Hallelujah
If you search on YouTube you will find a recording which purports to be Elvis singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. It isn’t, but it’s close enough for non-Elvis fans to think that it could have been him. I really wish Elvis had recorded the song. I think he would have done a most impressive version. But he didn’t sing any Leonard Cohen songs, which is a real shame. Elvis had a great talent for gospel, and he certainly had the vocal skill and gravitas to carry off a Leonard Cohen song. I have heard stories that he wanted to record Kris Kristofferson’s Sunday Morning Coming Down and Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You. The attempt on the part of Elvis’ management to secure 50% of the publishing meant these songs were lost to him, joining many other songs lost to him for the same grubby, greedy commercial reasons. Which is a real loss to music.
I once had the misfortune to hear folk singer Kathryn Williams sneering at Elvis’ version of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, describing it as monstrous and overblown, something like that. Fine, the big strings and voices approach does rather flatten the true delicacy of the song. But this was recorded at a time when Elvis was experimenting with a blend of folk and orchestration, issuing in songs like I’m Leavin’ which are far beyond the abilities of mere strummers. And Elvis also recorded three Kristofferson songs in the same period, which the author himself rates very highly:
When I was first becoming a songwriter, I never would have dreamed that Elvis would sing not just one of my songs but three of them and with so much soul. I feel a lot of gratitude for that.
Kris Kristofferson as noted in www.IHeartElvis.net
There is more praise for the Elvis of this period. At the same time of this folk turn, Elvis recorded Buffy Sainte Marie’s beautiful folk ballad Until It’s Time for You to Go. Buffy Sainte Marie’s biographer Andrea Warner singles out the Elvis version of this much covered song:
Presley’s interpretation amps up the song’s sentimental side. His drawl tucks the words inside his mouth, like one of those enveloping hugs that makes you feel safe until you start to feel smothered. But his emotional treatment is effective — if you can listen to it in full with dry eyes, email me the secrets of your robot heart — and it’s Presley’s version that most people associate with the song.
Elvis also recorded a couple of Gordon Lightfoot songs, That’s What You Get for Loving Me and Early Mornin’ Rain. Gordon rates Elvis and the versions he recorded of his songs most highly indeed:
I really got interested when I got into high school, about grade nine. I heard "Heartbreak Hotel" by Elvis Presley and I went and bought a guitar and so did a friend of mine. We both bought guitars and we practiced Elvis impersonations, way back when we were 15-years-old. And that was how I learned how to play the guitar. Elvis Presley has a great recording of my song "Early Morning Rain". He did such a good job on it too, and it was probably the most important recording that I have by another artist.
Gordon Lightfoot, answering interviewer Matt Wake on what got him interested in music,as published on the February 17, 2015 edition at Advanced Digital.
Bob Dylan? Elvis’ version of Dylan’s Tomorrow is a Long Time is the version of one of his songs that Dylan treasures the most. Elvis also recorded Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right.
I could go on but won’t, because the point has more than been made; it just beggars belief that it even needs to be made: Elvis Presley had a remarkable voice and was a singer of the very highest order.
I just get angered by the sneers and jeers of the folk purists. It is remarkable that, from the very first, the fuss over Elvis led to the very thing that is most remarkable about him coming to be ignored – his voice. It’s always the notoriety, the success, the fame, the hits, the adulation that dominates; the commercial success and cultural influence that the conservative critics feared from the first is also the very thing which certain hair-shirted folkies despise. I call it popularity. Elvis was a democrat, and that’s quite a crime, it seems.
Which brings me back to where I started and Leonard Cohen. Leonard Cohen is a well-respected figure, a man of words and weight. He has depth, he has integrity. He isn’t shallow, he isn’t superficial: he isn’t exactly ‘pop.’ So imagine my surprise when I discovered that Leonard Cohen was a big Elvis fan. It never occurred to me that he would have been. I’ve liked Leonard Cohen’s songs for a long time now, but have never actually checked out his influences. At a guess, among my own favourite artists, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Jacques Brel counted among Cohen's favourites. But I never imagined Elvis for some reason. Until I realized that he was of a certain age, a certain generation, and did have a certain, well, ‘pop’ aspect to his songs. Leonard Cohen put on a good show and he was an old song and dance man to the end.
I now come to what Leonard Cohen said about Elvis:
I was relieved that all the stuff we'd been feeling for so long found expression in Presley and in rock in general. I was playing his records all the time to friends when they'd come over. I'd say, 'This guy is a great singer' - and they thought this was some kind of inverse snobbery, but it wasn't. Presley had that special kind of voice which makes your heart go out to a singer. I was a huge fan of Elvis. In fact, I was in town until today and bought a compilation LP of the man. Soon you will hear me sing “Don’t” and “Are You Lonesome Tonight” – but not at the plate. My voice is too deep, with 20,000 cigarettes leading my tone of voice three to four notches down too far.
Leonard Cohen, as told to Bard Oses in an interview published on March 26, 2012 at "Leonard Cohen Jukebox" internet page. )
I won’t call it ‘relief,’ exactly – because I know Elvis to have been a great singer and don’t feel the need for validation and vindication – but I am pleased to learn that Leonard Cohen not only ‘got’ the fact that Elvis was a great singer but was prepared to tell his cool folky intellectual friends (whoever it was he told) so. I just find Cohen’s tale of the reaction of his friends all too familiar – the ‘inverse snobbery’ that Elvis and his fans have attracted over the years. In a previous blog post, Treat Me Nice, I wrote on the tendency of Elvis and all things Elvis to have drawn the disdain, the ridicule, and frankly the contempt of others. There has always been issues of taste surrounding Elvis. It wasn’t just old conservatives worried about the threat to the nation’s morals who objected to Elvis, but also plenty of progressives and democrats – people who love folk music but draw the line at the tastes, depravities and vulgarities of real folk – as well as the cool folk, the literary, the educated, not to mention the new crowd making it to the top of the hierarchies that the rock world quickly reassembled. I have too many examples to waste my time on, no doubt it is a theme I shall return to, naming names as I go.
Leonard Cohen has no time for any of it. Elvis was a cultural liberator, expressing everything that that repressed generation had been feeling. I shall return at some point in the future to look more closely at this notion of liberation. Because Elvis himself found that, shorn of bonds of belonging and meaning, of a moral culture that binds you and your behaviour to others, liberation quickly turns into an enslavement to a desire and an empirical necessity that is inflated out of all true human dimensions and proportions. It’s a false freedom.
Bob Dylan said something very interesting about Elvis as liberator:
When I first heard Elvis's voice I just knew that I wasn't going to work for anybody and nobody was going to be my boss. He is the deity supreme of rock and roll religion as it exists in today's form. Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail. I think for a long time that freedom to me was Elvis singing 'Blue Moon of Kentucky.' I thank God for Elvis.
Bob Dylan, US magazine, 24 August 1987
Come the 1970s, and Dylan was back to thanking God for all things. Elvis may have been the God and not just the King of Rock’n’Roll, but there is a much greater kingdom than that. ‘You Gotta Serve Somebody,” sang Dylan:
You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls
But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes
Indeed you're gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody
You might be a rock 'n' roll addict prancing on the stage
You might have drugs at your command, women in a cage
You may be a business man or some high-degree thief
They may call you doctor or they may call you chief
But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes you are
You're gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But …
But make sure it’s the Lord.
John Lennon was disgusted by the song, and spat out a bitter “serve yourself,” with all the trademark self-serving narcissism of that fake idol who, in God, said he only believes in himself, himself and Yoko. Babies in the pram who think the world revolves around them.
There was a liberation all the same with Elvis’ cultural breakout and musical synthesis and innovation. Elvis was the voice of the generation that broke-out. What interests me most of all, though, is that as Dylan followed Elvis out of jail, only later to come to terms with the need for service and sacrifice, Elvis never got the opportunity. Elvis succeeded to such an extent that he had the money and the power to keep pushing his liberation beyond all bonds until finally he ended up on his own, imprisoned in an impossible God-like identity, a hired-hand in his own career, exploited to death by his management and record company, loved to death by his fans.
Elvis was a ‘great singer’ from first to last. I’m as interested in the last years of failure and decline, Elvis working to death on a commercial treadmill, as I am in the early years of liberation and innovation. I make short work of the ‘inverse snobbery’ that Leonard Cohen so firmly rejects. Declaring himself a ‘huge fan of Elvis,’ Cohen nails Elvis’ quality and the source of his universal and timeless appeal in this line:
‘Presley had that special kind of voice which makes your heart go out to a singer.’
Elvis had that quality to the very end, and it is this that has always fascinated me. The critics tell a facile tale of rise and fall, divided between an early Elvis that was great and a late Elvis that was bad. I can certainly understand why Elvis’ later material was considered less appealing and less exciting than his earlier material. The man was obviously being subjected to contrary pulls and pressures, feeling the world closing in on him (as he sang in What Now My Love); he was plunging into misery and despair, and he was seemingly singing one sad, miserable song after another. Despair and depression always turn people away lest it become catching. Me, I’ll take Elvis both in joy and in sorrow. I think his version of Danny Boy, recorded in the last year of his life, is the best version ever of what is one of the five greatest songs ever recorded. And I love the line from that song: ‘in sunshine and in shadow.’ Elvis sang in both sunshine and in shadow, he sings songs of innocence and experience. In Elvis’ case this was an earned experience. But somehow he also kept an innocence to the end, even if that, at times, came with an unfathomable and unpleasant tendency to blame others for the source of his (largely) self-authored misery. ‘I’m so hurt,’ he bellowed, ‘to think that you lied to me.’ And so on, in a remarkable vocal performance, 1976 Hurt. You don’t have to believe Elvis’ version of his demise as down he goes, but there’s no mistaking the loss and the pain in his vocals, the suffering, the anguish, the despair, the heartache and, in the end, the heartbreak. His health was failing too, so at times he is struggling for breath control. His voice is not the supple instrument it once was. But it got richer, weightier, sometimes the flaws make it raw and real, sometimes he is so technically accomplished that he qualifies as operatic. (I’ll do a piece one day on all the opera singers who love Elvis). I love these later songs, I love Elvis’ emotionally charged performances.
Like (nearly) everyone else, I love the early Elvis, the Elvis who shook up the world and got it moving. That’s the Elvis who inspired a generation. But there were always songs of sadness in there among the joy. His voice always had a keening, yearning quality hinting at irrevocable loss. It was there from the start, on Blue Moon from 1954. There was a haunting quality to the voice, and he seemed a haunted soul, too. You can hear it. It’s there on That’s Someone You’ll Never Forget and Ask Me and many more. People speculate over what this haunting quality was about: his lost twin, his lost mother, lost hopes and dreams. Life is just a series of little losses, little deaths. I suspect that what Elvis lost was hope for the pure unconditional love he longed for but never quite had. Such a love is not for sale, and can’t be bought. Elvis found that out as he found out how little money was worth. He found out long before the end. That haunted quality in the voice became ever more harrowing as the end approached all too soon. On material that was merely standard fare, that quality doesn’t make for pleasant listening, so it is understandable that most people were and have remained deaf to the appeal of the later Elvis. I like it, though. It is as raw and naked as hell. The familiarity of a lot of the songs (Solitaire, I’ll Never Fall in Love Again, Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain, Danny Boy, And I Love You So, Green Grass of Home, even the much maligned Last Farewell) has many turning away. But it’s the unfamiliar rawness of the performances which is where the harrowing beauty lies. That’s what especially interested me in the quote from Leonard Cohen: ‘Presley had that special kind of voice which makes your heart go out to a singer.’ He retained that special quality to the end, it was a quality that allowed him to express universal themes and express a profoundly human chord. He isn’t out to impress us with that voice, for all of its range and power; he is out to move us, and move us he does, from deep within.
Unlike what at times seems like (nearly) everyone else, I love the Elvis of the later ballads. These are the songs where Elvis bared his big, bruised soul in the raw, showing the hurt and the pain, also the corruption of fame and fortune, as well as the ugliness of self-absorption and self-pity. No wonder many turned away, they couldn’t bear to look, let alone hear. At the same time, the old piety and sincerity of Elvis the peerless heart singer is unimpaired. You listen to him and you can forgive him all that you have come to know of his compromises, he is entirely believable – all the old promises are made yet again. It’s all still there, surviving the ravages of time: the passion, the desire, the unrequited love.
Whatever it was that Elvis needed, he didn’t get it; whatever it was he was searching for, he didn’t find it. I know fine well about his endless womanizing. I should write an extended piece on this, since there is yet another book out claiming to reveal the secrets of Elvis’ sins in lusting after female flesh. There’s nothing here that I hadn’t heard in the 1980s. Like sex and rock’n’roll are strangers to one another! And like this didn’t cut both ways. Elvis didn’t need to do anything by way of chasing, he was most certainly chased. Read what Catherine Deneuve writes in her autobiography:
'Anyways, after his opening show, and a press conference, I spent about fifteen minutes with him, in the hope to take him to bed, but there is a limit to what a woman can say to arouse a man, even for a French woman, especially as his then wife Priscilla was in the proximity. I have yet to see, to this day, a more strikingly beautiful man.'
Catherine Deneuve, in her autobiography "My life behind the camera", recalling the time she met Elvis on August 1, 1969.
I went off Elvis big time in the 1980s when I started to read accounts which purported to reveal the reality behind the image of this great deified rock idol I worshipped. The image I had worshipped for so long was something less than true. It was the revelations of drug addiction which hurt most of all, it all seemed so seedy and sordid. The defence that it was all prescription drugs and therefore legal just seemed mere apologetics. I was pitiless and unforgiving at the revelation that my idol had feet of human clay. Or was merely human flesh, like the rest of us. As for the details concerning Elvis’ sex life, my view remains now what it was then – for an age which prides itself on being sexually permissive with respect to people being free to do almost anything they like with almost anyone they like, the standards which are applied in celebrity take-downs seem to be remarkably repressive and impossibly naive. I shall write in more depth on this in another post. Suffice to say, I want to see the reinstatement of a genuine moral code. As for the revelations, Elvis, it seems, was an odd person with some remarkably odd sexual proclivities. Unlike the rest of the human population, then. Normal is what most people do. Good and bad. There’s another way of looking at this. There are people writing books in the hope of making a name and making money for themselves with this fake moralism. Bring back the moral codes, I say, the morality that binds and obligates each and all equally, rock stars and rock journalists both. And at the same time let’s come to see, identify, and name the erring acts of human beings for what they are, too – sin. And let’s have the nerve to call it Original Sin. And recognize we all possess it in common. Because only then will we be able to ask for forgiveness and have hope for redemption. I'm a lot more merciful and forgiving toward Elvis now than I was in the 1980s. Because I now see a humanism without mercy and forgiveness as utterly inhuman.
Elvis was a sinner. He was tempted, and, alas, he succumbed to temptation. He was led up the mountain and offered the whole world and, alas, succumbed to temptation. But who wouldn’t have done when you see what temptations were put in front of him? He was brought up dirt poor, yet became the highest paid star in the world, boasting one hundred Gold Records, more number one hits than anyone, breaking records in both Hollywood and Las Vegas.
As for sex, Elvis, according to Barbara Pitman, one of a billion former girlfriends, 'had a libido that would make Jerry Lee Lewis look like a monk.' And finally, Priscilla, long suffering wife, got tired of the revolving doors and left. Elvis, of course, was himself possessively jealous. It’s not a pleasant tale. Elvis had flaws a mile wide. To be tempted does not constitute an excuse to succumb to temptation – resisting temptation and making the right choices is what freedom as the use of free will allied to self-restraint is about. Elvis had huge temptations put in front of him and he was one who could resist anything but temptation.
Rather than indulge some spurious moralism to score points against dead celebrities, I would rather reinstate what Leonard Cohen openly calls ‘the western moral code’ (The Future) (so long as we don't interpret this exclusively, I rather like the eastern moral code too, and see Confucius as remarkably similar to Plato) and give our erstwhile moralists of the current relativist age, an age beyond good and evil, a genuine morality to adhere to. I’d hold them to that code as well as the people they criticise. The deadly sins are not called deadly for no reason. Elvis found them fatal. I’m not making him a martyr here, either. Elvis didn’t die for our sins, he died of them, succumbing to a power of temptation that was magnified by a factor of seemingly limitless money and power. Satan offered Jesus the whole world in return for his soul, but Jesus refused. Elvis was likewise led up to the heights of worldly power, only to prove all too willing to accept the deal put in front of him. It seemed so much better than anything he had ever had, so how could he refuse? He was ambitious for success. Having known nothing but grinding poverty, wouldn’t you be eager for something more? The deal, alas, was honoured, and Elvis became the most successful star on the planet. But those who are quick to blame here need to remember: Elvis was not Jesus. And neither are you nor I, and the myriad critics of Elvis’ character flaws are even less so. In my more lenient moods, I’m inclined to say that Elvis didn’t know any better. I don’t think that is true at all. He didn’t know how better to manage his career, that much is certainly true. But people remark on his superlative qualities as a gospel singer. He was brought up singing gospel. He had a religious grounding and he remained a spiritual seeker. He knew better. Unfortunately, the weight of the material rewards counted for so much as to induce him to silence his conscience and continue to carry on down a path that he knew to be corrupting of his soul. He became so big that he seemed to be on a planet of his own. He conquered the world in 1973 with the Hawaii satellite concert. And there, in front of over one billion people, he sang ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’ better than anyone bar Hank Williams himself had ever sung the song and could ever sing it.
In Tower of Song, Leonard Cohen sings:
I'm just payin' my rent every day in the Tower of Song
I said to Hank Williams "How lonely does it get?"
Hank Williams hasn't answered yet
But I hear him coughing all night long
Oh, a hundred floors above me in the Tower of Song
Elvis could give an answer. He made it to the very highest floor in the Tower of Song; there was no-one above him, and he had nowhere else to go, and he came to see the heights in all their soullessness. His talent took him to the very top, only for him to see how empty it was up there; there was nothing there that was essential to him. He got what he wanted, but not what he truly needed, and on the way he lost what he had.
But he didn’t lose everything. He still had the voice, and at the end he used it to report back from life in the dark depths. His later material was much less popular than his earlier material. For critics there is no mystery there: the early sides are stellar and revolutionary whereas the latter are tired and uninspired. I think that misses the point, in that it doesn’t compare like with like. Some of the greatest performances in his entire career come in those later performances. I am currently listening to Elvis alone at the piano singing I Will Be True. It combines an incredible weight with a naked piety and is delivered with a technically flawless, emotionally charged vocal. I could say the same of It’s Still Here and I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen. They are not revolutionary like Hound Dog, for sure, but they are revelatory in a way that Hound Dog never was and never could be. There are many more examples I could cite here. It’s Over from live performance, or My Boy, either the single from 1974 or the incredibly emotional live performance from 1975. These are Elvis' songs of experience.
Elvis didn’t live right, he didn’t love right, and it all went wrong. The story is all over the songs of the seventies, the most misunderstood, most overlooked, most underrated period of his career. At times he sounds like the self-pitying bore who sings his sorrows into endless beers at the bar. It’s not an appealing image. But if you do have the patience to sit down and listen, say, to Elvis Today from 1975, then the qualities of the songs – even Elvis in his bewildered, uncomprehending hypocrisy – will become apparent. You Want it Darker? Leonard Cohen asked on his last album. How dark do people want it? Sometimes, human beings are so flawed as to be thoroughly unpleasant and unappealing – awful and appalling. Elvis encompassed multiplicities in his musical persona. It seems he was scheduled to record the song The Good, the Bad, the Beautiful but ill-health led to the session being called off. The good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly is one way of summing it up.
There's a truth in these latter songs that isn't appealing, but is very revelatory all the same.
Some of the song choices are tired and overly familiar, and some are just plain unimaginative, utterly incapable of bearing the weight of the deep emotions Elvis evidently sought to convey. So you can hear him reaching for something deep inside his broken heart and trying to give expression to all that pain and hurt, and often all that comes out is an inelegant bellow, unconvincing accusations, and self-pity. But for all that there is an epic grandeur in it all. I’ll admit to being disappointed in these albums when I heard them the first time. The songs were relentlessly bleak. For every rocker that lifted the spirits (Burning Love, T-R-O-U-B-L-E, Promised Land, Way Down) there were several miserable ballads of loss and separation (I Miss You, Separate Ways are among the best of this style). The overall impression was depressingly maudlin. But I listened beyond the initial disappointment, and I came to love all of its raw, flawed, deficient, tasteless, tawdry reality. I’ll take Elvis’ Fool (by James Last, no less) and Last Farewell (Roger Whittaker) over a billion tasteful selections by music purists any day.
As for the inverted snobs taken to task by Leonard Cohen, Cohen states it plain, right, simple and straight – Elvis was a great singer: he was a great singer in the beginning and he was a great singer at the end. There’s great material to be had from all periods, and on all human life, in sunshine and in shadow.
As to the snobs, they are just that familiar breed, the patronising middle brows who lack the talent to challenge, let alone be, one of the high brows, and so indulge their resentment and cultivate their feelings of superiority by sneering at the low brows. The low brows are not just artists like Elvis, the ostensible target. The real targets, the people who are the real foul abominations in the eyes and ears of the snobs, are the kind of people who love Elvis, the vulgar people who scream and create and make no attempt to conceal their emotions in showing their boundless enthusiasm for the things they like; they are spontaneous and vital, don’t pay much attention to those who would impose taste, and don’t come up with great elaborate treatises in order to prove their impeccable good taste. The dreary librarians and archivists of the musical soul are the people who can – and will – make a point of tracing a tune you love back to Blind Bob from the Backwoods or Wild Willie Whatsisname, and then treat you to a lecture as to why the original was far better to any versions you may have come to know and love, and then leave you with the lesson that the people you know and love are all mere popularisers, utterly derivative commercializers who corrupted the music for their own personal aggrandizement. There's only one thing wrong with that approach: it's hogwash! I’d be inclined to give a lesson on the genetic fallacy and the fallacy of origins here, but I won’t. I can’t be bothered. So I’ll suggest you listen to Wooden Heart. Gee, the people of all kinds I knew who loved this song! Family members, the girls at school, even my elderly music teacher who was just one rung short of being a nun. None of them would know what the issue was here, they just had the ability to spot a good tune and a good voice. It’s as simple as that. But when Elvis recorded Wooden Heart there was an issue among German folkies concerning the American vulgarisation and commercialisation of their folk music. They wanted Elvis’ rendition banned. It wasn’t. The German public loved it and bought it in millions, and it stayed at number one on the charts for a billion years. It was number one in the UK for two months, too.
But, hey, it’s always perfectly possible that the people are dumb! I love how this lesson on what constitutes real music has tended to come from people from well-off, well-educated backgrounds, middle class folk, then, giving the common folk lessons and lectures on their own music – like the jazz critics of the fifties, people with big houses and original art works on their walls, telling Louis Armstrong that he was betraying his art.
Elvis was a commercial artist, and a very successful one, and he was immensely popular to boot, so he can’t be any good, right. He’s ‘showbizz,’ as Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson sneered in a recent interview. In that interview he also made a number of inaccurate factual statements which the more plain speaking among us would call downright lies motivated by bigotry. I’ll put it down to his faulty memory piecing his various prejudices together so as to draw one massively false conclusion. No, Elvis was not fat, bloated, drug-addled and forgetful of lines in 1970, as Anderson says - he is reading the tragic ending backwards out of sheer petty scorn and malice. And resentment. Because Elvis knocks these folk snobs into a cocked hat, and they know it, hence their constant need to sneer. If Elvis was so obviously bad, then it wouldn’t need saying so loudly over and again. Leonard Cohen speaks an obvious truth: Elvis was a ‘great singer.’ It's that simple. The people certainly knew Elvis to be a great singer, and decades after his death, they still flock in their millions to see and hear Elvis. And they make it clear they don’t give a damn what the snobs think. This makes the snobs even more resentful and peevish, even more inverted and bitter. If you think I’m exaggerating, read what happened to folk singer Phil Ochs when he declared how he rated Elvis the tops in a live concert in front of his folk fans. There was blood on the floor and Ochs never recovered his reputation. These snobs do real damage to people. It seems they can’t leave this one alone, making a virtue of being pure and playing music as an end in itself. If they get joy out of that, fantastic, but the fact that have to keep gnawing away on ‘commercial’ artists and their success suggests that they are less than happy. The reasoning is that their music is real music and commercial music is artificial, meaning that people seduced by the derivative stuff are being sold short, in terms of the music but also of their own happiness and potential. I get the argument. I understand it. I’ll not name names, because it does no good, but for the life of me the appeal of an awful lot of pop stars is beyond me. A thudding unmusical noise allied to a carefully constructed image that a ‘mass’ audience can identify with at level of projection and fantasy. I’m thinking of current artists I nurture a particular dislike of as I write that passage. The ‘inverse snobs’ I and Leonard Cohen are criticising could say that those words apply to Elvis. Well, I have Little Richard singing Good God Miss Molly on now, and that’s argument enough for me.
It’s reassuring when you are outnumbered to dismiss the people as dumb, tacky, and tasteless. They can be. I’ll declare a taste for the tacky, if not exactly tasteless. I’ve yet to find anyone who likes Elvis’ version of It’s Impossible. For critics, it’s everything that is bad about seventies Elvis: saccharine, drenched in strings, soft to point of soporific. I rather like it. I introduce it to friends as the greatest ever Mexican song. Not that I am an expert on Mexican songs. But its writer Armando Manzanero certainly rates Elvis and his version of the song:
'I never met him, although I saw his show in Las Vegas, and the great feeling I had after listening to his version of "Somos Novios" ("Its impossible") was always so well known in music circles that the other day I received the main master, in acetate form, from a friend who just passed away. It's without a doubt my most valuable treasure.'
Armando Manzanero, Mexican singer songwriter's opinion on Elvis and of his having recorded one of his songs "Its impossible", as related in NP25TV 2015
I love those words: ‘’it’s without doubt my most valuable treasure.” I’m serious: if you want to know the secret of Elvis’ immense and enduring popularity, it is this: the man touched a deep and universal human chord. It’s not the greatness of the material, it’s not the fine musical taste, it’s not the technical accomplishments of the voice, it’s none of the things that music critics (and snobs) value most of all. Elvis was everyman and everywoman, the tasteful as well as those, like me, with a taste for the tasteless. This was a singer who recorded at Stax Studios Memphis in 1973, the home of black Memphis soul, with half of Booker T’s MG’s on hand, and recorded Spanish Eyes. He did a great version of the song too. It’s not so much a world away from soul music as an entire solar system. But it’s typical Elvis, a man who, as a teenager, walked into Sun Records, noted for cutting blues sides by the likes of Howlin’ Wolf, and auditioned with ballads like My Happiness. He didn’t stick to the grooves, but struck out beyond the boundaries to where the people were. He found them and they found him, and stuck with him.
I will continue to argue for Elvis’ identity as a democrat rather than a king. And I shall continue to celebrate him as one who embraced a genuine and vibrant multiplicity in music. People can make mistakes, there’s no doubt about that. The pop charts, like electoral politics, are littered with miscellaneous rubbish. It tends not to hang around for too long, though. Given time, these areas are remarkably self-cleansing. (At least, they used to be, until the rubbish became expert at running a career). I’m generous enough in spirit to argue that, in the main, over a period of time, people have the wit to gravitate towards a good voice and a good tune and stay there.
Elvis had a great voice. It’s not just his technical abilities and his two and a half octave range, it’s the emotional investment, the melisma, the way he could swing a tune. There’s none to touch him. But even if I restrain my own praise here and limit myself to merely saying that Elvis was one of the greatest voices to have ever sung, it still nails the lie of the music snobs, begging the question as to just what the basis of their snobbery is – because any view that is premised on the notion that Elvis couldn’t sing is just so plain wrong. It demands an explanation. Snobs. I don’t care for them. Hail Leonard Cohen for telling the pure, unvarnished truth. As I have come to expect from the man.
Oh, and one final point, Elvis fans come in all shapes and sizes, all races, all classes, all ages, all sexes, from heads of state and scientists (Elvis is Richard Dawkins’ great idol, I kid you not, Dawkins’ own words), to opera stars (Placedo Domingo) and bluesmen, you name it, all the way down to ordinary fools such as I. Everyone, it seems, except the patronising but thoroughly mediocre middle brows, who continue in every age to form a seething resentful mob of impeccably good taste. For the record, Elvis Presley came from dirt poor origins, his family picked cotton, his father had a spell in Parchman’s Farm prison – you don’t get more folk-blues than that. Maybe he should stayed in overalls and kept his hillbilly hat on, sung about the misery of life, gone to prison and lived out all the other white middle class clichés about the real folk blues and country. He didn’t. He dressed in black styles in a country area, a peacock among rednecks in jeans. And he took his musical roots and blended them with what he heard on radio. His real achievement was to take his folk roots, mix and match all genres of music, add his own remarkable style and voice, and thereby recreate popular music as a democratic form that all could have a go at, without national, cultural, and racial implication. But instead of being recognized as the innovator and integrator he was, he now stands condemned as a cultural appropriator. That’s not just wrong, that’s a pathetic perversion of the truth; that’s a tragedy which traduces the name and reputation of a man who the world should be celebrating. That it isn’t is that world’s loss, and a sad indictment of an age that is unable to see and think clearly.
“Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.” (Leonard Cohen).