Happy 82nd birthday, Dear Elvis
Note: We’re launching a new weekly column by veteran reporter and critic John Beifuss. It will cover all things Memphis — the culture, character and characters of the city. Look for “The Beifuss File” most Sundays. If you have ideas for John, email him at john.beifuss@commercialappeal. com.
In the tradition of The Commercial Appeal’s “Take 5” columns, here’s a Take 82: four-score-plus-twomore factoids, observations, statistics, tidbits and random samples of what-not relating to Elvis Presley — the King of Rock and Roll and Memphis favorite son of Sun — on the occasion of what would have been his 82nd birthday on Jan. 8, 2017. Let’s take a breath and begin: 1. Before she married Vernon Presley, Elvis’ mother was Gladys Smith.
2. Her middle name was “Love,” which seems appropriate, because that seems to be the one thing she had in abundance to give her son.
3. Meanwhile, Vernon’s middle name was “Elvis.”
4. Before Beatlemania there was Elvismania. So in 1956, Lou Monte released the novelty song “Elvis Presley for President.”
5. The song presented this Presley campaign platform: “He’s all for love, love, love, love, love / He’s all for kiss, kiss, kiss / He’s all for hug, hug, hug, hug, hug / Who else can give you this?”
6. Note that the lyrics do not add:
“When you’re a star, they let you do it.”
7. Speaking of presidents, Elvis Presley met Donald Trump face to face on Sept. 2, 1988, in the “Doonesbury” comic strip, in a storyline in which it was revealed that the King — bald, paunchy, jumpsuited and, of course, alive — is a stowaway on a Trump yacht.
8. “Everything about you screams quality,” Elvis P. tells Donald T.
9. More presidents: When Elvis died on Aug. 16, 1977, President Jimmy Carter issued a statement that declared “Elvis Presley’s death deprives our country of a part of itself.”
10. Two administrations earlier, on Dec. 21, 1970, Elvis met President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office (for real, not in a comic strip).
11. A memo by White House staffers had this suggestion for Elvis: “Record an album with the theme ‘Get High on Life’ at the federal narcotics rehabilitation and research facility at Lexington, Kentucky.”
12. That never happened, but Nixon did break with protocol to give Elvis a coveted federal narcotics officer’s badge.
13. This inspired the Memphis band Human Radio, which in its 1990 semi-hit “Me and Elvis” sang: “Me and Elvis / Never worried about the cops / He flashed that badge he got from Nixon / Every time that we got stopped.”
14. Many Memphians still are surprised when they learn that that the city’s most celebrated musical forces — Elvis and Stax — came together for a series of recording sessions in July and December of 1973.
15. Those sessions are the source of one of Elvis’ best “grown folk” songs about illicit love, “If You Talk in Your Sleep” (”don’t mention my name”).
16. Also the source of Elvis’ best Chuck Berry cover, “Promised Land.”
17. The 1968 Elvis movie “Live a Little, Love a Little” was based on a 1965 novel titled “Kiss My Firm But Pliant Lips.”
18. In “Viva Las Vegas,” the following exchange occurs when customer Rusty Martin, played by Ann-Margret, walks into an auto shop and meets mechanic Lucky Jackson, played by Elvis. Rusty Martin: “Can you check my motor? It whistles.” Lucky Jackson: “I don’t blame it.”
19. In “Easy Come, Easy Go,” Elvis duets with the Bride of Frankenstein herself, Elsa Lanchester, on a song titled “Yoga Is as Yoga Does.”
20. This was back when yoga was considered a kooky California activity. Sings the twisted-like-a-pretzel Presley: “You tell me just how I can take this yoga serious / When all it ever gives me is a pain in my posterious?”
21. Another goofy Elvis movie song, from “Fun in Acapulco,” is “There’s No Room to Rumba in a Sports Car” (”When a little kiss I want to steal / I hit my head against the steering wheel”).
22. And then there’s the dance non-craze number “Do the Clam,” from “Girl Happy.” (”Dig right in and do the clam.”)
23. “Do the Clam” was co-written by Dolores Fuller, girlfriend of Ed Wood, the transvestite so-called “Worst Director of All Time.” Perhaps you remember the moment in Wood’s “Glen or Glenda” (1953) when Fuller removes her angora sweater and offers it to Wood as a token of understanding. (That moment was recreated with Johnny Depp as Wood and Sarah Jessica Parker as Fuller in Tim Burton’s 1994 movie, “Ed Wood.”)
24. Of course, lyrics aren’t necessarily the key to a great Elvis song.
25. Take the opening verse of “All Shook Up,” when Elvis sings “I’m itching like a man on a fuzzy tree.”
26. That’s not exactly a universal metaphor. How many listeners have experienced the itchiness that results from contact with “a fuzzy tree”?
27. Unimpressed by Elvis’ acting debut in “Love Me Tender” in 1956, Time magazine’s critic penned an alltime infamous pan of Presley’s screen presence.
28. Wrote the critic: “Is it a sausage? It is certainly smooth and damp-looking, but who ever heard of a 172pound sausage, 6 feet tall?”
29. He added: “Is it a Walt Disney goldfish? It has the same sort of big, soft, beautiful eyes and curly lashes, but who ever heard of a goldfish with sideburns?”
30. He kept going: “Is it a corpse? The face just hangs there, limp and white with its little drop-seat mouth, rather like Lord Byron in the wax museum.” 31. Ouch. 32. The terse he-man character names and “cool” occupations assigned to Elvis in most of his films supply much of the camp appeal that defines the “Elvis movie” as a particular genre.
33. For example, in “Easy Come, Easy Go,” Elvis is Ted Davis, “a former U.S. Navy frogman who divides his time between twin careers as a deep sea diver and nightclub singer.”
34. In “Kissin’ Cousins,” he has the dual roles of “look-alike cousins Josh Morgan, a dark-haired U.S. Air Force second lieutenant, and Jodie Tatum, a blond hillbilly.”
35. Elvis movies were so exciting that their poster blurbs required three exclamation points. For example, “Spinout” promised “It’s Elvis with his foot on the gas and no brakes on the fun!!!”
36. Meanwhile, “Girl Happy” enthused: “Elvis jumps with the campus crowd to make the beach ‘ball’ bounce!!!”
37. (Were the quotation marks around “ball” really necessary?)
38. By 1969, even Presley movie blurbs reflected the darker tone of a radicalized youth culture.
39. Warned the poster for “Charro!,” an Elvis Western: “On his neck he wore the brand of a killer. On his hip he wore vengeance.”
40. Some examples of vengeance would have been hard for Elvis to wear on his hip. Guns in his collection — 37 at the time of his death — included a Thompson submachine gun.
41. In the 1990s, Ole Miss literature professor Dr. Vernon Chadwick taught a course titled “Blue Hawaii: The Polynesian Novels and Hawaiian Movies of Melville and Elvis.” The course connected novelist Herman Melville’s Polynesian trilogy — “Typee” (1846), “Omoo” (1847) and “Mardi and a Voyage Thither” (1849) — to Elvis’ Hawaiian trilogy — “Blue Hawaii” (1961), “Girls! Girls! Girls!” (1962) and “Paradise, Hawaiian Style” (1966).
42. In Southern Reader magazine, Chadwick wrote that “Girls! Girls! Girls!” demonstrates that Elvis is “the deconstructor of civilized prejudices and prohibitions” who re-enacts “the anthropological function of the ‘taboo man,’ first delineated by Melville in ‘Typee.’ “
43. “Melville raised questions about race, class and cultural differences,” Chadwick told The Commercial Appeal. “A serious analysis of Elvis’s Hawaiian movies will uncover similar questions.”
44. In “Blue Hawaii,” released three years after Hawaii became a state, Elvis plays Chad Gates. Said Chadwick: ”It’s a wonderful allegory because at the end, Elvis opens a travel agency, which is called Gates of Hawaii, so there in an ambassadorial role he opens up the 50th state not only to tourism but to general cultural exploration. The movie coincided with the first jet transportation to Hawaii, which began the era of tourism from the mainland. Elvis explored all of that. He was the pioneer.”
45. Inevitably, Ole Miss students re-named Chadwick’s course “Melvis.”
46. In a scene cut from Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” Uma Thurman shares this existential wisdom with John Travolta: “There’s only two kinds of people in the world, Beatles people and Elvis people. Now, Beatles people can like Elvis, and Elvis people can like the Beatles, but nobody likes them both equally. Somewhere you have to make a choice, and that choice tells you who you are.”
47. Tarantino, apparently, is an Elvis person. In an episode of “The Golden Girls” that first aired on Nov. 19, 1988, the future writer-director was one of several struggling actors cast as Elvis impersonators.
48. The 1990 popular reference book “E Is for Elvis: An A-to-Z Illustrated Guide to the King of Rock and Roll,” includes a listing of “S” for “Sooties,” defined as “a baby-talk word Elvis used for feet,” employed during “love talk” with Priscilla and Linda Thompson.
49. We won’t go into detail about the “W” entry for “White Panties.”
50. In “It Happened at the World’s Fair” (1963), kid actor Kurt Russell, 11, kicks Elvis in the shin.
51. Sixteen years later, Russell took the title role in the made-for-TV movie “Elvis,” directed by John Carpenter.
52. An anachronism in that film occurs when a large cut-out of the X-rated 1970s cartoon character Fritz the Cat is seen on the wall of what is supposed to be a 1950s Memphis pawn shop.
53. Elvis himself was John Carpenter — Dr. John Carpenter — in “A Change of Habit” (1969). This particular John Carpenter is “a physician in a ghetto clinic who falls for a co-worker, unaware that she is a nun.”
54. Bride of Christ or bride of Elvis? That’s a tough choice, even for Mary Tyler Moore, who plays the nun.
55. In other words, “Carpenter,” in the case of “Change of Habit,” really might be a Jesus reference.
56. Connecting Elvis to Jesus has become something of a cottage industry.
57. Gregory L. Reece’s 2006 book “Elvis Religion: The Cult of the King” investigates “how the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll became a god-like figure,” and includes a chapter subtitled “Memphis Messiah, Jumpsuit Jesus.”
58. “Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith” is a 2008 book by popular young theologian Rob Bell, described by Time as the country’s premier “hipper-thanthou-pastor.”
59. In 1957, Sonny Cole and the Rhythm Roamers recorded “I Dreamed I Was Elvis.”
60. It’s supposed to be funny but it contains the saddest Elvis-related dog lyrics since “Old Shep.” Sings Cole: “My old hound dog let out a moanin’ wail / When they cut souvenirs off his big long tail / He laid back his ears / Started to run / But the girls didn’t care / They were having their fun.”
61. In 1956, the Holly Twins recorded “I Want Elvis for Christmas.” But a more original Elvis gift song was “The Sock,” recorded in 1960 by the Valentines.
62. That record tells the story of some happy female Elvis fans crowing in harmony over their purchase of “the hole in the sock made by Elvis Presley’s left toe.”
63. The song is ahead of its time in its critique of Colonel Tom Parker. The lyrics credit “the Colonel” with the sale of the hole: “The Colonel sold it to me / He nearly gave it to us free / It only cost ten dollars or so...”
64. Warren Zevon’s “Porcelain Monkey” (named for the unsettling simian statuettes in Graceland’s TV room) is one of the tougher Elvis “tribute” songs.
65. Sings Zevon: “Hip-shakin’, shoutin’ in gold lamé / That’s how he earned his regal sobriquet / Then he threw it all away / For a porcelain monkey.”
66. A more humorous Elvis tribute was the 1987 “Elvis Is Everywhere,” by Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper, which promised, with religious fervor, that “Elvis is everywhere / Elvis is everything / Elvis is everybody / Elvis is still the king.”
67. Or, as the song delineates: “Elvis is in your jeans / He’s in your cheeseburgers / Elvis is in Nutty Buddies! / Elvis is in your mom!”
68. The Elvis song was more respectful than Nixon’s celebrity follow-ups, “Debbie Gibson is Pregnant with My Two-Headed Love Child” and “Don Henley Must Die.”
69. One of the less popular residents of Graceland was Scatter, the chimpanzee, purchased by Elvis from “Cap’n” Bill Killebrew, host of a 1960s WMC-TV Channel 5 kiddie program.
70. Inevitably, members of the Memphis Mafia encouraged Scatter to grab at women’s skirts and taught him to sit on a bar stool and drink bourbon. A mean drunk, Scatter bit Vernon Presley’s second wife on the finger.
71. According to a report in Memphis magazine by Vance Lauderdale, “When Elvis called Bill to ask if the monkey had his rabies shots, Bill retorted, ‘Yes, Scatter had his shots. Does Mrs. Presley have hers?’ “
72. Memphis’ most dedicated Elvis-inspired artist is probably Mike McCarthy. The characters in his movies and comic books have included “Rebelvis,” “Psychedelvis” and “Damselvis, Daughter of Helvis.”
73. Rebelvis is a fictional character, but Californiaborn El Vez — the “Mexican Elvis” persona of Robert Lopez — was a once frequent performer in Memphis.
74. El Vez’s songs include “En El Barrio” (as opposed to “In the Ghetto”) and “Esta Bien Mamacita.”
75. Another Elvis artist who raised eyebrows during Memphis appearances was “the Lesbian Elvis,” Leigh Cook, who performed as Elvis Herselvis.
76. If you want to hear a great Elvis song you may not know, listen to “The Fool” (co-written by Lee Hazlewood and his wife Naomi Ford) on the 1971 album “Elvis Country.” It’s bluesy and soulful and ramshackle.
77. Or if you prefer a baroque bit of underrated Elvis pop that’s more Laurel Canyon than Lee County, Mississippi, check out 1970’s “The Next Step Is Love,” available on the 1970s box set, “Walk a Mile in My Shoes.”
78. In fact, it’s time to stop hating on the seventies Elvis. So the records aren’t the Sun Sessions, “Little Sister” or the Chips Moman comeback recordings. What are?
79. In case it’s not obvious, this column is intended to be entertaining, not disrespectful. I love Elvis. Always have, always will.
80. As Greil Marcus wrote in his 1991 book “Dead Elvis: Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession”: “Freud said, we all know genius is incomprehensible. This is part of the problem with Elvis. Yes, he was a genius, but not the kind we’re accustomed to.”
81. Of course, nobody said it better than Elvis himself, and he said it — according to Sam Phillips associate Marion Keisker — before he knew anyone outside his family would know his name. “What kind of singer are you?” Keisker asked when Elvis showed up at Sun in 1953 to make a record as a present for the mother whose middle name, remember, was “Love.”
82. Replied Elvis: “I sing all kinds.”