Saturday, January 11, 2003
Greil Marcus is asked to comment on Elvis once again, in which he brings up the big topics:
1) cultural and political relevance (and by extension critical relevance)
2) morbidity rates of a generation's music and of generational cohorts
I have my own memories of listening to Elvis Presley. I remember seeing black kids dancing to "All Shook Up" and feeling surprised ("a-bless-a-my-soul-a-what's-a-wrong-a-with-a-me?")
As far removed as I was from fame or fortune, several of my young friends actually went on to meet Elvis during his hey-days, which was described then as being exactly the same sort of experience as meeting a famous star now. One was a Southern girl, friendly and genuinely nice but from a family so poor they wore ten-cent go-aheads for shoes whenever possible. She lurked for days by the gates in Belair or Beverly Hills where Elvis was staying when making a movie and I believe she was waved to as he drove past. Another girl had family members with entertainment connections, so she got an autograph, and lifetime mementos -- a photograph of her as a child with Elvis on a movie-set, and a teddy bear besides. Another was a teenaged girl transported to Germany with the idea of meeting Elvis there by her own fire-and-brimstone radio preacher dad (she had her photo taken with Elvis, too). None of these events instilled either confidence in my "peer group" or in the world at large and to my most honest recollection did not cause me to suffer any appreciable pang of envy.
Speaking of Elvis movies and movie-sets is my last remark on this topic. Not until much later did I encounter someone whose true life story resembled the plot outline of an early Elvis Presley movie: A husband missing in action during a war and presumed dead (actually a prisoner of war) eventually returned home only to discover his wife after years had finally remarried. While I thought that was sad as I watched the movie as a kid, the story seemed set far in the distant remove of time (the movie was placed in the Civil War), and not at all like anything that could ever happen in real life. And for the people this happened to, how would they feel to hear "that's just like the plot to an Elvis Presley movie", which is exactly and unbelievably what a person later remarked to me, or I would never have made that connection myself.
Elvis' early stuff (as collected on For LP Fans Only) is what I happened to have heard the most of early on, and I would always haul out that record when people started bashing Elvis or snickering about him and if they liked music at all, they would come around. Elvis didn't come up in conversation often by the late '60s, as people were engrossed with other concerns. Someone just gave me the new Elvis compilation (30 #1 hits -- none of them from the For LP Fans Only era) and these songs sound high-pitched, tinny, and thin by comparison. The dubbed-up bonus track "A Little Less Conversation" is just silly. Did he always sound like this?
This is a good example of why Greil Marcus should get paid a lot for what he does. With a lifetime of experience, I'll never be able to squeeze out but a few tiny mis-matched paragraphs on Elvis. ¶ 1/11/2003 05:44:00 PM
1) cultural and political relevance (and by extension critical relevance)
2) morbidity rates of a generation's music and of generational cohorts
I have my own memories of listening to Elvis Presley. I remember seeing black kids dancing to "All Shook Up" and feeling surprised ("a-bless-a-my-soul-a-what's-a-wrong-a-with-a-me?")
As far removed as I was from fame or fortune, several of my young friends actually went on to meet Elvis during his hey-days, which was described then as being exactly the same sort of experience as meeting a famous star now. One was a Southern girl, friendly and genuinely nice but from a family so poor they wore ten-cent go-aheads for shoes whenever possible. She lurked for days by the gates in Belair or Beverly Hills where Elvis was staying when making a movie and I believe she was waved to as he drove past. Another girl had family members with entertainment connections, so she got an autograph, and lifetime mementos -- a photograph of her as a child with Elvis on a movie-set, and a teddy bear besides. Another was a teenaged girl transported to Germany with the idea of meeting Elvis there by her own fire-and-brimstone radio preacher dad (she had her photo taken with Elvis, too). None of these events instilled either confidence in my "peer group" or in the world at large and to my most honest recollection did not cause me to suffer any appreciable pang of envy.
Speaking of Elvis movies and movie-sets is my last remark on this topic. Not until much later did I encounter someone whose true life story resembled the plot outline of an early Elvis Presley movie: A husband missing in action during a war and presumed dead (actually a prisoner of war) eventually returned home only to discover his wife after years had finally remarried. While I thought that was sad as I watched the movie as a kid, the story seemed set far in the distant remove of time (the movie was placed in the Civil War), and not at all like anything that could ever happen in real life. And for the people this happened to, how would they feel to hear "that's just like the plot to an Elvis Presley movie", which is exactly and unbelievably what a person later remarked to me, or I would never have made that connection myself.
Elvis' early stuff (as collected on For LP Fans Only) is what I happened to have heard the most of early on, and I would always haul out that record when people started bashing Elvis or snickering about him and if they liked music at all, they would come around. Elvis didn't come up in conversation often by the late '60s, as people were engrossed with other concerns. Someone just gave me the new Elvis compilation (30 #1 hits -- none of them from the For LP Fans Only era) and these songs sound high-pitched, tinny, and thin by comparison. The dubbed-up bonus track "A Little Less Conversation" is just silly. Did he always sound like this?
This is a good example of why Greil Marcus should get paid a lot for what he does. With a lifetime of experience, I'll never be able to squeeze out but a few tiny mis-matched paragraphs on Elvis. ¶ 1/11/2003 05:44:00 PM
