something almost fated about this album . Even the cover , with its iconic image and its iconic pink-and-green design , became both a prototype and a symbol , with the 1979 Clash album , London Calling , clearly emulating it in both color and design , while the photographic image itself has come to stand for the wild , almost ( but not quite ) anarchic spirit of rock ‘ n ’ roll .
The album took off from the start . By mid-April it had sold 150,000 copies and stood at number 3 on the LP charts . But now RCA was faced with an even bigger dilemma : Success . RCA and Steve Sholes were now compelled to do all that they could to keep up with a runaway star who was not the slightest bit interested in listening to what he clearly considered to be their outmoded and shopworn ideas . Sholes set up another Nashville session in April , which , with only one song recorded in the entire three-hour session , turned out to be even more disastrous than the first . ( See the full account in the “ Recordings ” section that follows .) By this time , “ Heartbreak Hotel ” had gone gold .
Elvis ’ career by now was virtually unstoppable . Each television appearance drew a disproportionally greater number of viewers , and Elvis ’ performance improved with each one . Just to show how much greater his visibility ( and , not coincidentally , his attractiveness as a target ) had become , when he appeared on The Milton Berle Show on June 5 , for the first time he drew a firestorm of moral outrage for a performance that was deemed “ suggestive and vulgar ,” “ a display of primitive physical movement difficult to describe in terms suitable to a family newspaper ,” “ noxious ,” and “ musically appalling .” ( And that was just for a start .) Most of the criticism focused on his performance of “ Hound Dog ,” a song he had picked up in Las Vegas in April , which by now had become the centerpiece of his live act . Elvis and his accompanying trio viewed it as little more than a novelty number , guitarist Scotty Moore said , but the
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