Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Culture's Obsession

To go with said stereo, my parents purchased a dozen or so long-playing 33 1/3 record sets. For them, it was mostly Ray Coniff and Mitch Miller. But for my twin sister and me, they purchased some K-Tel collections of current music, as well as some of the "Close Up" Series (Close Up: The Beach Boys, etc). My parents really had no idea what they were buying us because they were older when my sister and I were born, being the age of most of our peers' grandparents. That made them adults in the Great Depression and their idea of music more informed by the Swing Era Big Bands than any other genre.

We also had a family, the Vests, living across the street with some kids our age and older. It was at their house that I first heard Elvis Presley singing the first song I would know the lyrics to, "Return to Sender." That began a lifelong exquisite obsession with music that would blast light years past The King in to the outer realms, only to return to him periodically over the next 30 years.

In August 1977, I was working as part of the maintenance crew for National Investors Life Insurance Company. I had graduated from Catholic High the previous May and was set to attend Hendrix College in September. I was in the company print shop when Presley's death was announced on the radio on a blistering hot Tuesday afternoon, the 16th. I thought little of it at the time. Presley by that time had become a parody of himself in his Vegas act, and I had gone on to discover all of the music he paved the way for.

For Presley, what followed was one "I-Knew-Him-When" memoir after another, beginning with the opportunistic Elvis What Happened? (Ballentine, 1977) and ending most recently with the equally opportunist and anemic nolo contendere The King and Dr. Nick: What Really Happened to Elvis and Me (Thomas Nelson, 2009). The decline and fall of the King of Rock and Roll: drugs, endless tours, exploitation and profligacy, would be told and retold until it became part of our culture's collective unconscious in the same way the betrayal of Christ had in the previous 1900 years.

Break ahead to Thursday, June 25, 2009 and the digital death notice of another iconic musician, Michael Jackson. The similarities were uncanny and compelling: both deaths were initially mysterious, the shock ubiquitous. Both involved drugs, both acutely and chronically. Both deaths ensnared previously respected physicians hired specifically to care of their respective single patients, ruining their careers in the bargain.

Jackson's death piqued my original but never satisfied interest in Presley's death 32-years previous. In the past year, I have read every tin-horn memoir and tell-all written in the wake of Presley's death, including the only two that really mattered: Albert Goldman's corrosively hateful screed Elvis (McGraw-Hill, 1981) and Peter Guralnick's superbly documented two-volume biography Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Back Bay Books, 1995) and Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (Back Bay Books, 2000).

Goldman's book, considered definitive at the time displayed a malignant pathology in its author who was trying to sell the reading public on a malignant pathology in the subject of the book. While Presley's ever so slow descent was more than likely accurately captured in Goldman's book, it was not done as sympathetically as was the case in Guralnick's superior account. In fact, the only reason to read Goldman's book is then to read Greil Marcus' review of said biography first published in The Village Voice and then expanded as part of his book Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (Doubleday, 1991).

"The real significance of Goldman's Elvis is in its attempt at cultural genocide."

Albert Goldman was the product of post-war Eastern Establishment America. His disdain for anything outside his narcissistic sphere was palpable in the type of works he published. Rather than pushing boundaries in his writing, he chose to illuminate the dank recesses of lives, fortifying what he found with fanciful speculation. In Elvis…

It is [his ] purpose to entirely discredit Elvis Presley, the culture that produced him, and the culture he helped create—to altogether dismiss and condemn , in other words, not just Elvis Presley, but the white, working-class South from which he came, and the pop world which emerged in his wake. For such a task, revelations about moral weakness and ill-spent life of a single individual are useful, nut no matter how numerous and squalid such revelations might be, they are not sufficient. It is necessary to utterly destroy the individuals claim on our attention by leading the reader to feel in every way superior to him; to sever the individual from that social context that might make sense of his work or allow the reader to feel kinship with him; to bury what might remain of that social context in bigotry and stereotyping; to selectively omit important parts of the story being told, and to falsify others; and to surround the enterprise as a whole with calumnies and lies.

Goldman does this by his depiction of Presley and his family as simpleton, racist, perverts, all chemically or sexually dependant evolved from Henry H. Goddard's 1912 study of the "Kallikak" families as the source of Presley's degeneracy. In doing so, Goldman, in his Eastern Establishment conceited manner, indicts all of Southern Culture, for good or bad, without which, the United States as a whole would be a boring, whitebread, collection of WASPs, Victorian in their conceits and profligate in private.

The effect Goldman was trying to achieve was expressed in Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's New York Times review of Elvis that "….one feels revolted by American culture for permitting itself to be exemplified by the career of Elvis Presley." That that quote is fraught with black-hole density contradiction is not even the point, it was the direction Goldman wanted to send things. Marcus counters one vein of Lehmann-Haupt's analysis with,

There is no reason to feel revolted, American culture has never permitted itself to be exemplified by Elvis Presley, and it never will. But certain Americans—and of course people from all over the world—have recognized themselves, and selves they would not have otherwise known, in Elvis Presley: Americans whose culture had taken shape long before Elvis Presley appeared, and those whose culture would have had no shape, should have been in no way theirs, had Elvis Presley been willing to keep the place allotted to him,

He wasn't willing to keep to his place, and now he is being returned to it. It is altogether fitting and proper that this be so, because as a redneck, as a hillbilly, as a white boy who sang like a [black man], Elvis Presley was never permitted to join the culture that has never permitted itself to be exemplified by what he made of it.

Had Elvis Presley ever feared for his place in American history, one need only tour Graceland, any day of the year and view what his memory had received in the previous week. I dare you!

The late music biographer, Dr. Albert Goldman was a first class son-of-a-bitch. Four years after the death of Elvis Presley, Goldman published his biography of the singer, Elvis (Mcgraw-Hill, 1981), savaging an entire region of the country (The South) in the bargain. Village Voice critic Greil Marcus, in his review of the biography, offered:

While all of this is true, Goldman did prove he knew how to research his subject, having as a prime source insider and Memphis Mafia member Lamar Fike, whom Goldman played (or paid) like a fine violin. Goldman adopted a typical Eastern Establishment position of hubris and superiority over his subject and everything his subject stood for, guaranteed to offend all living behind the cotton curtain. The true beauty of the biography is that while it was one long yawn of unrelenting Hell, it was also sarcastically entertaining and informative and infinitely superior to every book written by every Elvis insider cashing in on the King after his death.

Goldman, in a fit of introspective psychological analysis that would make a real music biographer, Maynard Solomon, smile:

This is one of the most probing and deeply effecting explanations of the tattered souls of the chemically dependent written. It says in one brief paragraph more than A&E's Intervention and TLCs Addicted could possibly pour out of an entire season parading one compulsive disorder after another before the modern Romans in the digital Colosseum.

So what books on Elvis Presley are the important ones? Goldman's, for sure, controversial or not.   For balance, I would also recommend Peter Guralnick's two-volume Elvis biography, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Back Bay Books, 1995) and Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (Back Bay Books, 2000).    For a cultural analyses of Elvis Presley, I recommend Greil Marcus' Mystery Train (Plume, Fifth Edition, 2008),  which may be the finest writing on rock music available.

I've described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis. The publishing industry has stooped terribly low to bestow on King a lifetime award that has previously gone to the novelists Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and to playwright Arthur Miller...

...Today there are four living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise. Thomas Pynchon is still writing. My friend Philip Roth, who will now share this "distinguished contribution" award with Stephen King, is a great comedian and would no doubt find something funny to say about it. There's Cormac McCarthy, whose novel Blood Meridian is worthy of Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick," and Don DeLillo, whose Underworld is a great book..."

President Obama's ambitioushealthcare reform program has yielded some wonderfully unexpected dividends,the formation of the "Tea Party," for one.

In this political season thedesignation "moderate" is a very bad one, even pornographic.  The political Left and Right have lesstolerance for the middle than they do for one another (I have always thoughtthat the far Left and the far Right meet in the back behind the barn and have acircle jerk).  It might be Jethro Bodinelogic, but if the political fringe was meant to me mainstream, then theywouldn't be the political fringe.

The prospect of a Republicansplit is indeed an attractive one.  As aquintessential Reagan Democrat (that would be one dedicated to Civil Rights andnot giving a damn about global warming much less believing in it) I have oftenthought I would best be a Republican.But the only way that would possibly happen is if religion wascompletely removed from the GOP's political genome.

Being pragmatic, I realizethat is as likely as pigs flying from my bottom singing Handel's Messiah.  But it is fun to consider two Republicanparties one secular and one religious, not unlike the German SozialdemokratischePartei Deutschlands (SPD - Social Democratic Party of Germany) and theChristlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU - Christian Democratic Unionof Germany).

 What about the Democrats,you ask?  The Democrats will alwaysexist, as they do, in spite of themselves.But there are many disaffected conservative Democrats, like myself, whowill want to find a more comfortable home.Therefore, I propose two Republican parties, the Social Republicans (anyoxymoron?  Just go with me on this...)and the Christian Republicans.

The Social Republicans willbe invested in responsible management of the economy, the smallest governmentpossible, and the promotion of human rights, all in an effort to achieve someegalitarian place where we all can all care for one another as espoused by theostensible spiritual inspiration for the other half of the this newly split party.

The Christian Republicanscan devote their attention to Old Testament self-flagellation and witchcraft andthe smug self-righteousness in the belief that they, and only they, couldpossibly be correct (never hearing, much less considering, Cromwell's words, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think itpossible you may be mistaken").  They will keep their lamps trimmed andburning in breathless anticipation of the rapture.

Canwe find a practical and productive middle ground?  I won't hold my breath.