Thirty-seven years ago this morning, Sir Tone was walking towards his office on Music Row in Nashville when he heard one of Elvis’ side men yell out “You hear Elvis is dead?”
Sir Tone: “Drugs?”
Side Man: “Yeah.”
The mere mention of Elvis’ name is enough to throw Sir Tone into a fury. The primary reason black blues musicians and early pop recording artists never got their due, Sir Tone says. Not half so good a musician as a multitude of them, never wrote a song of his own and most egregious of all, failed even to acknowledge his debt to the Delta black music his baby self breathed in along with its white country and church music.
Sr. Tone is not wrong. However, his story leaves out some things.
Rock and roll existed before The King, but in those heavily segregated times, Elvis is the one who, in 1956, brought the sound and sexiness of black music to white kids in even the whitest corners of the US of A. He also brought a hardscrabble white Southern fantasy into the mainstream. He didn’t look clean (the pompadour, the hair grease!) and he didn’t look clean-cut (the weird pink and black clothes, those popped collars) and his taste in shoes—well, not classy. Even kind of girly. Two-tone, with pointy toes! But fascinating. The smoldering eyes, the long growly warm yearning in his voice. And that slow raised-lip sneer. Prim and proper suddenly looked silly and childish.
Now I need to make a slight digression. Long ago (but not far away), I was one of two (2) female newswriters working in a TV network station. Management had hired us reluctantly in what turned out to be a vain attempt to stave off an affirmative action suit. Our welcome, shall we say, was not warm. So far as the men in the room were concerned, the whole thing was our fault. Last night’s HBO documentary about Gloria Steinem featured a handful of stunningly vitriolic anti-woman screeds from famous newsmen of the time. I am here to tell you those were but the tip of the proverbial iceberg. But none of that was why—I’ll call her Jane—Jane and I became fast friends. We became friends because we were both hard-core Elvis fans.
Elvis was by then a sorry mess, a bloated stand-in for the glorious boy he’d been. Fleshy, glassy-eyed and given to ridiculous glittery jump suits that made much of his swollen belly, he and his music were completely out of sync with the post-Haight, post-Civil Rights Movement SDS/Panther/anti-war dominated youth culture of the time. He didn’t even smoke pot, or so we thought; he did po’ white boy prescription drugs. (News about who was really abusing ‘scripts didn’t make it into the AP wire in those days.) And he had pervy sexual fixations—famously, the dirty white panties of pubescent girls. Nice girls like Jane and me preferred not to know such things. Elvis had become the opposite of cool.
The day before Elvis’ Madison Square Garden concert in July 1972, his first there since the 1950s, the News Director put the two of us in charge of prepping the reporter assigned to the press conference. (Did we think one of us should have the gig? Nope. Not for a moment.) Ask him about that big-ass belly belt and about his sneer, we advised, figuring either question might elicit a flash of vintage Elvis. We were right, SO right I am proud to say, that the resulting news clip has made it into several Elvis documentaries.
I was in editing early the next afternoon when Jane called to tell me it was urgent I come down to the newsroom. Urgent? Odd. I was but a lowly newswriter.
There was big news. None of the grown-ups had the least interest in the two press passes for that night’s Elvis show. They were ours! My legs went; I fell into a chair, shrieking and shrieking. Yeah, the boys loved the sight of girlish hysterics but so? Real thrills happen rarely in life. Best that one enjoy them when they do. In the press section that night, Jane and I were the sole shriekers. We had a wonderful time.
In truth, we shrieked more for the memories and the associations than for the thing itself. Physically, he was kind of disgusting. Musically, he was far into white middle-of-the road pop and far away from the rhythm and blues sounds that made him famous. His voice was still strong and true, but he sang almost nothing straight-up. Instead, he parodied his great hits, bent them, held notes for a loooooong time and then broke down laughing. Points for self-knowledge, I guess, but it was sad and embarrassing to watch him make fun of himself. Perhaps the drive to get out there no matter what is a mark of a born performer. I don’t know. Money. There was lots of money involved.
Years later, I met Scotty Moore, a top Nashville sessions player and the guy who, Sir Tone says, actually discovered Elvis. In Elvis’ early TV appearances, Scotty is the guy to screen left, playing guitar. He is modest and a little shy. Nice man.
The most interesting thing about Elvis’ death is, of course, the he’s-not-really-dead cult. It becomes smaller and less vehement as his original disciples die off, but it’s still around. I have a theory about it. If Elvis has risen from the dead, for whom is he The Redeemer? A story for another day; I mention it now only because I want you to imagine low-key, plain-spoken Scotty Moore listening to me intellectualize about the meaning and power of Elvis as a cultural symbol. On second thought, stop that! But Scotty was patient, Scotty listened, and then Scotty spoke.
“Elvis was just a boy who loved music.”
RIP, Elvis.
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