"Girls, I'll see you all backstage"

On the thirteenth [of May 1955] they played Jacksonville. Before the show Mae [Boren Axton] took Elvis [Presley] and some of the other musicians out to dinner, and she tried to wheedle him out of the frilly pink shirt he was wearing. "Skeeter Davis was there, and June and Anita [Carter], and some of the boys with Elvis, and I said, 'Elvis, that's vulgar. And it would make me such a pretty blouse.' And Skeeter said, 'I want it,' and June said, 'I want it.' And he just kind of grinned. And I said, 'Elvis, you ought to give it to us, one of us anyway, because they are just going to tear it off you tonight. Not really thinking about it - knowing the people liked him but not really thinking about it."

That night at the show, in front of fourteen thousand people, he announced at the conclusion of his act: "Girls, I'll see you all backstage". Almost immediately they were after him. The police got him into the Gator Bowl's dugout locker room, where Mae and the Colonel were totaling up the night's receipts. Most of the other acts were backstage, too Mae recalled, when the fans started pouring in through an overhead window that had been inadvertently left open. "I heard feet like a thundering herd, and the next thing I knew I heard this voice from the shower area. I started running, and three or four policemen started running, too, and by the time we got there several hundred must have crawled in - well maybe not that many, but a lot and Elvis was on top of one of the showers looking sheepish and scared, like 'What'd I do?' and his shirt was shredded and his coat was torn to pieces. Somebody had even gotten his belt and his socks and these cute little boots - they were not cowboy boots, he was up there with nothing but his pants on and they were trying to pull at them up on the shower. Of course the police started getting them out, and I never will forget Faron Young - this one little girl had kind of a little hump at the back, and he kicked at her, and these little boots fell out."

The Colonel, said Mae, "and I don't mean it derogatorily, got dollar marks in his eyes." It was Jacksonville, said Oscar Davis, that marked the turning point that was the real eye-opener, the Colonel said to him.

- Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, 1994, p.189-90.