I'll Say Goodbye to Love
Is Love going out of fashion?
The subject of this essay is Lester Bangs’ famous obituary of Elvis Presley from August 1977. I’d like to premise the discussion that follows on an article written on the 30th anniversary of Elvis’ death by Richard Corliss. The article is entitled Elvis: The Last Romantic. Corliss writes of the extent to which Elvis was a paradoxical revolutionary. Despite upsetting the older order and transforming popular culture, Elvis was actually explicitly inclusive and sought to cover all bases and sing ‘something for everybody’ from the first:
‘Elvis wanted to be the full-service, multi-generational entertainer; he was on a mission to convince his fans' parents that he could do more than grind his pelvis. So nearly every Elvis single would have a soft, sentimental tune ("That's When Your Heartaches Begin") on the flip side of a rockin' hit ("All Shook Up"). His movies balanced the uptempo songs with a few mellow ones ("Love Me Tender," "Young and Beautiful," "Blue Hawaii"). Later, some of his biggest hits were emotive reworkings of plaintive folk songs from Italy ("Sorrento" became "It's Now or Never") or France ("Plaisir d'amour" morphed into "I Can't Help Falling in Love With You"). You might guess he was ignoring his core fans to play to their elders. But no, kids liked the slow numbers too, if only because it allowed them to dance body-to-body.’
Corliss writes of the attempt on the part of Elvis' management to model Elvis’ career on that of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. That Crosby and Sinatra were the model that Elvis was to follow effectively took him out of and away from the rock’n’roll revolution that if he didn't quite kick-start then certainly headed with such force and vigour. When the world he brought into being went nasty, Elvis stayed where he had always been: nice. But the paradox was there all along. Elvis didn't sell out, for the reason he had never bought in in the first place. Elvis was an unwitting revolutionary. He embodied, unified, and personified certain things that the dominant culture sought to keep apart. But he was always basically a nice who loved his mother and worshipped God. As Carliss puts it:
‘In the 50s, being a mainstream movie star meant scrubbing up the image, turning Elvis from a satyr into a nice guy, the well-behaved boy parents wouldn't mind their daughter dating.
What Presley and Parker didn't understand was the revolution Elvis had created. He had overthrown the empire of nice; now the outlaw was in. Later pop stars, like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, didn't sanitize themselves for the mass culture. They knew they were the mass culture, and they did films only as a lark. They had seen what indenture to the old Hollywood dream had done to Elvis: a bunch of B movies that betrayed his revolutionary promise, neutered the sneering sexuality of his early live performances. His top-of-the-charts ballads might have enlarged his audience, but these anodyne musical comedies served to demonstrate his irrelevance in a fickle pop culture. The white-hot star at 21 was an anachronism before he was 30.
That's why modern Elvis fans ignore most of his 31 Hollywood movies, except for the 1957 Jailhouse Rock (with its wild and crazy production number for the title song) and the 1964 Viva Las Vegas (where the feral Ann-Margret compels him to unleash some of the old animal urges). Today his most popular DVD titles are the ones that show him in unbridled action: the documentary This Is Elvis and the concert film Elvis: That's the Way It Is. They also allow the faithful to plunge more deeply into the sacred mystery that is St. Elvis.
When Presley gave up movies in the late 60s, and hit Vegas, he reverted to balladeer form: reprising his rock hits but concentrating on the passionate crooning of songs made famous by people like Crosby ("White Christmas") and Sinatra ("My Way"), finally outing himself as rock's first — maybe last — romantic. Sequins and strutting aside, Elvis had become the singers he grew up listening to. Only fatter.
But Bing's name doesn't get 37,300,000 links on Yahoo. Frank's fans don't gather by the thousands at his home on the anniversary of his death to hold a candlelight vigil. They were just great singers and movie stars. Elvis alone rules the kingdom, with the power of his myth, and the glory of a billion dollars in endlessly renewable merchandise.’
Lester Bangs was on the side of nasty and expressed nothing but loathing and contempt for nice. For Bangs, the greatest rock 'n' roll was the kind that gave him barking fits. Bangs is interesting for the way he savages Elvis and what he became whilst nevertheless still celebrating him as the greatest ever rock star, with no-one coming remotely close. How to explain this seeming paradox?
In this review of Jim DeRogatis’ Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic, Dwight Garner points out that in contrast to most rock critics, who pour over every detail and nuance of Elvis' ''Sun Sessions'' as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls, Lester Bangs was never fanatical about Elvis Presley. In the seventies, the decade in which Elvis crashed and burned, Bangs was busy obsessing over the music he called ''imperative groin thunder'' in a radiantly unbuttoned way. He was much more into Iggy and the Stooges and Lou Reed than Elvis. Elvis by then was tame and lame in comparison. If Elvis wanted to matter again, Bangs remarked in 1971, he should ''join the Doors.'' That gig would soon become available, too. Jim Morrison, an Elvis fanatic who would make people stand to attention every time an Elvis song was played on the radio, would be gone even sooner than Elvis. But Elvis himself was long gone somewhere else by then. He did have Jerry Scheff, who played bass on The Doors' Riders on the Storm, in his crack live band, though.
When Elvis himself died, Bangs repeated a quote from one of Elvis's producers in a piece he wrote for The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner: ''It's like someone just came up and told me there aren't going to be any more cheeseburgers in the world.''
Make of that dismissive comment what you will. Lester Bangs was wild and erratic, shunned the obvious, said what he thought, and often got things very wrong. He also wrote with great sparkle and daring, and to his lasting credit got at least some of the big calls right. Which is more than most people. He is the only kind of critic worth paying attention to, then.
Bangs is not an obvious Elvis fan, and could be downright abusive and plain wrong about Elvis at times. Elvis himself sought approval. He led the rock’n’roll revolution but always sought to prove to the adults that he really could sing. Truth is, he always saw himself as a ballad singer more than a rock singer. He entered Sun Studios Memphis, a noted R&B label, singing ballads. I mean, how more revolutionary could a person be? Elvis was a strange kind of rebel. He always looked for validation and acceptance whilst transgressing boundaries. He was the individualist who sought to fit in; he was nice rather than nasty, and always said 'yes sir' and 'yes ma'am.' He didn’t see how the revolution he had started had changed culture in the direction of non-conformism. As the sixties became more and more non-conformist, Elvis became safe and tame, grinding out lame movies to a predictable formula to an undemanding audience. Those he had incited and inspired in the previous generation now eclipsed him and made him look like a relic.
Elvis had become a gross caricature of his former self, a puppet in his own show. But even this has a certain appeal. For Bangs, ''grossness was the truest criterion for rock 'n' roll.'' He rejected pretension and cheap sentiment in favour of music that gave him ''barking fits.'' Elvis singing "Yoga is as Yoga Does" in a 1966 movie starring the Bride of Frankenstein Elsa Lanchester gives me barking fits. But Bangs has something much different in mind. He excoriated the members of Led Zeppelin as ''emaciated fops'' and claimed that the Jefferson Airplane was made up of ''radical dilettante capitalist pigs.'' He didn’t much care for James Taylor either. Whilst such vicious denunciation may be unappealing, if somewhat entertaining and possibly enlightening, it is Bangs’ passion which stands out in his appreciation of the music he loved, such as Van Morrison's ''Astral Weeks'' or Lou Reed's ''Metal Machine Music.'' It is the passions that reveal the soul, and Lester Bangs had great passions and a huge soul. There’s never been a rock critic like Lester Bangs, and it is highly unlikely there ever will be again, at least not one that would be published by music magazines that want to stay in business. Even rebellion, and maybe especially rebellion, has to be safe, conformist, and predictable now, people saying all the right and tasteful things that everyone knows they must say in order to be accepted as part of the crowd. I never cquired that facility, hence my ease with Elvis at every stage of his rich and varied career. 'Old Shep' is just as good as 'Hound Dog' in my book. I have wide and eclectic taste, and maybe no taste at all. It doesn't do to impose taste. I have heard Elvis dismissed as fundamentally tasteless, which isn't true - he had his own taste, just as you, should you ever develop the nerve to pay no attention to what others think, have yours. It doesn't do to impose taste. I have heard the critics' choice of music too often to pay tem much attention.
If you want to read of the immensity of Lester Bangs’ passions and excesses, then Let It Blurt is the book for you. I’m more interested in the way that Bangs fell in with that group of self-educated critics that included Nick Tosches, Dave Marsh, and Richard Meltzer, and how these form a stark contrast with the more professorial demeanor of Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus. All of these critics have written perceptively on Elvis. For my part, I appreciate the scholarly words of Christgau and Marcus for the way they validate Elvis as an artist of worth. At the same time, I have a feeling that the more direct and visceral approach of Tosches and Marsh tells it like it is: Elvis was and is the best, the best there ever could be, simply, no clever words and arguments required. Elvis was beyond validation. As the fans knew all along. Together, the work of these critics came to shape the world of rock criticism. For good and for ill. Bangs himself could say some things that were just plain daft – like his view that true rock 'n' roll can only be made by hormone-addled ''guitar-slappin' brats.'' That puts him on the side of the revolt of the nasty, rock'n'roll becoming what its biggest critics said it was all along, 'a rancid smelling aphrodisiac' in the words of Frank Sinatra, 'phony and false' music that 'fosters almost universally negative and destructive directions in young people.' Bangs would embrace Sinatra’s harsh words here as words of praise. The problem with that reduction of rock to revolt is that it makes the music a mere adolescent spasm, and not a good one either. It passes, people grow up. Possibly. At the same time, Bangs seems on the right side of sanity: ''I just like people with some Looney Tune in their souls.'' He would probably have thought Sinatra a little too po-faced.
I have an affinity with Lester Bangs. I like to tell people that the peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri never actually finished any of the books he ever started, apart from his masterpiece The Comedy, and that only just before he died, with the ending lost for a while and needing to be added later. I am forever writing and never finishing. I always intend to go back to a piece of work and edit it, but never quite find the time having moved on. There is always another project calling for my attention. That's how it is with passion. Dwight Garner notes that Lester Bangs never managed to ever get round to finishing the novel he'd worked on sporadically over the years. None of his other book proposals amounted to anything, either, other than a couple of quickie books on Rod Stewart and Blondie. His writing remains influential and celebrated, although only a fraction of it has been published in one place.
One of the books that Bangs never got round to writing was titled 'A Reasonable Guide to Horrible Noise.'' Bangs was noisy. Very noisy. I’m interested in his obituary of Elvis Presley, "How Long Will We Care?" Bangs wrote this piece for the Village Voice in August 1977 and it has been described as the greatest Elvis obituary. It isn't. In fact, it barely reviews Elvis' music at all, and much of what he does say is plain wrong. At the same time, it probably said more about Elvis' significance than all of the other obituaries that were packed with details of all of Elvis' many hits and triumphs. Hagiographies reduced Elvis to facts and numbers. The people who really understand Elvis' importance raise him to myth, facts and figures and gold records be damned. Bangs' obituary is well worth tracking down and reading, if you can. Bangs says some controversial things, and makes statements about Elvis which strike me, as an Elvis fan, as wildly inaccurate. But you have to read the article right. Bangs is writing at least as much about us and the culture we are mired in as he is about Elvis - a culture which Elvis in part created, embodied, and personified, even in and especially in its impossibilities.
As I noted, Bangs was never an Elvis fanatic. That his obsessions were elsewhere constitutes heresy to Elvis fans. Bangs is on the side of the nasty against the nice, the non-comformist, and rebellious. He’s not one of the faithful. He says some harsh things about Elvis, overly harsh, I would say. Let us just say that he could be less than charitable. It’s just that in being blunt and direct, Bangs can do something remarkable in the field of music criticism, and tell the unadorned truth, a truth buried by friends and enemies alike.
Many of Bangs’ comments are provocative, but his direction is the right one and his judgement sound. Some of his passages saying goodbye to Elvis are so eloquent that I shall reproduce them in full.
Elvis died on August 16, 1977. Lester Bangs’ obituary appeared a week later. Bangs, the wildest and most passionate of critics, zeroes in on Elvis and what he represents with unerring accuracy:
“Where were you when Elvis died? What were you doing, and what did it give you an excuse to do with the rest of your day? That’s what we’ll be talking about in the future when we remember this grand occasion. Like Pearl Harbor or JFK’s assassination, it boiled down to individual reminiscences, which is perhaps as it should be, because in spite of his greatness blah blah blah, Elvis had left us each as alone as he was; I mean, he wasn’t exactly a Man of the People anymore, if you get my drift. If you don’t I will drift even further, away from Elvis into the contemplation of why all our public heroes seem to reinforce our own solitude.”
To Elvis fans, that’s a provocation. If Elvis was anything at all by the end, then he was a man of the people. His own people, maybe, but 'the people' all the same. Elvis drew on a wide fan base, all ages, classes, races, nationalities. On stage in front of the public was the only place he could call home, the only place where he could find community and belonging. He sang for 'the people.' He was scorned by critics and people of taste for doing precisely this in the latter stages of his career. In truth, he had been scorned all through the sixties. In fact, whilst we tend to look back on the fifties as Elvis' creative peak, he was scorned by critics and middle-brow sophisticates then, too. The hipsters jeered Elvis from the first and carried on doing so. Go and find Frank Zappa's view of Elvis. To these people Elvis was plain dumb, and so too were his fans. Elvis attracted ridicule and condescension from the first. Elvis knew it and the fans knew it. I certainly knew it. I still see it. It seems to be the default position. There is somethig about Elvis' openness to 'ordinary' folk that brings out the snob in those who like to mix music and politics. The bond between Elvis and his fans was based upon this scorn of the sophisticates. I'll venture that Elvis was far closer to the people than Lester Bangs ever was. Elvis lost touch with the shakers and the movers in the rock and soul world in the sixties, but he remained close to the ‘ordinary’ folk who were simple enough to know a decent tune and a great voice whenever they heard one. That'll do me fine. I was never daft enough to look for my politics in the sleeve of a record.
Bangs’ article is a lively read. Much that he writes is contentious. He doesn’t portray Elvis in good light at all, to be honest. He doesn’t have to, of course. But, in an obituary, he does need to respect truth and fact. Bangs makes references to events that don’t ring true to me, like Elvis wearing a “giant gold belt” in 1971 and falling over twice in 1973. This is too much the popular caricature that reads Elvis in the seventies backwards from his ignominious end in 1977 for me to take seriously. Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull has recently made similar claims about a fat and drug addled Elvis forgetting words in a Las Vegas show from August 1970. Anderson dates it precisely as August 1970, linking it to details in his own career in the US. That is just plain wrong. The Elvis of August 1970 is well recorded and he was in superlative form, maybe the best of his entire career, certainly as a live artist. That means that it is Anderson himself who is addled, or merely bigoted. I'd suggest the latter. But it is a bit rich for a man who plays the flute whilst hopping on one leg to dismiss Elvis as 'showbiz.' It is best to brush past such criticism. It is idle to engage, for the reason that the issues that lie at the heart of such controversies involve more than fact, they involve culture and prejudice. These are minor issues. Who gives a damn what Ian Anderson says? Who is he? Doesn't he have a fish farm these days? Good luck to him. When he reaches a certain fortune, can't we open a park for him and name it after him? Anderson Trout Park. Or am I getting mixed up with another hipster, Captain whatever his name was. I digress.
Extremes magnify the truth, said Schopenhauer. The truth here is that Bangs was attempting to convey something of the disappointment that he had felt coming to see the real Elvis as someone who was so much less than the hero of his imaginings. And the truth is that Bangs had a point, even if he didn’t have the right facts at his disposal. We know that in August 1975 Elvis performed a concert where he sat on stage and gave short sets. Elvis did also wear an outsized belt in the Detroit show of 1972. The criticism that Elvis was fat in 1971 is off, but his weight did balloon in the years after. The fans lapped it up all the same. Where is the challenge, the incentive to evolve as an artist, when the fans consume it all the same? When there is no difference between good and bad, why be good? The only person who could challenge Elvis by this stage was Elvis himself, and he was bored by this stage. He had conquered the world and there was nowhere else to go. Apart from Britain. We would have liked to have seen him in live performance here. But his management refused to let him out of the US. His miscreant mismanager the parasite Parker was an illegal immigrant who was in danger of not being able to get back into the US should he ever leave it. And he determined never to let his golden goose out of his clutches.
These, however, are minor questions, the lesser trees in a much greater wood. You have to see what Bangs’ main point is. And as to that main point, I can see exactly why it wouldn’t strike any great chord with Elvis fans. His point is more about society and culture and the emptiness of both than it is about Elvis. You can go further here and argue that Elvis as king and icon is the symptom of a collapse in true religious faith, embodying that emptiness in all its impossibilities. Elvis is a surrogate religion, with spiritual sensibilities frustrated and with nowhere to go in a prophetless and godless terrain being projected upon a suitably deified mortal man. Elvis was raised to some impossible status and never allowed to live, breath, and grow as any mortal human being. At the Press Conference before the Madison Square Gardens concerts, June 9, 1972, this exchange took place:
Q: Are you satisfied with the image you've satisfied?
Elvis: Well, the image is one thing and the human being is another, you know, so ...
Q: How close does it come? How close does the image come to the man?
Elvis: It's very hard to live up to an image, I'll put it that way.
Elvis was charged with living up to an impossible identity, and he knew it. Where could he go? The critics scorned him, and had from the start, whilst the fans were in thrall to the image.
I mentioned that some consider Bangs’ obituary as the greatest Elvis obituary. Others would contest that view, not least because it is not really about Elvis at all. Bangs makes no attempt to detail and assess Elvis' music or to establish the range of his songbook in any proper context. In fact, Bangs is writing more about himself and contemporary culture, and about what he thought Elvis was and should have been, than he is about Elvis. The sweeping generalisations Bangs makes make a nonsense of Elvis’ career, dismissing everything that came after the initial burst of creativity in the fifties as an undifferentiated morass of mediocrity. How many times can a man be expected to revolutionize music and culture? Critics expected Elvis to do it time and again, for the reason that this is what made Elvis in the first place. That alchemy can't be repeated and can't be contrived according to a career plan. Once seems to me to be not merely enough but most remarkable, achieving something that is achieved only by a tiny handful of people. Elvis is one of that tiny handful. Some want to keep living in the revolutionary moment, clinging on to something that can only come and go, thereby revealing themselves to be the real reactionaries here. If rock’n’roll is really nothing more than an adolescent impulse, then a permanent nastiness and negation beckons. Whatever else that is, it isn't revolution. Revolting, maybe, but not a revolt. In this, Bangs reveals himself as a representative of the solipsistic culture he excoriates.
Bangs says the world has been waiting for Elvis to get wild again. Elvis was greater than that. He never ‘sold out’ for the very reason he never ‘bought in.’ Of course, if you are locked into permanent revolution as an adolescence that never grows up, then nothing Elvis did after the fifties is of any relevance. Or anything he did after 1956, or after Sun, or after ‘That’s All Right’ at the very beginning. This is innocence in denial of experience. It's regression. Elvis developed as an artist. I’ll not bother to detail what critics who dismiss the last two decades of Elvis’ career have missed, I’ll simply say that they have missed everything.
But I’ll exempt Lester Bangs from criticism. He makes no pretence of being an archivist of the music. He’s perceptive, passionate, and has things to say, in the way that Greil Marcus, Dave Marsh, Peter Guralnick, Jon Landau, and such like have things to say. He reminds me of Nik Cohn in the UK, whose book 'Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom' is provocative, irreverent, wrong, and insightful in almost equal measure. Such writers are not merely informative, nor just entertaining, but revelatory and imaginative; they say something worth saying, that no-one had noticed and yet which immediately strikes everyone as obvious and true as soon as it is said. They also manage to translate the energy and excitement of Elvis into written form.
If Bangs does sound dismissive, glossing over huge chunks of Elvis’ career and treating it as one amorphous lump, he has the merit of honing in sharply on what matters most of all about Elvis. His writing in general has an irreverent tone, regardless of who he is writing about. His concern is to dissipate any flabby mythology around a subject to identify the essential core of greatness that may, or may not, lie at the heart of the matter. In his obituary, Bangs was concerned not to list Elvis’ hit records, record sales, films, and concerts but to identify Elvis as a musical revolutionary and cultural liberator. That’s a hard act to follow. No wonder he dismisses the last twenty years of Elvis’ career! If Elvis couldn’t live up to his achievement and his promise, then neither could anyone else. Very few, anyway. These are one-off achievements.
In the August of 1977, Bangs sought to establish precisely where Elvis and his revolution had ended up. If Elvis was still King, then the question was begged: the king of what, whom, and where? Where, precisely, were we all?
Whilst Bangs’ obituary needs to be read in full, it takes full flight and soars in certain passages. The last paragraph is as precise a diagnosis of these estranged, pointless, and lonely times as you’ll find in any writing anywhere
“The ultimate sin of any performer is contempt for the audience,” Bangs writes. “Those who indulge in it will ultimately reap the scorn of those they’ve dumped on whether they live forever … or die fashionably early …” Bangs goes on to write of the contempt that Elvis showed for his audience. I'm not sure about this. Whilst Elvis has received scorn, it hasn’t come from his audience. There was a backlash in the 1980s. The idol had fallen, and many turned on Elvis with a vengeance. But over forty years after his death, his star shines as brightly as it ever did, and somewhat brighter than it was shining in 1977. Whatever Elvis' artistic sins and crimes, they have long since been forgiven and forgotten, at least by his fans. And new fans are emerging.
Bangs charges that “Elvis’s scorn for his fans” is manifested “in ‘new’ albums full of previously released material and one new song to make sure all us suckers would buy it.” He claims that that scorn is “mirrored in the scorn we all secretly or not so secretly felt for a man who came closer to godhood than Carlos Castaneda until military conscription tamed and revealed him for the dumb lackey he always was in the first place.”
Whoever or whatever Bangs is writing of here, it isn’t Elvis. Those albums were put together by a greedy record company and a greedy manager, who conspired to have Elvis on an impossible four releases a year schedule. Elvis was productive but was worked to death. From 1971 to 1975, RCA put out one padded album after another, three alone of the material from the 1973 sessions at Stax, instead of gathering the best quality material in one place. Elvis was recording quality music, but it wasn't being packaged properly by his recording company. Rather than select the best, RCA issued it all, without regard for quality control. And hearing it all, the critics concluded that Elvis was on the slide. Should Elvis have intervened here? Probably. But when you are tied to an impossible recording schedule, any objection to the issuing of lesser quality material would have meant a return to even more hard work in the studio.
Bangs' criticism is a repetition of John Lennon’s claim that Elvis died when he entered the army. The truth is that John Lennon’s false and fanciful imagining of who and what Elvis was died in the confrontation with reality, as do all illusions and delusions with respect to holding on to youth. That 'Elvis' is the Elvis of indolent dreams; that 'Elvis' never existed. When Lennon left The Beatles, he shot down critics who were mystified by saying that he, Lennon, 'grew up,' and that they, the critics clinging to The Beatles' past, hadn't. It is a pity he never allowed Elvis to do do the same, calling the Elvis after the age of 21 a betrayal. Elvis himself was not the solipsist that Bangs claims he was, it is the myriad projectors in search of something to believe in who stand revealed as the ultimate source and content of solipsism, Bangs and Lennon both ('I don't believe in ... I only believe in me,' sang Lennon in the spirit of Ayn Rand. 'Serve yourself' was Lennon's contemptuous response to Dylan's 'you've got to serve somebody.') So who is the world's greatest solipsist?
Elvis was as simple and as straight as he had always presented himself as being. And for that he is scorned as a dumb lackey. He was a prisoner of forces that he had brought into being, but which he was unable to escape. Elvis is the epitome of alienated labour in capitalist society. He had promised freedom, only to be as chained up in the iron cage as the rest of us. Worse, he was a proletarian in his own company. Bangs writes that ‘ever since, for almost two decades now, we’ve been waiting for him to get wild again.’ Just as we have been waiting for Marx’s proletariat to read the script and overthrow capitalism as an act of freedom.
“Fools that we are, and he probably knew better than any of us in his heart of hearts that it was never gonna happen, his heart of hearts so obviously not being our collective heart of hearts, he so obviously just some poor dumb Southern boy with a Big Daddy manager to screen the world for him and filter out anything which might erode his status as big strapping baby bringing home the bucks, and finally being sort of perversely celebrated at least by rock critics for his utter contempt for his audience.”
So why didn’t Elvis get rid of his exploitative, mediocre, incompetent parasite manager Tom Parker?
Bangs is way off-beam when referring to the contempt that Elvis had for his fans: “Elvis was perverse; only a true pervert could release something like Having Fun With Elvis on Stage, that album released three or so years back which consisted entirely of between-song onstage patter so redundant it would make both Willy Burroughs and Gert Stein blush.”
The problem with that view is that Elvis didn’t release the album, he had nothing to do with it. The whole venture was the brainchild of the true pervert at the centre of the corruption, Elvis’ miscreant mismanager Tom Parker. Here is where the corruption lay, in the treatment of Elvis as product by the setup he had become entangled in. Elvis had effectively become an exploited proletarian enslaved to a career that was now in the alien hands of others.
“Elvis was into marketing boredom when Andy Warhol was still doing shoe ads, but Elvis’s sin was his failure to realize that his fans were not perverse — they loved him without qualification, no matter what he dumped on them they loyally lapped it up, and that’s why I feel a hell of a lot sorrier for all those poor jerks than for Elvis himself now. I mean, who’s left they can stand all night in the rain for?”
The answer to that question lies in the continued popularity of Elvis, over forty years after his death. Elvis has never gone away. He is needed, and Lester Bangs shows why and how.
Who’s left that people will stand in the rain all night for? “Nobody,” replies Bangs, arguing that the true tragedy lies in an “entire generation which refuses to give up its adolescence even as it feels its menopausal paunch begin to blossom and its hair recede over the horizon — along with Elvis and everything else they once thought they believed in.”
There is a schizophrenic quality to Bangs’ criticisms here. On the one hand, he demands that Elvis ‘get wild’ again, dismissing the last twenty years of Elvis’ career as a throwaway; on the other hand, he condemns those who refuse to give up their adolescence. I would suggest that those who identify Elvis with the ‘wild’ Elvis of a couple of years in the 1950s are the real adolescents here. Elvis had grown up and moved on. He may not have been wild, but he was mature. I would stand Elvis’ recordings from 1969, 1970, and 1971 against his recordings of 1956, 1957, and 1958. I’m not saying that are better, nor that they are more revolutionary, but I am saying that they are substantial, evince substantial artistic growth, and have proven to be of an enduring musical quality. I'd go further, too, to show that I can be as provocative and as insightful as Lester Bangs, and argue that "My Boy" from 1973 has infinitely more power, depth, and emotional truth than "Hound Dog" from 1956. All that fuss over "Hound Dog," and what is it really? Elvis threw it away in contempt in the 1970s, for the reason he knew the song had had its moment and that he had much more important things to be singing about. He was embarrassed by it. The fans lapped it up all the same.
“Will they care in five years what he’s been doing for the last 20?”
Yes. They cared then, five years later in 1983, and care even more now.
But here is where Bangs gets really interesting, going beyond Elvis into the culture he presided over as a common reference point and even as a unifying force. Bangs identifies Elvis as “the last of our sacred cows to be publicly mutilated.” Elvis was subjected to such vicious assault from the first that it is remarkable that he not only survived but was made a king, the leader, figurehead, and symbol of the new world that was coming. But what was that world if nothing but a subjectivism in the process of plummeting into narcissism that was destined to finally disappear into solipsism?
“As I left the building I passed some Latin guys hanging out by the front door. ‘Heard the news? Elvis is dead!’ I told them. They looked at me with contemptuous indifference. So what. Maybe if I had told them Donna Summer was dead I might have gotten a reaction; I do recall walking in this neighborhood wearing a T-shirt that said ‘Disco Sucks’ with a vast unamused muttering in my wake, which only goes to show that not for everyone was Elvis the still-reigning King of Rock ’n’ Roll, in fact not for everyone is rock ’n’ roll the still-reigning music.”
And there is the fate of the public realm in the contemporary world: mutual indifference. Elvis' decline and fall is a tale that has been well-told since 1977. For a long while, Elvis took the flak for problems caused by others, problems which he more than anyone bore the brunt of. There is a need to recognize that if Elvis was complicit, then his complicity amounted to no more than being unable to manage his career effectively. But substitute the true architects of the perversion that befell Elvis’ career for the Elvis condemned in this article, and Bangs’ words are incisive and accurate.
Bangs proceeds to identify the central malaise of the times, the absence of unifying, cohering principle and purpose, the lack of a shared language. The problem is not one of mere fragmentation but of discrete relationless atomization:
“By now, each citizen has found his own little obsessive corner to blast his brains in: As the ’60s were supremely narcissistic, solipsism’s what the ’70s have been about, and nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the world of ‘pop’ (huh?) music. And Elvis may have been the greatest solipsist of all.”
Elvis wasn’t my king, wrote Helen Kolawole in a particular ignorant and nasty attack on the 25th anniversary of Elvis’ death. (It was in The Guardian. Of course it was). So what? Why should anyone be interested in who Kolawole’s king is, or whether she even has a king? Who cares about the blatant lies told about Hound Dog (it was written by two Jewish white kids who had to sue Johnny Otis and Willie Mae Thornton who were trying to claim copyright). Who cares about Hound Dog? It's just a song, not a lost Bach cantata. Who cares about any kind of standard, musical or otherwise? Of what concern is it to anyone what others think in a pluralist culture on its way to moral solipsism and public indifference? Insofar as we are all entitled to choose our own kings, what do the choices of others matter? Without a common objective standard to refer to, we lack a means by which to evaluate the choices made. We choose our own kings and gods, which may just as well be paupers and devils, since there is no way of differentiating between the two.
Bangs undertakes a trek through a lonely landscape. He finds some disgruntled person who complains about seeing Elvis in Vegas: “He squatted on the stage and asked the band what song they wanted to do next, but before they could answer he was complaining about the lights. ‘They’re too bright,’ he says. ‘They hurt my eyes. Put ’em out or I don’t sing a note.’ So they do. So me and my wife are sitting in total blackness listening to this guy sing songs we knew and loved, and I ain’t just talking about his old goddamn songs, but he totally butchered all of ’em. F**k him. I’m not saying I’m glad he’s dead, but I know one thing: I got taken when I went to see Elvis Presley.”
That millions of others say precisely the opposite about seeing Elvis in concert goes without recognition. It doesn’t fit the tale that Bangs wants to tell. Having given the impression that Elvis was the worst thing in the world, an artist who had once mattered but who had long since settled into lazing out on his image and idolatry, Bangs makes it clear that it is Elvis who matters the most: “I mean, Mick Jagger, whom I saw as far back as 1964 and twice in ’65, never even came close.”
Bangs then says he “got taken too, the one time I saw Elvis, but in a totally different way.” It was the autumn of 1971, in Detroit. “Earlier Charlie had said, ‘Do you realize how much we could get if we sold these f&$£!ng things?’ I didn’t, but how precious they were became totally clear the instant Elvis sauntered onto the stage. He was the only male performer I have ever seen to whom I responded sexually; it wasn’t real arousal, rather an erection of the heart, when I looked at him I went mad with desire and envy and worship and self-projection. I mean, Mick Jagger, whom I saw as far back as 1964 and twice in ’65, never even came close.”
“No matter how lousy his records ever got, no matter how intently he pursued mediocrity, there was still some hint, some flash left over from the days when…well, I wasn’t there, so I won’t presume to comment. But I will say this: Elvis Presley was the man who brought overt blatant vulgar sexual frenzy to the popular arts in America (and thereby to the nation itself, since putting ‘popular arts’ and ‘America’ in the same sentence seems almost redundant). It has been said that he was the first white to sing like a black person, which is untrue in terms of hard facts but totally true in terms of cultural impact. But what’s more crucial is that when Elvis started wiggling his hips and Ed Sullivan refused to show it, the entire country went into a paroxysm of sexual frustration leading to abiding discontent which culminated in the explosion of psychedelic-militant folklore which was the ’60s.’
I’d check this lazy repetition of the view that the early Elvis was great and the later Elvis lousier by the year. I mean, 'Suspicious Minds' from 1969 knocks spots off 'Hound Dog' from 1956 any day. I would also check the view of Elvis as pursuing mediocrity. Check his work in the studio in 1969, 1970, and 1971 and you will see the very opposite to be the truth. Just listen to 'Kentucky Rain,' 'Tomorrow Never Comes,' and 'I'm Leavin' (and dozens more) and you will see. All it takes is a pair of ears. Elvis died when he went into the army, said John Lennon. The first recording session that Elvis did upon leaving the army nails that assertion flat cold, insofar as it pertains to Elvis the singer and musician and not Elvis the icon of fifties rebellion.
But Bangs’ instincts are right. He asserts a truth that is much more than the facts. Elvis was not ‘the first’ he is often proclaimed to be. He wasn’t the first rock’n’roller, and he himself said so repeatedly at the time. He wasn’t the first white singer to ‘sound black.’ But whilst the facts deny Elvis the honour of being the first musically, they absolutely support his claim culturally. What critics condemn as Elvis’ ‘selling out,’ commercialising a roots-based music, was actually his most revolutionary act, the very thing that made him and pop culture in the first place. Elvis didn’t ride a folk music to commercial success so as to enter the musical mainstream with a genuine multiplicity in music; he brought a popular sensibility to that music in order to transform the mainstream by the mere act of entering it. Here he was most certainly the first, and the most; and here, in the meeting of music and culture, is the Presleyan Moment. We all live in Elvis’ world now. And he did it without conscious revolutionary intent, but simply by being himself, a poor white country boy with a taste for the blues. And gospel. And pop. He merged the lot seamlessly to make a universal pop accessible to all without implication of race, class, culture, nationality. Why, even a group of ex-Skifflers from Liverpool could try it on for size. and add something of their own, taking it to places its originators could never have dreamed of.
That's Bangs' key claim:
‘I mean, don’t tell me about Lenny Bruce, man — Lenny Bruce said dirty words in public and obtained a kind of consensual martyrdom. Plus which Lenny Bruce was hip, too goddam hip if you ask me which was his undoing, whereas Elvis was not hip at all, Elvis was a goddam truckdriver who worshipped his mother and would never say s**t or f**k around her, and Elvis alerted America to the fact that it had a groin with imperatives that had been stifled. Lenny Bruce demonstrated how far you could push a society as repressed as ours and how much you could get away with, but Elvis kicked “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” out the window and replaced it with “Let’s f**k.” The rest of us are still reeling from the impact. Obviously sexual chaos reigns currently, but out of chaos may flow true understanding and harmony, and either way Elvis almost singlehandedly opened the floodgates. That night in Detroit, a night I will never forget, he had but to ever so slightly move one shoulder muscle, not even a shrug, and the girls in the gallery hit by its ray screamed, fainted, howled in heat. Literally, every time this man moved any part of his body the slightest centimeter, tens or tens of thousands of people went berserk. Not Sinatra, not Jagger, not the Beatles, nobody you can come up with ever elicited such hysteria among so many. And this after a decade and a half of crappy records, of making a point of not trying.’
Bangs states at extremes – Elvis didn’t spend a decade and a half of ‘crappy records,’ the hard facts simply do not support that claim. He did, however, make records that failed to meet with critical acclaim. Nevertheless, he continued to spark hysteria.
Bangs’ final paragraph needs to pondered at length. The age of narcissism will descend into solipsism, to bring about a world that is utterly without unifying purpose and coherence. There will be no shared language and no common culture and, as a result, no possibility of communication. People as discrete individuals will choose their own kings and gods, but there will be no reason for anyone to take them seriously, show them respect, or even acknowledge their existence. Rather people agreeing to disagree in order to keep the civil peace, there will be neither agreement nor disagreement in a society that has sunk into complete indifference. The public realm will dissolve into pure negation in which nothing can be said without being immediately contradicted. Whether you liked Elvis or not isn’t the point that matters. For or against, we all knew who Elvis was, we knew his musical and cultural roots, we understood his language, and we shared common ground with him. The fact is that more people were for Elvis than anyone else, and more of every kind of people. Elvis’ achievement was to have embodied in his music and his person a commonality that embraced multiplicities. That commonality has fractured. Elvis is still king, but his domain is much diminished. There are those who make a point of insisting that ‘Elvis was not my king.’ They are playing a dangerous game. In fact, they are playing the endless and unwinnable game. If they think that it is possible to bring Elvis down and replace him with a king of their own choice, then they are profoundly and pathetically mistaken. Unless they want to impose taste - in all things - by force. They take for granted the unity that Elvis more than any singer or artist held together. Remove Elvis, and that unity is gone. They may not care for Elvis, but they need to recognize that neither I nor anyone need care for anything they say either. When the common ground and common language is contested so much as to dissolve into rival claims, without hope of resolution, then unity is gone. We could agree on Elvis because we shared common ground and common language. Those things have gone. And gone, too, is love. Get rid of Elvis, and you get rid of the unity that he embodied in one person. The multiplicities that he embraced break into pieces and pull away from each other. I don’t care who your king is, and you don’t care who mine is. We don’t even know who is who anymore, and to the extent we don’t care, there’s nothing more to say other than goodbye:
‘If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others’ objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation’s many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis’s. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.’