes, saying nothing, watching the evening develop with the particular quality of attention he brought to most situations, present, quiet, not performing availability, but not withdrawing from it, either.

He had been at Ellis Auditorium that evening for reasons that had nothing to do with the show, a conversation with someone in the building’s management about an unrelated matter, the kind of errand that brings people to venues on show nights without making them part of the show.

He was 28 years old, and he was known to most of the people in that room in the way that certain people are known, their face preceding them into rooms, their name preceding their face. But the green room at Ellis Auditorium on a show night had its own economy of attention, and in that economy, the man on the couch was simply another person backstage, which was the version of himself he found easiest to be when the opportunity for it presented itself.

When Gerald Potts finished his request and looked at eight people, the man on the couch said, “How long did you say?” Gerald said 20 minutes, maybe 25. The man said, “I can do 20 minutes.” Gerald looked at him. He had not recognized him. Gerald Potts was a stage manager, and a good one, and his relationship with the performers and musicians who passed through Ellis Auditorium was professional and specific, and did not always extend to faces he had not personally booked.

He looked at the man on the couch and saw someone who had answered his question without the hesitation that uncertainty produces and without the enthusiasm that wanting to be helpful sometimes produces, and he decided that this was sufficient. He said, “Can you be ready in 15?” The man said yes. What happened in the next 40 minutes was the kind of thing that becomes a story, not immediately, not on the night itself, but in the days and weeks afterward when the people who had been present began telling it to people who had not been present and discovered that the telling produced a particular quality of response in the listener. The quality was disbelief that modulated as the telling proceeded into something closer to recognition, the feeling of a story that sounds impossible but has the texture of something true. Gerald Potts introduced the man from the couch to the crowd of approximately 800 people who

had filled the auditorium floor and the first several rows of the balcony with the minimal introduction that short notice situations produce. He said they had a special guest who was going to play a few songs while the evening got underway. He did not say the name because he had not fully confirmed the name in his own mind and because the situation did not require it.

The man sat down at the upright piano on the left side of the stage. He played 23 minutes. He had not prepared anything. There was no set list, no rehearsed sequence, no plan beyond the general knowledge of what he knew how to play and what a crowd of 800 people on a Friday evening in Memphis in November might want to hear.

This was, for him, not an uncomfortable position. He had spent years in rooms where the plan changed at the last minute, where the thing that was supposed to happen did not happen, and the thing that was required had to be found in the moment. The ability to find it in the moment, to reach into whatever he had accumulated over years of listening and playing and performing and pull out something adequate to the occasion, was not a skill he had developed intentionally.

It was something that had developed because it had been required, and he had learned that it was more reliable than a plan. He did not play a set. He did not perform in the way that people perform when they have rehearsed and prepared and are executing a plan. He played the way people play when they are in a room with a piano and have been given permission to sit down at it, following what the room seemed to want, reading the crowd with the specific attentiveness of someone who has spent years reading crowds, and for whom the information a crowd gives off is not noise, but signal. He played pieces the crowd recognized and pieces they did not, and he moved between them with the ease of someone for whom the distance between different kinds of music had never been the problem that other people found it. He talked to the crowd occasionally, not extensively, not performing patter, just the small exchanges that keep a room warm and connected to the person in front of them. Somewhere in the eighth minute, the

publicist from the review’s management company, who was standing in the wing to the right of the stage, turned to the crew member beside her and said the name. The crew member looked at the stage. He looked at the publicist. He looked at the stage again. He said, “Are you sure?” She said she was sure.

The crew member said, “Does Gerald know?” She said she didn’t think so. Gerald Potts was standing at the production desk at the back of the auditorium floor, running the show from the position he always ran it from, and he was watching the stage with the focused practical attention of a stage manager monitoring an evening for problems.

He was not watching for greatness because monitoring for greatness was not his job, and he had learned over 9 years that monitoring for problems and monitoring for greatness were different activities that could not be done simultaneously. He was watching for timing and levels and the hundred small variables that a show required managing.

>> [snorts] >> Somewhere around the 15th minute, he stopped monitoring for problems. He said later to a colleague who asked him about that evening several months afterward, after the colleague had heard a version of the story from someone else and wanted to hear Gerald’s, that he had noticed the crowd.

Not anything specific about the crowd, not a detail he could point to, but the overall quality of 800 people in a room who have stopped being a crowd waiting for something to happen and have become a crowd that is already inside something happening. He had felt that quality in rooms before, though not often, and it had a signature that was different from the signature of an audience being entertained and different from the signature of an audience being satisfied.

It was something more like the signature of an audience that has been given something they did not know they were going to get and are receiving it with the specific gratitude that unexpectedness produces. He watched the stage for a few minutes with this awareness and then he turned to the runner beside him and said quietly, “Who is that?” The runner told him.

Gerald Potts stood at the back of the auditorium floor and said nothing for a moment. Then he said, “Right. Okay.” He went back to monitoring the show. The 23 minutes ended. The man from the couch stood up from the piano bench and acknowledged the crowd with the brief, unceremonious nod of someone who has done something and is finished doing it and walked off the left side of the stage.

The crowd applauded in the way that crowds applaud when they are not entirely sure what has just happened but are certain they want more of it. The applause lasted longer than was strictly necessary for a warm-up act that nobody had arrived to see. Several people in the first few rows had worked out who it was, recognition running through a crowd like a current, person to person, and the energy this produced blended with the general warmth in the room into something that the headline act would walk out into 20 minutes later and feel immediately, the way performers feel the temperature of a room the moment they step onto a stage. The headline act’s lead performer said afterward in the dressing room that it was the best crowd they had played to in 3 months on the road. He said the room felt like it had already been opened, like the thing that usually took the first 20 minutes of a show to achieve had been achieved before they came on. He asked Gerald what the warm-up had been. Gerald told him. The lead performer sat with this for a

moment and then laughed in the specific way of someone who has received information that explained something and finds the explanation both satisfying and slightly absurd. The headline review came on 12 minutes later and played a good show and the evening proceeded as evenings proceed when the thing that was supposed to fill the gap turned out to be the thing the evening will be remembered for.

Gerald Potts found the man from the couch in the green room after the show and said he owed him a significant favor. The man said there was no favor owed. He said he had a piano and 20 minutes and it had seemed like the right use of both. Gerald said he was welcome at Ellis Auditorium anytime he wanted to come.

The man said he appreciated that and he meant it in the way that people mean things when they are not performing gratitude but expressing it. He finished his coffee. It had gone cold while he was on stage and he drank it anyway and said good night to Gerald and to the few people still in the green room and walked out through the stage door into the November night.

Three of the 800 people in the auditorium that evening wrote letters to the venue in the following week mentioning the warm-up pianist. The letters used different language but converged on the same description, that the piano playing before the main show had been unexpected and that unexpected was not an adequate word for what it had been.

Gerald Potts filed the letters in the folder he kept for correspondence about specific events and then kept the folder for the rest of his time at the auditorium, which was 16 years. Gerald Potts managed events at Ellis Auditorium for another 16 years. He told the story of the evening of November 8th, 1963 selectively because he had learned that selective telling was the version that kept its quality over time.

He told it when someone asked him about the strangest or most memorable night in his 9 years at the auditorium and he told it the way he told all the best stories, plainly, in order, without embellishment, letting the facts do the work that embellishment would have done less well. He always ended it the same way.

He said, “I asked a room full of people if anyone could fill 20 minutes on a piano. A man on a couch said he thought he could. I said yes because he didn’t hesitate and he didn’t try too hard and in 9 years of managing stages, those were the two things I had learned to look for.” He paused.

He said, “I was right, which is not always the case. That night I was right.”