Hit the stores and what you'll find, amazingly enough, is an actual hit single -- Elvis' first in decades -- a throbbing remix of "A Little Less Conversation," a forgotten 1968 album cut that was picked up by Nike for its World Cup sponsorship; a bevy of CD boxsets, including a four-disc set of outtakes and live performances scraped from the bottom of the Presley barrel; a cleaned-up, remastered release of some of his earliest live recordings from the Louisiana Hayride show; DVDs by the armload, including a three-disc set of some of his best performances; and several new books including a couple of weighty coffeetable tomes that'll set you back 50 bucks apiece. In September, you'll be able to buy a CD of Elvis' 30 Number One hits (yes, including the new one).
On top of that, several universities are holding Elvis conferences, and some stores will be selling Elvis furniture suites. There are now Elvis bank cards, and in some parts of the country, you'll even be able to find Elvis-themed state lottery tickets. If that's not enough, AOL Time Warner, along with Elvis Presley Enterprises, has created a toolbar link on AOL's Internet keyword page leading to Elvis music, pictures and news of Graceland events, including the annual Elvis Week (August 10-18) and the third annual live Vigilcast on AOL (August 15). The national celebration will reach its peak at Memphis's Pyramid Arena with "Elvis: The 25th Anniversary Concert," featuring a live band, including many musicians who toured with Elvis, accompanying film and video images of Presley in performance.
All that is, of course, in addition to the usual stampede of Elvis kitsch available all over the world: Elvis ashtrays, Elvis shot glasses, Elvis wall clocks, coasters, pencil boxes, teddy bears, salt and pepper shakers, toothpick holders, towels, hats, pennants, coffee cups, trivets, spoon rests, t-shirts, cigarette lighters, silverware, placemats, baseball caps, toilet paper holders, laminated wall plaques, decals, sunglasses, key chains, vases, tie tacks, stickpins, posters, candles, wallets, calendars, and God knows what else.
And that's all fine, or at least there's nothing you can do about it; like it or not, a full-tilt commercial glut is America's way of celebrating events and honoring heroes -- it even seems fitting this time, in view of Elvis' status as one of the all-time champion buyers of consumer goods.
The problem, though, is that as each year passes, the images of Elvis that remain in our cultural memory become more and more cliched, leaving little room for the Memphis boy who rebelled against, and conquered, his native culture's repression and racism. (It's an increasingly aged cultural memory we're talking about here, by the way; try to find someone under 25 who really knows or gives a rip about Presley.)
Elvis' life is now generally summed up in the media by three main images -- a) Fat Elvis the druggie; b) trim, Vegas karate chop Elvis; and c) Silly Movie Star Elvis. So who's missing? That would be the young Elvis, the important Elvis, the turned-the-world-upside-down Elvis, now largely drowned in a tide of latter day jumpsuits, odd personal quirks and inconceivable pill habits.
In present-day culture, the extremely famous become something more than human, at least to their fans. And so it is with Elvis Presley. But it was a very human and shy boy, a mama's boy with a wild streak and a "dreamy" disposition, who wound up taking last century's great musical leap of faith for us, mixing black and white styles with an energy and flair no one else had imagined.
Presley's melding of genres has become part of the rock history canon. Some very learned, talented people have written about what Elvis means to our culture, what lessons are to be learned from his career, how he was a metaphor for the potential, and the traps, in the American system. But what's easily lost in the shuffle is how gutsy that kid was -- the kind of guts that's often the property of the underclass -- growing up poor, living in public housing, with really nothing to lose anyway, so why not play a white man's version of rhythm & blues? Nobody had really cared about anything he'd ever done before, anyway; why should it be any different this time? Of course, this time he was so good at it, it all turned out to be very different.
The Dividing Line
It's hard to imagine, if you weren't there, just how tight, repressive and bland mainstream American culture was after World War II and through much of the 1950s. When Elvis first popped his hip, shook his legs, curled his lip and howled, "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog" on television in 1956, he set in motion a revolution in American life that loosened the reins of social control and led, over the next decade, to a new appreciation of personal expression, of personal style, and of plain guiltless fun.
Just as importantly, he became, in a way that was unstated but deeply felt by the whole country, the embodiment of new racial attitudes. In other words, Elvis was the spark that ignited the pop culture that we live in and take for granted. He was the great dividing line between the old, pre-war white cultural consensus and our present-day, everchanging climate of clashing, interweaving, diverse cultures. As filmmaker Ralph Bakshi put it, "Presley freed us." Or as John Lennon told Elvis when he first met him, "Before you there was nothing."
Those are impossibly high standards to live up to, especially for a guy who never had any intention of being the cultural catalyst he turned out to be. But no matter how he hard he may have fallen from his initial perch, no one can take away the fact that Presley really did cause a whirlwind of change.
But it took real courage, and that's what has been forgotten. If you read or listen to most histories of early rock, it's easy to have a romanticized view of the pre-civil rights movement South. When critics or historians talk about the cross-fertilization that took place between black and white forms of music, you can almost imagine a South where it was OK for southern blacks and whites to get to know one another, to trade guitar licks in each other's homes. That wasn't the case by a long shot.
During the South's "Happy Days" of the 1950s, nearly total segregation was the law -- not just social custom, but the law. To most whites, it was ludicrous to think they could gain anything from black culture -- hell, it was insane to even call something so raw, so savage, culture. Under no circumstances was it acceptable for a white person in the South to seek out, much less copy, black behavior of any sort, including music. Any frank cross-cultural exchanges had to occur in the shadows.
Yet it was impossible to keep the two races totally separate. In the murky areas of the South's history, the fringes of the two cultures had a way of weaving themselves into new, exotic cloth. But this was never done openly, sometimes not even consciously -- and certainly not in the revealing bright light of the national media. Not until Elvis Presley.
The great Southern rockers -- Presley, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and a slew of others -- became who they were by breaking the rules, and rising above segregation's rigid restrictions. It was the kind of thing you could be killed for.
In 1956, the year of Elvis' big national breakout, the greasy-haired, rubber-legged kid who would soon become a symbol of freedom for millions of teenagers was, to many Americans, more symbolic of degeneracy.
Elvis was the only white man to move so freely onstage, or to dress and sing in a way that was so unabashedly, defiantly black. The kind of music Presley had appropriated and made his own was tolerated among southern blacks because it was seen as harmless. But when Presley sang Little Richard's "Ready Teddy," not only acknowledging R&B's legitimacy but celebrating its power and fun, he stirred up outrage and blind hatred in his native region and beyond. The kind of hatred that led the Alabama White Citizens Council to announce that it had "set up a 20-man committee to do away with this vulgar, animalistic, nigger rock & roll bop."
The Leap of Faith
As with most great musical innovators, the young Presley was a cultural sponge. He listened to and loved and sought out all types of music, from Dean Martin crooning, opera, and Tin Pan Alley show tunes to white gospel, Country & Western, and, most significantly, the music of the culture he was supposed to hate. He took the blues and R&B to heart and proclaimed his newfound self to the rest of Memphis, and then, through non-stop touring, to the rest of the South, and finally to the world.
In an early interview with the Charlotte Observer's Kays Gary, Presley explained, "I remember old Arthur Crudup (a black bluesman). . .and I used to think if I could just feel what ol' Arthur felt, I'd be a music-maker like nobody ever saw!"
The remarkable ease with which he accepted black culture wasn't just a quasi-revolutionary act for a white Southerner at the time, it was a striking personal victory over his upbringing's racism -- and a forceful promise of things to come.
Elvis was denounced nationwide for his "vulgarity" (which usually meant his Southernness) and his sexuality, but down South it was his confusion of racial identity that elicited mockery and abuse. When his first record, "That's All Right Mama," was released in Memphis, the first question asked by callers to radio stations was invariably, "Is that a white boy or a colored?" Presley had already started to undermine the taboos on black and white interaction.
It took a brave, maybe even a desperate, leap of faith to meld divergent Southern musical forms into a popular national art. Through his personal triumph over the racist inhibitions of his environment, Presley early on set the tone for what rock & roll at its best would be, not just for the South but for the nation: a challenge to the status quo, a celebration of freedom, and a bold embrace of America's wide, deep cultural diversity.
It's a part of his legacy that's usually buried today under the ever-breaking wave of commercial exploitation of his career and image, and worn down by his own history of long decline. But at his most important, his most daring and his most dangerous -- in those three or four years before commercial pressures, the Army, and the long tentacles of Col. Parker squeezed the spark from him -- Presley was the raw flame, America's own funhouse mirror that, depending on your outlook, either reflected a scary, vulgar delinquency or a completely unexpected excitement and sense of liberation.
That upsetting of the status quo, the acknowledgment of black and white interdependency, were what lay at the heart of his initial appeal, and were what ignited rock & roll's Big Bang. And that's why, despite the sparkly jumpsuits, the pills, the years of creative indolence, the thousands of fat jokes, and the hothouse-flower quality of his personal weirdness, Presley is still impossible to forget.
As rock critic/historian Greil Marcus wrote, "[Elvis] remains the specter of possibility -- in rock, pop culture, "America,' modern life -- and he remains the fact of ruin. Solve that question if you can, or else drop the question of who you are, where you came from, where you might end up."
So go out there and enjoy the new Elvis "product" (I know I'm loving the DVD box set), tune in to the big gatherings in Memphis, and maybe even tell a few Elvis jokes. But spend at least a few minutes remembering that this guy wasn't just a fat druggie who loved fried chicken, karate, and young women in white cotton panties. At one time, he set the world on fire, he felt like an earthquake rumbling through the land, he opened white eyes to black music, he brought Americans the gut feeling that everything had changed. And he did it all himself.
John Grooms is Editor of Creative Loafing - Charlotte and is a former instructor of Rock & Roll History. He was six years old when he saw Elvis Presley perform on the Ed Sullivan show, and it ruined him for life.