It's February sixth, and on this day in 1955, Elvis Presley performed two Sunday shows at Memphis’s Ellis Auditorium—but the real action happened backstage. Between the 3:00 and 8:00 p.m. performances, a pivotal meeting took place between Elvis, Colonel Tom Parker, Sun Records president Sam Phillips, and members of Elvis’s inner circle, including Tom Diskin, Scotty Moore, and Bill Black. The topic? Elvis’s future.
Colonel Parker was already pushing the idea that Elvis needed a bigger label than Sun to go national, telling Phillips that RCA was interested in buying Elvis’s contract. Phillips didn’t take kindly to the suggestion that Sun was holding Elvis back, and the meeting quickly went cold. While nothing was signed that day, the tension between ambition and loyalty set the stage for one of the most significant transitions in Elvis’s career—the eventual sale of his contract to RCA later that year.
