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It's time to take
Elvis seriously By William McKeen, Ph.D. © Copyright 1999 William McKeen |
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First
there was Thin Elvis, the musical subversive who rose from abject poverty
in the 1950s to start the rock 'n' roll revolution. Then there  was Fat Elvis,
the glorified Vegas lounge singer in the white jumpsuits with the split
pants.Someone once pointed out the inherent American contradiction—that we can put some human beings on the moon, but that we can't stop other human beings from wearing spandex pants to the mall. Elvis will drive you crazy like that. Whether you like or loathe Elvis Presley, it's time to take him seriously. Twenty years dead and he's still a powerful figure—a historical figure, whether you like it or not. There's been so much trash written about Elvis Presley that when Peter Guralnick published Last Train to Memphis in 1995, it was greeted as a wonder. Finally, one of the most gifted writers on music history—Guralnick wrote the great trilogy of Feel Like Going Home, Lost Highway and Sweet Soul Music—was giving Elvis the treatment he deserved. What we learned in Last Train to Memphis was that Elvis Presley deserved serious treatment. His deep love for the blues and other elements of African American culture, combined with his country and western background blended in his hybrid style that had symbolic and social value that went beyond the record charts. In a way and on a scale that no other musician had managed, Elvis brought white and black culture together on a 7-inch piece of vinyl. His first single for Sam Phillips' Sun Records label paired blues song "That's All Right Mama" with country standard "Blue Moon of Kentucky." The  revolution had begun.Guralnick's book made you appreciate Elvis' early accomplishments and realize that he was not a mere doofus who happened into a good thing. In the early days, he rarely did anything without putting a lot of thought into it. That was Thin Elvis. Careless Love is an equally wonderful book, and a magnificent achievement in the literature of popular music. Alas, this is Fat Elvis. The first book ended with Elvis' induction into the Army and his beloved mother's death in 1958. Careless Love picks up as Elvis musters out of the service and returns to a different world. In many ways, the story has tragic overtones as Elvis stumbles into a string of bad movies and mediocre recordings and the company of hangers-on eager to ride the King of Rock 'n' Roll's coat-tails to whatever good time he dreams up. Of course, the villain in all of this is Col. Tom Parker, Elvis' manager. When Elvis returned from the Army, Parker steered him straight down the middle of the road, and kept him away from pursuing his fringe musical and spiritual interests, so as not to offend the customers. And, of course, Parker got Elvis into all of those horrible movies. Maybe Elvis' problem was that he was just too polite to tell the Colonel to get lost. Whenever Elvis asserted himself—over the Colonel's objections, of course—he could still achieve magnificent results. Witness the 1968 television special in which Elvis pulled off a stunning comeback in the tie-dyed, dope-smoking world of the late 1960s. He also ventured outside his normal recording confines to the white-hot American Studios of Memphis, working with soul music legend Chips Moman that showed that, at the dawn of the 1970s, Elvis still had it. The Colonel at every turn fought any attempt by his client to mess with "the formula," that Parker saw as a
ticket to continuing financial success, but which condemned Elvis to a
career of mediocrity with occasional flashes of brilliance.Then, of course, there's the Priscilla Situation. While still in the Army, Elvis spotted Priscilla Beaulieu, teen-age daughter of an Army captain, and somehow got parental consent for her to move to Memphis with him. He kept her close by for years, withstood her efforts to consummate the relationship, had scores of flagrant affairs with her knowledge, married her, had a child with her, then refused to ever have sex with her again. Then there's Vegas and jumpsuits and jelly doughnuts and a man at once a legend and a laughingstock, dead at 42, keeled over in the bathroom while reading The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus. Fat Elvis, sure. But also, in the hands of a great writer like Peter Guralnick, a true American tragedy. Guralnick has written often—and with great insight—about Elvis for three decades. Often, he prefaced his work with this quote from poet William Carlos Williams: "The pure products of America go crazy." That would seem to sum up Elvis pretty well.
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Careless Love:
The Unmaking of Elvis Presley
Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay: An
Anthology
Dr. William McKeen is journalism
department chairman at the University of Florida's College of Journalism
and Communications. McKeen writes frequently for The Orlando Sentinel
book page and has authored several books, including: