Profile/Copyright © 1974, 2006 by Jim O’Donnell
It is the face that sailed a thousand hips.
Twentieth-Century man—and woman, especially—knows the first name better than any other two names that ever graced the lips of humankind—Charlie Chaplain and Beethoven, Walter Cronkite and Sandy Koufax, Jane Fonda and Harry Truman, notwithstanding.
To record listeners, he's a Big Hunk 'O Love; to record makers, he's The Big Boss Man.
Popular music was all talk, no action, till he came doggone swivel-hipping out of Mississippi in the early 1950s, and started the South's biggest personality cult since General Lee.
Except that this one-man Confederacy never surrendered. All he has to do even here in 1974 is sigh in the luxury of one of his velvet-draped, smoke-glass living rooms, and Richard Burton, Richard Nixon, and Richard Penniman all get thrown off the 11 o'clock news, Rona Barrett and page one, and his sigh becomes a topic of the next day's lunch-hour conversation.
Where his name is writ largest, however, is across the hipness of every rock music act that followed him.
"Nothing really affected me until Elvis," John Lennon told biographer Hunter Davies.
Elvis Presley’s fame is so whiz-bang universal, it eats up every other fame in entertainment. Onstage he once joked, "My mouth's so dry, feels like Bob Dylan slept in it all night." To Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan is just the filling in the sandwich.
Elvis Aaron Presley's occupation is pop singer, the hours are good, and the pay beats anything he ever got at workaday jobs mowing lawns, driving trucks, or ushering movie houses in Tupelo, Mississippi.
And he's so crazy about the work, 1950's America got all shook up just over the way he put his foot down and the fact that he had better things to do than get haircuts—like make money, for instance.
He started shaking down banks and shaking up the world about late 1955. Hitting the floor, hitting the headlines, hitting his stride, he jolted youth's heretofore unflexed hips, and had them hitting their wallets.
He'd get on stage, and couldn't seem to help rousing every sleeping nerve in his feet, legs, hips, arms, shoulders, neck, eyes, face, tongue. He even wiggles around in studios when he records.
Young America, hipnotized blind into watching him, got hoodwinked into loving him—tempting eyes, tough sideburns, blustery hair and all.
Adult America, meanwhile, was hitting the ceiling. Grownups didn't wink back at him, so to speak. They laughed, said he was a riot, at first.
Well, it wasn't long before his concerts were riots. Newspaper columnists started glancing at his stripteaser style, and called him things like "Elvis the Pelvis," "Sir Swivel," "Wiggle Hips." An Oakland cop took a glance and commented that "If he did things like that in the street, we'd arrest him."
The story of his fame is arresting in and of itself. Elvis was eighteen-and-a-half in late June, 1953, when he dropped in to the offices of the Memphis Recording Service during his lunch break from driving a truck for Crown Electric Co.
He paid $4 that Saturday afternoon, he claimed, to tape two songs for his mother's birthday.
That might well have consummated the recording career of truck-driver Elvis Presley, but for an alert office manager named Marion Keisker. She'd often heard Sun Records owner and founder, Sam Phillips, dream out loud about the fortune he could make if he could find a white man who sang black.
The Memphis Recording Service was a Sun Records sideline, and office manager Keisker, hearing Elvis sing, keenly detected black intonations in the teenager's voice, and taped him.
She eventually proved to be Elvis' fairy godmother, and the glass around the studio which enclosed Elvis that day might as well have been made out of Cinderella's glass slipper.
Elvis had sung country for the most part, but he also loved Mississippi blues. "Sinful music," Memphis townsfolk said it was, though his taste for it was not at all surprising. He used to sing at religious revivals with his family at the Assembly of God Church when he was a boy.
Prince-like, producer Phillips eventually tracked down the owner of the voice. On one side of the microphone you had a white country boy with a black-spiritual swing in the playground of his larynx, and on the other side a knowledgeable businessman listening for black in white.
The wedding of rhythm and blues to country and western was imminent, till death do them part.
Phillips and Presley teamed up in early summer, 1954, Elvis singing "That's All Right, Mama," Phillips recording and then distributing it, and both stepping back with their eyes squeezed shut, and fingers in their ears, ready for the POP!
The record monster-smashed, regionally, and Elvis started doing local night clubs. He'd had his sideburns even back then, but we'll never know whether it was those, his singing, his hips, or all three, that almost right off made him every teen female's Golden Heart Throb.
It wasn't long before Elvis quit his job driving a truck for Crown Electric Co. and started on his happily-ever-after drive for another Crown—the one he would wear as the King of Rock 'n' Roll.
Trading in his glass slipper for a pair of Blue Suede Shoes, he kicked his heels through life, wondering when the clock was going to strike twelve.
By 1955, he had three Cadillacs; and less than a year after that, early '56, RCA-Victor bought out his contract, act, and tapes for $35,000 and a bonus $5,000 to Elvis for signing. His first RCA record, "Heartbreak Hotel," sold 1.5-million copies in short order and seemed unstoppable.
By 1957, he was an annual $22-million corporation. He had become the first rock ‘n’ roll Pied Piper, leading long spellbound lines of kids from their childhoods, and through the mountain cave of adolescence.
Elvis was so big by 1958, it took a nation's military to harness him—ala King Kong. The U.S. Army decided that on the Monday morning of March 24, 1958, Elvis Presley was to get himself a 65-cent haircut and start dressing normal. That is to say, the Hound Dog was to get a dog tag. The salary was to slip from $100,000-a-year to $78-a-month.
Elvis US53310761 Presley took it all like a soldier. He kicked off his blue suedes for size 12 combat boots, and smiled real respectful-like all the way to Fort Hood and to Germany.
It's a good thing he came marching home again in March of 1960. If he hadn't, one of Elvis's fan clubs—like, say, the El's Angels of Kansas City—might have started a teen uprising that would have ear-shattered away any mere Army a nation could pay.
Millions of Elfan admirers had stayed stuck on him, every twenty-four hours crossing off the days to his discharge on their bedroom-wall calendars.
He hadn't been around in person, but he'd held center stage in teen dreamworld just the same. His stamp on rock ‘n’ roll had been indelible. Hero-worship in absentia is what it was.
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And while the adult world still didn't worship him, by the time Elvis had finished his Army duty, the grownup feeling was that he wasn't so diabolical after all. Or as the English author Nik Cohn put it in his book, Rock From the Beginning: "The monster had shown that it was only kidding."
Nor did adults begrudge him the fact that their kids and their 89-cent-a-record contributions had sicced 300 reporters on him at a time; dunked him into his own private swimming pools; dumped him in ten-room hotel suites; and given him wild ovations every time he stuck his nose out of doors.
The thinking was, so what if Elvis Presley liked arriving on stage in golden Cadillacs and golden suits and golden slippers? So what if his Christmas cards were known to be Christmas cars (Cadillacs mostly, of course)? So what if he liked to live in white-columned mansions on 160-acre estates? The boy'd gone afar in his Army duds to prove himself a man, society-at-large felt.
The way some tell it, you get the idea Elvis just about couldn't help being a Golden Boy—not with his manager, one Colonel Thomas Andrew Parker around anyway. For while military history had its Little Corporal, this is entertainment's Big Colonel.
Colonel Parker is a guy who you figure could catch a sparrow in flight, paint it yellow, and sell it as a canary.
He says things like "I consider it my patriotic duty to keep Elvis in the 90 percent tax bracket." You can see that prospective customers never get a chance to forget that pretty faces cost pretty pennies—especially the pretty face that lets the Big Colonel do his business thinking.
Ever since he spotted Elvis at an outdoor fair, and inducted him into his regiment in 1955, he's been the most famous Colonel since Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Look him up the next time Elvis plays Madison Square Garden or the International Hotel in Las Vegas, or any place in between. He's a sideshow in himself.
He'll be the big guy out front with the big cigar, hawking big autographed Elvis posters. And he'll be wearing a big change apron.
Tactics of the Colonel's—like the saturation bombing of 1956 when RCA rolled out seven Elvis Presley 45's in one shot—are what helped Elvis get his Cadillacs and super sport coats and fat diamonds.
Included in that seven-record onslaught, by the way, was the only single ever to have both sides make it to Number One on the record charts: "Don't Be Cruel" backed by "Hound Dog."
Now, you might think all that wealth must have been a bit confusing for a good country boy like Elvis who didn't see a movie until age 14, who'd enjoy a Louisiana hayride any old time, and who probably got to stay up clear to 9 o'clock on New Year's Eve. Like, to this day, Elvis Presley addresses most everybody in the record and movie businesses as "sir" or "ma'am."
Through his early recording years, the more ragged cigars who'd heard about the boy's Bible-reading background, and the fact that he loved God, country, and in particular his mother, would grin knowingly and wink through their rings of pollution. Give him time, give him time, he'll change, they'd reassure.
He didn't, of course. The public image has stayed the same. One of the first things Elvis Presley bought with his big money was a sizeable estate for his parents.
He stayed a polite, curious, funny, reclusive, womanizing millionaire. Slightly sensitive, even. It's said his close friends wouldn't be surprised if they found him alone tinkling a piano to the tune of "Moonlight Sonata."
But then he has to do something to sidestep all those nice girls who love him tender and want him to autograph their underwear.
He spent ten years, in fact, as a fleshless movie idol, sidestepping the entire real world so well, rumors spread that he was living somewhere over the rainbow, most of the time staring in genuine amazement at his pot of gold.
Sitting pretty behind brick walls and tall wrought-iron gates on Memphis and Bel-Air hilltops, laughing at time, he'd apparently decided he'd sit things out a while, and didn't show his face on a concert stage from 1959 to 1969. His '68 Comeback Special was an in-studio TV show.
Then in August of 1969 he did a month of shows in Las Vegas. He hadn't changed his tune. Time hadn't stolen his thunder. He was no museum piece.
In fact as recently as June 1972, he performed at Madison Square Garden--that at an age most kids would deem watching a rock concert bad for the heart.
Next January, it says here, Elvis Presley turns 40. That may be so. But in my book he's really 400,000,000 records old—a guy who made waves that a generation spent its life riding. His name—which is l-i-v-e-s spelled inside out—exerts a haughty imperiousness in pop music domains.
Yet through all the pomp and flash, the image that really sticks with me is one from when Elvis and his family were living in a federal low-rent housing project in Memphis.
The late Mrs. Gladys Presley is sitting in a seedy chair and telling her only son: You may come from poor country folk, Elvis, but you're just as good as anyone else.
You have to guess it was that kind of talk that gave Elvis Presley the boy-truck-driver the courage to be Elvis Presley the man-pop-star.
Still, it's hard to imagine Elvis as a hip off the old block—anybody's old block. He always seemed to have everything on his side: talent, looks, charm, family, determination, money, even luck.
He's one of those cats who always seems to land on his feet. The only thing zero about Elvis Presley is his blood type.
He cleaned up as far as pop music is concerned. Cleaned up, in fact, by being “dirty," or so they said because he shot from the hip. Which in rock music is where the money is, was, always will be.
So while to his time he was hip, we see him as The Hips because he taught us rock 'n' roll movement. And for that he's usually granted the lion's share of credit—or blame—for the lifestyle of a generation.
Too much.
You know, we would do well to remember Elvis Presley.
Occupation: pop singer.
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CD: Elvis Presley, Elvis 30 #1 Hits. BMG, 2002.
Book: Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley. Back Bay Books, 1995.
Websites: http://www.elvis.com
http://www.elvisnews.com
http://www.rockandrolljournal.com
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