Memphis magazine, July/August 2002
“Before Elvis, there was nothing,” said John Lennon. And after him? In the 25 years since Elvis Presley left the building, the rest of us have seen a new millennium come – and if the hopes of this new age have yet to be fully calibrated, the fears that come with it have been measured and named. “September 11th”: One thinks now of events before and after that date almost in the sense of the sacred initials B.C. and A.D.
“Before” is an enormous span of time, a regular seculum, including everything from teh invention of fire to the Pharaohs to the Industrial Revolution to the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t promise of time/space travel; “after” is the blank expanse that awaits us.
That’s one consideration. Another is the fact that Elvis’ life accounts for only a relative blip of time, technically, and that his “product,” as the commercial vendors call it, is finite and even now in its third or fourth recycling. These and other realities have recently caused some to wonder: Is It Over With? Is the Elvis Phenomenon, as a well-read and circulated New York Times piece recently conjectured, already receding into a past that is ceasing to matter?
To bring it home a bit, is the breed of doters and pilgrims who honor us Memphians with their presence on important Presleyan anniversaries – notably January, the birthday, and August, the death-week – ceasing to reproduce itself?
“Us Memphians”: We locals still have a regard for the phrase and the aura of ancient Egyptology that emanates from it. Just as we know that we are connected geographically and in other ways to the crossroad Down South a bit where Robert Johnson the bluesman met his Devil and cut his deal. “Time-space travel,” indeed! We know (or suspect) we are on teh faultline of eternity, but we are modest enough to refer to ourselves merely as “North America’s Distribution Center,” because this is how we make our living, so to speak, and culture, like a man, has gotta eat. Erst Fressen, dann Moral.
It’s embarrassing to admit it, but we didn't even have enough self-confidence to hold on to that orb of crystal that Isaac Tigrett or whoever it was lodged in the tip of The Pyramid when it first got built. “Numinous” be damned; once the fact was exposed, we were ashamed to admit we believed in magic and we took the thing out and chunked it.And now we view The Pyramid itself, but a decade old, as so much scrap metal ready for the junk heap.
And yet we still ask ourselves: Will Elvis last another 25 years, or even forever? That much conviction endures, no doubt because it is something that we share with the rest of the known world. And a belief in magic is at the heart of the question.
To get at what Elvis is, we first need to deal with what he is not. Yes, he had a four-octave range, as his family and handlers reminded us after his passing, lo, that brief snap-of-the-fingers-quarter-century ago. They had seen him worn down by age and self-abuse and grief and knew him (even the new guys around him did) to be only the bloated shell of what he once was. Not even the denial that was a necessary condition of being in his service could keep them from seeing that.
But they insisted that he sang as well as ever .Never mind that we could see his backup singers taking most of the high notes in his last concert appearances – the ones archived as evidence in that eerie but glorious posthumous footage on CBS. It is also true that he had to be rolled out of bed at Graceland to sing a few tracks for Moody Blue, his last album. But “Pledging my Love,’ one of the songs on that album, still rocks – in both the literal and the figurative senses of that word. Yes, he could still sing, he could always sing. No songs, no Elvis. He certainly couldn’t have made archetypical status on the strength of his acting – which to him was having to pretend to be somebody else, a difficult task when he was ever about the task of creating himself first!
We can hazard a little analysis as to what made his voice so appealing. “That curious baritone,” one critic called it. Actually, that is inexact. The voice had mixed propensities, hovering between tenor and bass and everything in between. Even a convincing falsetto lay within his range. His oeuvre can best be described in terms of oxymorons: the mellow rasp of the early Sun sides, the tender majesty of his best later ballads, the constant dialogue in all his best sides between vulnerability and self-certitude. Nobody could take himself as seriously as Elvis. Think “American Trilogy”; nobody could parody himself so self-deprecatingly, either, as in almost all his concert version of “Love Me Tender” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,” two songs that were especially close to the core of his personal need.
One thing he was not, ever, was Steve-’n-Edie, the polished, professionally accomplished Vegas artistes who once pronounced on an afternoon interview show (Mr. Lawrence enunciating the sentiment for himself and his partner/wife, Ms. Gorme), “We don’t really think of Elvis as a singer. But he was a star.” It is only when, years later, one gets past the indignation of hearing such apparent ignorance, that the sense of the observation becomes clear. A singer someone like Steve Lawrence rolling effortlessly (and meaninglessly) through a shlok-standard like “What Now, My Love?” More or less like doing the scales. A star is the persona in whom one invests one’s vicarious longings, a being who is constantly hazarding – and intermittently succeeding at – the impossible stretches that every soul wishes to attempt but lacks the means or the will to It’s not a matter of virtuosity.
For the shameless reason that it dates me, I have more or less stopped boasting of the fact that, when I was growing up on lamar Avenue I lived, for the better part of a year, next door to Elvis Presley at the very time that the young star, then still recording for Sam Phillips and Sun Records, was about to burst from his cocoon into the world’s consciousness. I am honored that Peter Guralnick, whose books are the best guide possible not only to Elvis but to such important Ur-sources as gospel, blues, and soul, assigns me my own corner of the Elvis calendar. In his Elvis Day By Day, he chronicles the day in 1955 when I – perhaps first among ordinary mortals – heard the strains of the immortal “Mystery Train” coming, via a freshly minted acetate on Elvis’ own record player, from a window of the rented brick house next door that Elvis shared with his parents (I am grateful to Peter also for naming me, in Last Train To memphis, as the rightful source for a few other widely circulated Elvis moments, but that’s another tale for another time). The fates do not place you in the way of such things without affecting your sense of the possible.
I mean, lookit, the King of Rock-and-Roll used to sit on his front porch next to mine and sing and strum for my sister and her girlfriends! How’s that for bringing art to the people?
“They said you was high-classed! Well, that was just a lie!” Poor Steve Allen, a real talent and a delectable enough caret wit, but an artist of the old sort who didn’t understand the revolution in consciousness that came in with Elvis. He thought Elvis was poor white trash (That idea endures among many of today’s cognoscenti – and even among some of those who deserve the P.W.T. epithet themselves). Reluctantly Steverino signed the new phenom for an appearance on his TV show in 1956, only because he happened to be in a ratings competition with the reigning monarch of his own genre, Ed Sullivan. Talk about condescension! Allen dressed Elvis up in tails and had him sing to a basset hound adorned in a top hat. “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog!” Despite itself, the message still worked through the irony. And poor Steve never, not to the end of his days, when he was taking out full-page ads in The New York Times decrying the tempora and the mores, got it. The week after being on the Steve Allen show, Elvis came home to Memphis and did a concert at Russwood Park on Madison, at the site where the parking garage for Baptist Memorial Hospital (itself shortly to be demolished) now stands.
“Don't worry. Those folks in New York aren’t gonna change me none,” Elvis told the crowd. And then he kicked into “Hound Dog.” Weeks later he was doing his run on Sullivan’s show. After the second show, he was only visible from the waist up. But everybody got the idea. And it’s still with us.
True it was that Elvis lacked the songwriter’s gift. Either that, or he disdained the effort, knowing just how transforming was the nature of his performing art all by itself. But, even so, he was a segue from the old age of Tin Pan Alley songsheets and assembly-line artists to a newer time of self-creation. There is a persistent myth, even in some fairly sophisticated quarters, that the Colonel or Felton Jarvis or even Sam Phillips, his discoverer at the venerable Sun label, dictated his artisti course. Sam’s testimony, frequently rendered, is one antidote to that. Elvis’ take of the Arthur Crudup blues tune “That’s All Right,” the Godfather of Rock-and-Roll has proclaimed endlessly, emerged from the 19-year-old Elvis’ clowning around during an improv session with Bill Black and Scotty Moore, his sidemen. And further evidence that the King charted his own course, one has only to listen to a famous bootleg tape (actually, it’s become a standard CD long since) of Elvis on a weekend visit at the home of a friend named Eddie Fadel at Kilgore, Texas, in 1958, just outside the young draftee’s first Army base. Virtually oblivious to Fadel’s attempts at conversation, Elvis keeps putting one R&B number after another on his host’s 45 record player and doing his own variations on what he hears. He absorbs folk sources into art like nobody’s business.
One has to remember that Elvis was only 42 when he died. By the standards of today’s ever-graying population, made up in such large measure of evanescent baby boomers, some of whom even now are achieving prodigies of fitness at far riper ages, that is still youthful. And, indeed, the durability of so many of Elvis’ younger contemporaries seems in a curious way to rejuvenate him ex post facto. Bob Dylan, for example, was several years Elvis’ junior, and we have his testimony that – hipper-than-thou though he might have seemed – he always aspired to Elvis’ sort of persona (As tangible proof we have Dylan’s astonishingly flat and gravelly, but somehow gallant and hopeful version of “Can’t Help Falling In Love”). Though he looks more and more like Father Time, Dylan is still playing, recording, and touring. Meanwhile we have a youthful-sounding Elvis in an RCA Victor boxed anthology, tinkering with Dylan standards in the manner of a neophyte, doing first “I Shall Be Released,” and then “Don't Think Twice, It’s All Right,” punctuating these two convincing efforts with the simple ingenuous-sounding phrase “Dylan!” It is as if the two artists have swapped places in time.
And, though there is every objective reason to discredit the legion of Elvis impersonators – foremost among such reasons being the fact that virtually all of these specimens are far too lumpy, homely, and untalented to even remotely resemble the Real Thing – they at least perform the service of keeping the King’s latter-day jumpsuits modish within their own limited but highly visible circles.
The fact is, nobody knows whether the Elvis Phenomenon is currently at its end its middle, or, indeed, still in its beginning. We have a handy operative phrase, however: The King is Dead, Long Live the King. Archetypes of Elvis’ magnitude constitute a dynasty of sorts. When there is a new icon to succeed the old one, the na d only then do we move on. Prince WIlliam, a not improbable English monarch of the imaginable future, will always own a greater resemblance to Jay Gatsby or even JFK Jr. than he does to such antecedents as Henry the Eight, whose royal garter is, to say the least, dated. There have been many incarnations of English kings, connected by several centuries worth of daisy-chain progression, and none of them stands out more than another.
However: “Before Elvis, there was nothing.” And after him? Let our minds race as they will among the ranks of potential successors, and we find no one worthy of substituting for the late King of Rock-and-Roll. There is not yet even a musical variant different or distinctive enough to suggest a break with the popular culture Elvis has come to symbolize. Springsteen? The Boss is but a proletarian strain of the early Elvis. Michael Jackson? Prince? That way lay freakishness and dead ends. Change genders, then: Madonna? A considerable talent, but essentially a quick-change artist. ‘NSYNC? Will sink. Britney Spears? Come on!
The King is Dead. Long Live the King. The same old one, then, until a new one comes. The crowds – the ones that are still coming this way – will let us know when that happens.
