Whether it's Elvis then or Beavis and Butt-head now, the young have to fight for the right to their own culture.
A few years ago, a college professor asked second- and third-graders in a Jasper, Tennessee, public school who Elvis Presley was.
"He was an old guy who was a king somewhere," was one kid's conjecture.
"He was a great big man and he invented rock and roll," said another.
"He lives in a big house in Memphis and he only comes out at night."
"He's this big, black guy who invented the electric guitar."
As Greil Marcus recounts in his haunting 1991 book, Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession, the children in Jasper were probably representative of the young adult population. We all know the name, and a lot of us know he did something big, but just what it was is often cloudy. For people under 40, it's harder all the time to grasp why anybody - except supermarket tab readers or TV tab viewers or worshipful Boomers - really cares whether the guy's alive or not. He has his fanatic, still-adoring following, but Presley is not a chic or revered figure - either in most modern media or to many of the young. If anything, he's a joke, embodying the decadent and empty side of a certain kind of celebrity.
But there is at least one reason to care about Elvis: the rock icon let the genie out of the bottle for good. The music he synthesized somehow dealt a devastating blow to the system; it was the force that finally liberated the culturally impoverished young. The controllers and overseers never really recovered their moral force and authority, and they never regained control. Cable and computers and all the new digital and screen technologies make it unlikely they ever will again.
Ironically, the Boomers, the very people transformed by Elvis's and his heirs' music, are now clucking the loudest about pornography online, violence in TV shows and videogames, dirty lyrics in music, the hypnotic effect of MUDs. Their parents' voices seem to have gotten stuck inside their heads, stored for decades on genetic chips for eventual playback with their own offspring. At the core, that's what the endless attacks on rap, hackers, videogames, and cable are all about: control. The guardians, the elders and their media, want it back.
Succeeding generations long ago moved on, as they should, listening to their own music, creating their own entertainment and communication technologies, recovering from their own cultural tragedies, worshipping their own godheads.
But Elvis is very much alive, as busy since his death as he was before it. His demise was the beginning of a completely different, spectacularly American sort of life. "No one, I think," Marcus writes in Dead Elvis (now in paperback, Anchor Books, US$14), "could have predicted the ubiquity, the playfulness, the perversity, the terror, and the fun of this, of Elvis Presley's second life: a great, common conversation, sometimes, a conversation between specters and fans, made out of songs, artworks, books, movies, dreams; sometimes more than anything cultural noise, the glossolalia of money, advertisements, tabloid headlines, bestsellers, urban legends, nightclub japes."
Elvis proves beyond a doubt that there is life after death. He has been seen everywhere; he has meant nearly everything. Hard Copy aired one of the greatest segments ever in tabloid TV history, a reenactment of the death of Elvis in his Graceland bathroom. A print tab spotted him singing at a Club Med. A diner waitress lit a candle outside Graceland's gates in November. A woman prayed to an Elvis shrine on her tiny fireplace mantle in Oklahoma City. In December 1994, The Far Side's Gary Larson had him peering out of a window with another man in a comic strip over the caption: "Roommates Elvis and Salman Rushdie sneak a quick look at the outside world." Larson's image was especially telling. Nobody is as trapped inside his or her own mythology as Elvis.
All kinds of strange Elvises have appeared, meticulously and faithfully recounted by Marcus: "Elvis Christ, Elvis Nixon, Elvis Hitler, Elvis Mishima, Elvis inhabiting the bodies of serial killers, of saints, fiends."
In addition, Elvis was the spiritual founder of the country's raucous, vital, and controversial tabloid media, his name and image selling more individual magazines, newspapers, and TV shows than any other single figure in modern American history. O.J. would have to be on trial a long time to come close.
They may resist, but Elvis fans need to hear that generationally, he is an old story. The phrase "Generation Gap" seems pathetically inadequate to describe the chasm between the people who lived through Elvis's rise and fall and those who didn't.
One of the most unappetizing habits of adults is the foisting of their own experiences on their glassy-eyed children, who are - let's be frank - rarely fascinated by their elders' formative experiences. Even when we know better, the impulse to pass on one's own special history seems irresistible: "I scrimped and saved through the Great Depression. Elvis was the birth of rock. The '60s were better. I remember when JFK was shot." (Soon it might be: "I remember the sound my first modem made.")
These reminiscences have become a sort of hazy wallpaper associated with growing up. Sometimes, despite our most polite intentions, we want these stories to end, so that we can go out and discover our own narratives. But later on, when our own identities are strong and secure enough to make it safe, then sometimes - only sometimes, and for brief moments - we can turn back and listen, curious to know more about how other people's watersheds shaped our own.
With the tabloid Elvis exhausted and (momentarily at least) supplanted by O.J., that time seems ripe. Peter Guralnick has seized the moment in Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Little, Brown, $24.95). Those who are ready couldn't find a better way to make the trip.
Presley's significance was never just, or even primarily, musical; it was what the music unleashed. The kids of his generation now seem as remote as people in Civil War photographs. They inhabited a narrow, claustrophobic, black-and-white world run by tight-lipped white men in suits, a world in which J. Edgar Hoover was still a hero, dirty words were a major transgression, teachers wielded rulers during slow dances to keep the boys and girls the proper distance apart, and gyrating hips were obscene. In this Pleistocene Epoch, mass media meant Ed Sullivan, LPs, Howdy Doody, three network newscasts, several AM radio stations per city. It was a grainy, timid cultural universe whose heavily guarded borders were fortified by parents, clergy, and politicians.
What's even tougher to explain to today's inhabitants of the Net, who can reach one another so continuously and easily, is how alone nearly everyone was back then, isolated in small and fragmented communities. Outside of movie theaters, Chevys, and burger joints, almost nobody could reach out and touch anybody. The young had no chance to develop generational politics, and no way to figure out if anybody else had any.
With a modem, there's a way to find out quickly that it isn't you who's crazy but Them, to rally the troops in one's own battle, whatever it is, to seek reassurance and draw support and solace from the like-minded, to test ideas against the unconvinced. Back when, nobody could be sure that there was anybody like-minded.
But that was Before Elvis. After Elvis, little was the same. His defiantly sexual, racially charged, very loud music struck at the heart of oppressive notions of permissible expression for the young; it was an electrifying signal that life existed beyond the narrow confines of individual experience.
This new force proved too pervasive to be contained, though the powers-that-were surely tried. The New York Times likened early rock dances to the "bite of the Tarantula," to devil fevers of medieval times. The country's deeply entrenched guardians were stunned by this Elvis mania, attacking it in much the same way the body rushes to reject a dangerous foreign substance injected suddenly into the bloodstream. Girls were sent home from school if they wore their skirts (no pants allowed) too short; boys were ordered to cut off their ducktails and leave their blue jeans at home. Records were seized and destroyed. Towns banned rock tours and dances. Parents, radio stations, and commercial TV banned the most defiant music, and ordered the volume turned down. Then as now, academics and pundits worried that civilization was beginning to unravel.
Although few kids know it, the fights over rap lyrics, control of the Net, even Beavis and Butt-head, are echoes of this same struggle, different battles over new forms - but the same basic conflict. In America, it seems, the young will always have to fight to defend their culture, which may be the strongest link between Elvis then and life now.
Perhaps the most poignant revelation in Guralnick's new book, the first of a two-part biography of Presley, is that there's nothing to suggest Elvis had a glimmer of this significance; in fact, there's plenty of evidence to suggest he never gave it a thought. He just liked to hang around, play the guitar, and sing. Even as Presley's fame increased, his standing and reputation began to diminish. It's understandable, perhaps inevitable. We tend to remember him at his most recent - his bloated, tacky worst.
But the struggle to control culture, with one ethical value system fighting to supplant another, is eternal. Presley presided over the birth of a great new means of expression, one of three such flowerings in America since World War II. The second was television and its varied offspring, from cable to music videos. The third is the Net.
Peter Guralnick has done a brilliant job in Last Train to Memphis of crafting the story of Presley's first 24 years on earth. Guralnick aims low, but scores all the higher for it: his goal isn't to rehash the breathless Elvis worship or the vast mythology but to capture the very modest, plaintive life that inspired it.
Guralnick's Presley couldn't differ more from the Vegas caricature stuck in so many of our minds. Last Train To Memphis beautifully evokes a poor, spiritual, simple young family-centered man growing up in the post-war South. In its language, imagery, and tone, the book brings us into small-town America. Exotic, tinny sounds blaring out of radios. Cruising down Main Street in big stinky cars. Matinées at the movies. Soda pops at drive-ins. Biography is really about making someone's life comprehensible to strangers, even those from a distant time, and Guralnick succeeds at it magnificently.
One of Elvis's first girlfriends captured the spirit of young Presley. "He was not a put-on," Dixie Locke remembers. "He was not a showoff, and once you were around him long enough to see him be himself, not just act the clown, anyone could see his real self, you could see his sweetness, you could see the humility, you could see the desire to please."
Meticulously researched and sparely written, Guralnick's book carries all the more punch because we know that his story turns out to be a tragedy. The grotesque figure who died on a toilet seat in Graceland two decades ago bears little resemblance to that girlfriend's recollection. The Las Vegas act he became at the end of his career bears even less similarity to the earnest kid who pestered Sun Records weekly for an audition in the '50s. Sun was often crammed with people waiting to make records, writes Guralnick, but "always the young boy with the long, greasy, dirty-blond hair poked his head in the door shyly, tentatively, looking as if he were ready to withdraw at a moment's notice if you just said boo to him."
In July of 1954, Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun and a music producer who passionately believed there was a new kind of music to be created through the fusion of black and hillbilly, called a musician he knew and asked him to audition a kid named Elvis Presley, about whom Phillips had an uncertain gut instinct. "Elvis hunched over his guitar and mumbled something about not really knowing how to play, then tried singing fragments of almost every song he knew," recalled the musician. It was a bumbling performance. Eventually, one of the musicians recalled, Elvis left, "trailing clouds of oily smoke behind him in the humpbacked old Lincoln."
Presley dressed oddly, was painfully shy, and seemed apart from everyone else - the individualistic, ungainly, out-of-place oddball who inhabits every class in almost every school in America. He had a distant, sullen father. He was a mama's boy, raw, dirt-poor, and timid. He learned to play the guitar from a preacher who probably would have fainted had he a clue as to how it would be used. Nobody would ever have voted Elvis most likely to succeed, or even likely to survive.
It is impossible to read Guralnick's loving account without thinking of the many geeky and unheralded kids who, a generation later, patched together their own revolutionary culture in suburban bedrooms all across the country while their parents watched TV downstairs, wondering all the while why nerdy Harry wasn't out at the mall with the other normal kids his age.
Last Train to Memphis introduces a gallery of vivid characters: Phillips, the idealistic producer (a modern-day counterpart seems inconceivable) who desperately wanted to free the black musicians he loved from their poverty and obscurity and bring them to a wider audience; Colonel Tom Parker, Presley's eventual manager and, in the book, an ominous, deftly introduced metaphor for what was to come; Gladys Presley, the mother who talked baby talk to her son till the day she died; and a galaxy of other pals, lovers, and country, jazz, and blues musicians (Hank Snow, the Carter Sisters, Mother Maybelle, comedian Whitey Ford - the "Duke of Paducah") who pop in and out of Presley's story.
There aren't many books that capture the birth of a culture this vividly. In l955, rock music didn't even have a name. A radio interviewer who asked Elvis to describe his work prompted, "You're a bebop artist more than anything else, aren't you?" The '50s being far from the media savvy '90s, Presley never seemed to have anticipated or thought through the answers to such questions. "Well, I never have given myself a name," he said, "but a lot of the disc jockeys call me - bopping hillbilly and bebop. I don't know what else."
In l995, the year Elvis would have turned 60, it seems inconceivable that a star of Presley's magnitude would be drafted by the US Army at the peak of his career and sent off to Germany, perhaps the unlikeliest warrior ever in the Cold War. Fittingly, it's at this point that Guralnick concludes his first volume.
Although his military tenure was uneventful, things were never, of course, the same. In a way, it's hard not to dread what we know is coming in volume two. Presley was torn from his deep, grounding roots, and never seemed able to reconnect or grow new ones. The symbol of rock-and-roll rebellion returned to the states a mutant: a pretty face gracing dumb Hawaiian beach movies; a troubled superstar stuffing himself with drugs; an aging freak passing out Cadillacs like candy bars; a patriarch lording over a retinue living in a tacky mansion; and, eventually, a Vegas act whose jeweled jumpsuits now come more readily to mind than the quiet, oblivious, oddball kid.
One of Guralnick's many memorable re-creations is Elvis's last night in America before shipping out, still bewildered, but now surrounded by what would become a ubiquitous pack of bodyguards, gophers, admirers, and hangers-on. "There is a group picture from Elvis's last night in Killeen (Texas)," recounts Guralnick, "taken with Vernon, Lamar, Eddie, Junior and Red, along with two or three of the fan-club presidents. Elvis has his arms around Eddie's and his father's shoulders. He is wearing his marksman and sharpshooter medals, and he is surrounded by friends, but he looks alone and lost, his eyes blank, his mouth downturned, as if he were about to cry. After the picture was taken, he asked Eddie if he would lead the group in prayer, and then they left to take him to the troop train in the drizzling rain." One of the many touching things about Presley's life is that he died aware only of his fame, but too soon to see what it had wrought. He would probably have been flabbergasted to see that the first kids over the Berlin Wall headed to buy music videos - or that pirated signals from MTV may have done nearly as much to undermine the tyrannical regimes of Eastern Europe as NATO's tanks.
When the books stop selling and the tabs stop speculating - as they inevitably will - when Elvis finally does join Monroe and Bogart as cultural icons, then, prophesies Marcus, "For the first time, Elvis will really be dead."
Guralnick doesn't romanticize Presley. Quite the opposite: he brings him down to a human scale, revealing, at long last, the person underneath the hype. It still seems incomprehensible that so unremarkable a person wrought such remarkable things. Nobody can - or should - make anybody else care about Elvis Presley. What we know is this: in some profound, still vaguely understood way, he helped open the doors.
