40 years later, Elvis remains rock ‘n’ roll icon
Only two responders to a Facebook post Wednesday said they were unborn when Elvis Presley passed from this life 40 years ago.
Madonna Louise Ciccone, destined for a singing career, turned
19 on that summer Tuesday in 1977, the 29th anniversary of Babe Ruth’s death.
By way of review, Jimmy Carter occupied the White House and David Pryor the Arkansas governor’s mansion with a young Bill Clinton early in a political career that he would hold both jobs. No one knew it, but baseball would get a golden oldie of a World Series (Yankees vs. Dodgers) and Razorback football fans would celebrate an Orange Bowl victory over Oklahoma.
Musically, on the third week of August 1977, three sisters from Chicago doing business as the Emotions topped the Billboard Hot 100 charts with “Best of My Love,” composed by two members of Earth Wind & Fire. But after the news flash from Memphis on that Tuesday afternoon, Elvis tunes pushed Barry Manilow, Andy Gibb and Shaun Cassidy off the airwaves for days to come.
“I can still remember tearing off the newsfeed from the (Associated Press) teletype and reading it more than once to truly believe it,” says a Glenwood High classmate, then working for Little Rock radio station KXLR. “As per the program director’s orders, an Elvis marathon followed very quickly.”
My blessed mom contended that Elvis might have lived beyond
42 had he remained a truck driver. I am not so sure of that. If it had not been Sam Phillips, the boss of Memphis-based Sun Records, someone else would have unleashed the phenomenon known as Elvis.
A college friend writes, “Some are blessed with a gene most of us don’t have. (Clark) Gable had it. (John F.) Kennedy had it. (Johnny) Cash had it. We call it charisma ‘cause we don’t know what else to say. Elvis Presley had a magic hard to define.”
Nothing has been quite the same in American music — arguably in Western civilization — since the evening of July 5, 1954, when in a late-night session at Sun Records, Sam Phillips heard a guitar-playing Elvis sing a 1946 blues number, “That’s All Right.” Phillips, whose label focused on black musicians, wanted a white singer who could cut across racial boundaries, saying “I could make a billion dollars.” Here was his man, and a single was pressed with “That’s All Right” on the A side and Bill Monroe’s country classic “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on the reverse.
From “Heartbreak Hotel” to “Hard Headed Woman,” Elvis’ first 11 singles went No. 1 in the United States, putting every Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Bobby Darin on notice that a new force in American music was present. Along with fellow Sun artists Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, Elvis ushered in rockabilly, twisting and shouting long before the Beatles.
“He was an integrator,” said Little Richard. “Elvis was a blessing. They wouldn’t let black music through. He opened the door for black music.” Forrest City native Al Green, who like Little Richard is black, agreed: “He broke the ice for all of us.”
His career did not suffer with a 1958-1960 hitch in the U.S. Army — starting at Arkansas’ Fort Chaffee and sending Presley to Germany, there meeting 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu, who after a seven-and-a-half-year courtship would become his wife — but with the early death of his beloved mother, Elvis lost his emotional compass. He became more and more a lackey for Colonel Tom Parker (his rank honorary from the fictional Louisiana State Militia), who kept Elvis at work in the 1960s making movies though steering him away from star turns in “West Side Story” and “Midnight Cowboy.”
Elvis basically abandoned the recording studio in the decade dominated musically by the Beatles. The mind boggles at the material such as John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Carole King, Burt Bacharach, Neil Diamond, Neil Sedaka and Jim Webb might have composed in his behalf. Instead, this was the Elvis of the triple-feature movies on Friday nights at one’s local drive-in theater.
But like Al Jolson in the 1940s, Elvis returned in full force with his 1969 recording of “Suspicious Minds,” his first American No.
1 single since “Good Luck Charm” in 1962. Credit producer Chips Moman for spearheading the late phase of Presley’s career, which included hit recordings by solo artists Mac Davis (“In the Ghetto”) and Eddie Rabbitt (“Kentucky Rain”). His 1970 recording of Baker Knight’s “The Wonder of You” spent six weeks atop the charts in the United Kingdom.
There was a downside, of course. Hence followed years of excessive living, the Elvis of Graceland and pink Cadillacs and what came to be known as the “Memphis Mafia.” Journalist John Harris writes, “It was no wonder that as he slid into addiction and torpor, no one raised the alarm. To them, Elvis was the bank, and it had to remain open.”
Like three other musical icons, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison — all at 27 — Elvis died young. It will not be many more years before he will be dead longer than he lived. This much we know: Elvis Aron Presley, a former truck driver from Tupelo, Miss., “shook up” American music like no one before or since — and that in Memphis, and a lot of other places, he remains the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.