Stupid about Elvis (1956–1969)
Elvis may not still be everywhere, but Elvis Stupidity never dies . . .
(This is the first in a series for Tell It Like It Was which updates some thoughts I’ve put together over the last seven years at my blog The Round Place in the Middle under the category “Stupid Stuff People Say About Elvis.” I’ve placed twenty entries in it, about three a year. This barely scratches the surface of Elvis Stupidity. An exhaustive study would require an encyclopedia. This series should, though, at least give you a taste of how, where, and when the Stupidity was likely to reveal itself. There will be five posts this week, proceeding in chronological order from the 1950s to today. After that, I’ll wrap it up with a think piece on why there’s so much Elvis Stupidity and why it has prospered and multiplied. Meanwhile, thanks to Neal for his incisive intro. I feel like I’m at the plate with the bases loaded and nobody out.)
Elvis Stupidity is like any other stupidity, only more so.
Most stupidity has a limit. Elvis Stupidity has none. It is not bounded by age, race, sex, religion, politics, time, space, or IQ. It sprang into existence (as we shall see) almost the moment he burst onto the national scene in 1956 and (as we shall also see) has never abated. If anything it has intensified with the passage of time and the exponential increase in the speed and force with which information, including “mis” and “dis,” can be spread to a public which is caught in the modern trap of being sanguinely convinced it knows more than any of the earth’s previous inhabitants by the same relentless forces who strive, day and night, to ensure that it knows less.
Most stupidity has a limit. Elvis Stupidity has none.
Let us not join their company.
To begin at the beginning:
“Is it a sausage? It is certainly smooth and damp looking, but who ever heard of a 172-lb sausage 6 ft. tall? Is it a Walt Disney goldfish? It has the same sort of big, soft, beautiful eyes and long, curly lashes, but who ever heard of a goldfish with sideburns? Is it a corpse? The face just hangs there, limp and white with its little drop-seat mouth, rather like Lord Byron in the wax museum. But suddenly the figure comes to life. The lips part, the eyes half close, the clutched guitar begins to undulate back and forth in an uncomfortably suggestive manner. And wham! The mid-section of the body jolts forward to bump and grind and beat out a low-down rhythm that takes its pace from boogie and hillbilly, rock ’n’ roll and something known only to Elvis and his Pelvis. As the belly dance gets wilder, a peculiar sound emerges. A rusty foghorn? A voice? Or merely a noise produced, like the voice of a cricket, by the violent stridulation of the legs? Words occasionally can be made out, like raisins in cornmeal mush. ‘Goan . . . git . . . luhhv . . .’ And then all at once everything stops, and a big tender trembly half smile, half sneer smears slowly across the Cinemascope screen. The message that millions of U.S. teen-age girls love to receive has just been delivered.”
(Time magazine review of Love Me Tender, 1956. Reprinted in Elvis: The Biography, Jerry Hopkins, 1971 and Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock and Roll, Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave, 1988. NOTE: At the time of publication, Time claimed to be read by at least 20,000,000 people a week, in a country with about half today’s population.)
And there are those who, even now, think Pravda lacked subtlety.
Within stupidity, though, even Elvis Stupidity, inadvertent truth may lurk. I highlighted the parts where the reviewer may have been giving away more than he intended. Anyone who has seen Love Me Tender knows this is not a critique of the movie or anything Elvis either did or represented between the opening and closing credits. It’s a critique of his incendiary stage and, especially, television performances directed not only at Elvis the Existential Threat but his teenage audience as well, with the emphasis, as always, on . . . the girls, with the clear implication that what was known “only to Elvis and his Pelvis,” was known to them as well.
Within stupidity, though, even Elvis Stupidity, inadvertent truth may lurk.
One might think it’s frivolous to complain. It might be, except that the style of the critique, right there at the first moment when Respectable America was forced, against its will, to take notice of the Presley phenomenon, has never gone away — and never been limited to Elvis.
Meaning, of course, this kind of assault continued into the “enlightened” 1960s:
“I never went to a single Presley movie and I never, not even once, not even for “Hound Dog,” bought a single Presley record. Even then I knew Julie London had a better voice.”
(Roger Ebert, Review of Easy Come, Easy Go, 1967)
I’ll put my vinyl-diving credentials up against Ebert’s any day. And, speaking as both one of the world’s more devoted Julie London fans and someone who has no interest in rearranging all previously accepted boundaries of surrealism in order to make a false point, I’ll go the extra mile and add: Hooey.
And, since Ebert, fourteen when Time’s review of Love Me Tender appeared, tells us he didn’t go anywhere near Love Me Tender (or, God forbid, Jailhouse Rock or King Creole), we can assume he formed his impressions from others, maybe even that very review. Thus does every form of Stupid spread like peanut butter over every cognitive receptacle on Mother Earth.
In this case, Ebert’s first impression was a lasting one, carried over to the days when he was beginning to review movies for major periodicals on his way to becoming the very definition of crit-illuminati, the most famous film critic in an America which was determined, at every turn, to dispense with Elvis Presley’s revolution — what I call Rock & Roll America — and all it represented.
And that’s why it matters. Because it was always easier to find your way forward in the world the men who ruled it were trying to reassemble by dismissing Elvis than by understanding him.
And — as we shall see — it has remained ever thus.
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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.
