Why Elvis?
Fight the powers that be! Okay, but remember, only one man ever made the ground shake under their feet. (Summarizing the “Stupid About Elvis” series.)
“Consciousness and conscience are burdens imposed upon us by the American experiment. They are the American’s agony, but when he tries to live up to their stern demands they become his justification.”
(Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act, 1964)
“But the living souls of men may interrupt the mechanical march of events at any moment.”
(D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 1923)
“The most difficult years was when . . . about the time Elvis Presley came out. That rock and roll boom and that just about crippled everybody. I guess that’s the reason Columbia Records let us go. And there was a lot of entertainers that the record companies got rid of at that time and it just crippled everything except the rock and roll.”
(Bluegrass great Ralph Stanley, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, July 15, 2002.)
“Chaos is a cultural corrosive, one dissolving the tight connection between a deterministic mathematical model and the delivery of a predictable future.”
(David Berlinsky, “The Soul of Man Under Physics,” Commentary, January 1996)
“See, Elvis closed every show, so when he’d get to the dressing room, we’d all be back there already sitting around. And this one time he came back, sat down at this old piano that was there, and started playing some old gospel song. When he finished the song, he spun around on the stool and said to everybody, ‘You know that’s the music I really love.’
“Well, Ira’d been drinking some. It was happening more and more by that time, now that we’d started to have a little success. ‘Well, you damn white n***r,’ he said to Elvis. ‘Why do you play that crap on the stage if that’s what you love?’
“Elvis just grinned at him. It wasn’t the first time he’d been called a white n***r, I’m sure. A lot of people in Nashville felt the same way.”
(Satan Is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers, Charlie Louvin with Benjamin Whitmer, 2011)
“Well, what about the rumor that you once shot your mother?”
(Hy Gardner, interviewing Elvis on New York Radio just hours after Presley’s appearance on The Steve Allen Show, where he was forced to sing “Hound Dog” to a basset hound. Transcripts of Hy Gardner Calling!, used in the film This Is Elvis (1981) and the TV documentary Elvis ’56 (1987))
PLEASE INDULGE ME while I go through a brief minimalist phase:
We forget now.
Hell, we forgot right away.
It wasn’t supposed to happen.
Not any of it.
The paths to success were as carefully guarded in the 1950s as they always were before and always have been since.
You were not supposed to be able to walk into a recording studio the size of Donald Trump’s daughter-fondling hands, somewhere in the hinterlands (say Memphis, Tennessee) with a head full of dreams and scant-to-none performing or recording experience and mount a challenge to the society’s underlying racial, sexual, economic, and spiritual assumptions right from there.
Even if you had such notions — even if such notions were of little personal consequence to you but were a remotely foreseeable consequence of your actions — you were not supposed to succeed.
Too many people had put too much effort into stopping you before you got started for you to have any real chance.
Then as now and now as then.
Revolution? What revolution?
Let’s say you were an actor.
Okay, you were an actor.
Say you were a writer. Say you were a comedian. Say you played an instrument.
The guitar? The saxophone? The piano? . . . The kazoo?
Say you were a film director, a politician, a preacher.
Say you were anything at all.
Then or now.
So what?
You think you’re gonna make somebody worried?
Sh-i-i-i-it!
Do anything you want, son. Break all the rules.
We got ways to deal with you.
And they did.
And they do.
By the time you have walked the line, for however long it takes to make your way to Broadway or Hollywood or Vegas or D.C. or Wall Street or just one of the little recording studios run by the handful of record companies who can distribute product nationally without going bankrupt they will have you figured out.
And they will have put a stop to you.
Devious smiles or wan shakes of the head. Acting class or the casting couch. The lawyer’s office or the “mentoring” process. Endless auditions or back alley beatings.
Heck, if nothing else works, they’ll have you sign a contract.
That’ll make you wish you took one of the other options.
One thing is sure.
We’ll get you.
And before it’s all said and done, you’ll be on their side.
Just like all the others.
Say what you like about Elvis.
He didn’t end up like all the others.
Or any of the others.
And it wasn’t supposed to happen.
Elvis wasn’t remotely like anyone else, so he had to be transformed into the exemplar of selling out.
Inevitable? Who you callin’ Inevitable?
Later, of course, it all seemed “inevitable.”
Elvis wasn’t remotely like any of the others so he had to be transformed into the exemplar of selling out — a pure product of cultural forces over which he not only had no control but was damned lucky to have had the one-in-a-million hillbilly’s chance to serve.
It wasn’t his talent that was special. It certainly wasn’t his vision.
No, it was his mendacity dammit!
Or his timing. Or the inscrutable ways of the Cosmos.
Or . . . well . . . something! Something else.
Anything else.
People don’t just set out to pull the rug from under The Man’s feet — or even make him stumble about a bit and fail, for the briefest moment, to exercise maximum control — and then just . . . do it.
By God, it doesn’t work that way!
And if anybody actually pulls it off we’ll make damn sure they pay. We’ll see to it that nobody else gets such ideas! Politicians aren’t the only ones who can make sure anybody who manages to get what they want gets it good and hard.
My “Stupid about Elvis” series here at Tell It Like It Was gives a small taste of just how relentless this process has been, across six decades and every conceivable sociopolitical divide.
The decades come and go. The old boss becomes the new boss. Dreams die. Roads are not taken. We all end up a little further down whichever road we do take, though not nearly as far as we hoped and dreamed.
One day we look around and realize we are stuck.
Then, to make ourselves feel a little bit better, we forget.
Not what was . . . well, not necessarily.
Some of that, maybe, but truth be told, we tend to remember a fair bit of what was.
What actually happened?
Sure, that we at least partially remember.
What we do forget, entirely, is what once seemed possible.
Because the best possibility didn’t happen — because instead of the better world waiting that beckoned when Elvis was “the King of Rock and Roll” (a title he scorned, perhaps because he knew it would be used, like every other available club, to beat his memory) we have a thousand “cultures” and none.
We forget.
When we’ve investigated ourselves and exonerated ourselves we have no trouble remembering not to blame ourselves.
Elvis wasn’t the only one who forgot to remember to forget.
Now, what was it again?
What did we forget?
What we didn’t do, of course. But it’s even trickier than that.
Whose fault was it, this forgetting?
Have we forgotten that?
Well, yes, but only when it’s convenient, meaning when it’s not us.
Hey, when we’ve investigated ourselves (the true job of any worthwhile intelligentsia) and exonerated ourselves (the true job of any worthwhile propagandist) then we have no trouble remembering not to blame ourselves.
We’ve got a thousand ways to forget.
But what we forget, well, that’s another matter.
And what we’ve mostly forgotten about Elvis in the ’50s — about the birth of White Boy Stomp and its not-really-inevitable convergence with Black Man’s Blues — is how cataclysmic it all was.
We’ve forgotten this to such a degree that we’ve fooled ourselves into believing it didn’t really happen, or it didn’t happen the way we think it did, or it happened but it didn’t really mean what we thought it meant, or it didn’t happen by anyone’s design, or it was just one of those things but even if it wasn’t just one of those things it doesn’t matter because, well, it really, really didn’t happen!
The key word in V.I. Lenin’s famous phrase “useful idiot,” after all, is “useful.”
And then, there were schools of thought! There are enough arguments along these lines to now qualify as a “school of thought.” (Martha Bayles and Elijah Wald, names I didn’t get to in the “Stupid about Elvis” series, are big in this area.) The sincerity and competence of the school’s main thinkers are both undeniable and largely inconsequential. The key word in “useful idiot,” after all, is “useful.”
Being useful is a trick. Being an idiot is no trick at all. Legions of idiots are highly intelligent, as the monstrous author of the phrase that pegged them knew all too well. (Incidentally, the basic line of reasoning in this “school of thought” is that rock & roll was a dance craze, like the Lindy Hop or the Black Bottom, only, you know, bigger! So, okay, maybe I’m giving these people credit for a little more intelligence than they really deserve.)
So-o-o-o . . .
Watergate we could handle. Elvis, not so much.
A time to forget.
Why do we forget??
Why do we forget to live?
Because if the world that hove into view once Elvis had gone on Ed Sullivan and effectively ratified Brown vs. Board of Education ten years before the political system caught up, never actually came to pass, even after, or especially after, the system caught up, surely we need to forget.
If it was right there in our hands and we could feel it at our fingertips just by turning on the radio and hear it just by listening to what we found there, and it still somehow slipped away, then let’s face it, there would be no punishment fit for the crime. No just punishment would exist even if we were willing to indict, convict, and sentence ourselves, which, of course, we would neglect to do.
Clever us.
We forget how cataclysmic it all was because we’ve trained ourselves to forget, which is maybe how we came to be more delusional about Elvis than we were/are about Vietnam or Watergate or Barrack Obama’s birth certificate.
We forget because it hurts too much to remember.
We forget, mostly, because we know, deep down inside, how improbable it really was.
We forget because we know it wasn’t really supposed to happen at all, that chance we got.
And because we know it won’t come round again.
For all the blather about the American Dream, we know, deep down inside, that teenage truck drivers with recording and stage experience that can be counted in hours do not walk into hole-in-the-wall recording studios in the hinterlands and lay dynamite under the existing culture.
And we certainly know that, if this does somehow occur, the dynamite does not go off.
And if the dynamite does go off, it does not go off because that same teenage truck driver turns out to be holding the match to the fuse and is willing and able to touch it off.
This we know . . . this we keep telling ourselves, everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to the good old Village Voice and back again.
Sixty years down the road we keep trying to forget what was possible.
We’re back in our little hidey-holes now. The new tribes have sorted themselves out and they look disturbingly like the old tribes.
Elvis didn’t invent “rock & roll,” and never claimed to have done so. That was a straw man argument, setting him up for the day when he could be called “a straight-up racist” by a butt-hurt Chuck D long after Presley’s style of genius had helped make “racist” the insult it never was before.
What he did instead was resolve contradictions. All those contradictions everyone else had always assumed — prayed? — were unresolvable.
Heck, the one everybody talks about, the one between “country & western” and “rhythm & blues” (labels which were themselves made up to whitewash the discomforting realities inherent in the original designations of “hillbilly” and “race”), wasn’t even much of a contradiction and, to the extent it was, he dispensed with it at his first real recording session.
“Accidentally,” of course: Living out Sam Phillips’s “white boy who sounded black” dream, the dream Phillips himself had, according to numerous witnesses, who may or may not have been under his spell (and may or may not have been misremembering), been promoting around Memphis for years and would be satisfied with for the rest of his life. A dream which, by itself, was actually nothing new and certainly nothing to worry about.
A lot of work — no small amount by Phillips himself — has gone into making sure everybody knows it wasn’t Elvis’s dream and, in a way, the Palace Guard in charge of setting the boundaries for this particular narrative has been right.
It wasn’t Elvis’s dream.
Elvis’s dream was much, much bigger.
He knew no white boy ever had or ever would remake the world just by singing the blues. No formula that simple or well-worn could have underwritten what he was about to do. For what he was about to do to have its chance, he had to resolve all those other contradictions: between ghost and machine, church and state, city and country, material world and spirit world, uptown and downtown, backwoods and village green, both sides of every set of tracks running through every community in the realized and thus-far imagined nation.
Also between introspection and assertion — the divides in the universal soul as well as the national one.
Between the spirit of celebration underlying jazz and gospel, the spirit of melancholy romance underlying pop, and the spirit of doubt and doom underlying blues and country.
All that, just for starters.
We don’t have to speculate about what his “vision” was. We know.
We’ve got the records he was never supposed to be allowed to make for evidence.
Long before Elvis was Everywhere, the “powers that be” had seen him coming.
They didn’t know what he looked or sounded like. They didn’t even know whether the way he looked or sounded would matter in the least. That’s not how Powers-That-Be become and remain who and what they are. Prophecy is a fool’s game.
The powers that be are never fools.
If you want to spare yourself looking like a fool, what you need to do is build walls. Walls big enough and high enough and strong enough to keep the real fools in.
That’s right. Come on boy. See can you kick down our walls.
But first, let’s chat awhile, out here in metaphysical space and time.
What are your intentions anyway? What’s your thinking?
Run for office? Write for one of those magazines we own just for the purpose of making sure only the writers we like get hired?
What, a book even?
Act a little? Do stand-up? Preach a little gospel? Sell shoes? Greeting cards? Cars from Detroit? Cars from Tokyo?
Hamburgers?
Cheeseburgers?
Whooo-boy.
Wait, what’s that you say?
Sing. . . . SING???
She-i-i-i-i-t boy! That’s alright.
We got you covered.
Step right over here and sign on the dotted line.
You’re . . . contained.
We got some walls built.
Just for you.
And don’t you worry son. You’re gonna like it in here!
What wasn’t supposed to happen of course — what wasn’t supposed to be possible — was for somebody to do what Elvis did between the summer of 1954 and the spring of 1958 when he was “coincidentally” drafted by the Army.
What wasn’t supposed to happen was he wasn’t supposed to smash those three-hundred-year old walls (built on the foundations of ten, twenty, hundred thousand-year-old assumptions) into mountains of dust, just like he was a revolutionary or something.
I mean, he hadn’t read any of the right books, hadn’t talked to any of the right people.
And not only was no audience supposed to respond the way Elvis’s audience responded (at all!) but, if they did, somebody . . . SOMEBODY . . . was supposed to put a stop to it!
What were they dealing with anyway? Some damn hillbilly? A bunch of screaming girls? Some teenage hoodlums in leather jackets, curling their lips?
Shee-i-i-i-t boy!
You can hear it still. The struggle within the long night of the corporate soul.
Well if I can’t deal with some damn . . .
And right there was the opening.
The way around their defenses lay in the inability of the powers that be to define what it was they were dealing with.
Elvis spent the rest of his life and the years since his death paying the price: Death by a thousand cuts. Go back and read my “Stupid about Elvis” series for the nuts and bolts of deconstructing Elvis — for evidence that maybe all that Elvis Stupidity wasn’t so stupid after all.
I mean they were — all of them, fans, haters, ingrates, sycophants, curmudgeons, and straight-up morons alike — trying to bury him, to prove the most any damn hillbilly ever gets to do is represent some element of the power structure against the interests of some other element and then only if he behaves.
The idea that one man — any man — got past their defenses somehow, could never be allowed to stand. Underestimate a single peckerwood and, next thing you know, the Barbarians are at the Gates.
It’s entirely possible all Elvis really dreamed of was getting rich and having a good time.
So if you want to know the “why” of “Why Elvis?” just try to blow away the chaff of sixty-five years — chaff that started with the marketing department dreaming up King of Rock ’n’ Roll, not to exalt but contain him, place him safe within the walls of Show-Biz Sanctity (He sells! He sells out! And, dammit, anybody who sells out can be sold out!), and is being carried to the ends of the earth by quiet storms of social media chatter as you read this — and take a hard look at just how deeply Elvis Presley disrupted American culture in his own time and ever after.
It’s entirely possible all he really dreamed of was getting rich and having a good time.
If so, it only makes his revolutionary essence more galling to those assigned, then and now, to keep him in his place.
Bad enough he shook the walls, made the earth tremble under The Man’s feet.
Worse if he did it without even trying.
When you reflect that the Stupid about Elvis Brigade cannot credit him with the puniest level of self-consciousness, a level they happily concede to chimps, that they’ll run to Sam Phillips or Leiber and Stoller or Scotty Moore or Chips Moman or “laryngitis” or even the goddam Colonel for an explanation — any explanation — if they have to, and you begin to see their dilemma.
As an agent of his own choices, Elvis is merely terrifying, treating the Old Guard like Godzilla stomping Tokyo.
Bad, of course, but for that, there are flamethrowers — or column space.
As an idiot-savant, he’s worse.
How do you defend against that?
Dude sang “Love Me Tender” and “Jailhouse Rock,” right in a row. Put “Hound Dog” and “Don’t Be Cruel” on the same 45.
Then he sang “Peace in the Valley” and “Santa Claus is Back in Town.”
And it may have just been that he didn’t feel like being pinned down — that he only felt — but he also not only meant every word but judged every word.
You can hear it if you listen.
And because he meant every word and judged every word he sold every word.
He pried wallets and pocketbooks and college funds and piggy banks open all over the country and then the world. Then he changed hearts and minds, left us unfit for maintaining the Empire the Overlords had planned for, turned us, however briefly, into a permanent threat to impose decency on ourselves and leave others be.
And if we’ve forgotten all that, is it really Elvis’s fault, no matter how much we insist on blaming him?
No, the fault lies within us. We know it and it’s for all that he’s never been forgiven.
If you think Chuck or Richard or Jerry Lee — or John Lennon or Mick Jagger or Bob Dylan — could have done all that, could have got The Man to keep worrying about them while they moldered forty years in the grave, well, you just might be a little Stupid about Elvis yourself.
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Thanks for reading! Below are links to three articles that are essential to knowing what Tell It Like It Was is all about. “Blogging with Tell It Like It Was” is my attempt to keep readers abreast of any changes happening here while “Introduction to Tell It Like It Was” is our mission statement for this publication.
And “Introduction to The Toppermost of the Poppermost” explains the project that John, Lew, and I embarked upon months before launching this publication: a series of articles that review every record to make it all the way to #1 on the Cash Box Top 100 charts from 1960 through 1969.
