Although I was born in the 1960s and sat in The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine in Liverpool, my musical heart lies in the fifties. I’m still pondering the new Elvis film. Like many other narratives, the film tells a story that hipsters like to believe but which simply isn’t true – Elvis the rebel years followed by a long, long decline with brief interludes. Sorry, but this is plain wrong. Elvis hit #1 in the middle of Beatlemania (1965) and again in 1969 as The Beatles broke up. Alone among the fifties artists he maintained a decent-high chart profile, owning the early sixties, coming back strong in ’68 and ’69. ‘Little Sister,’ ‘His Latest Flame,’ ‘I Feel So Bad’ were outstanding singles (1961), same with ‘Devil in Disguise’ (1963), which pointed forward to ‘Guitar Man’ (1967). In between, you have the best ballad of the sixties (‘It Hurts Me’ 1964), Grammy Award winning gospel (How Great Thou Art 1966) and Elvis trying on Dylan for size and absolutely nailing it (‘Tomorrow is a Long Time’ 1966, "the one recording I treasure the most." And that’s before we get to the remarkable American Sound sessions of 1969 (‘Suspicious Minds,’ ‘Kentucky Rain,’ ‘Any Day Now,’ ‘In the Ghetto’ etc). In 1970, Elvis was singing better than ever.
You see films and documentaries and read books and it’s always the same, Elvis was great for a brief moment and then slumped into films, ballads, and bad songs. There was deviation, there were wrong directions, he should have got out of Hollywood, got rid of his parasitic miscreant mismanager, but surely to goodness we should have learned to be leery of cartoon world dichtomies between the wholly good and the wholly evil. The answer to any controversy is always going to be neither the one nor the other. The new movie is right enough to argue that Elvis was trapped in a gilden cage, but pays scant attention to the relentless gathering of gold in the first place.
In 1972 Elvis performed a series of record-breaking dates at Madison Square Garden, with John Lennon, George Harrison, and Bob Dylan as paying customers. Chris Chase of The New York Times said of Elvis at Madison Square Garden, "He looked like a prince from another planet.”
A year later and he delivered the first ever global concert via satellite from Hawaii. We always quote the figure of a billion and half people watching, but the more soberly calculated figure of a mere five hundred million seems more accurate. With success like this there is no need to exaggerate.
It’s hard to turn around a decline that has all the hallmarks of unprecedented success.
The song “Garden Party” tells the story of the time when Rick Nelson was booed at a concert at Madison Square Garden. "Garden Party" tells of various people who were present: "Yoko brought her Walrus", referring to John Lennon). Nelson came on stage wearing bell-bottoms and a purple velvet shirt in line with the latest fashions, his hair hanging down to his shoulders. He played his old songs, but the crowd started to boo when he played his latest material in the country rock vein:
But it's all right now, I've learned my lesson well
You see, you can't please everyone,
so you've got to please yourself
Ricky Nelson was a fifties pop icon who went on to become Rick Nelson the country rock artist, and a good one too. It was a path travelled by the Everly Brothers too. But the public weren’t with them. The same with Jerry Lee Lewis, who, starved of chart action, returned to his country roots and became a magnificent country artist (I have all his records, “Another Place, Another Time” is one of the greatest songs ever). People rave about Little Richard. I rave about Little Richard. The difference is, I rave about the records he continued to make in the sixties. I have him backed by a young Jimi Hendrix. I much prefer Little Richard to Otis Redding. But the sixties audiences judged otherwise. Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jerry Lee were all playing their old hits in the lounges of Las Vegas years before Elvis’ triumphant return to live performance at the biggest hotel in Vegas, the International in 1969 (I’ve been there!).
But Elvis too was worn down in the end. He found that the audiences were happier with him throwing away medleys of his old hits than they were with challenging new material, so he resigned himself. The shows of 70-71 were super, then it becomes hit and miss and routine, even self-parody. Even he was doing what the others were already having to do, sing memories for people reliving their youth. And good memories and records they were too.
But as Rick Nelson sings in this great song “Garden Party,” “if memories are all I sing, I’d rather drive a truck.” Elvis sang “Memories” the song and sang memories, and he was indeed a truck driver in his youth. Is a working class hero still something to be? Elvis knew no bounds, his rock’n’roll answers, like the liberation he inspired, ran out of gas and in the end so did he.
“When I first heard Elvis Presley’s voice I just knew that I wasn’t going to work for anybody and nobody was going to be my boss. Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.” – Bob Dylan
Leonard Cohen said something similar:
“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.”
(Leonard Cohen, as told to Bard Oses in an interview published on March 26, 2012 at "Leonard Cohen Jukebox" internet page.)
But both Dylan and Leonard Cohen learned the limits of liberation, that there is a reality beyond self-creation and self-assertion. Elvis flew off the planet and evaded that reality check.
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.
John Lennon was disgusted when he heard this song, writing a scathing ‘serve yourself’ in response. In that response we hear the clarion call of modern libertarianism, the self-assertion of the deified ‘I.’
Elvis learned the hard way that there is no life when you live beyond the boundaries. The modern age is struggling to learn the same lesson.