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Keeping Down the King
Now he took hold of Black and White, – "Elvis Presley Blues" by Gillian Welch The original Elvis Presley hasn’t left the building; the music industry has just made it seem like he has. In this 25th Elvis deathiversary year, with an avalanche of commercial product intended to cash in on, er, commemorate Presley’s legacy, even the most discriminating record buyer would be hard-pressed to find a trace of the still-pimply, brown-haired, nervous Memphis teen who gathered all his courage and walked into Sun Studios to make a record for his mama.
Today, record-store Elvis has his first hit single in decades (a throbbing remix of "A Little Less Conversation," a forgotten 1968 album cut that was picked up by Nike for its World Cup sponsorship); a bevy of CD boxed sets, including a four-disc set of outtakes and live performances scraped from the bottom of the Presley barrel; a cleaned-up, remastered release of some of his earliest live recordings from the Louisiana Hayride show; DVDs by the armload, including a three-disc set of some of his best performances; and several new books including a couple of weighty coffee-table tomes priced at 50 bucks a piece. In September, you’ll even be able to buy a CD of Elvis’ 30 Number One hits (yes, including the new one). Some stores are marketing Elvis furniture suites, and there are now Elvis bank cards and even Elvis-themed state lottery tickets in some parts of the country. If that’s not enough, AOL Time Warner, along with Elvis Presley Enterprises, has created a toolbar link on AOL’s Internet keyword page leading to Elvis music, pictures and news of Graceland events, including the annual Elvis Week (Aug. 10-18) and the third annual live Vigilcast on AOL (Aug. 15). The national celebration will reach its peak at Memphis’s Pyramid Arena with "Elvis: The 25th Anniversary Concert," featuring a live band, including musicians who toured with Elvis, accompanying film and video images of Presley in performance. All of that is, of course, gravy on top of the usual stampede of Elvis kitsch available worldwide: Elvis ashtrays, Elvis shot glasses, Elvis wall clocks, coasters, pencil boxes, teddy bears, salt and pepper shakers, toothpick holders, towels, hats, pennants, coffee cups, trivets, spoon rests, t-shirts, cigarette lighters, silverware, placemats, baseball caps, toilet paper holders, laminated wall plaques, decals, sunglasses, key chains, vases, tie tacks, stickpins, posters, candles, wallets, calendars and God knows what else (Shop Elvis will give you some idea of the offerings). Good or bad, there’s nothing we can do about this, to be sure. Like it or not, a full-tilt commercial glut is America’s way of celebrating events and honoring heroes. It even seems fitting this time in view of Elvis’ status as one of America’s all-time champion consumers. The problem here, though, is that as each year passes, the Elvis images that remain in our cultural memory become more and more clich’d, leaving little room for the Memphis boy who rebelled against, and conquered, his native culture’s repression and its racism. (It’s an increasingly aged culture we’re talking about here, by the way; try to find someone under 25 who really knows or cares about Presley.) Elvis’ life is now generally summed up in the media by three main images: a) Fat Elvis the druggie; b) trim, Vegas karate-chop Elvis; and c) Silly Movie Star Elvis. So who’s missing? That would be the young Elvis, the important Elvis, the turned-the-world-upside-down Elvis, now largely drowned in a tide of latter day jumpsuits, odd personal quirks and inconceivable pill habits. The extremely famous have become something more than human, at least to their fans. And so it is with Elvis Presley. But it was a very human and shy boy, a mama’s boy with a wild streak and a "dreamy" disposition, who wound up taking last century’s great musical leap of faith for us, mixing black and white styles with an energy and flair no one else imagined. The Dividing Line Presley’s melding of genres has become part of the rock history canon. Some very learned, talented people have written about what Elvis means to our culture, what lessons are to be learned from his career, how he was a metaphor for the potential, and the traps, in the American system. But what’s easily lost in the shuffle is how gutsy that kid was — the kind of gutsy that’s often the property of the underclass. Elvis grew up poor and lived in public housing with nothing to lose anyway, so why not play a white man’s version of rhythm & blues? Nobody had really cared about anything he’d ever done before, anyway; why should it be any different this time? Of course, this time he was so good at something, public reaction would be very different. It’s hard to imagine, if you weren’t there, just how tight, repressive and bland mainstream American culture was after World War II and throughout much of the 1950s. When Elvis first popped his hip, shook his legs, curled his lip and howled, "You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog" on television in 1956, he set in motion a revolution in American life that loosened the reins of social control and led over the next decade to a new appreciation of personal expression, of personal style, and of plain guiltless fun.
Just as importantly, he became, in a way that was unstated but deeply felt by the whole country, the embodiment of new racial attitudes. In other words, Elvis was the spark that ignited the pop culture that we live in and take for granted every day. He was the great dividing line between the old, pre-war white cultural consensus and our present-day, ever-changing climate of clashing, interweaving, diverse cultures. As filmmaker Ralph Bakshi put it, "Presley freed us." Or as John Lennon told Elvis when he first met him, "Before you there was nothing." Those, of course, are impossibly high standards to live up to — especially for a guy who never had any intention of being the cultural catalyst he turned out to be. But no matter how hard he may have fallen from his initial perch, no one can take away the fact that Presley really did cause a whirlwind of change. It took serious courage for Elvis to be Elvis and that’s what has been forgotten. If you read or listen to most histories of early rock, it’s easy to enjoy a romanticized view of the pre-civil rights movement South. When critics or historians talk about the cross-fertilization that took place between black and white forms of music, you can almost imagine a South where it was OK for southern blacks and whites to get to know one another, to trade guitar licks in each other’s homes. Yet that wasn’t the case by a long shot. During the South’s "Happy Days" of the 1950s, nearly total segregation was the law. Any frank cross-cultural exchanges had to occur in the shadows — never openly and rarely consciously, and certainly not in the revealing bright light of the national media. Not until Elvis Presley. The great Southern rockers — Presley, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and a slew of others — became who they were by breaking the rules and rising above segregation’s rigid restrictions. It was the kind of thing you could be killed for. In 1956, the year of Elvis’ big national breakout, the greasy-haired, rubber-legged kid who would soon become a symbol of freedom for millions of teenagers was, to many Americans, more symbolic of degeneracy. Elvis was the only white man to move so freely onstage, or to dress and sing in a way that was so unabashedly, defiantly black. The kind of music Presley had appropriated and made his own was tolerated among southern blacks because it was seen as harmless. But when Presley sang Little Richard’s "Ready Teddy," not only acknowledging R&B’s legitimacy but celebrating its power and fun, he stirred up outrage and blind hatred in his native region and beyond. The kind of hatred that led the Alabama White Citizens Council to announce that it had "set up a 20-man committee to do away with this vulgar, animalistic, nigger rock & roll bop." Leap of Faith
As with most great musical innovators, the young Presley was a cultural sponge. He listened to and loved and sought out all types of music, from Dean Martin crooning, opera, and Tin Pan Alley show tunes to white gospel, country & western, and, most significantly, the music of the culture he was supposed to hate. He took the blues and R&B to heart and proclaimed his newfound self to the rest of Memphis, and then, through non-stop touring, to the rest of the South, and finally to the world. In an early interview with the Charlotte Observer’s Kays Gary, Presley explained, "I remember old Arthur Crudup (a black bluesman) … and I used to think if I could just feel what ol’ Arthur felt, I’d be a music-maker like nobody ever saw!" The remarkable ease with which he accepted black culture wasn’t just a quasi-revolutionary act for a white Southerner at the time, it was a striking personal victory over his upbringing’s racism — and a forceful promise of things to come. Elvis was denounced nationwide for his "vulgarity" (which usually meant his Southernness) and his sexuality. But down South it was his confused racial identity that elicited mockery and abuse. When his first record, "That’s All Right Mama," was released in Memphis, the first question asked by callers to radio stations was invariably, "Is that a white boy or a colored?" Presley had already started to undermine the taboos on black and white interaction. It took a brave, maybe even a desperate, leap of faith to meld divergent Southern musical forms into a popular national art. Presley’s personal triumph over the racist inhibitions of his environment set the tone for what rock & roll at its best would be, not just for the South but for the nation: a challenge to the status quo, a celebration of freedom, and a bold embrace of America’s wide, deep cultural diversity. It’s a part of his legacy that’s usually buried today under the ever-breaking wave of commercial exploitation of his career and image, and shrouded by his own history of long decline. But at his most important, his most daring and his most dangerous — in those three or four years before commercial pressures, the Army, and the long tentacles of Col. Parker squeezed the spark from him — Presley was the raw flame, America’s own funhouse mirror that, depending on your outlook, reflected either a scary, vulgar delinquency or a completely unexpected excitement and sense of liberation. That upsetting of the status quo, including the acknowledgment of black and white interdependency, was at the heart of his initial appeal and ignited rock & roll’s Big Bang. And that’s why, despite the sparkly jumpsuits, the pills, the years of creative indolence, the thousands of fat jokes, and the hothouse-flower quality of his personal weirdness, Presley is still impossible to forget. As rock critic/historian Greil Marcus wrote, "[Elvis] remains the specter of possibility — in rock, pop culture, ‘America,’ modern life — and he remains the fact of ruin. Solve that question if you can, or else drop the question of who you are, where you came from, where you might end up." So go on and enjoy the new Elvis "product" (I know I’m loving the DVD box set), tune in to the big gatherings in Memphis, and maybe even tell a few Elvis jokes. But spend at least a few minutes remembering that this guy wasn’t just a fat druggie who loved fried chicken, karate and young women in white cotton panties. At one time, he set the world on fire, he felt like an earthquake rumbling through the land, he opened white eyes to black music, he made Americans feel in their gut that everything had changed. And he did it all himself. John Grooms is editor of Creative Loafing - Charlotte, an alternative newsweekly, and is a former instructor of rock & roll history. He was 6 years old when he saw Elvis Presley perform on the Ed Sullivan Show, and it ruined him for life. Related Sites |
