The King Is Dead

Elvis died yesterday, 33 years ago. I lived in Mississippi that day, and I remember the silence that descended on that summer afternoon. I had already come to the conclusion that I had been born too late, I don't really know when. I was 12. Star Wars came out that summer, and even in my youthful obsession--I had probably seen Star Wars a half dozen times since the beginning of that pre-VHS summer--I could smell the nostalgia in it. Here was more confirmation.

I saw Elvis at the Houston rodeo. I had seen David Cassidy the year before, and I think I saw Doc Severinson the year after. I would see Evel Kenievel jump a dozen Camaros in the Astrodome, too, but not as part of the Rodeo. I'm not sure why the rodeo had headliners, but it was Texas. We got a day off school  the first Friday the the rodeo was in town. He, Elvis, was a tiny, glittery figure on the center of the Astrodome floor. Even from the top deck, I want to say the Purple Seats, but maybe the Orange Seats. Anyway, the way the lighting worked, you could see the rhinestones flash even at close to a quarter mile away. My grandparents had seen him in Vegas, and when they visited us, my grandfather borrowed my guitar and showed me some of the King's moves. He later made me a strap out of one of his belts, it was white, so I could gyrate while holding the guitar. They were fans of Englebert Humperdink and Shirley Bassey, but the next time we were all in Vegas together they took my parents to see him.

That afternoon, when the Gilligan's Island rerun and dialing-for-dollars movie cut out--late summer, late afternoon, Brandon, Mississippi, you are goddam right I was inside in front of the television--in favor of the haircuts and blazers and somber, unaccented mellifluousness of Jackson newscasters, I wondered if this was what people meant when they talked about remembering where they were when Kennedy was killed. A few years earlier, in Houston, I had watched Lyndon Baines Johnson's all day funeral with my great grandmother, a Republican, like a Lincoln Republican, and patriot, who I can't imagine was super-fond of LBJ (Who knows, maybe she was. In spite of a somewhat dated racial vocabulary, she was vehemently pro civil-rights and pro-Vietnam entanglement, so maybe she loved LBJ. I do remember vividly she and my mother screaming at each other about Richard Nixon, though, her, the great-grandmother taking the rare-for-the-time pro-Nixon position.), but we sat there from noon to sundown in my parents' living room watching the caisson creep down Congress in the rain. I was pretty sure that wasn't what the Kennedy people were talking about.

Jailhouse Rock is easily the best Elvis movie. Viva Las Vegas! has some cool songs and old Vegas scenery and Anne Margaret. My favorite, though, is Roustabout, because his co-star and erstwhile love interest is Barbara Stanwyck. It haslo has the song "Poison Ivy League" which in certain fantasies, I get to play from the DJ booth when GW Bush comes into the fantasy West Louisiana dive bar where I work for minimum wage (It's a pretty high-concept fantasy.)

That Albert Goldman Elvis: What Happened? was a nasty piece of work, but highly readable and satisfying in a corpse desecrating kind of a way. Griel Marcus famously calls Goldman a hippy in the pre-60s/Yippee sense--the guy who has to use the most highly charged and provocative vocabulary and phrasing to describe anything at anytime--in opposition to a hipster who knew when and what to say and knew how to keep things cool. His Mystery Train makes a great antidote to Goldman's venom. Then Peter Guralnick takes two brilliantly designed volumes to go deeper and than anyone else ever will.