What they say

In a series of new and previous interviews, the San Diego Union-Tribune asked an array of artists from across the musical spectrum to evaluate Elvis Presley, his originality (or lack thereof) and his legacy. Here’s what they said.

› Boz Scaggs: “Elvis was no more a thief than any other artist I know. No more, no less. We all come from someplace.”

› Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler: “If I could sit down with Elvis, I’d smack him in the face for not giving credit to all those black musicians. For years I’ve been struggling with that. You know, he was a great man, but he maliciously — or maybe unconsciously — took all the credit.”

› Matchbox Twenty singer Rob Thomas: “Yeah, but I think he was an innocent thief — he didn’t realize he wasn’t supposed to steal. In his mind, I think he thought he was taking what he loved and paying homage. In some ways, he was a product of a fog of ignorance that existed in the 1950s. Had he been part of a more aware decade, he would have been one of the more aware people.”

› Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro: “I respect what Elvis did, but I’m pretty much indifferent to the whole thing. There aren’t that many artists that have affected me on a deep level, and he’s not one of them. Even though I’m aware that he’s influenced people who influenced people who influenced me, when it comes to feeling connected, I’m just not.”

› Fleetwood Mac drummer Mick Fleetwood:

“The reality is that black R&B and blues was the instigator that sparked this whole fire. You can’t listen to any music now without tracing the umbilical cord back to blues and R&B. It’s just a fact.”

› Neo-soul singer Maxwell: “It’s a very touchy subject. Because it’s like it was appropriation, but there was a certain window that was opened that never would have been opened without people like Elvis and The Beatles. They were into the grooves and soul of black music and introduced it to the world at large. And then the world caught on to the original artists Elvis and The Beatles were inspired by. So it was kind of like a civil-rights breakthrough, as I see it.”

› Jon Bon Jovi: “I loved him, but I don’t want to be him. He was the first prisoner of rock ‘n’ roll, and it was self-inflected wounds that he died of at 42 … I don’t want it to end, and I don’t want to be the fat guy in the white suit. Elvis died from the inside out.”

› Former Sex Pistols’ singer John Lydon (a/k/a

Johnny Rotten): “Elvis is absolutely irrelevant. He was something my parents liked, so I naturally dismissed him. I’ve never been overly fond of rock ‘n’ roll anyway, (although) I don’t wish death on anyone. I’ve had far more awful examples (than Presley) right up close and personal to really bother about someone like him.”

› Jazz saxophonist Branford Marsalis: “All great music is thievery. Beethoven stole from Haydn, and everybody stole from Bach. Charlie Parker stole from Lester Young, who stole from Frankie Trumbauer. People who like Elvis don’t want to hear the facts.”

› Jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis: “To me, Elvis represented somebody who — because our country was not ready then to embrace the black artist and make them No. 1 — became No. 1 because of his rendition of what some black people sounded like. What made it distasteful is that we had people who could do it better than him but who couldn’t be accepted at that time because of the color of their skin.”

› Tony Bennett: “Elvis was the first Coca-Cola bottle, the first human Coca-Cola bottle. He was just marketed that way. I met him once at Paramount Studios. He was a gorgeous Adonis of a man and a great guy, very, very elegant-looking. He looked like a Greek statue. More than that, he was very warm and nice. But when you hear him, it’s not like Nat King Cole singing a song. When you listen to Elvis, it’s almost like country music; there’s a simplistic unreality to it all.”

› Jethro Tull mastermind Ian Anderson: “Well, I went to see Elvis at one of his comeback dates in Las Vegas in 1969. Seeing him in Vegas, in his white jumpsuit, was very interesting, in terms of seeing how music that starts off with a fire in somebody’s belly ends up being an inferno in somebody’s wallet. It was pure show-biz. And although he worked hard and well that night, he gave the impression of a man not in total control of his chemical future. He seemed to only give lip service to the essence of his songs.”

› Alice Cooper: “I think everybody puts a little of Elvis into their show. I was invited to come up and meet him in 1971 in Vegas. I got in this private elevator, and it was Chubby Checker, Linda Lovelace, Liza Minnelli and me, going up to see Elvis. He walked in and was really looking good, he wasn’t overweight or drugged out. He said, ‘You’re the guy with the snake, aren’t you? That’s really cool.’ Then he takes me in the kitchen, puts a loaded .38 gun in my hand, and says: ‘I’ll show you how to disarm somebody.’ He didn’t hurt me, but he knocked me to the floor with one of his karate chops.”

› Quincy Jones: “Before Elvis, white pop music was ‘The Ballad of Davy Crockett’ and ‘How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?’ Then Elvis came on (the Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey-hosted CBS-TV show) ‘Stage Time’ in 1956, and they wouldn’t shoot him below the waist because they still couldn’t handle anybody shaking their (rear) — black or white. And the show got 8,000 letters about his performance. I could see it then, I thought: ‘Things are going to change because they’ve discovered how to emotionally feel music.’ This had been happening with black music forever, but this was the first time young white kids did. It was amazing to watch.”

› John Oates of Hall & Oates: “I think the story of American music — jazz, blues and how all those styles evolved — is a story of appropriation across the board, from the very beginning. How far do you want to go? Do you want to take it back to Africa and say American-born slaves appropriated music that they got from their ancestors and reimagined and recrafted it as part of their lives and American experience? And, then, the next step was that white Americans heard and recreated and reimagined the same music. It goes on and on, and I think it’s the history of American popular music. It’s really built upon the shoulders of everything that came before.”