Why Elvis had to be destroyed

January 31, 1996
Issue 

Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley
By Peter Guralnick
Abacus, London, 1995. 578pp., $17.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Norm Dixon Elvis Aaron Presley has had a rather rough time at the hands of some left-wing cultural critics understandably piqued by the US entertainment industry's blatant exploitation, debasement and plagiarism of African American music. Presley has become, for many such critics and black performers, the personification of this although, even on the left, opinions on Elvis vary widely. Revolutionary native American poet John Trudell has described him as an unwitting cultural revolutionary, a "Baby Boom Che", who smashed through the psychological repression of the '50s. On the other hand, Public Enemy raps: "Straight up racist that sucker was, plain and simple". Peter Guralnick's epic and sympathetic study of Presley's early years, Last Train to Memphis, shows that charges of plagiarism and racism against Presley, certainly in the crucial formative years of his career, are undeserved. Guralnick is one of the most perceptive and able writers on popular culture in the US. In Last Train to Memphis and earlier works — Lost Highway, Sweet Soul Music and Feel Like Going Home to name the essential — he paints a glorious picture of the rich music culture that evolved in the US south. At its root were African American blues, gospel and r&b, which deeply influenced the bluegrass and country styles popular among poor whites. "Rock and roll" was the product of the interaction of the black and white southern working class and poor. It became the expression of a generation of youth rebelling against a stultifying society. If the early Presley was the personification of anything, it was this. Guralnick describes Presley's humble family background: poorly educated, hard working battlers who moved from backwoods Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee. Presley's father rarely had secure employment, and had done time on a forgery charge. Elvis was a shy, meek, polite boy who loved his mother. In the Presleys' home town of Tupelo, poor whites and blacks lived in similar circumstances side by side. The tub-thumping evangelical revival meetings so loved by "po' whites" were borrowed directly from the even more ecstatic black services. Black music was always within hearing. It is not surprising that black gospel and blues seeped into Presley's very bones. In Memphis, the Presleys lived just a stone's throw from the black section of town. But, as Guralnick points out, "even if he never left the apartment, just listening to the radio ... was like an Aladdin's lamp of musical vistas and styles ... 'Muddy Waters' 'She Moves Me', 'Lonesome Christmas' by Lowell Fulsome, and Elmore James' brand new 'Dust My Broom', all current hits, and all collector's classics some forty years later." An increasingly individualistic loner (he was partial to flashy bolero jackets, red-striped trousers, greased hair and eye make-up), Presley was drawn to the centre of Memphis' black community, Beale Street. He became well known and accepted. Long before Presley first entered Sam Phillips' Sun Studios in 1953, he was hanging out in the blues clubs, and sometimes he sang. "He would watch the coloured singers and then got to doing it the same way as them. He got that shaking, that wiggle ... He wasn't doing nothing but what the coloured people had been doing for the last hundred years. But people went wild over him", reported Robert Henry, a Beale Street promoter. Nat Williams, MC at the Palace Theatre amateur nights and "unofficial mayor" of Beale Street, added: "The audience always gave him as much recognition as they gave any black musician. He had a way of singing the blues that was distinctive — not necessarily like a Negro but he didn't sing 'em altogether like a typical white musician ... He had that certain humanness about him that Negroes like to put into their songs. So when he had a show down there at the Palace, everybody got ready for something good. They were crazy about Presley." These influences were never denied by Presley in later life. He paid credit to the black blues and gospel performers who inspired him. The charge that Presley was a calculating and conscious plagiarist is undermined as Guralnick painstakingly recreates his first recording session at Sun Studios in 1954. All but ready to give up, Phillips and the band were taking a break after running through a series of standard pop tunes with the singer, none of which seemed very promising, when they heard Presley fooling around with his countrified version of Big Boy Crudup's "That's All Right". The recording machines were turned on, and the rest is history. The Elvis Presley phenomenon was much bigger than one oddball kid attracted to black music. Had there not been profound dissatisfaction among large numbers of young people, Elvis would have sunk into obscurity. Post-1945 teenagers enjoyed an unparalleled affluence. They had money to spend on films, music, literature and entertainment. Their rulers had promised that the victory of "democracy" over fascism would lead to a new era of personal freedom and prosperity. Yet they confronted an "official" popular culture which presented a highly romanticised, homogenised and repressed — sexually and politically — picture of society. Signs of young people's alienation with this smug conservatism were already apparent with the popularity of the anti-adult novel Catcher in the Rye and the cult status of Marlon Brando and James Dean — the young film stars of The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause in which troubled, rebellious youth face a world in which adult authority is not only unable to give guidance, but also is seen as responsible for society's ills. African Americans too were becoming increasingly assertive and vocal about racism and the failure of US capitalism's "democratic" promises. Campaigns for an end to the apartheid "Jim Crow" system in the South, and civil and economic equality throughout the US were gathering pace. This growing black assertiveness struck a chord with youth rebelling culturally. Late at night, white teenagers were tuning in to radio stations playing black music, the most popular being the hard-edged, sax-driven r&b whose typical 12-bar blues structure became the basis of rock 'n' roll. In 1953, a stage show featuring top black r&b artists attracted a crowd of 30,000 youngsters — two thirds of which were white. Sam Phillips and Presley stumbled upon a formula that excited this restless white youth — black r&b infused with white "hillbilly" country music performed with overt sexual energy. The sudden and uncontrolled popularity of rock and roll was seen as a threat to established authority — of parents, the church and the state. It was denounced from the pulpit and legislatures as too raucous, too "earthy", too black. As the US rulers hyped up the "enemy without" during the intensifying Cold War, teenagers became the "enemy within". Juvenile delinquents rivalled communists as the greatest threat to society. The state and the entertainment industry spent the remaining years of the '50s struggling to bring the youth rebellion under control. Their success was symbolised by Presley enlisting in the army to serve the nation rather than endanger it. Under the stifling management of the sideshow entrepreneur "Colonel" Tom Parker, Presley's early youthful vigour and iconoclasm became buried beneath an avalanche of bland pop tunes — increasingly purged of their threatening black influence — and awful movies. In later years, Elvis became the antithesis of rebellion: a sad, paranoid, podgy, sequined figure of ridicule holed up in a mock southern mansion. It is this tarnished image that the establishment has promoted and deified. Tens of thousands of Presley impersonators have thrived on what the Las Vegas Elvis of the '70s became: a joke. For the capitalist entertainment industry, like that infamous village in Vietnam, Elvis and rock and roll had to be destroyed to be saved. Last Train to Memphis reminds us why.

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