How did you get a rock and roll sound out of a hollowbody?
That’s hard to say, because there wasn’t any rock and roll before. So that was it! We couldn’t get the highs or bend the strings as far as many players do now, because we didn’t use light gauges. We just had to work harder. The Gretsch Chet Atkins strings were the only ones that would hold up on my Gibson Super 400. By today’s standards, those strings are like rope. They’re so thick.

What was Elvis like in the beginning? Was he much of a player then?
Elvis was just an everyday guy—young and wild. He only played rhythm guitar— what I call self-accompaniment. He didn’t consider himself a guitar player as such, but his playing did add to the group, because he played rhythm, and he more or less tied things together. But singing was always his first concern.

Did he have a shaping effect on the course the music was taking, or did you, Bill, and J.D. pretty much decide what the music was going to be?
It was a combination of everybody. We’d stop and say, “Let’s see if this will work.” But, for the most part, I think you could say that once we’d get a rhythm pattern going that felt good with the way Elvis wanted to sing, we’d work everything else in around that. The rhythm was the primary thing. Any lead work was really secondary at that point.

lead work was really secondary at that point. Was it strictly up to you to decide the guitar leads in those pre-rock days?
Yeah. They were primarily my own invention—if you can use the word “invention.” A lot was a combination of old blues licks, some Travis, some Atkins, a combination of thumb and finger—just whatever I could make work.

In Jerry Hopkins’ book, Elvis, he hints strongly that you were the real reason for the Elvis sound—that it was your musicianship and your guitar playing that actually drove the group and created its sound.
Well, it’s easy for another guy to say nice things about you.

He also suggests that you guys really got beat on the money end of it.
Ouch—that was a good lick!

Do you play a lot of jazz?
No. I love it dearly. I wish I could. But when I was at the point of grasping things pretty fast and putting things together in my own way, we were in a rut. With Elvis, unless we were making records, we were on the road playing the same thing day in and day out. So as far as becoming a good musician as opposed to a commercial player—well, I missed that chance. But, that’s show biz!
—Excerpted from Douglas Green’s piece in the August 1974 Guitar Player