The Sam Houston Coliseum backstage had the particular quality of large venue backstage spaces in the early 1970s, functional, institutional, the kind of space that exists entirely in service of what happens on the other side of its walls, and has never been asked to be anything more than that. Concrete floors, fluorescent lighting, the residue of a thousand previous evenings, and the specific smell of the place, the accumulated atmosphere of performances and the people who had produced them.
Rolling Stone magazine had sent a photographer named David Cartwright. This was significant in the way that Rolling Stone assignments were significant in 1970. The magazine had been publishing for 3 years, and had in those 3 years established itself as the place where rock and roll was taken seriously, where the conversation about popular music operated at a level that the older music press had not attempted, and that the artists themselves recognized as different from the usual coverage.
Being in Rolling Stone was not the same as being in Life or Look or any of the other publications that had covered Elvis across his career. Rolling Stone was a different kind of attention, the attention of people who cared about the music as music, and about the artists as artists, rather than as phenomena to be documented.
David Cartwright was 26 years old and had been shooting for the magazine since its early issues. He was good at his work, technically precise, with an eye for the image that would carry the story the editors wanted to tell, with the professional efficiency of someone who has learned to do what he needs to do in the time he has available, and deliver what is expected of him.
He had specific expectations for this assignment. The piece was a profile, a long, considered assessment of Elvis’s return, of what the Vegas comeback meant, of where Elvis Presley stood in the landscape of popular music in 1970. The editor wanted a cover image, or something that could be a cover image, And Cartwright had come to Houston with a clear sense of what that image should be.
Elvis, the star, the face that had defined something, the image that communicated the specific thing that Rolling Stone wanted to say about him. He had set up in the backstage corridor after the show. The show had been 2 hours and 15 minutes of what Elvis Presley could do in 1970, which was considerable. The band he had assembled for the tour was the best he had ever had.
The rhythm section tight and driving, the horns precise, the Sweet Inspirations bringing a gospel quality to the backing vocals that elevated everything they touched. James Burton on lead guitar, whose playing had the specific economy of someone who has learned that every note needs to earn its place. The ensemble operated with the coherence of a unit that had been working together long enough to anticipate each other.
They were extraordinary, and the audience had known it for 2 hours and 15 minutes. After the show, they came off stage with the specific quality of people who have just done something very well and are in the process of returning from the elevated place that doing it very well puts you. The energy was different from the pre-show energy, looser, warmer, the specific satisfaction of completed work.
Cartwright had organized his setup in the corridor outside the dressing rooms, a backdrop he had brought, two lights, the technical equipment of a portrait session conducted in a non-studio environment. He had done this before in other corridors in other venues, and he had a procedure for it. His procedure in this corridor on this evening included a particular decision about who should be in the frame.
He did not announce this decision. He did not say anything explicit about it. He simply, in the way that he organized the space and positioned his backdrop and gestured toward the people he wanted, made a series of choices that produced, as their aggregate result, a specific configuration. Elvis at the center, the white musicians of the ensemble arranged around him, and the black members of the band, the Sweet Inspirations and two of the rhythm section, positioned in such a way that they were present in the corridor, but
outside the frame he was building. The arrangement was not accidental. It was the arrangement that Davie Cartwright had made because it was, in his professional assessment, the arrangement that produced the image the magazine wanted, the image that would read clearly on a cover, that would communicate what he understood the piece to be communicating, that would not present an editorial complexity that the magazine had not asked him to create.
He framed the shot. He looked through the viewfinder. James Burton was to Elvis’s right, which was where he usually was. Charlie Hodge was to his left. The other white musicians of the ensemble filled the frame on either side. Five men arranged with the natural ease of people who have been asked to stand together and are complying without self-consciousness.
Millie Kirkham was standing just outside the edge of the frame. So was Sylvia Shemwell. The two women who had been singing with the Sweet Inspirations and who had been part of the sound of the show for 2 hours and 15 minutes were in the corridor, but not in the rectangle that Cartwright was framing through his viewfinder.
They knew what was happening. They did not say anything. They stood where they were standing with the specific quality of people who have been in this situation before. Not this exact situation, perhaps not precisely this configuration, but situations with this essential shape. Situations in which the decision about who was included and who was not included was being made by someone with the authority to make it and was being made in a particular direction.
Millie Kirkham looked at the backdrop, then at the lights, then at the viewfinder that Cartwright was looking through. Sylvia Shemwell looked at the same things. Then they looked at each other, briefly, with the specific communication of a look between two people who share a context and do not need words to communicate within it.
Elvis was standing at the center of the frame in his post-show clothes with the patient quality of someone waiting for a process to complete. He had done this before, the post-show photographs, the press requirements, the documentation of the evening that had to happen after the evening itself. He was looking at Cartwright, then he was looking at the viewfinder, then he was looking at the corridor on either side of the backdrop, at the arrangement of people in it, at who was where, at the specific geometry of the space and
what that geometry communicated. He saw Millie Kirkham. He saw Sylvia Shemwell. He saw where they were standing relative to the backdrop. He saw the direction of Cartwright’s camera. He understood, in the immediate way of someone who has been in enough rooms to read rooms, what was happening and how it had happened and what the current arrangement was.
His expression did not change. He stepped out of the frame, not dramatically, not with the performance of objection, not with the announcement of a decision, not with anything that called attention to itself as an act. He simply stopped being in the place where Cartwright was framing him and moved to the place where Millie Kirkham and Sylvia Shemwell were standing, and he positioned himself between them, one arm moving naturally to the space beside each of them, and he stood there, in the corridor, outside the backdrop, outside
the frame. Cartwright lowered his camera. He looked at Elvis, at where Elvis was now standing and who he was standing with and what the arrangement had become. He looked at the backdrop and the lights and the musicians still arranged around the space that Elvis had vacated. The corridor was very quiet.
James Burton, who had been in his position to the right of where Elvis had been, looked at where Elvis now was. He looked at Cartwright, then he stepped out of the frame, too, and walked to where Elvis was standing. Charlie Hodge followed. The other musicians, understanding the geometry of what was happening without needing it explained, moved out of the frame in the quiet way of people making a decision they have already made before the decision was formally available to them.
The backdrop stood against the corridor wall with no one in front of it. Cartwright looked at Elvis. “Mr. Presley,” he said. Elvis looked at him. He was standing between Millie Kirkham and Sylvia Shemwell with the ease of someone who is exactly where he intends to be and has no plans to be anywhere else. He did not say anything.
He waited. Cartwright looked at the backdrop, at the lights he had set up, at the empty space where his photograph had been, at Elvis Presley standing outside his frame with the black members of the ensemble waiting. The calculation ran. David Cartwright was 26 years old and had a Rolling Stone assignment and had come to Houston with a specific image in mind and was standing in a backstage corridor in which that image was no longer available to him because the subject of the image had walked out of the frame.
He moved his lights. He repositioned the backdrop. He looked through the viewfinder at the new configuration, at Elvis Presley standing between Millie Kirkham and Sylvia Shemwell with James Burton and Charlie Hodge and the rest of the ensemble arranged around all of them, the entire band, every person who had been on that stage for 2 hours and 15 minutes, arranged in the corridor without distinction.
He took the photograph. Elvis was not at the center of the frame. This was the thing that the people who saw the final photograph would notice if they were paying attention, that the subject of the piece, the man whose face was supposed to carry the image, was not where the subject of a group photograph usually stood.
He was to the left of center, between two of the Sweet Inspirations, with the ensemble arranged around him in the natural configuration of people who have been asked to stand together and are complying without hierarchy. It was a better photograph than the one Cartwright had originally planned. He knew this when he took it, and he knew it when he developed it, and he knew it when he submitted it with the rest of the take for the editors to review.
He had wanted the image of the star, and he had gotten the image of the band. And the image of the band was truer to what the show had been than the image of the star would have been, and truth was what made photographs last. He did not say any of this to anyone at the time. The woman who eventually told the story was not Millie Kirkham or Sylvia Shemwell or James Burton or any of the musicians who had been in the corridor.
It was a production assistant named Carol Simmons who had been in the corridor managing logistics and who had watched the whole thing from the far end and had understood what she was watching and had said nothing in the moment because saying something in the moment had not been her role. She told it 30 years later at an event honoring the musicians who had been part of Elvis’s touring band in a room full of people who had been there for pieces of it and who received the story with the quiet attention of people hearing
something they had half known and are now hearing whole. “He just walked out of the frame,” she said. “Nobody told him to. Nobody asked him to.” He looked at where Millie and Sylvia were standing, and he walked over there, and he stood between them. She paused. And then everyone else followed. She looked around the room.
“He never said a word,” she said. “He just moved.” The rule, as Joe Esposito articulated it in the years that followed, was never formally stated. It did not need to be. It was understood in the way that things are understood in close working groups, through the accumulation of instances rather than through explicit declaration.
Elvis did not call a meeting and announce a policy. He walked out of a frame in Houston in March of 1970 and stood between two women who had been left outside it. And the people around him understood what that meant and carried the understanding forward into subsequent situations. All of them or none of them.
That was the rule. It was not a complicated rule. It did not require legal language or formal enforcement. It required only that the person with the power to enforce it be willing to use that power, which Elvis was, and that the people around him understood that he was, which they did. The contact sheets arrived at the Rolling Stone offices in San Francisco 4 days after the Houston show.
The editor who opened the envelope was a man named Ben Fong-Torres, who had been with the magazine since the early issues, and who had developed over those years the specific eye of someone who reviews a great many photographs and has learned to identify quickly which ones carry something beyond technical competence.
He spread the contact sheets on the light table and moved through them with a loop. The standard frames first, the ones Cartwright had taken before whatever had happened had happened, and then the later frames, the ones from after. He stopped at the full ensemble. He looked at it for a long time. Elvis to the left of center, the two women on either side of him, the entire band arranged around them without hierarchy.
The fluorescent light doing what fluorescent light does, honest, unflattering, true. The backdrop slightly off center because Cartwright had repositioned it quickly and had not had time to perfect the alignment. Fong-Torres called Cartwright. “The group shot,” he said, “tell me about it.” Cartwright told him briefly, without embellishment, the way you tell a story when you are not certain what the telling reveals about you.
Fong-Torres listened. When Cartwright finished, there was a pause. “This is the cover,” Fong-Torres said. Cartwright was quiet for a moment. “I had other frames, tighter, just Elvis.” “I know,” Fong-Torres said, “this is the cover.” He hung up and looked at the frame again on the light table, at Elvis Presley standing between Millie Kirkham and Sylvia Shemwell in a Houston corridor.
The whole band around them, the photograph that had not been the photograph anyone planned to take. He had been looking for a cover that said something true about Elvis Presley in 1970. He had found it. The Rolling Stone photograph ran in the May issue. Elvis is to the left of center. He is standing between two women whose names appear in the caption.
The ensemble surrounds them all without distinction. The entire group that had produced 2 hours and 15 minutes of music in the Sam Houston Coliseum on a March evening in 1970, documented together in a backstage corridor with fluorescent lights and a portable backdrop and the specific quality of a photograph that is true to its subject.
It is a good photograph. David Cartwright kept a print of it for the rest of his life. He did not often talk about how it came to be the way it was, but he kept it.
They Excluded Black Singers From the Photo — How Elvis Ruined Their Plan With One Move
The Sam Houston Coliseum backstage had the particular quality of large venue backstage spaces in the early 1970s, functional, institutional, the kind of space that exists entirely in service of what happens on the other side of its walls, and has never been asked to be anything more than that. Concrete floors, fluorescent lighting, the residue of a thousand previous evenings, and the specific smell of the place, the accumulated atmosphere of performances and the people who had produced them.
Rolling Stone magazine had sent a photographer named David Cartwright. This was significant in the way that Rolling Stone assignments were significant in 1970. The magazine had been publishing for 3 years, and had in those 3 years established itself as the place where rock and roll was taken seriously, where the conversation about popular music operated at a level that the older music press had not attempted, and that the artists themselves recognized as different from the usual coverage.
Being in Rolling Stone was not the same as being in Life or Look or any of the other publications that had covered Elvis across his career. Rolling Stone was a different kind of attention, the attention of people who cared about the music as music, and about the artists as artists, rather than as phenomena to be documented.
David Cartwright was 26 years old and had been shooting for the magazine since its early issues. He was good at his work, technically precise, with an eye for the image that would carry the story the editors wanted to tell, with the professional efficiency of someone who has learned to do what he needs to do in the time he has available, and deliver what is expected of him.
He had specific expectations for this assignment. The piece was a profile, a long, considered assessment of Elvis’s return, of what the Vegas comeback meant, of where Elvis Presley stood in the landscape of popular music in 1970. The editor wanted a cover image, or something that could be a cover image, And Cartwright had come to Houston with a clear sense of what that image should be.
Elvis, the star, the face that had defined something, the image that communicated the specific thing that Rolling Stone wanted to say about him. He had set up in the backstage corridor after the show. The show had been 2 hours and 15 minutes of what Elvis Presley could do in 1970, which was considerable. The band he had assembled for the tour was the best he had ever had.
The rhythm section tight and driving, the horns precise, the Sweet Inspirations bringing a gospel quality to the backing vocals that elevated everything they touched. James Burton on lead guitar, whose playing had the specific economy of someone who has learned that every note needs to earn its place. The ensemble operated with the coherence of a unit that had been working together long enough to anticipate each other.
They were extraordinary, and the audience had known it for 2 hours and 15 minutes. After the show, they came off stage with the specific quality of people who have just done something very well and are in the process of returning from the elevated place that doing it very well puts you. The energy was different from the pre-show energy, looser, warmer, the specific satisfaction of completed work.
Cartwright had organized his setup in the corridor outside the dressing rooms, a backdrop he had brought, two lights, the technical equipment of a portrait session conducted in a non-studio environment. He had done this before in other corridors in other venues, and he had a procedure for it. His procedure in this corridor on this evening included a particular decision about who should be in the frame.
He did not announce this decision. He did not say anything explicit about it. He simply, in the way that he organized the space and positioned his backdrop and gestured toward the people he wanted, made a series of choices that produced, as their aggregate result, a specific configuration. Elvis at the center, the white musicians of the ensemble arranged around him, and the black members of the band, the Sweet Inspirations and two of the rhythm section, positioned in such a way that they were present in the corridor, but
outside the frame he was building. The arrangement was not accidental. It was the arrangement that Davie Cartwright had made because it was, in his professional assessment, the arrangement that produced the image the magazine wanted, the image that would read clearly on a cover, that would communicate what he understood the piece to be communicating, that would not present an editorial complexity that the magazine had not asked him to create.
He framed the shot. He looked through the viewfinder. James Burton was to Elvis’s right, which was where he usually was. Charlie Hodge was to his left. The other white musicians of the ensemble filled the frame on either side. Five men arranged with the natural ease of people who have been asked to stand together and are complying without self-consciousness.
Millie Kirkham was standing just outside the edge of the frame. So was Sylvia Shemwell. The two women who had been singing with the Sweet Inspirations and who had been part of the sound of the show for 2 hours and 15 minutes were in the corridor, but not in the rectangle that Cartwright was framing through his viewfinder.
They knew what was happening. They did not say anything. They stood where they were standing with the specific quality of people who have been in this situation before. Not this exact situation, perhaps not precisely this configuration, but situations with this essential shape. Situations in which the decision about who was included and who was not included was being made by someone with the authority to make it and was being made in a particular direction.
Millie Kirkham looked at the backdrop, then at the lights, then at the viewfinder that Cartwright was looking through. Sylvia Shemwell looked at the same things. Then they looked at each other, briefly, with the specific communication of a look between two people who share a context and do not need words to communicate within it.
Elvis was standing at the center of the frame in his post-show clothes with the patient quality of someone waiting for a process to complete. He had done this before, the post-show photographs, the press requirements, the documentation of the evening that had to happen after the evening itself. He was looking at Cartwright, then he was looking at the viewfinder, then he was looking at the corridor on either side of the backdrop, at the arrangement of people in it, at who was where, at the specific geometry of the space and
what that geometry communicated. He saw Millie Kirkham. He saw Sylvia Shemwell. He saw where they were standing relative to the backdrop. He saw the direction of Cartwright’s camera. He understood, in the immediate way of someone who has been in enough rooms to read rooms, what was happening and how it had happened and what the current arrangement was.
His expression did not change. He stepped out of the frame, not dramatically, not with the performance of objection, not with the announcement of a decision, not with anything that called attention to itself as an act. He simply stopped being in the place where Cartwright was framing him and moved to the place where Millie Kirkham and Sylvia Shemwell were standing, and he positioned himself between them, one arm moving naturally to the space beside each of them, and he stood there, in the corridor, outside the backdrop, outside
the frame. Cartwright lowered his camera. He looked at Elvis, at where Elvis was now standing and who he was standing with and what the arrangement had become. He looked at the backdrop and the lights and the musicians still arranged around the space that Elvis had vacated. The corridor was very quiet.
James Burton, who had been in his position to the right of where Elvis had been, looked at where Elvis now was. He looked at Cartwright, then he stepped out of the frame, too, and walked to where Elvis was standing. Charlie Hodge followed. The other musicians, understanding the geometry of what was happening without needing it explained, moved out of the frame in the quiet way of people making a decision they have already made before the decision was formally available to them.
The backdrop stood against the corridor wall with no one in front of it. Cartwright looked at Elvis. “Mr. Presley,” he said. Elvis looked at him. He was standing between Millie Kirkham and Sylvia Shemwell with the ease of someone who is exactly where he intends to be and has no plans to be anywhere else. He did not say anything.
He waited. Cartwright looked at the backdrop, at the lights he had set up, at the empty space where his photograph had been, at Elvis Presley standing outside his frame with the black members of the ensemble waiting. The calculation ran. David Cartwright was 26 years old and had a Rolling Stone assignment and had come to Houston with a specific image in mind and was standing in a backstage corridor in which that image was no longer available to him because the subject of the image had walked out of the frame.
He moved his lights. He repositioned the backdrop. He looked through the viewfinder at the new configuration, at Elvis Presley standing between Millie Kirkham and Sylvia Shemwell with James Burton and Charlie Hodge and the rest of the ensemble arranged around all of them, the entire band, every person who had been on that stage for 2 hours and 15 minutes, arranged in the corridor without distinction.
He took the photograph. Elvis was not at the center of the frame. This was the thing that the people who saw the final photograph would notice if they were paying attention, that the subject of the piece, the man whose face was supposed to carry the image, was not where the subject of a group photograph usually stood.
He was to the left of center, between two of the Sweet Inspirations, with the ensemble arranged around him in the natural configuration of people who have been asked to stand together and are complying without hierarchy. It was a better photograph than the one Cartwright had originally planned. He knew this when he took it, and he knew it when he developed it, and he knew it when he submitted it with the rest of the take for the editors to review.
He had wanted the image of the star, and he had gotten the image of the band. And the image of the band was truer to what the show had been than the image of the star would have been, and truth was what made photographs last. He did not say any of this to anyone at the time. The woman who eventually told the story was not Millie Kirkham or Sylvia Shemwell or James Burton or any of the musicians who had been in the corridor.
It was a production assistant named Carol Simmons who had been in the corridor managing logistics and who had watched the whole thing from the far end and had understood what she was watching and had said nothing in the moment because saying something in the moment had not been her role. She told it 30 years later at an event honoring the musicians who had been part of Elvis’s touring band in a room full of people who had been there for pieces of it and who received the story with the quiet attention of people hearing
something they had half known and are now hearing whole. “He just walked out of the frame,” she said. “Nobody told him to. Nobody asked him to.” He looked at where Millie and Sylvia were standing, and he walked over there, and he stood between them. She paused. And then everyone else followed. She looked around the room.
“He never said a word,” she said. “He just moved.” The rule, as Joe Esposito articulated it in the years that followed, was never formally stated. It did not need to be. It was understood in the way that things are understood in close working groups, through the accumulation of instances rather than through explicit declaration.
Elvis did not call a meeting and announce a policy. He walked out of a frame in Houston in March of 1970 and stood between two women who had been left outside it. And the people around him understood what that meant and carried the understanding forward into subsequent situations. All of them or none of them.
That was the rule. It was not a complicated rule. It did not require legal language or formal enforcement. It required only that the person with the power to enforce it be willing to use that power, which Elvis was, and that the people around him understood that he was, which they did. The contact sheets arrived at the Rolling Stone offices in San Francisco 4 days after the Houston show.
The editor who opened the envelope was a man named Ben Fong-Torres, who had been with the magazine since the early issues, and who had developed over those years the specific eye of someone who reviews a great many photographs and has learned to identify quickly which ones carry something beyond technical competence.
He spread the contact sheets on the light table and moved through them with a loop. The standard frames first, the ones Cartwright had taken before whatever had happened had happened, and then the later frames, the ones from after. He stopped at the full ensemble. He looked at it for a long time. Elvis to the left of center, the two women on either side of him, the entire band arranged around them without hierarchy.
The fluorescent light doing what fluorescent light does, honest, unflattering, true. The backdrop slightly off center because Cartwright had repositioned it quickly and had not had time to perfect the alignment. Fong-Torres called Cartwright. “The group shot,” he said, “tell me about it.” Cartwright told him briefly, without embellishment, the way you tell a story when you are not certain what the telling reveals about you.
Fong-Torres listened. When Cartwright finished, there was a pause. “This is the cover,” Fong-Torres said. Cartwright was quiet for a moment. “I had other frames, tighter, just Elvis.” “I know,” Fong-Torres said, “this is the cover.” He hung up and looked at the frame again on the light table, at Elvis Presley standing between Millie Kirkham and Sylvia Shemwell in a Houston corridor.
The whole band around them, the photograph that had not been the photograph anyone planned to take. He had been looking for a cover that said something true about Elvis Presley in 1970. He had found it. The Rolling Stone photograph ran in the May issue. Elvis is to the left of center. He is standing between two women whose names appear in the caption.
The ensemble surrounds them all without distinction. The entire group that had produced 2 hours and 15 minutes of music in the Sam Houston Coliseum on a March evening in 1970, documented together in a backstage corridor with fluorescent lights and a portable backdrop and the specific quality of a photograph that is true to its subject.
It is a good photograph. David Cartwright kept a print of it for the rest of his life. He did not often talk about how it came to be the way it was, but he kept it.
