Elvis Presley didn't have on blue suede shoes when I saw him. He wore black pumps instead and when he went on stage he removed his cream-colored striped jacket with the black velvet collar and put on a blood-red one.

Now that his TV special showed he still had the drawing power, Elvis and the Colonel are discussing his going out on tour and actually making personal appearances. Live concert appearances have been rare in the Presley career. He made half a dozen or so in the beginning and then the TV shows and the hit records spun him right off into the flicks and he was gone.

Back in June of 1956 when Jim Morrison was eleven years old, Elvis Presley came to the Oakland Auditorium Arena across the Bay from San Francisco. It's been renovated since then but it was at the time really raunchy, an old hail with a huge stage, U-shaped balcony and a flat floor with moveable seats. Elvis didn't sell it out.

That was most surprising. He did two shows, which may have been the problem, but he certainly came in with all the press and radio in the world going for him. Full coverage at the airport and the rest. It was a Sunday night but that shouldn't have stopped anyone. After all, it was Elvis. Right?

Before the show he hung around the dressing room, poking his head out the door occasionally to yell at the chickies hanging over the railing above him and talking with friends and people he'd gone to school with. He was afraid of the crowd even though he said he loved them. When he went to the head, he took along a police escort.

The crowd was overwhelmingly female and young. They screamed like their descendents did for the Beatles. The sound, echoing off those walls which had seen Ringling Brothers and the Harlem Globe Trotters and so many old, tired prize fights, was deafening. He signed some programs (one chick fainted just before she got to him).

I asked him about the audience and he said, in a thick drawl, "Ah thunk they-yuh wonderful. It makes muh wont tuh live up tuh they-ah opinion uv muh." Or something like that. The show left him sweating and he stayed in the dressing room for half an hour afterwards until a squad of Oakland cops could arrange an exit to his Caddy. Dozens of girls charged the police escort and almost got him as he climbed into the car (like Dylan in Don't Look Back) and as he drove away they stood there screaming and waving.

Before he made the run to the car, an occasional chick would get past the cops and bust all the way through to the dressing room door. He was sweet to them as earlier he had baited them as they hung over the railing or, when he was onstage, they ran up to the line of cops. He'd slap his crotch and give a couple of bumps and grinds and half grin at the insane reaction it produced each time.

He actually kissed a couple of them on the cheek after signing their programs and it was a clean, kind gesture that seemed quite removed from the hysteria that surrounded the rest of the show.