When Elvis followed his dream to Florida

@1999 The Gainesville Sun

 

On a lonely stretch of State Road 40, the pine forest gives way to sawgrass and sabal palm as the Gulf of Mexico draws near. A concrete bridge spans the Withlacoochee River, angling slightly left before the road flattens out again and continues toward the big water. Eleven miles to the south, the twin towers of the Crystal River nuclear power plant loom like smoking concrete volcanoes. These days, nobody comes out here much, except fishermen looking for a boat ramp or teenagers looking for privacy.

For six weeks in the summer of 1961, however, this place had everyone’s attention. It was here that Elvis Presley, at the height of his fame, brought a whole Hollywood contingent to make a movie called Follow That Dream. Before he left, Presley had Levy County, and much of North Central Florida, all shook up.

Eugenia Burns was 14 and lived in Cedar Key; her mother volunteered to drive her and some friends the movie set. Off they went one morning to Yankeetown, four in the car with Mom at the wheel, followed by a load of girls in another car. “We drove up there, and they must have been between takes,” Burns recalls. “We could see Elvis, and my mother cautioned us about being real quiet and not screaming and yelling. Well, he looked up and he saw us, and we were being calm and everything.

“We went to the end of the road and turned around, and we were driving real slow, and when we came back to the set he had walked up to the side of the road as if he was waiting for us. My mother stopped the car, and he reached into the back seat where my friend Susan was sitting, and he squeezed her hand. She wet her pants, she was so excited. He reached in and squeezed my hand, too.

“The other carload of girls were screaming and yelling and that kind of stuff,” Burns says “and he wouldn’t even go near their car.”

Based on the novel Pioneer, Go Home by Richard Powell, Follow That Dream is a comedy, the ninth of Elvis’ 33 movies. He stars as Toby Kwimper, the eldest child in a hillbilly family that “homesteads” on a remote spit of land, much to the consternation of the state government. There are only five Presley songs on the soundtrack.

The film – which was almost titled Here Come the Kwimpers – was budgeted at $1.5 million, one-third of which was spent in Florida. Presley’s salary at the time was $500,000 per picture. “Since the book was set in the Fort Myers area, they wanted to capture the Florida scenery,” explains Gainesville writer Steven Opdyke, who’s working on a book about Elvis movies. “They were looking for a river, and they started down along the coast from Fort Myers on up and found everything too populated.”

Heading west along State Road 40, the filmmakers discovered what they were looking for at Bird Creek Bridge, at the tip of marshy Little Pumpkin Island. Producer David Weisbarth’s location scouts wound up in the Yankeetown office of realtor Ollie Lynch. “They came in and asked who owned that land,” Lynch says. “And I told them that I did.” Most of the three-acre set where they made the picture, Lynch recalls, was sawgrass, almost totally submerged at high tide. “They didn’t pay us anything for the use of the land; they just paid us in fill dirt,” he explains. The Florida Development Commission spent $8,000 to haul in sand, plant palm trees (all of which died before filming was completed) and re-surface the asphalt in front of the set. In the movie, it looks like a tropical beach on the side of the road.

The filmmakers were not permitted to remove a power pole near the bridge; they simply “dressed” it as a palm tree, complete with attached fronds. It’s clearly visible in Elvis’ first “fishing” scene.

Lynch became the moviemakers’ local liaison and arranged for extras. “I was in four different scenes, three of which were cut out before they showed it,” he chuckles. “They used to come into my office and say ‘Mr. Lynch, we need 10 men dressed like fishermen tomorrow morning.’ So then I’d get on the phone and call people. They got paid $10 a day and lunch, if they were there for the lunch hour.”

Presley was put up at the Port Paradise Motel in Crystal River. The star had his 20-foot Century Coronado speedboat docked behind the motel. Reportedly, he rarely ventured out in Crystal River or the nearby towns, preferring to take his boat out into the Gulf and waterski with his co-star, Canadian actress Anne Helm, and members of his omnipresent entourage, the so-called Memphis Mafia. “They basically stayed in their rooms,” says Opdyke. “They had their meals delivered. Anne Helm later said that they would do Dexedrine to stay up, and if they wanted to go to sleep, Elvis would give her Valium.”

Omnipresent too, on and off the set, was Presley’s manager Col. Tom Parker. “The colonel,” Opdyke reports, “was here for the duration, and several people have said that he stuck pretty close to Elvis.” Parker arranged several “publicity stops” for his client; Presley was photographed at Weeki Wachee Springs, and crowned the first king of Tampa’s Latin Festival (the crown was reportedly lost in all the confusion). One Sunday, Presley spent hours signing autographs at a park in Brooksville (according to Opdyke, Parker exacted a hefty fee from the town council for the Elvis appearance).

Mary Ellen Boyette, the 1961 Chiefland Watermelon Queen, visited the set and posed for photos with the star and a very large melon. “He was such a nice person, but I was just completely tongue-tied through the whole thing,” she says. “But it’s one of my treasured memories.”

On July 15, the production moved to Ocala for the first of four days’ shooting at the First Commercial Bank on Silver Springs Boulevard. Hundreds of spectators stood in a roped-off section; many more watched from the library steps across the street. Elvis’ dressing trailer was parked alongside the bank, in the drive-in lane.

“All the girls and boys were watching, hoping for a glimpse of him,” remembers Joanne Parramore, who was 15 at the time. “And he’d stick a hand out, or he’d stick a foot out, and everybody’d scream.”

A police escort would rush Presley inside the building when he was needed. Parramore’s mother worked at the bank, so Joanne and a friend were allowed inside to watch the filming – so long as they remained quiet and out of the way. “When they took a break, he came over to us,” Parramore recalls. “I distinctly remember him saying something like ‘Boy, these lights sure are hot.’ He was very nice and signed the back of a deposit slip.

“My mother was real impressed with how polite he was. They had lines for the lemonade, or water or whatever they had to drink, and he’d stand in line. He wasn’t the first guy in line.”

Earl Jernigan (1997 photo)

With members of her family, nine-year-old Shirley Darnell of Gainesville stood in the crowd outside the bank, after a morning’s fun at Silver Springs Park. “We only really saw him from a distance,” says Darnell, who’s now Capt. Sadie Darnell of the Gainesville Police Department. “My sister and I stared at his chair, the stereotypical movie chair with the name on it, and watched for when he’d come and sit in it.”

Darnell’s uncle, Earl Jernigan, had a job as assistant set decorator and prop man on the film. “I remember we were very proud that our uncle was involved in such a major production,” she says.

In the family group that day was Darnell’s 10-year-old cousin, Tom Petty. “My sister and I weren’t all that impressed about Elvis being there, but we knew that Tommy was very excited about being a part of what was going on,” Darnell says. “He was absorbing it all. It was one of the few times I ever saw him kind of serious.”

Joe Stewart, then 21, had come down from Gainesville with his sister and sister-in-law, and he brought his 8-millimeter movie camera. “Word on the street when we got there was that Elvis and Anne Helm were having lunch at the Marion Hotel on Magnolia Street,” Stewart says. “Locating the hotel, we went around back and discovered Elvis’ white Cadillac parked at the loading ramp. We camped outside the fence surrounding the area, and were lucky enough to catch Elvis and Anne on film as they came out the door.”

In Stewart’s dim, scratchy home movie Presley – still dressed in his blue Toby Kwimper shirt and jeans – feigns surprise as he and Helm, accompanied by their driver, spot the crowd and climb into the Caddy’s back seat. The next shot shows the big car passing through downtown Ocala on its way back to the Commercial Bank. “The temperature actually reached 102 degrees before the day ended, Stewart says, “but it did nothing to disperse the crowd outside the bank.”

The film’s finale was shot in the county courthouse in Inverness, with dozens of local people hired as extras.

Presley left Florida after six weeks in front of the camera; the film’s interiors were shot later, on a California soundstage. Within a month he was knee deep into his next movie, Kid Galahad.

Follow That Dream had its world premiere April 11, 1962 at the Marion Theatre in Ocala. Presley was in Hawaii, working on Girls, Girls, Girls, but he sent a telegram thanking everyone for their help on the picture. The movie opened a week later in Gainesville, at the Florida Theatre, and shortly thereafter around the country. It was, at one point, the No. 2 box office attraction according to Variety. “It generally got good critiques,” Opdyke says. “Variety equated it to Lil’ Abner and The Real McCoys. The Hollywood Reporter said Elvis did well playing comedy.”

It’s not much of a movie, but among Elvis aficionados it’s considered one of his better vehicles. “Most of his fans said, all we wanted to see was Elvis three times a year, performing new material,” reports Opdyke. “We didn’t care what it was, we just wanted to see him performing.”

Thirty-eight years after Follow That Dream came and went, Ollie Lynch still owns the land by Bird Creek Bridge. It’s overgrown with trees and weeds now, but he can still find the place, just off the set, where Presley’s personal trailer was parked.

“My mother was up in her 80s, and she’d always read how wonderful Elvis was to his mother,” Lynch says. “So she thought he was pretty fine, and she wanted to bake him a pie.

“I pulled up there and went around the corner, and Elvis was just coming out of the trailer with those hoody-looking friends that he traveled with. I told him ‘My 80-some year-old mother’s out here, and she’s got a pie for you.’ And he said ‘Well, bring it around.’ He was very gracious.

“So I got mother out with the pie and took her around there, she gave the pie to him and he handed it to these guys and said ‘Take that in there; we’re gonna have some of that real soon.’ And then he leaned over and kissed mother’s cheek.

“And I swear she didn’t wash her face for 3o days after that.”

‘Let’s go out there and be a bunch of bros’: Ron Blair and the Heartbreakers

@1990, Gainesville Sun

As the bass player in Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, Ron Blair went from the nightclubs of Gainesville to the coliseums of the world in just a few years.

He was one-fifth of a wildly successful rock ‘n’ roll band, and just at the apex of his hard-earned career — at the time most people would’ve been content to lean back and count their money — he threw it away and started over.

In the early ’70s, Ron Blair had left Gainesville for Southern California, where the women were beautiful, the beach was nearby, and the music business, in which he hoped to make a buck or two, was a way of life. He was 23.

Four fellow Hogtown expatriates convinced Blair to join their band. The band didn’t have a name, but it did have a record deal, due to the singing and songwriting talents of its frontman. Blair knew Tom Petty well, respected his talents, and joined his group without reservation.

Within five years, the band — dubbed at the very last minute Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers — was the biggest act on the road, selling out arenas from coast to coast and tearing it up in Europe and the Far East. Critics called them the American Rolling Stones. In 1980 alone, the Heartbreakers sold over three million albums; Blair, like his bandmates, amassed a sizable bankroll.

And then, abruptly, he quit.

“Some days I’ll think, ‘Couldn’t I have put up with it?'” the 41-year-old Blair says in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, where he still lives. “At the time, it was really a gut decision. That’s kind of what I regret, that it wasn’t a real thought-out decision.

“I physically and verbally tuned out on an emotional level, rather than really thinking it out.”

Purely and simply, he says, it just ceased to be fun. That’s why he broke with the band.

Today, Blair owns and operates a swimwear shop called Shapes, on a busy downtown street in Tarzana, a Los Angeles suburb. He bought the business in 1982, just after he told Petty he “couldn’t get back on the bus” and on on another tour.

“The first couple of years we were open, there was a rumor that Tom Petty’s wife had opened the shop,” Blair says with a chuckle. “We didn’t do anything to squelch it.”

Ron Blair’s father, a career Navy man, moved his family around the world and eventually put down roots in Macon, Ga., where Ron was born.

In 1969, he chose the University of Florida for his alma mater simply because a girlfriend expressed her desire to go there; Blair was only interested in a college that “didn’t have compulsory ROTC.” On the advice of counselors, he chose engineering as a major, but what he really wanted to do was play music. He dropped out in his junior year.

Eventually Blair became part of a rock band called RGF (the initials stood for different things on different occasions). The group — which also included guitarist Jeff Jourard, later to form the Motels — was “like the Who, or a little nastier,” Blair reports. RGF was Gainesville’s resident loud and sloppy “hard rock” band. Its polar opposite, Mudcrutch, played country-tinged rock ‘n’ roll, with the kind of vocal harmonies that RGF wasn’t at all interested in.

“We used to play a lot of the same gigs,” Blair remembers. “Or even throw gigs – we used to rent the University Auditorium, split the gig and split the money.

“They were into a different kind of rock than the band I was in. But they were real good, and they had their own following around there. We did, too, but maybe a little more of the degenerates.”

Mudcrutch’s lead singer and chief songwriter, Tom Petty, was a year younger than Blair. “Tom used to impress me because he had kind of a beard, he was a real scraggly guy,” Blair says. “He looked like he drank a few beers, just really loose onstage. He looked like he was on the edge of looseness – like ‘this guy’s gonna fall off the stage!’ but then he’d keep it together and rock the whole set.”

It was obvious to Blair and everyone else that RGF and Mudcrutch were about the best things going in Gainesville. Both groups had large local followings. “But I didn’t understand what their band was about. I didn’t quite know what they were trying to do, because it wasn’t a straight-ahead thing, (and) it wasn’t a Southern Blues thing.”

In early 1972, RGF made a run for the big time. “It just came to a point where we’d played all the gigs you can play around Gainesville, and then everybody started thinking about leaving,” Blair recalls. “Tom and them were pretty smart — they were making tapes and thinking about going somewhere they could record.

“The band I was in, we just took off to Boston on a kind of a wild hair. It was either New York, Boston, or California. We ended up gettin’ froze out. It got to be October and the band split up and everybody went back home.”

Blair dawdled briefly in Gainesville before returning to Macon, where he spent a year and a half without a steady band — and, in his words, went “stir crazy.” He hung around with the Allman Brothers Band and their Macon legions for a spell (his younger sister married Gregg Allman in 1972) and, with the encouragement of friends, traveled to Southern California for a visit in early ’74.

He never went home again.

Soon he was playing bass in three different club bands, just making ends meet. It wasn’t long before Mudcrutch appeared on his doorstep.

“Tom and a couple of the guys came over,” Blair remembers. “They had just driven across the country in a truck with their cats, dogs, women and whatever, and they just showed up.

“Most of my friends had already moved out here and were trying to get something going on, and I said ‘All right, everybody’s out here now!'”

The members of Mudcrutch had made the trek with the promise of a recording deal with Shelter Records, Leon Russell’s company. But after one single, the band began squabbling internally, and the album was never finished. A year after pulling up in Petty’s truck, Mudcrutch dissolved. Shelter retained Petty, and he started recording with studio musicians.

Stan Lynch, a Gainesville drummer who’d also headed west looking for “the big gig,” called his old buddy Blair in early ’76 and asked him to sit in on some late-night demo sessions for pianist Benmont Tench, who’d been in Mudcrutch, and, like the rest of them, was now taking whatever work he could find. The studio sessions weren’t costing Tench anything; he had a friend who worked there and had invited him to record after hours.

Guitarist Mike Campbell, Petty’s songwriting partner in Mudcrutch, came along, and so did Petty. “I forget the songs,” Blair says, “but it just seemed to be real natural. It was kind of easy. I think we played pretty late into the night, for a couple of nights.

“I think it was just a natural thing. I guess everybody’s roots were similar, I don’t know, it was really kind of a magic thing. Nobody was getting in the way of each other. I don’t think anybody was trying to take over or dominate.”

It took a little record-company convincing, but soon Petty’s solo career became Petty’s band: Petty, Campbell, Tench, Lynch and Blair. After the first few sessions they worked together, it felt too good to everyone to consider bringing in more studio guys.

Blair says it was the “cause” – getting Petty started successfully on his record career – that motivated them all in the beginning.

The first two Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers albums did zero to little business in the United States, although the band got to be huge in England. But when Damn the Torpedoes appeared in mid-1980, they went from club dates and opening slots to headlining arenas in a real hurry. The album reached No. 2 on the national charts and went several times platinum. Suddenly, Petty was big business; the adulation, and the money, started rolling in.

“It used to be a lot of fun,” Blair explains. “The first two records were a lot of fun, and then touring up to there – even though it was a real strain – it had that kind of cause feel to it, ‘let’s go out there and be a bunch of bro’s, doing it.’

“When we started doing the third record, some heavy kind of producer guys came in and really tried to professionalize it. And from that point on, it entered the uptight era. It just got uptight from really that moment on until I wasn’t with the band any more.”

Success, Blair feels, really tested the Heartbreakers. There was a lot of pressure on Petty, too, to “keep up the good work,” and the inevitable fissures appeared between Petty and the bros in the band.

Torpedoes was the biggest record the band ever had, and there were a couple of really cool tours, but something happened,” Blair explains. “It was like the band got tense; the band as a unit got stressed.

“It seemed like everywhere we were playing was an upside-down bathtub, the sound was bad, and the bass sounded especially bad. For me, it got to be almost depressing — we’d have soundchecks, and it would be like bad group therapy.”

“He was just slowly and slowly fading away, it seemed, fading far away from us,” Petty told the Gainesville Sun in 1985. “We’re all pretty close, and we didn’t see him socially, ever. I don’t really know what it was. He was just disillusioned, I think. Big business rolls into the picture, and I think Ron was just a pretty casual person.

“It wasn’t like we were sad to see him go, either, because it’s no fun having somebody in the group who isn’t really into it.”

Blair played on half of the platinum Hard Promises album in 1981, and on the subsequent world tour. By then, he was traveling to and from the concerts separately.

“I was still there trying to do everything that was asked, being a soldier and everything, but I made a little bit of a tuneout and it sort of wedged the whole thing apart.”

Howie Epstein replaced Blair on bass in 1982, and is with the Heartbreakers to this day.

Blair and his wife designed Shapes with a “rock ‘n’ roll vibe” in mind; he says they wanted the front of the store to look like an album cover. When the couple divorced in 1985, Blair became the sole proprietor of the shop, which from all reports is very successful. Blair manages a staff of eight; at home, he has a 9-year-old son, James.

Every once in a while, he gets a longing for that rock ‘n’ roll rush. He has a pair of platinum albums on the wall, but that’s not enough to bring it back.

“Sometimes I regret it a little bit,” he explains. “I’m not a quitter, and I don’t like to think I left something unfinished. But it was like some voice told me, ‘You’re gonna go crazy. Do something else. Be independent.'”