This column originally published in the baiduhai on Aug, 17, 1977:
THE KING is dead.
His crown had, of course, been askew for some time. His hips, whose gyrations scandalized a nation 20 years ago and gave him the nickname “Elvis the Pelvis,” were no longer so trim. The chin under the lips whose “sexy” sneer had launched a million squeals had begun to double.
But to many, Elvis Aron Presley remained “the king of rock ‘n’ roll.” In latter years his concerts had begun to border the self-parody, and compared to many of today’s rock stars, Elvis Presley, even at his most torrid, was tame. But his impact on popular music was like a kick in the head from a blue suede shoe, and he remains one of the seminal figures in the sound called rock ‘n’ roll.
Rock ‘n’ roll, of course, did not spring forth full-blown. Its roots are in Black music, rhythm and blues — “Race music,” as it still was called in the 1950s, when musical styles, like the social structure of the country, remained largely segregated. White singers sang “white,” big-band stuff. Controlled. Rhythm and blues was something else: funky, more emotional. Suggestive.
Elvis Presley was white but he sang Black. He had always liked rhythm and blues, just as he had always liked country and rockabilly music, and the two styled melded in his delivery. But in 1953, when he parked his Ford pickup outside the Memphis Recording studios, a subsidiary of Sam Phillips’ Sun Records, Elvis Presley was merely a 19-year-old Tennessee truck driver with two goals: The first, and immediate one, was to cut an acetate record of “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” (total cost, $4) to give his mom for her birthday.
His second, longer-range ambition was to own the coolest car in town, preferably a pink and black Cadillac.
Phillips eventually heard the tape Presley made and was mildly impressed, but thought the boy would take a heap of grooming if he ever were to become a singer. But a year later, when Phillips couldn’t get hold of the Black singer he wanted for a recording job, he called up the kid with the sideburns and took him in hand. One year later, Elvis was able to afford his first Caddy.
By 1956, Elvis had a new manager, a former carnival pitchman named Col. Tom Parker, a recording contract with RCA Records, and a hit with “Heartbreak Hotel.” He was making $7,500 a week (a lot back then) for personal appearances.
He was also making history. Elvis and his suggestive wiggle and pouty looks were celebrated by teen-agers, who thrilled to his songs. That same wiggle and way with a song also were being condemned as “vulgar” and “obscenely suggestive” by adult authority figures (when Presley appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show that year he was televised only from the waist up).
Other pooh-poohed Presley as merely another passing fad and fancy. They were making a big mistake, for Elvis cast a long shadow on contemporary rock ‘n’ roll. He became, in his time, a rallying point for youth, in the same way that actor James Dean had been a few years earlier on a smaller scale. For teen-agers were beginning to come into their own in the middle 1950s.
Before, they had been pretty much “little adults,” at least in terms of their music. “Adult music” was about all that was available to them, unless they sought out rhythm and blues records. With rock ‘n’ roll, with the advent of performers closer to their own age, they finally had their own heroes. Elvis and his music was, in many ways, a sort of rallying point for adolescent rebellion.
He wasn’t the first rock ‘n’ roller (Bill Haley had a hit in 1953 with “Crazy, Man, Crazy”). But Presley took things further. His voice was sexy and husky, he shook, rattled, and rolled his hips. He looked anti-authority, and his hair was too long by “nice” teen standards.
His songs spoke to the young. The slower ballads held depths of emotion and longing. The fast, uptempo numbers made kids want to move, to get loose. That was what parents were afraid of, of course, that getting loose. But like it or not, Elvis Presley had indeed loosened the strictures of pop music. He had set some wheels in motion. After him, music couldn’t go back — only forward, to a rhythm heavy on the backbeat.
Other groups, in years to come, kicked out the jambs farther. But it was a wiggle that started it all.
From the vantage point of the 1970s, the early furor over Elvis Presley seems ludicrous. But it was not the 1970s when Presley made his impact, it was the 1950s, and we’ve come a long way down the line since then.
Meanwhile, the teens that once thrilled to a young Elvis moved forward in time, too. But to many of them, even in the 1970s, Elvis remained a symbol of their salad days, the days when both rock ‘n’ roll and their dream were new and exciting. And those onetime teenagers still turned out to see the onetime king, even though he had segued into thickening middle age and become, to younger generations, simply a nostalgia figure — a period piece from the stone age of rock.
But it wasn’t only his contemporaries who continued to revere Presley. At his last appearance in Chicago, on a night in May, the Chicago Stadium was packed with people of all ages. Some were there to reminisce; others, who weren’t even born when Presley sang “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Love Me Tender,” were simply curious about the legend.
Some said his voice was going. But his mystique had not melted away. Sociologists once dismissed him as a passing fad, “kind of like the Charleston.” That was more than 20 years ago. “Funny,” as Presley sang at one of his last shows in Chicago, “how time slips away.” Elvis Presley has slipped away, but his legend lingers on.
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