This summer: Clash of the baby boomer titans
The Beatles vs. Elvis — in 2017, who comes out on top?
In this year of momentous anniversaries, it’s a logical question to ask.
Both artists will be celebrated. The Beatles with the 50th anniversary reissue of what is arguably the most influential rock album of all time, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” And Elvis with a raft of celebrations to mark the 40th anniversary of his death.
Both were titans in their respective eras: Elvis in the ’50s, The Beatles in the ’60s.
Temporally, one segued into the other. Elvis personified the raucous spirit of early rock, The Beatles transformed it from visceral, R&B fused mayhem into the classic artistry that exerts an influence today.
Both have a presence on Spotify, with Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” running neck and neck in popularity with The Beatles “Here Comes The Sun.”
Both boast instantly recognizable sonic trademarks: Elvis’s rumbling baritone (Dean Martin meets Big Mama Thornton), The Beatles elegantly boisterous harmonies.
Both have Sirius XM satellite radio stations devoted exclusively to their music:
Elvis Radio, on which the King’s old Memphis Mafia pals, including a few who stabbed him in the back, spin records and yak about what a great guy he was.
The Beatles Channel, which launched last week and, in addition to hits, rarities and live performances, will play the rereleased “Sgt. Pepper” in its entirety next Thursday, with commentary from the album’s producer, the late George Martin.
Both have legacies tinged with sadness: Elvis dying from a life of excess at 42, The Beatles’ John Lennon tragically assassinated at 40 (with both ranking highly on Forbes’ Top Earning Dead Celebrities list).
Having said this, there is a massive difference in the way these acts are perceived in 2017.
Elvis — hail the King — has become a pop culture punchline, a hip-swivelling source of mirth and merriment, whose music pops up in the occasional Disney cartoon (“Lilo & Stitch”) and as a comedic subplot in B-grade action flicks (“3000 Miles to Graceland”). Artistic credibility: zero. The Beatles, who never descended into parody, are revered as innovative trendsetters who caught the tailwind of a seismic cultural shift, inspired generations of rock bands who followed and smartly packed it in before accusations of sellout could tarnish their legacy.
Artistic credibility: through the roof.
The Beatles have another advantage, of course: they wrote their own material, cast a wider net creatively, and stayed in tune with their audience.
After his first kinetic burst in the ’50s, Elvis — pushed by his shady, money-grubbing manager “Colonel” Tom Parker — lost his way, spent the ’60s making cheesy drive-in flicks and paraded around in jumpsuits for the last seven years of his life.
His sideburns clinging to his face like fuzz-encrusted pork chops.
Ah, Elvis. Decades after his death, his cheesy “Bubba” image has obliterated any semblance of the endearingly humble superstar his fans warmly remember.
Even in 2002, when I visited his Memphis home, Graceland, to write about the 25th anniversary of his death, the place had a gaudy amusement park grandeur — and impersonality — that wasn’t in evidence a mere decade and a half earlier.
It’s shocking to think that in 1987 I was still able to access, by rifling through a phone book, a slew of people who had known the King personally — his barber, his tailor, his maid — and were eager to chat about their experiences to a Canadian journalist they had never met.
By 2002, all these people were gone, swallowed by the mammoth Elvis estate that — in the intervening years — learned to stage-manage contact with the outside world and put a price tag on his image.
Elvis The Man had been deftly replaced by Elvis The Brand.
The Beatles, prime innovators who didn’t need some bellicose fake colonel telling them what to do, are a different story.
“Elvis was an excellent singles artist,” University of Leeds prof David Hesmondhalgh told The Guardian, explaining why Elvis’s musical cachet has fallen so dramatically.
“He emerged before the formation of rock culture as we know it, so the mythology of the original rock album was lost on him. He doesn’t have anything near a ‘Sgt. Pepper’ for young people to connect through.”
“Pepper,” of course, was monumental in its time, the soundtrack to the legendary Summer of Love, an experimental breakthrough that set the tone for the newly emerging counterculture.
But even this meticulously crafted groundbreaker has taken a hit in recent years, blamed by angry Gen-Xers for the rise of pretentious art rock and critically dwarfed by belated recognition of its boundary-pushing predecessor, “Revolver.”
And yet it remains a breathtaking song suite filled with complex musical progressions, drug-tinged psychedelia and weird sonic textures that reverberate with giddy expectation.
If Elvis was the Big Bang of Pop, The Beatles were Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, embracing change at a time when pop culture was frothing at the bit, eager for a new paradigm.
Fifty years later, The Fab Four have the benefit of two key members — Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr — still banging out Beatles tunes on the road, popping up at awards shows and teaming up with younger artists who claim them as formative influences. It makes a difference. When Cirque du Soleil presented the Beatles tribute show “Love” in 2006, it was an immediate hit that still sells out 11 years later.
When “Viva Elvis,” an acrobatic and dance salute to the King, attempted the same feat in 2010, it lasted barely two years before poor ticket sales ended its run.
It isn’t fair. Elvis, in his time, was totemic. And despite his campy image today, he made great music — it just doesn’t get acknowledged.
His early Sun Records seethe with a guttural frisson that rocked ’50s conformity, while his “’68 Comeback Special” — a visceral masterpiece — sees the leather-clad legend ripping through his biggest hits like a man with nothing to lose.
That all this stuff gets forgotten isn’t surprising, given that the biggest celebrations for Elvis revolve around, ahem, his death.
During 2002’s 25th blowout — which at the time was (mistakenly) touted as the last major Elvis anniversary — the highlight was a fake concert that saw performance clips of the King projected onscreen as live performers played in sync with images of their much younger selves.
Dead Elvis, of course, showed up in a hearse.
Scanning the list of events for this year’s 40th — Aug. 11-19 — I see nothing has changed: Another fake concert, this time with a symphony orchestra, an auction, tribute artists and the usual candlelight vigil, where tearful mourners parade past his tombstone while souvenir hawkers line the streets, rubbing their hands with anticipatory glee.
“If you ask a small child about Elvis, the fact he died on a toilet through overeating or wore a silly suit is all that registers,” notes Hesmondhalgh.
“The music has become far less important than the caricature. His image has been cheapened.”
The Beatles, despite Lennon’s death, seem immortal, because their music has proven adaptable to different eras, different contexts, untethered from the here and now.
Not to say one artist is better than the other. Both were talented. Both made their mark. But historical memory is fickle. And just as Charlie Chaplin will always be the toddling Little Tramp in silent movies — as if his later work didn’t register — Elvis will go down in history as a jumpsuited fat man, cramming his face with doughnuts before toppling off a toilet.
It’s marketing. It’s commerce. It’s grossly unfair.
But when it comes to cultural longevity, you take what you can get.