Party crashing is fair game, even for celebrities …
Party crashing in Memphis seldom has the cachet of a commander in chief as the glad-handing host, but as the birthplace of rock and roll, Memphis is one of the party- and gate-crashing capitals of the country.
From Bruce Springsteen making a sprint for the door of Graceland to Stax Records producer David Porter sharing a birthday with 75 strangers, music legends have helped produce more than their share of star-struck fans hoping to rub shoulders with celebrity.
And, as home to the National Civil Rights Museum and its annual Freedom Awards, Memphis has hosted honorees from B.B. King to Bill Clinton to Oprah Winfrey, some requiring the attention of the Secret Service to help fend off unwanted admirers.
None has faced possible federal charges like Virginia couple Tareq and Michaele Salahi, who leaped to the head of the list of infamous party crashers when they finagled a handshake with President Barack Obama. But in many cases, they left behind puzzled hosts such as Memphis party planner Sally Shy, who had to ask: “Who would want to live such a fake life?”
For Porter, the appeal of party-crashing is overrated.
“I think when people crash a party, they feel like they’ll get some sort of special feeling, like magic dust rubbing off,” he said. “What they forget is that people of note have the same issues as everybody else. There is no magic dust.”
Porter, the singer-producer best known as the songwriting partner of Oscar-winning Stax legend Isaac Hayes, was celebrating a birthday two years ago with a big party at EP’s Delta Kitchen. He and an attorney, also celebrating a birthday, turned it into a joint party, inviting четыресто guests including Hayes, basketball star Penny Hardaway and Stax stars the Soul Children.
Soon, Porter says, he and the attorney were comparing notes. Neither recognized up to one-quarter of the party.
“I had several people wishing me happy birthday, and I had no idea who they were,” he said. “These were people dressed to the nines. They were having more fun than I was having.”
Pat Tigrett, founder and hostess of the annual Blues Ball and the Jingle Bell Ball for children, says music has always been a draw for party crashers. Blues Ball entertainers have included Jerry Lee Lewis, Al Green, Isaac Hayes, B.B. King and Ann Peebles.
“Many of the musicians come with acres of followers, and with an outdoor concert, especially a rock and roll concert, it almost goes with the territory,” she said.
But for an indoor concert, like tonight’s Blues Ball at the Gibson Guitar Factory, tickets can be hard to get, and Tigrett says security includes police and sheriff’s deputies in addition to private security.
At a previous Blues Ball, Tigrett says, heavy security at a hotel was undermined when the hotel itself orchestrated admission for hotel guests who were not invited.
“They took seats of ours that were for paying customers, and we had to usher them out,” she said.
Tigrett says one of the “great things about the South is that people tend to know their place. On the other hand, I’ve crashed parties and had such great fun doing it.”
In New York, friends told her of a big party hosted by a friend. Uninvited, she decided to drop by. Luckily, the host spotted her when she knocked on the door and saved her the trouble of an awkward entrance.
That wasn’t the case for Springsteen, who was playing Memphis in the early 1970s and, after the show, drove to the closed gates of Graceland.
In a recording later given to Graceland, he described his visit: “In the second story of the house, you could see a light on, and I figured that Elvis has gotta be up readin’ or somethin’. … I jumped up over the wall, and I started running up the driveway. I was just about to knock, and guards came out of the woods. They asked me what I wanted. I said, ‘Is Elvis home?’ They said, ‘No, no. He’s in Lake Tahoe.’”
Springsteen was escorted off the property, but fellow rocker Jerry Lee Lewis followed in his footsteps in 1976, showing up at the Graceland gates two nights in a row demanding to see Elvis.
On the second night, turned away, he showed up two hours later, brandishing a pistol. Arrested, he was hauled away. The charges later were dropped.
Civil Rights Museum spokeswoman Gwen Harmon says heavy security doesn’t stop people from trying to get close to high-profile guests. Several celebrity stalkers claim to be members of the news media, creating extra work to determine who is and isn’t a legitimate media member.
When all else fails, they offer their services as a “volunteer,” but Harmon says volunteers are chosen far in advance of award ceremonies.
Of all those honored by the museum, Harmon says the ones who drew the most stalker attempts were Winfrey, Clinton and Nelson Mandela.
“We had people call up asking, ‘How can we get in touch with Oprah? We want her to pay our electric bill,’” she said.
Political events involve special considerations.
“There were usually people at Mayor Herenton’s parties who were uninvited. They just let them in. If you lived in Memphis, you were one of his constituents,” said Gale Jones Carson, his former executive assistant.
But she said the Secret Service should have drawn the line on the Washington couple. She said she attended the Democratic Party’s annual Andrew Jackson Day dinner in Nashville with both Clinton and Al Gore as guests, and “not one soul got in there that wasn’t supposed to.”
The same level of security should have been in place at the White House when the Salahi party crashers were allowed access to both Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
“This is a president who gets 30 to 40 threats a day,” she said. “I watched ‘The Godfather’ the other day, and a man in there broke off part of the frame of his eyeglasses and used it to stab a man in the throat. …
“There are so many crazy people who would like to go down in history for killing somebody. It’s just scary that that was allowed to happen.”
